C Hribal - The Company Car

Rebuffed by wife and friends, our father was reduced to muttering that it wasn’t all that great a museum. He’d been to the Smithsonian. Its exhibits were dusty.

Is this how families end? Not with a bang but a mutter? Our father chafed against the out-of-court settlement. He chafed against the houses going in all around us. He chafed against the kinds of people who were filling those houses, people who drove their snowmobiles and ATVs willy-nilly across our fields and through our woods. People who picked our asparagus and wildflowers and hunted our land without asking. The privilege of trespass drove him crazy. And his oldest daughter had gone on welfare, had worked for Mel while still getting government checks, which made her a welfare cheat, and now her kids—his grandkids!—were having kids. Half the kids at the school didn’t know who their father was, or had some guy who was their mom’s boyfriend serving as their father, or were getting raised by their grandparents, which was what our mother was doing with most of Cinderella’s kids. Cinderella, beaten down for years by Oswald Grunner, had found love, or something close to it, later in life, and wanted to be the belle of the ball again. She had no time for her own kids. So the younger ones hung out at our parents’ house until, like the older ones, they found friends to hang out with, and they all quickly learned how to apply that hardened polish that allows naÏve kids who aren’t being raised by anybody except themselves to fend off both that which hurts and that which helps. Did this make them any different from Ollie Cicerelli, lost soul from our youth? And if they weren’t different—if we weren’t any different—what had our father protected us from? Or was it just a delaying tactic, an attempt to get us to adulthood before the whole house of cards collapsed?

“What’s up with Dad?” we’d ask each other when we got together for holidays, gathering on the roof or in Ike’s tepee. We’d drink beer, smoke cigars, and discover that we had no answers. Or too many. But clearly, something had been taken out of our father. He looked terrible. For most of our lives he’d had the body of an onion wearing size fifty-two boxer shorts. Now his boxers, bunched at the waist, protruding from his multipocketed shorts, sagged to his knees, and his rumpled nose and broken-veined face were the color and texture of a pomegranate.

“What’s up with Dad? What’s up with Dad?”

“Nothing a Rob Roy or a Bloody Mary won’t cure,” said our father when we asked him. He held up his glass. “V8, garlic salt, pickled peppers, and peppered pickles—that’s the secret to a long life,” he’d insist, and it was true: his drinks, except for the alcohol, resembled vegetable markets. Pearl onions, pickled asparagus, celery stalks—you name it, it sprouted from his drinks. Our mother kept trying to get him to see a doctor, but he didn’t believe in doctors. “They only give you bad news,” he said, and for him it seemed to be true. Then again, he went to see a doctor only when something bad had already happened—cataracts, for which he needed surgery, a touch of glaucoma, ongoing heart problems. His treadmill numbers were abysmal.

But that was only the beginning. After Christmas dinner he dropped like a stunned cow in the middle of the living room. Another heart attack? No, a stroke. In the hospital they discovered he’d had a series of ministrokes before that. That might explain, the doctor said, some of his wilder pronouncements. The brain, the doctor said, is a funny organ.

“You’ll notice, Doctor,” said our mother, “that none of us is laughing.”

The stroke was not crippling. “No biggie, as strokes go,” said the doctor—another comment that was met with an icy stare from our mother. This doctor looked like he went Rollerblading between shifts at the hospital. He exuded the confidence of the healthy. “Just what I need,” said our mother, “a decathlete telling me my husband is dying.”

But he wasn’t dying. He was collapsing, his body giving way beneath him the way sand castles dissolve at a beach. The high blood pressure, the stratospheric cholesterol numbers, the hardened, then weakened, arteries—everything they’d warned him about for years was now accumulating in his body as though prizes were being given for having one of everything. In the scavenger hunt for preventable maladies, our father took first prize. His infrastructure was breaking down. His skin had acquired the papery look of the aged. His fingers had started to curl, as though the tendons had decided that it was too much work to stretch out fully. He shuffled along on shitty ankles, moving the bulk of his body about our living room like a barge nudging a much bigger ship into harbor.

It didn’t help that he “watched” his diet, his drinking, and took his medicines on a schedule so random that it was charitable to call it a schedule. This had been going on for years.

Finally, though, one January a county cop pulled him over for weaving erratically on Highway 45. He was returning from the Dog Out. The cop thought he had a live one.

“I’ve only had a few beers, Officer,” said our father.

“I’m sure,” said the officer. “Could you close your eyes and touch your nose, please?”

Our father could.

“Could you walk this line?” Our father could. He had shitty ankles but decent balance. Or maybe decent ballast. The cop was perplexed. He was sure he had a DWI. Still, there was something about the way our father stared at him. The cracked veins, the watery, unfocused eyes. He waved a finger in front of our father’s face. It was clear that one of our father’s eyes wasn’t tracking the officer’s finger. If this guy wasn’t drunk, what was he? He gave our father a Breathalyzer test. There. That was what he wanted to see.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m placing you under arrest.”

“For what?” Our father’s speech was slightly slurred.

“Driving while intoxicated. Your blood sugar’s way above what it should be.”

Said our father, “I’m not intoxicated.”

“No? Then what are you?”

“Diabetic.” Our father shook his head. “I haven’t been a good boy about taking my medicine.”

“No, my guess is that you’ve been a good boy at taking a different medicine. Why don’t we go to the station house and see exactly what kind of medicine you’ve been taking?”

Our father collapsed again at the station house. An ambulance was called. Our father came to in the hospital with an insulin drip in his arm and a medical alert bracelet identifying him as a diabetic on his wrist.

“I don’t want to wear this,” our father said.

“You do if you ever want to drive again,” said our mother.

“Doctor’s orders?”

“No, the police officer’s. You’re lucky he has a diabetic brother-in-law. He said he’d drop the DWI to a ‘driving while impaired’ if you’d agree to see a doctor regularly and wear a bracelet.”

Our father scoffed. “What does he know?”

“He knows, Wally-Bear, that you’re blind as a bat in your right eye.”

It was true. His collapse at the station house had been another ministroke. The blood vessels at the back of his eyeball had burst, filling his eye with blood. The fact was he needed to quit drinking or risk a coma while he was driving. A diabetic coma while he was on the road: that scared him. He also had a cataract developing in his good eye. It was a miracle, the doctor said, he could even see the road, much less weave on it.

This news sobered our father. Even though he wasn’t selling anymore, the idea of having his driving privileges taken away—it was too awful to think about.

“I guess you can let things slide for only so long,” said our father.