C Hribal - The Company Car

The balloon was red and blue when we launched it, but in the gathering darkness it is magenta and midnight. It’s coming in low, so low we wonder if they are going to clear the house. Our father, even reduced in his old age, is still quite a load. We see our mother waving. Her eyes in the twilight are glistening. She’s crying, she’s so happy. Our father is talking to Eddie. You can tell they’re getting along. Eddie even lets our father work the propane fire that heats the air inside the balloon. We are waving and calling out, “Do you like it? Do you like it? What do you see?”

“Everything!” calls out our mother, like the voice of God. “I see everything!”

They are almost on top of us now. They are so close we can touch the basket. Our fingers graze the weaving, our fingers are reaching up to touch our mother’s, our father’s hands. We have to step out of the basket’s way or they are going to knock the lot of us, even Wally Jr., off the roof. Dorie catches my hand. It feels good holding it. “Steady, Ace,” she says. “I don’t want to lose you.”

“Ready?” calls out our father, and our mother cries out, “Ready!” And we are not sure if it is our father or Eddie who does this, but there is the sudden hiss and whoomph! of flame shooting up, and then the balloon itself lurches and starts to rise.

“Good-bye, good-bye,” cries our mother, waving, and we are puzzled, but we keep waving. Their friends, their family—all of us waving, crying out. The balloon, with our parents in it, continues to rise. They are moving quickly. “I love you, I love you all,” cries our mother. “And that’s the name of that tune!” echoes our father. No doubt he is saying other things as well—that’ll put hair between your toes, no guts, no glory, we shall see what we shall see, et cetera, et cetera—but we can’t make out any of it. Their voices are growing faint. The hill drops away beneath them, they pass over the big red X done in spray paint on the alfalfa, and still they rise. The balloon gains altitude to clear the trees, to clear the pines on the back hill, to clear the hill itself, and still they rise, their position marked by the burst of flame from underneath the canopy.

It is growing dark. Venus has come out. The Big Dipper, too. Soon other stars will be visible as well. But not our parents. They have risen and disappeared. Except for the light of the stars, the great vault of the sky is empty.

Below us in the drive, gleaming beneath the yard light, sits our father’s ’55 Chevy Nomad, abandoned. Our father, I realize, did not want to drive at all. He wanted to fly.

Standing on the roof, my hand arrested midwave, I remember something from this morning. Folding a last load of laundry for our parents prior to the day’s festivities, I came upon a pair of our father’s boxer shorts. Saggy, loose, rent, droopy—they were a lot like our father himself. I held them up and realized that he had not, because of the diabetes and the drinking and the heart medication, had an erection in many years. “I know you know we know you know,” I said to that empty pair of boxers, and it’s what I say to the empty vault of the sky now. It’s up to somebody else now. Other people. It didn’t start with them, and it won’t end with them, either.

But our mother is still our mother, our father still our father. And if the word is to have any meaning at all, then it is to be found in embracing a sagging, balding, red-faced man who seemingly has no future, with love.

Of course before our mother and father left for this grand adventure, we hugged them. Of course we gathered around. And as we stare into the spot of sky, now vacant, where they last were, we are each of us coming to the same knowledge. That we are not going to sell this plot of earth. Not now, not ever. It will fill in around us. And our children and grandchildren will grow up surrounded, much as we did, all our lives. Not protected from a goddamn thing, but happy.

Sweet Christ, happy!

This book couldn’t have existed without the help of my friends and family. So many, many thanks to A. Manette Ansay, to Robert Boswell, to Ehud Havazelet, to Kevin “Mac” McIlvoy, to Jim Marten, to Toni Nelson, to Rick Ryan, to Steven Schwartz, to Carol Sklenicka, to Ellen Bryant Voigt, and to all the faculty and numerous students at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, with whom I learned so much. For duty above and beyond the call: Charles Baxter. Sainthood for Rick Russo and Pete Turchi, for the love, advice, suggestions, and support throughout their readings of the manuscript. Special thanks and gratitude to Nat Sobel, for continuing to believe, and for his many suggestions that improved the book; to Judith Weber, for her help; and to Jon Karp, for his patience and his careful editing of the manuscript. It would not be the book it is without all of their insight and advice. I would also like to thank all the folks at Random House who worked on this novel: Susan M.S. Brown, for her careful copyediting; Evan Camfield, for all his work; Jonathan Jao and Jillian Quint, for all theirs, particularly the hand-holding; and to Gene Mydlowski and Beck Stvan and the rest of the design team for helping make this a beautiful book. Thanks, too, to Marquette University, for the time and financial assistance in getting this novel written; to the Guggenheim Foundation, for their generous support; to Krystyna Kornilowicz, for her support over the years; and to Lisa Zongolowicz and Ben Percy, for their help in preparing the manuscript. I am also deeply indebted to my children, Tosh, Roman, and Hania, from whom I learned how to resee the world.

Portions of this novel originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Witness and in the Sycamore Review. Portions of “Our Mother, the Trouper” appeared in Townships, edited by Michael Martone. Two chapters, “Loose Lips Sink Ships” and “And That’s the Name of That Tune,” appeared in different form in the collection The Clouds in Memphis.

Thanks to Ernie Garven for writing the Hamm’s beer jingle.

C. J. Hribal is the author of “The Clouds in Memphis,” which won the AWP (Associated Writing Programs) Award in Short Fiction; Matty’s Heart, a collection of short fiction; American Beauty, a novel; and he edited and wrote the introdution for The Boundaries of Twilight: Czecho-Slovak Writing from the New World. Hribal was born in Chicago and grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. He received his B.A. from St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, and his M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University, where he studied under Tobias Wolff and the late Raymond Carver. He has held fellowships from the Bush Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. A professor of English at Marquette University and a member of the fiction faculty at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, he lives with his three children in Milwaukee.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2005 by C. J. Hribal

All rights reserved.

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