C Hribal - The Company Car

“Don’t be crazy,” said Peg Leg Meg. “They love each other.”

“Well,” said Wally Jr., “they got a piss-poor way of showing it.”

The one thing we would do up there that most bonded us, though, was what we called Rooftop Cinema. How many times in our youth, via Saturday Night at the Movies, did we see Jason and the Argonauts or Hercules, Steve Reeves battling monsters and armed skeletons, or Casablanca, or The Maltese Falcon, or Rear Window, or Hatari! with Red Buttons and John Wayne, or McLintock! with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara (our father’s favorite), or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (our mother’s favorite—she loved Howard Keel), or Captain Blood or Robin Hood or They Were Expendable or The Longest Day or Harvey or It’s a Wonderful Life or Command Decision or It Happened One Night or The Road to Morocco or The Secret Life of Walter Mitty or The African Queen or Birdman of Alcatraz or Gone With the Wind or The Magnificent Seven or any of a thousand other films that filled our heads on Saturday nights and gave us our notions of how the world was and how it should be?

Up on the roof we re-created them. We had help in this. Borowski.

Borowski had a first name, but nobody knew what it was. It didn’t matter. Borowski was Borowski. What he was doing hanging out with us I’ve no idea. Our mother loved him. He said “Please” and “Yes, ma’am,” so she was willing to overlook the fact that he drank too much, got into fights, and had a grade point average in the low one-point-somethings. “He’s just a little misguided,” said our mother, who was willing to tolerate in others what would drive her crazy in us. It was rumored Borowski had parents, but nobody had ever seen them, and when you asked him, he simply said they’d divorced and he never wanted to see them again. He worked for Tony Dederoff and lived there, more or less. We, too, worked for Tony Dederoff from time to time, which was how we knew him.

His other connection to us was that he, too, loved the movies. He was even willing to act them out for us. We’d climb to the roof as though it were the balcony, and Borowski, down below, would put on a matinee. Sometimes we’d jump into the landscape of our dreams to help out. “No, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong,” we’d say. “When the rhino impales Red Buttons in Hatari! it’s like this—” And then we’d demonstrate, bent over, two-by-fours pressed to our foreheads as we ran at each other, trying to gouge, trying to maim.

We rarely did complete movies. Usually it was just scenes. The beach landing scene and the parachute scene from The Longest Day, fistfights from westerns, sword fights from all those Errol Flynn movies, send-ups of the great kissing scenes. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a rat’s ass,” said Borowski, holding Peg Leg Meg in a clinch, and Meg would fly into hysterics. “That’s not how it goes!” she’d protest, and Borowski would promptly drop her. “You want to get kissed or not?” She’d scramble to her feet and they’d try it again. She had a terrible crush on him, and God bless Borowski, who’d screw anything that moved (back in high school he’d slept with Dorie a few times, if the rumors were true), he did not take advantage of it. Meanwhile we’d hoot and holler and call out for the grapefruit scene from The Public Enemy, or re-create the rooftop scenes from To Catch a Thief and Where Eagles Dare.

Our ebullience sometimes roused our parents, who came outside to see what we were up to. “What in God’s name is going on out here?” our father would ask. They’d stand in what, in a theater, might be the orchestra pit but which was actually our alfalfa field, and by turning their heads this way and that they could take in our antics both on the ground and on the roof. “Oh,” said our mother. “It’s just the normal noises, Wally. Leave them be.” And they’d go back inside, either to wrangle away some more or to make up. Given that we’d been driven outside by their fighting, we counted it a victory if later, sitting above their bedroom window, sipping beers, winding down, moonlight washing over the fields, we heard the sounds of two large bodies administering love to each other, and our mother’s “More! More!” echoing into the night air.

No such noises, normal or otherwise, tonight. Our farm is laid out before me in the moonlight—the fields, the woods, Ike’s tepee nestled in down by the marsh. A fine layer of frost over everything. Below me in the drive is our gift for our father. Tony Dederoff must have driven it over while we were in the tepee. He’d have known our father was already in bed, and he knew what a charge it would be if, in the morning, when everyone awoke, there it’d be, gleaming.

The next thing I know I’m in the driveway dropping its tailgate. Tony left the keys in the ignition. The tailgate gives beneath me, and I think about time and its passing, and what our mother said about secrets. Maybe the two are related. Maybe this is the beer talking, but I don’t think so. Consider how time accelerates as we age. As my siblings and I grew away from each other, away from home, the years passed, quick and then quicker. I tried explaining this once to our kids. How when you are little time seems to go so slowly—the clock hands barely budge—but when you’re older whole months simply fly by. The device they use in old movies to indicate time passing, calendar pages falling like leaves—it’s true. And here’s the reason: when you’re four, say, a year of your life is a full quarter of your life. When you are eight, it’s an eighth. Still a sizable amount. When you’re twenty, though, it’s a twentieth, when you’re thirty, a thirtieth, and so on. Each year is a smaller fraction of your life. So time itself seems to speed up.

When things don’t seem to be happening in your life, when you seem to be waiting for the next thing to come along, then time slows down again. When I left home for school, for example, the family to me seemed to remain constant. I was the one who was meteoring across time. No doubt if I were listening to Ernie’s and Peg Leg Meg’s stories of that time, though, I would realize that there was a lot going on while I was absent. Things that happened to them while I was gone that I will never know. And vice versa. Maybe that explains some of the distance between me and my siblings. Maybe not.

There’s also this: in the great wash of time, things take place without our seeing them. They don’t show up on our radar screens, and when they finally do register, we are reminded of how quickly time moves, and how different things are. It throws us for a loop.

In families—in marriages—people experience time at different rates. They pay attention to different things. This is what gets families and marriages in trouble.

Take, for still another example, Nancy. Harold’s Nancy. Harold, our cousin who dared suggest to our father that marrying Nancy might be a reason for not going into the military, and his fiancée, who in Evergreen Park that night had been poked and prodded by our relatives—as we did with Meg’s Greg, and Cinderella’s Mel, and anyone else who dared enter our closed circle. How she’d good-naturedly put up with it, though that evening must have crawled by agonizingly slowly for her, as evenings did for us when our father went out of control. Had time speeded up for her once the party was over and she and Harold escaped into the cool evening air? Had they found someplace—the backseat of a car, maybe—and had a good laugh over what they’d been put through? Did they experience a little calm pocket of time right then, a moment when they understood each other completely? And then had time speeded up as they locked on each other’s eyes and started fumbling with each other’s clothes—the opening of Harold’s belt and zipper, the hiking of Nancy’s skirt, her underwear scrunched down her hips, then peeled down her shins and over her ankles, and then, joy, joy, all that frenetic, frenzied, rapturous joy? Which slowed down eventually, their heartbeats slowing, their breathing slowing, time slowing. I can imagine Harold sighing, and Nancy, underneath him, sighing, and time coming almost to a standstill when she breathes to him, “Will you love me forever?” And Harold, exquisitely sated with his new knowledge, breathing back, “Oh, baby, absolutely.”