C Hribal - The Company Car

Wally Jr. was in the shed, working on Mikey Spillsbeth’s exhaust system, the two of them under Mikey’s most recent taxi—a midnight blue Bonneville with a harvest gold right front quarter panel. Mikey never married, and his last date might well have been with Cinderella when both were still in high school a quarter century ago. At forty-two he was still the Augsbury Taxi, still ferrying kids around town, still helping his parents with their half-assed orchard, still suspected by parents of “being up to no good” with their kids, and still more than a little creepy, though nobody had ever heard of him doing anything to anybody. He was also still sweet on Cinderella, oddly enough, and part of us thought that would be an okay match and part of us wanted to laugh. Certainly he would do her no harm, and after Okie that in itself seemed like a recommendation.

But he never got the chance. The Bonneville had flunked the emissions test once already, and the thought of the taxi being grounded was too much for Mikey to bear. He practically begged Wally Jr. to help him get the exhaust system up to snuff. So it was that Wally Jr. was welding and Mikey was holding the pipe in place when the double-jack system holding the car up gave way and came crashing down on the two of them. Wally Jr., no stranger to the undersides of cars, heard the first creak of the jack slipping on the concrete floor, that deadly metallic scrape, and heaved himself out from under on the dolly.

There were only two problems: one was that a dolly, with its tiny little wheels, doesn’t move as fast horizontally as a three-quarter-ton Bonneville that’s dropping only nine inches does vertically; the other was that there was only one dolly. The Bonnie caught Wally Jr. right above the kneecaps and severed or smashed pretty much everything connecting his thighs to his calves.

It also landed on Mikey Spillsbeth’s chest and face.

You have no doubt heard of feats of superhuman strength performed by people in desperate circumstances. Car doors ripped open, heavy objects pushed aside, whole cars lifted. The adrenaline rush reigns supreme. Well, those people had leverage, and they didn’t have crushed skulls. Grunting in absolute agony, before the shock completely froze him, Wally Jr. managed to lift the chassis sitting on his legs just enough to see that Mikey’s face was a flattened mess. Then he screamed, dropped the Bonneville on himself, and passed out.

A neighbor, Howard Zipfel, putting in a load of hay, heard the scream and drove over. Entering the shed, he encountered a curious sight: it appeared as though Wally Jr. had managed to triple the length of his legs. His kneecaps were just barely under the Bonneville, and coming out the other side were his feet. It looked funny for just a second, like a magician’s trick, and then Howard realized what had happened. Fortunately there was a block and tackle in the shed, and Howard was able to get the chain around the engine block and hoist the Bonnie up high enough to slide both bodies out. Looking at all the blood, he thought they were both dead.

He was half right.

We were deep into the family diaspora by then, scattered not so much geographically—though at various times you were as likely to find a Czabek in California or New York as in the Midwest—as spiritually. We did not seem to have much truck with each other. All those years of being told “We’re a family, a family, goddammit!” You hear that often enough, and after a while you say, “So what?”

But you also internalize the epithet. We were a family, for good or ill. It’s like that corny growing-up story everyone tells. How you spent your childhood beating up or picking on or getting beaten up by or getting picked on by your brother or sister (or both—in our family it was always two picking on one), but just let some outside offer come in to do the picking on or the beating up for you, and whoa, Nellie, Katy, bar the door, the Czabeks have closed ranks.

So it was when we got word that Wally Jr. was going to lose a leg, and that our parents were being sued by Angus and Marcie Spillsbeth. We gathered around Wally Jr., who told us he’d felt worse, his fingers absently playing with where his one knee had been, and we told him to “buck up,” and “hang in there, bro,” and other inanities. We felt like idiots.

“It coulda been worse,” Wally Jr. said. “What about that guy over in Neenah who got his back broke? You hear about that? He was messing around with somebody’s wife. She’s twenty-one, they’re estranged”—Wally Jr. pronounced this “ex-stranged”—“not boinking, if you get my drift, and she turns up pregnant. So the ex-stranged husband goes over to this guy’s house, finds him in the garage, and smashes him in the back with the blunt end of an ax. Neighbor says it sounded like pencils being crushed with a ball-peen hammer.”

That was meant to lighten us up.

Our father had as little clue how to deal with a invalid son as we did an invalid brother. What was he—what were we—going to say? “You know what they do with horses?” Our father’s clichés, almost never adequate to the situations for which they were deployed, were particularly inadequate now. Coming into Wally Jr.’s room, our father would mutter and shrug and try not to notice his namesake. He was preoccupied with something else entirely. He could not reason his way around getting sued. He had moved us out of Elmhurst years ago to be among real people, honest people, the kind of people who did not get divorced, who did not sue over slips on the ice, falls from the swing set, the kind of people whose kids did not get pregnant, whose kids did not use drugs, whose kids did not die or lose their legs. The kind of people who did not suffer from diabetic impotency, or blindness, whose wives did not hang out with lesbian couples who lived in the neighboring farmhouse, nor, for that matter, did lesbians live in the neighboring farmhouse. The kind of people whose sons did not drink excessively and whose daughters did not marry men who beat them or cheated on them or who abused their kids. In short, he wanted to live in a place where no one ever got hurt, or acted badly, let alone drowned, died, or had his legs crushed. Where a man could come off a long, frustrating week on the road and find everything exactly as he had left it, the people and the place he left behind preserved in amber, perfectly, absolutely unchanged. His position in the universe fixed, safe, secure. He believed in this, as much as he believed that a man was the head of his family and his wife was his devoted helper and his children were adoring and silent and conveniently semi-invisible, which would allow him to ignore them with a clean conscience. These mythical children: they never grew up, never had problems, and then they, too, were magically and safely adults, with perfect wives and husbands and children of their own. The Great Chain of Being, extending outward in every direction, holding us all firm and secure within its links. The Great Chain of Being, as he envisioned it, extended even into his professional life. He believed the company would honor him in his old age, bestowing upon him prestige and respect, and if he had an inkling that this was all a crock of shit, he gave no indication that he knew. You could almost forgive him his inability to understand that the world did not, would not, conform to the picture of it he had in his head. Oh, oh, that it did!

Where was this place, where people were unfailingly kind, and generous, and decent, and good? We had no idea. All around us, certainly, there were plenty of good, generous, decent people. But there were also louts, fools, knaves, idiots, jerks, dunderheads, and a large quantity of what our mother called “no-goodniks.” And then there were lots and lots and lots of people like us. People in the middle, muddling along, stuck in ruts, people blundering into one fool situation after another, buffeted about here and there, hither and yon, willy and nilly, and always, always, always hoping for the best. The win somes, lose somes. The galoots.