C Hribal - The Company Car

“Your bellies will burst,” said our mother.

“That water’s ice cold,” Artu said. “I can put you in there if you want, but I’ll be taking you right out again once you cool off.”

Artu was not given to hyperbole like our mother. If he said something, you could believe him. Still, we didn’t want to believe him.

“Where’s Dad?” Robert Aaron asked.

“Your father,” said our mother both loftily and with pity, “is in a world of hurt.”

Indeed he was. We found him in his bedroom lying belly-down on the bed, a thick smear of orange jelly across his back. He was moaning. It sounded worse than this morning. We were used to his morning moan. Threaded through that complaint was a certain good-naturedness; we knew it would eventually stop and he’d get up, almost playful, and start bacon and eggs snapping in the fry pan. The underpinning of this moan, however, was a pitiful whine, the sound dogs make after you’ve kicked them. And underneath that smear of orange jelly you could make out the source of his whine: a diamond plate pattern of boiled skin, so red it was ugly. It stood out even more because each diamond was separated from its neighbors by a white border formed by the shirt he’d been wearing. His back looked like a white window well cover had been stenciled over a slab of hot meat. As though a grill had left its marks on his back in negative.

Our mother joined us. “When he took his shirt off, all I could think of was that scene in The African Queen when Humphrey Bogart takes his shirt off and he’s covered with leeches and the look on his face when he knows he has to go back into the water.”

“What did Nomi say?” Like Artu, we trusted her judgment about things in a way we didn’t quite trust our mother’s.

“ ‘Good God.’ That’s what Nomi said. ‘Good God.’ Just like that. That’s just what she said. Oh, God, he does look pitiful, doesn’t he? At least Dinkwater-Adams makes an unguent.”

Robert Aaron raised his opened palm. He was about to bring it down hard against our father’s back, but our mother caught his wrist in its descent. I do not think Robert Aaron was simply being mean. I think he also wanted to see what it would feel like to land his hand in the middle of all that jelly. I think we were all curious about that.

It wasn’t that we were callous, either. After our mother said, “I think you better leave,” each of us went up to our father to tentatively touch him and tell him we hoped he was feeling better. “Don’t touch me,” our father said through gritted teeth as each of us came near.

When the pool was about half full we reported this to our mother, who let us change into our swimsuits. “No diving,” she said. “It’s not deep enough. And wipe your feet before you climb into the pool.”

Artu was right. It was freezing cold despite the air’s heat, and it didn’t get any better the longer we tried to stay in. We kept getting out, shivering, our thighs numb, and then feeling hot with the towel over us and climbing back in. We quickly forgot about the plastic washtub we were supposed to use as a footbath, and the pool surface was soon covered with a scum of dirt and grass clippings and the pool bottom was gritty with sand. It would be several days yet before any of us felt brave enough to dunk our heads under the water and explore the texture of the bottom, to run our fingers over the ribs of the walls, to feel the liner stretched tight by the force of all that water, to explore the wrinkles in the pool bottom as though we’d just discovered the Mariana Trench. We were quite a picture: five shivering kids huddled like refugees in scummy, grass-littered water.

We were still like that when our father emerged from the house. The shadows had been lengthening for a while, and although it wasn’t evening yet, you could feel the tenor of the afternoon had changed. It was the time when games become possessed of a certain fury, born of the desperate knowledge that soon you would be called in for supper, and even if you had nothing at all going on, even if you were shivering in a half-filled pool, you still didn’t want to go inside.

Where was our father going in his weakened condition? The hardware store? The Office? The liquor or the grocery store? It didn’t matter. We all started shouting, “Take me with you! Take me with you!” as though he were leaving a deserted island and whoever stayed behind was going to be marooned.

Our father moved gingerly. His face looked like a Christmas ornament behind his green-lensed aviator sunglasses, his crew cut a bit of fringe on top. He was wearing a pair of khakis and a light blue sport shirt made of very thin cotton. I had gotten colder quicker than anybody and had already changed into a pair of blue sailor pants, with square sewn-on pockets front and back. I had a towel over my skinny shoulders, and I was still shivering, but my T-shirt was draped over a lawn chair, within easy reach.

“You got shoes?”

I nodded vigorously. They were right under the lawn chair.

“Okay, you come along, Emcee. The rest of you—it’d take too long for you to get ready, sorry.” This was our father’s excuse when he didn’t want to wait for us. We knew the drill. He didn’t like going anywhere with more than one of us. I think Mom talked to him about this—the idea of making us feel sequentially special, of taking at least one of us each time he went out. Our turn would come, if we were patient and waited. Of course, it had the opposite effect, all of us vying for position, trying for it to be our turn, always keeping score. It was random, but we tried to make it a science.

“I can be ready before Emcee even gets his shoes on,” shouted Robert Aaron.

“I’m only taking one of you,” said our father. “You went last time.” He meant the York Liquor Store, which was in a little shopping center just down from our church. There was a dry cleaners, the York Liquor Store, a Kroger’s, a beauty parlor, a barbershop. He went to the York Liquor Store about once a week, usually for a six-pack or some scotch for Nomi.

“Where are we going?”

“We shall see what we shall see,” said our father.

I sat forward in my seat. When you were the only one in the car with Dad, you got to sit up front. Place of honor. Usually only our mother sat there. If there were two or more of us, we rode in back, or even asked to sit in the wayback so we could see every place we’d just been.

Our father was sitting forward in his seat, too. The orange burn cream—what our mother called an unguent—was staining the back of his shirt. Above the collar his neck was orange and bright lobster red. It looked like it was on fire from the inside out.

“Does it hurt?”

“Like hell,” said my father. He winced. “Don’t tell your mother I said that.”

I didn’t say anything. We kalumped over the tracks for the Chicago, Central and Pacific Railroad, and then we were in the old part of town. The houses here were bigger, mansionlike. It was always special crossing St. Charles Road; it was like you were visiting royalty. You knew you didn’t belong, but they let you in as long as you didn’t stay long, which you wouldn’t because you felt uncomfortable there anyway. Once we were downtown our father made a series of left turns, then a right back onto York. We were headed back the way we came.

“Are we going home?”

“Fat chance,” said our father, snorting and wincing at the same time.

It turned out we were looking for a parking place. Our father said, “This must be the place.” We were in an alley. He winced when he pulled open a door. Everything that required movement seemed to cause him pain. I felt sorry for him. He had worked hard for us all day, and now here he was taking me on an outing to the magical world of downtown Elmhurst.