C Hribal - The Company Car

Once we were inside the building, the sun, which had been so brittle and harsh I was squinting, diminished. Now it was dark, and the contrast between the harshness of the hot outside light and the cool, mute darkness inside made my eyes swim. It was like I had entered a cave. Then I could see light up ahead, some of it green, some of it yellow, some of it red. We were in a paneled corridor. Near the bathrooms, if my sense of smell was accurate. Then I could see the nameplates: MEN, WOMEN. It had always scared me, what went on inside the women’s bathroom. It must be something mysterious, or why would they need a separate bathroom in the first place?

The corridor was dark, and something crunched under my feet. I felt like I was stepping on beetles, and I tried to walk carefully, but the floor was strewn with them. The corridor opened into a big room. There seemed to be four or five round tables, each surrounded by barrel-backed chairs. Everything looked heavy. Along the far wall was a long, long counter, and behind it an equally long mirror, and a whole wall softly glittery with bottles arranged on shelves that went up higher than you could reach. On the top shelf was an old radio flanked with beer cans, and above that a moose head sporting a Cubs cap. I couldn’t not think of Rocky and Bullwinkle. A neon sign hung in the window, only it faced out so you couldn’t read it. Men were spaced erratically down the length of the counter; two sat together at one end, just after it curved back to the wall. I couldn’t see them very clearly—the window they sat against washed out their features. My father had us sit on stools right at the curve. His body blocked the sun, but when I leaned forward I caught it full in the face. A beefy man in a striped shirt and a crew cut cropped so tight his head looked like a bowling ball with stubble—which is to say he looked like my father—was leaning against the back shelving, where all the bottles were.

“What’ll it be, Walter?”

This man knew my father! We must be at the Office! So this was it—where my father got all his work done, where he went to be alone, to think, to get away from Nomi’s serenity and the pandemonium caused by us kids.

My father boosted me up on the chrome-legged stool, then hunkered down beside me. “We’re here to unwind,” he told me. “Don’t tell your mother. She’d kill me.” Then he lifted up his head and said to the man in the striped shirt, “The usual, Bobo.”

“Your kid wants a boilermaker?”

My father grinned. “Shut up and pour. And a soft drink for the little guy.”

“You know what a boilermaker is, kid?” He poured something amber-colored into what looked like eggcups, then drew a draft for my father. He put those side by side in front of my father. Then he made the same thing for the two guys sitting just down the bar. Unlike my father, they dropped the little glass inside the big fluted one and drank it down like that. “That’s a boilermaker, kid, only your dad can’t seem to get the hang of it.”

“That’s because you don’t stock tomato juice.”

“That’s because nobody in here drinks Bloody effing Marys.” Only he didn’t say “effing.” He said the F-word.

“Hey, my kid.”

“What, he’s got virgin ears?” said Bobo. “Sorry, kid. The way your old man talks in here, I figured you already got an earful. Forget what I said. It don’t mean nuthin’.”

Bobo had a big gut and he looked pretty serious, but the gut was hard as a rock and you could tell he liked to look serious so he wasn’t grinning all the time. He liked to move the ashtrays around, too, especially when somebody was about to break the ash off his cigarette, then he’d make a big deal of wiping down the countertop and loudly complain about what slobs we all were. He also liked to turn the bottles every so often so their labels all faced front. He made me a Coke decorated with a swizzle stick and a maraschino cherry—what I knew as a Shirley Temple—and whenever he saw my glass was low he refilled it. He set a wooden bowlful of peanuts in front of me. “Go ahead, kid,” he said, “it helps polish the floor.” I looked at the floor. It was covered in peanut shells.

“The oils,” my father said. “That Bobo, he’s a smart man for a dummy.”

“Takes one to know one,” said Bobo.

“Hey, Bobo, you lettin’ us die of thirst here or what?” said one of the other men.

Bobo said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s a regular frickin’ Sahara in here is what it is. I want people to find your bones bleaching in the sun come spring.” But he was already making their drinks. He had a glass of Coke with a swizzle stick in it, too, which he sipped from while working a toothpick around in his mouth. He liked to wait until people insulted him before he poured them another drink. He kept busy wiping down the bar. He seemed to like everything just so, which was funny, given how the floor was littered with peanut shells. I was fascinated by that. I suppose it helped that nobody paid me much attention except Bobo, who from time to time offered me maraschino cherries straight from the jar. “I gotta get rid of these somehow,” he said, like he wasn’t doing me a favor.

My father was distracted by his boilermakers. Or maybe I should say he was intent on them. He would throw back the shot and say Ah! like my brothers and I did after we guzzled a full glass of milk in one long, deep draft. Then he’d sip his beer and say Ah! again. He and the other two men at the bar and Bobo got to talking about the Cubs—what a rotten team they were, but if they ever got some pitching, the men agreed, they could do some damage. Then they started talking about what branch of the service they’d been in, and where they’d served, and what a swell group of guys they’d served with, except the sonsabitches, and the old man, he was okay, too, except for when he was bustin’ their balls, and it went on like that for quite a while.

When his beer got low, my father made little dancing motions with his index finger, gesturing to both glasses simultaneously, and Bobo would fill ’er up. That was what my dad said to Bobo, “Fill ’er up, Bobo, fill ’er up.” Like we were at the Sinclair station and my dad was speaking to the attendant. He did this for the other guys a couple of times, too, the little finger dance—he even did it for Bobo—and they drank to his health.

“May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead,” said my father.

I looked out the window at the people going past. Men in hats, women in skirts with boxy yokes, their arms bare, kids on bicycles. I made out what the sign in the window said despite the electrician’s tape or black paint or whatever it was. Pabst, it said. I looked at the moose, who seemed to regard everything under its massive chin with benign amusement.

My father turned to me. “These are men,” my father said. “These are men. Never forget that.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but there was something about my father’s intentness that scared me. I asked to be excused. By this time I’d drunk three or four sodas and my father had had four or five boilermakers. I don’t know about him, but I was really feeling it. My father excused me, and I gingerly made my way across the peanut shells on the floor, not sure if I was allowed to stomp on them or not. In the bathroom everything felt better. The urinal was a wall model shaped and sized like a bathtub, and it gave me great pleasure to relieve myself into its curved porcelain immenseness. I wrote my name, broke up cigarette butts in the bottom, chased flakes of the sanitary cake around the drain. It even came to me what my father was talking about at the bar. All these men had served in the military. That was what made them men. Although I was also pretty sure he was alluding to some other quality as well, something intangible that he could just feel about them, but for the life of me I didn’t know what that was. Maybe I would have to join the military to find out. I decided not to let it bother me. My father said a lot of things I couldn’t figure out.