C Hribal - The Company Car

That we could be sued by such people—by people like us—our father could not fathom.

“People are different nowadays, Wally-Bear,” said our mother. “People will sue at the drop of a hat.” She was looking at the papers the family’s attorneys had mailed over.

Our father glanced through them as well, then went back to making a refill of his Bloody Mary in a tumbler the size of a 7-Eleven Big Gulp.

“They oughta be shot,” he said.

“Oh, Wally-Bear, don’t be saying that,” said our mother, as though he were joking, but you could tell by the adamant look on our father’s face and the speed at which our mother was trying to shush him with jocularity that he wasn’t.

“They don’t deserve to live,” said our father.

“Wally-Bear, shush now,” said our mother.

“Vermin. It’s like the goddamn Trilateral Commission and the fucking World Bank.”

“Wally, the children.”

We looked at each other. Children? Meg was twenty-five. And it wasn’t as though we hadn’t heard this before. Impotent rage had been our father’s strong suit for years. What he had a harder time with was understanding that the world was not a conspiracy. That everything did not fit together malevolently like some humongous, universe-size, patchwork quilt.

He brought up Ben Keillor, our neighbor just up the road. Ben Keillor had drunk himself silly years ago, and then, when he was dying of cancer, he took it into his head that he could grow, using different crops, the image of a bottle in a forty-acre field for a whiskey distillery. The distiller was going to pay Mr. Keillor a huge fee for this. They would take photographs and use it in their advertising. His own wife thought he was being taken for a ride, but Ben insisted, told anyone who was willing to listen (and quite a few people who weren’t), no, no, this was on the level. This was the real deal. They’d pay him to grow the bottle in timothy and wheat and corn and alfalfa, and they’d fly over and take a picture, and if they used it they were going to pay him a king’s ransom for his trouble.

“If?” asked the skeptics, his wife among them.

“They will,” Ben insisted.

“And what are they paying us if they don’t use it?” his wife, Matty, asked.

“They will,” Ben insisted. Matty didn’t argue. He was dying of lung cancer. His insides were all torn up from the chemo. She was going to let him win this one. The bigger losses, she told our mother, were coming down the road anyway, and they were driving a Mack truck. If her husband didn’t want to get out of the way, well, that was his business. He’d suffered enough. Better, she thought, if his dreams killed him rather than something else.

Our father, of course, had a great affinity for Ben’s harebrained scheme. Why not wheat and timothy, corn and alfalfa? He liked the marriage, too, of old-time hand planting with modern technology: after everything was growing, the liquor company would check Ben’s work and take photographs from an airplane. Aerial photography and farming—our father loved that. Never mind that they weren’t connected. In his brain they were—as though the next great thing since crop dusting was farming from an airplane. He could see it coming. When he had a spare minute he’d go over and check out how Ben’s bottle was coming along. He’d stand there and make conversation about free enterprise and Niels Bohr and the green revolution and punctuate his speech with slugs from a glass mug filled with a Bloody Mary that he carried around with him as though the mug was growing out of his stomach.

Ben suffered him because our father also kept a hip flask in his overall pocket, and whenever Ben took a break our father would offer him a snort. If you gazed out the window at them, it almost looked as though our father was supervising him: the two men in the field, one on his knees, plucking and planting, the other standing over him, gesturing with what looked to be a beer mug flashing white in the sun. No doubt our father came to see himself in that role as well. Or if not in a supervisory capacity, then as a partner in the dream.

By God, they were going to make that bottle fly!

So when it all came to naught, when the distillery announced they “had decided to go in another direction” (they ended up doing it all on computers), and they sent a check for Ben Keillor’s time and trouble, a check for a ridiculously tiny amount compared to what they’d promised had they actually used the photographs they’d taken, our father was perhaps more crushed than Ben Keillor was.

Or maybe not crushed. Not despondent like Ben Keillor was. No, our father was outraged. The Great Chain of Conspiracy had raised its ugly head. Something evil was afoot.

I had never figured this out, how our father could put all his trust in a company like Dinkwater-Adams or Drydell Chemical or the Dinkwater Corporation, and then, when the company turned its back on him, he blamed not the company for doing what companies did but something larger, darker, more evil, something “out there” that had sucked the company in to do its bidding. A distillery hadn’t exercised its kill-fee clause; rather, the Trilateral Commission, the World Bank, the one-world movement, and nameless enemies of capitalism—including but certainly not limited to Communism and the liberal media—had banded together to put the kibosh on Ben Keillor’s whiskey bottle grown in a field. The last great dream of Ben Keillor done in by a conspiracy. The reach—the insidious reach—of that conspiracy! It was something.

So we were sued by Angus and Marcie Spillsbeth, neighbors if not friends, and our parents, who’d almost paid off the farm, had to start from scratch again on their mortgage. The settlement was in the neighborhood of the low six figures, and the insurance on the shed covered only part of it. The settlement would have been worse except Wally Jr. in a wheelchair, with his little stub legs, made a hell of a witness during the pretrial depositions. Credit Wally Jr. When his attorney said he could get the whole farm if he sued our parents, too—all that suffering and mental anguish stuff—Wally Jr. said, “Fuck you, we’re family! We’re goddamn Czabeks!” and pushed his wheelchair out of the office. The attorney for the plaintiffs, perhaps realizing that in a still nominally rural area—where accidents happened and were taken as a matter of course—he’d have a hard time rounding up a jury sympathetic to the idea of willful or intentional malfeasance, offered to settle. Angus and Marcie, despite their lawsuit and the dollar signs dancing in their eyes after years of eking out a living with the orchard, probably didn’t have the heart for a long trial, either. Anyway, it was quietly over, and people settled in for their grieving.

Except for our father. Although the settlement was not crushingly onerous, it was plenty bad, and that he’d been sued at all set something off in him. After the settlement our father went a little squirrelly. This went beyond his old assertion that Walter Cronkite was a Communist. Now they all were: Rather, Chung, Morley Safer, Andy Rooney—that whole 60 Minutes crowd—Peter Jennings, sure, him too—he spent all that time overseas, didn’t he? In London !

“Dad, he’s Canadian. He was a London correspondent.”

“What’s he doing on an American broadcast then?”

This culminated in our father wanting to blow up the Smithsonian. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings that ended World War II, the Smithsonian Institution planned an exhibition that would look at the event from various perspectives. In addition to tracing the history of the bomb, and how the four-and-a-half-ton Little Boy came to be loaded into the belly of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay (and a similar bomb, code-named Big Boy, came to be loaded in the belly of the bomber Bock’s Car ), the exhibition also would examine the aftermath of that bombing run: how the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki essentially ceased to exist, 115,000 people blown into oblivion outright, another 100,000 dying later of burns and radiation sickness. Veterans’ groups, particularly the American Legion, were incensed that the focus wasn’t entirely on how the bombs ended the war and saved American lives. One of those lives being our father’s. The Smithsonian tried to explain they wanted the exhibition to look at the larger picture, from a less nationalistic perspective, but the firestorm of criticism was tremendous.