C Hribal - The Company Car

“Some things aren’t meant to last,” said our father. “Lights out now.”

In the hallway we could hear our mother. “I wish you wouldn’t tell them stories when you’ve been drinking. You always make things seem better than they are.”

The next morning the family wrestle was cut short because our father said he had “big things cooking for you kids,” and we should let him sleep. We kept bouncing on his belly, and when he rolled over to get away from us, we continued on his back. “What big things? What big things?” we shrieked as we kept bouncing.

“Go look in the car,” our father said, and groaningly rolled into our mother as we dashed out of their bedroom to look.

In the back of the Buick was a large rectangular box. BLASTCO’S ABOVEGROUND POOL it read, 48 IN. TALL. There was also a model number that looked like something the Man from U.N.C.L.E. might need Illya Kuryakin to translate.

“All right!” Robert Aaron and Sarah screamed. This was the big time. An aboveground pool! We weren’t naÏve. We knew that box was too short for it to include a diving board. But there would probably be a deck we could dive off, a shallow and a deep end, and a rope of red and white colored floats. On these hot and humid days, the whole neighborhood could cool off in our aboveground pool! People would come from blocks all around just to see.

We asked our father when he was going to put the pool up. (Soon. Later that morning. Just let him rest now.) How long would it take to fill? (A long time. He didn’t know. Go ask your mother.) How deep was deep? (He didn’t know. Go ask your mother.) How soon could we go in it? (He didn’t know that either. As soon as it was filled, providing we waited an hour after lunch. Let him rest now.) How deep would it be—over our heads? Would it have its own alligators? Would it be big enough for a boat? Could we go sailing on it? Could we leave it up in the winter and use it as an ice rink? Our mother, coming up from the basement with an armload of laundry she dumped on her husband, said, “Let Daddy sleep. Daddy’s tired. Daddy had too much to drink last night, didn’t Daddy?”

Too much to drink?

“Pool water,” said our mother, separating the staticky sheets from each other to find the socks hidden within their folds. “He was testing it.”

We were starting to sound like that Dr. Seuss classic Green Eggs and Ham. “Could we, would we—”

“LET ME BE, GODAMMIT!”

“Pool water makes Daddy cranky,” said our mother, who started folding pieces of underwear and dropping them on the bulge in the blanket that indicated where our father had hid his face. “Still, he shouldn’t use language like that, especially in front of his own children.”

Actually, he was using that language on his own children, but it didn’t seem like the right time to point that out. So in a rare display of family unity, we helped our mother fold laundry, making neat, wobbly piles down our father’s body, stacking each pile on its own bulge of flesh, our father snoring all the while. Then we made beds, put away the laundry, swept the kitchen, washed our breakfast dishes, and stacked our National Geographic s. We didn’t dare leave the vicinity of the driveway. From time to time we looked in the station wagon’s wayback to marvel at the wonderful, unbelievably fantastic aboveground pool (48 in.!), soon to be ours.

Our father came outside at nine-thirty, rubbing his eyes and forehead, a cup of coffee in hand. By that time Artu had arrived with a trunkful of sand. Our father got plastic sheeting and his toolbox from the basement and unloaded the pool box from the station wagon. Then he went for more sand. We stared at the box, trying to imagine it unpacked, set up, the water glistening. When our father came back, he and Artu started unloading the sand from the trunk of Artu’s car into a wheelbarrow, then dumping it onto the plastic sheeting. It was hard, hot work. During a break Artu opened up the pool box and took out the instruction sheet. “I see we’re supposed to cut a circle for the base,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be easier, Walter, if we cut that first, then dumped the sand right where we wanted it to go?”

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

Our father said this every step of the way. He said it less frequently as the day wore on. By day’s end he was using a lot worse language than when we’d tried waking him that morning.

It was getting hot. We—Robert Aaron and I—were standing on the sand pile while Artu and our father were cutting out the sod. Sarah was off somewhere, pouting over not owning a Barbie like her friends. Wally Jr. stood at the bottom of the pile with a bottle hanging out of his mouth. Ike tried getting onto the pile with us, but it was too small and we kept pushing him off.

“Hey, you kids, stop that. We won’t have any sand left for the pool bottom.”

Chopping out the sod and hauling it to our compost heap made unloading the sand look easy. Artu had stripped down to his athletic T and an old pair of his elevator operator’s pants, which were slate gray and had dusty blue stripes up the sides. He looked like a Civil War soldier. Our dad went inside and came out wearing his Christmas present from our mom, a fishnet T-shirt he’d seen advertised in a magazine as the latest thing from Sweden to keep warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

They finished removing sod from the circle and started hauling wheelbarrows of sand, dumping each in place. Our mother called us in, no doubt so we’d stop bugging our father and Artu as they toiled under the hot, hot sun. Lunch came and went. Our mother served them lunch on the shady side of the house while we ate inside. Artu put on a long-sleeved shirt. “You should put a shirt on, too, Walter. Sun’s bad today. It’ll fry you.”

“I’ve seen tougher suns than this aboard ship,” said our father, for whom his time in the Navy had become the benchmark and reference point for all experience. He was taking things out of the box and lining them up on the grass. The big curl of the frame was sky blue. As though someone had taken a shears to the heavens and cut out a goofy rectangle. The lining was the same color, and there were yards and yards of curlicued white rim to keep the lining in place. Now came the hard part, stretching the lining, getting it to stay on the frame, keeping it smooth on the bottom and sides, getting the trim in place without the lining slipping. They worked on it for hours. We got bored watching them, even with our father’s bad language. Our mother kept coming to the kitchen window and yelling, “Walter, the children!” as though we were meat on the rotisserie he had forgotten, and he’d yell back, “I know, I know,” and then quieter, under his breath, “Jesus H. Christ, you’d think they never heard the words before.”

“At least not from you,” said Artu. For our part, we were pleased to be reminded that our savior had a middle name. No doubt Henry, Hank for short.

We rode our bikes around the neighborhood for a while. Nobody was out. Maybe everyone had gone to the pool up on York Road, or to Wrigley Field to see the Cubs take on the expansion Mets, who were so bad even the Cubs could beat them. Or maybe other mothers worried more about their kids being out on a day when the sky had gone white with haze and if you stopped pedaling and straddled your bike pools of sweat formed on the sidewalk.

“Hot,” said Robert Aaron, and all we could do was agree.

We went home, and there it was, our oasis, with an aluminum and white plastic ladder on the side and a green garden hose looped over the railing. Water gurgling into the bottom. There was already an inch or two, enough to cover the hose’s tip. We watched the turbulence of the new water coming in against the bright blue bottom. We went inside and drank a gallon of Tang and begged our parents to let us sit in the pool while it filled up.