C Hribal - The Company Car

“What gives, Dad?”

“Yeah, what gives?”

“All my life,” says our father, “all my life I’ve wanted to live out West.”

This is a lie. He’s never said any such thing to any of us, ever. He’s had plenty of dreams, but living in Colorado was never one of them. He had been driven mostly by the curious but common belief that someplace else was better than where he was. Safer, greener, less corruptible, less corrupting. Virgin soil. A place where a man’s dream, like his seed, could take root and flourish. Our father believed in it, in the Holy Grail of open space. Many years ago it had been the open prairie of Elmhurst, the last stop on the trolley line out of Chicago. A decade later it was the seemingly unbounded space of ninety-nine acres three and a half miles from the nearest town. Now it was a valley in a state he had visited only once.

We are stunned. What this means is that for our father, no one place mattered. For all his talk about rootedness and family and home, place is replaceable. It is simply the variable x that finds its way into our father’s equation for happiness. In his heart, our father is the Ancient Mariner. He is Odysseus, he is Arthur, he is Magellan, searching, searching, always searching. Which makes our mother Penelope and Guinevere and whatever poor woman Magellan had taken for a wife. I wasn’t crazy about how any of those stories turned out. I wasn’t crazy about how this one was turning out, either.

“But I thought—I thought you liked it here,” I said. I was perplexed and angry, and I didn’t know why. Or maybe I did, and I didn’t want to admit that. It had to do with Dorie, and with the realization that what you thought was stable could turn into sand beneath your feet. My wife, my father. Was I the only person in this family who did not like surprises, who wanted, after all, even more than my father, for things to remain the same? Have I become my father, or who I thought my father always was, the one person I could never imagine myself becoming?

But then a voice wiser than mine—it was Wally’s, it was Meg’s, it was Ike’s, it was Robert Aaron’s, it was everyone’s—said, “Let it go, Emcee, let it go. It’s what he wants.”

“But how does he know what he wants if it keeps changing?” I cried. I could not believe this was happening.

Said our mother, “Wally-Bear, why don’t you tell them the real reason?”

A giddy light enters our father’s eyes. “Your mother and I don’t have to go anywhere,” he says. He starts pointing out things we hadn’t seen right off: the circles that indicate fire hydrants, the circles for light poles. “It’s like Elmhurst when we first started. We’ll lay out everything. We’ll do everything ourselves. It’ll have everything but the kitchen sink—improved lots are a lot more valuable, you know. Why have the developer pocket everything when we can develop it ourselves? We can form our own corporation—Czabek’s, Incorporated. Ernie can handle the financing, Wally Jr. and Ike the bulldozing, Emcee writes the brochures, Robert Aaron and I will do the selling, Cinderella and Meg and your mother will run the office. We’ll be a family business. We’ll keep our house right in the center, here”—our father points—“and then we’ll buy up other farms and do everything all over again. And that’s when your mother and I will retire, and you’ll all be together. Everyone will be together, like a family, like—”

Our father caught our faces. He stopped. What he was proposing was impossible if not ridiculous. Quit our jobs, move home to the family farm, then work in tandem to eradicate its existence and live on the rump estate that was left? What was he thinking? Of all the harebrained, ill-conceived, idiotic—

We bit our tongues. What could we say to him? What could we possibly say?

“Is this what you meant by contingencies, Mom? That we’d all live here, helping out, both with the development and with you and Dad?”

“Your father was just thinking this was something that we might all agree on. He didn’t really think—”

“You’re right, Susan,” said our father, his voice trembling. “I didn’t really think. I just… I just thought… Christ, I don’t know what I thought.” His fingers traced the curb lines of his dream development. It was only then that we noticed the names of the streets: Lucinda’s Lane, Aaron’s Court, Emil’s Drive, Eisenhower’s Circle, Wally’s Way, Ernest’s Place, Megan’s Terrace. “I was meaning this as a kind of legacy for… you know… you kids. And your kids. And your kids’ kids. I guess I’ve always—I’ve always—” He couldn’t finish. His head had dropped to his chest, and it was bobbing up and down and his shoulders were shaking.

If this were a comedy, I would try to find, I suppose, some way to end this with a marriage. As though marriage ends all problems. And if it were a tragedy, I suppose I’d find some way of ending it with a death. Our father’s, I suppose. I could have him driving out to Colorado, his new promised land, and dying over the wheel of his car, slumped and fading, the car coasting to the side of the highway, not unlike the way he suffered his first heart attack.

But then his heart was always under attack.

If I were poetic, I would make the night of his death be one of those nights when the aurora borealis is draping the sky with rivers and canyons of light—yellow, green, purple, red, and white—dancing and weaving, shimmering and wheeling. Our mother would have that to look out on; she would have more than one thing to gape at with awe.

As I write this, though, everyone is still alive. It’s not going to last, no. But it is.

Marriages don’t end things. Death neither. Things continue. They go on. It’s what’s in the middle, the before and after, that matters. Marriage and death are just station markers. In between and in between—that’s life.

And near the end of his life, our father didn’t want to end anything. He wanted to start over. God bless him. Like everything else in his life, his ideas had no rhyme, little reason.

Willy-nilly, Artu would say.

Willy-nilly is a pattern, too, our father would say.

“It’s okay, Wally,” said our mother. “There are other possibilities.”

Our parents excused themselves. They had a balloon to catch.

___

You don’t catch a balloon like you catch a taxi. We drove our parents over to Chetaqua, a sleepy little village of one and a half streets twenty years ago that’s now one of the biggest bedroom exurban communities in the valley. They’ve grown because when they incorporated, they gobbled up as much surrounding farmland as they could, miles and miles of it, and claimed it all as part of their tax base. In the southwest corner of the township is a huge open field, mostly mowed marshland, that’s destined to become Chetaqua’s business park–golf resort in another couple years. For now, though, it’s where American Antiquities and Romance launches its balloons.

Flo and Eddie Brumfeld, the proprietors of American Antiquities and Romance (in addition to the balloon rides, they own a B & B and an antiques store in Neenah), greet our parents and us and introduce themselves. Flo snatches a cigarette out of her mouth and says, “Flo and Eddie, the Turtles, yeah, yeah, we’re so happy together,” even before I can ask.

Flo is the businesswoman. She’s nervous and quick, despite being a tad on the heavy side, and she smokes unfiltered Camels just as fast as she is able. You get the feeling the balloon rides and the B & B were her husband’s ideas, ways of diversifying the business, and she’s gone along, but mostly to keep an eye on him, so he’s not floating over half the countryside, giving free balloon rides to whoever asks.