C Hribal - The Company Car

It rankled our father. He wanted a station wagon, for chrissakes. What could be more American than that? But Dinkwater-Adams thought it looked more professional for their field reps to drive sedans, not to mention they got a better deal on their fleet cars if they were all the same make and model. So our father had to argue with them, exhaustingly, every winter and spring, about his need for a station wagon. I knew why. Until he started building his own in his father’s basement, a station wagon was, for a long time, the closest thing our father had to a boat.

Certainly our father needed a station wagon for all the samples he was hauling around, and traveling as a family would have been impossible in anything other than a station wagon, but I think our father would have requested a station wagon regardless. I think he liked the feeling of being in a car that rode—and looked—like a boat. A beach landing craft, to be specific. The famed Higgins Boat. Something you had to moor to the curb, a car that wobbled a little from side to side and whose steering was soft enough it floated. A car with at least the memory of wood on it, something that connected this mode of transportation to his preferred transportation. Our father wept when Detroit replaced the real wood in the woodies with simulated wood-grain plastics, and he railed when Detroit announced it was no longer putting wood trim of any kind, real or simulated, along the hulls—excuse me, the sides—of its station wagons. “What is this country coming to?” our father would ask, his fingers running along the car’s sides the way, many years later, I would tentatively run my fingers along the flanks of the first girl I got naked with. (The question I asked myself at the time was, of course, quite different.)

I was amazed, year after year, at our father’s slight disappointment with every new car that showed up in our drive. Perhaps this was because of the haggling he had to do to get what he wanted. Perhaps it was because even then he didn’t have much say in the specifics. Or perhaps it was because by the time he got his station wagon—just about when school let out—the other sales reps had had their new sedans for months, and our father was just then taking possession (and temporarily at that) of a vehicle that was already eight months old.

Still, there they were, every other spring—Oldsmobile Vista Cruisers, Pontiac Bonnevilles and Catalinas, Chevy Bel Air Impalas, Chevy Nomads and Chevelles and Kingswood Estates. Regal in their names, magical in their possibilities. And our father in them.

Can he really be blamed for hoarding that magic for himself? We wanted to go along with him on his travels, but we understood that some work needed to be done alone. His was a lonely profession—we understood that. We capeeshed. We capeeshed even as we lined up on both sides of the car as he backed out of the drive, heading to the Office for another long evening’s worth of work.

“Take me with you, take me with you!” we’d cry, and our father, a man on a mission, pretended not to hear.

The mystery of the Office was cleared up for us—for me, anyway—one Saturday in July. I was going on seven. Nomi’s hip was better—the cast was off—but she still slept upstairs, and the steel- and chrome-armed pulley-and-brick whatchamacallit was still at the foot of her bed. The evening before our father had done a curious thing. Rather than come home late from the Office, he spent the evening cutting the yard front and back—a job he usually reserved for Saturday mornings. When we asked him why, he said he was keeping his distance from our mother. We knew he was only half-joking.

While he mowed, we ran around and caught lightning bugs, putting them in a jar with mown grass in it. The grass was for their nutrition. We did this with grasshoppers we caught, too. But they never ate the grass. They just jumped around the insides of the jars trying to find purchase, looking out at our glass-distorted faces with their sad grasshopper ones, and eventually they died of starvation or asphyxiation, despite the holes we punched in the lid. The lightning bugs fared better. We usually released them before they fell on their backs, gasping for breath with their little lightning bug lungs. Tonight we were going to keep them, though, and use them as night-lights. After all, lightning bugs were domesticated insects. They crawled over your hands, lighting up your skin with that weird greenish yellow glow before they got brave enough to fly away, and even then it was easy to catch them, and if not that one then another. So we did that as our father mowed and drank beers. He stopped every few turns for a good long pull at his bottle of Pabst, then put the empty in the case nestled up against the Weber grill and rotisserie. We were already in our pajamas, running around the yard in the new mown grass. Our father did not particularly like an audience that moved. “Hey, you kids,” he shouted, “sit on the stoop. And stay there!” We would listen for maybe fifteen seconds, then we’d be dancing around the lawn again, the grass cool against our ankles.

“You keep that up, I’m not doing for you what I’m doing tomorrow.”

“What are you doing tomorrow?” we asked, but he was already heading the other way, and our question was lost to the bark of the mower. We didn’t follow. If we trailed after him with our questions, he was liable to cut our feet off in the dark. Our mother came out and said, “Off to bed with you, tomorrow is a big day.” We asked her, too, but she remained her enigmatic self. “You’ll see tomorrow,” she said. She seemed both bitter and pleased.

“We shall see what we shall see,” said our father, who’d come in while we were wiping the grass off our toes. He was finishing his beer. He seemed immensely pleased with himself.

“What are we gonna see? What? What?”

“I see, said the blind man, as he picked up his hammer and saw.”

We pretended to puzzle over this one for a few moments. If you answered him, it only encouraged him to say something about the hair between your toes. Or the hair on your chest. Or how you were a day late and a dollar short. Did you really want to volunteer for that barrage?

Our father held up our jar of lightning bugs. “I’m going to let these go outside,” he said. “They make lousy night-lights.”

How did he know that was why we’d brought them inside? “You think you’re the only ones who were young once?” That really gave us pause.

Then he sat on the edge of Robert Aaron’s bed and told us again about how when he was a young boy he used to watch Al Capone’s cars run down his alley, and how he used to catch lightning bugs in a jar and go to sleep watching their irregular flarings on his bedside table. He talked about how he used to build balsa-wood airplanes with tissue-paper skins, with rubber bands attached to the propellers. He went into loving detail about this, how he would spend hours making these things, cutting the struts and gluing the wings, all the bracing and infrastructure, and how careful he had to be or the tissue paper would rip, and how he’d then take his finished airplane to the attic, wind it up, stick a lit match in the nose, and sail it out the window, the whole thing bursting into flame before it hit the trees across the street.

“Magnificent,” our father breathed at us in the dark, his bottle of Pabst squeezed between his thighs. “The whole thing was magnificent!”

“You did all that work, and then you burned it up?” Our heads were filled with the image of that balsa-wood-and-tissue-paper airplane afire, burning as it glided into the trees.