C Hribal - The Company Car

Mrs. Duckwa arrived and took us to her house. We sat on her couch, and she fluttered about, offering us cookies and Kool-Aid, pacing, smoking cigarettes, shooing us back to the couch whenever one of us got up to look out her windows as she was, holding the curtain open with one hand while anxiously watching the street. When the ambulance came, we rushed to the window and she didn’t try to stop us until the gurney appeared with our mother on it. Then she shushed us back and had us sit on the couch again. Her daughter came home, and Mrs. Duckwa said, “Do something with them.” The daughter whose name we didn’t know—she was simply the Duckwa daughter—looked at us with something like sympathy and said, “You wanna play Monopoly or something?” We shook our heads. The sight of our mother on a gurney was enough to silence us. The Duckwa daughter shrugged and went to her room. She reappeared when her mother asked her to keep an eye on us, and sat with us while Mrs. Duckwa hurried outside. Our father had arrived, and Mrs. Duckwa told him what happened. Then our father drove off, his tires peeling. Mrs. Duckwa came in and said, “He’s going to the hospital. He’ll call once he knows everything is fine.”

For the next five hours we sat on that couch, filled with dread and uncertainty. Five of us, arranged according to height, with identical stricken looks on our long thin faces. Our father hadn’t called, and Mrs. Duckwa forgot to feed us. When she did remember, she confessed she didn’t have much in the way of kid food. She wouldn’t have remembered at all except her daughter came through announcing she was meeting friends for pizza. Mrs. Duckwa looked at us and said, “Oh, my, you little dears.” She heated up some hot dogs and served them on dry buns without mustard or ketchup. Mrs. Duckwa did not eat with us. Evidently Mrs. Duckwa lived on cigarettes and whatever she was drinking from what our father called a “rocks” glass. Mr. Duckwa had not come home yet. Mrs. Duckwa said he sometimes worked late, sometimes he ate out, and sometimes, well, sometimes, she said, stubbing out her cigarette and lighting another, sometimes Mr. Duckwa was a regular SOB. After we ate we put the dishes in the sink, and Cinderella washed them. We went back to the couch. Mrs. Duckwa remained at the table smoking and drinking. Every once in a while she came in to where we were sitting and said, “Your mom’s going to be all right. Everything will turn out fine.” We didn’t believe her—from the torn look of worry on her face we could tell she didn’t believe herself either; I think she was afraid nobody was going to come for us and she’d be stuck with us—but we were too polite to say so. Unspoken in all this, and driving our dread, was our knowledge that there was a baby inside our mother’s tummy, and we knew it was not good for a baby to be falling down the stairs. We tried to cheer each other up: “Kids bounce,” said Cinderella, trying to sound like our father. “Maybe the baby bounced.” “Shut up, Cinders,” said Robert Aaron.

But it was true, sort of. Our father came home about eleven with the news that our mother was okay, considering. She had a concussion and a broken—smashed to pieces, really—nose and a gash above her ear that required twenty-eight stitches to close (it was the gash and the nose that produced all that blood), and they were keeping her overnight for observation, but she was okay other than that. Nomi was staying with her. The baby, as far as they could tell, was going to be all right. It was just as the chain-smoking Mrs. Duckwa had said. As Cinderella had said. As our father always said. Kids bounce.

For years afterward we were reminded of our family’s near brush with tragedy each morning as we got dressed. Our underwear, our socks, our T-shirts—they all bore the once bright, now brown stains of our mother’s blood.

“You can’t look at your mother, can you?” said our mother.

It was true. For a little while our mother had been a bloody angel. She’d been almost beautiful, lying at the bottom of the stairs, her stomach great with child, clothes strewn about her, blood streaming out of her. She had been, for those brief moments we stood at the top of the stairs gazing at her, an icon: mythic, eternal, still as plaster.

Seeing her back inside her body again, with a big square of gauze taped to her nose and a long rectangle of it over her ear, her bandages leaking yellow ointment and stained with blood—it was creepy. She had been someplace else and come back damaged. Was she even the same person? People lost their memories all the time after a conk on the head. They were completely different people. I’d seen lots of TV shows where that happened. We had a whole religion based on something like this: He’d died, and when He came back He was a completely different person. He hung around afterward for a while, but He was different, everyone knew it, and eventually He just went up in the clouds and disappeared.

So this stranger in our living room, wincing as she served drinks to Nomi and Artu and the Duckwas and to Aunt Margie and Alvin and Grandma Hubie—it was a little celebration party for her coming home safely—I was wary of her. She seemed different, and it wasn’t just the huge butterfly wings of gauze over her nose. But then she pulled me into her lap and nibbled my ear to make me giggle and I decided, reluctantly, that this woman back from the dead was indeed my mother. Still, it was unsettling.

It was a time of unsettledness and uncertainty. Our pets were dying, the town was changing, and our father was becoming more and more restless.

Lucky’s quiet demeanor in the store had been misleading. He was not stoic; he was diseased. His eyes clouded with gunk, then swelled shut. His feathers turned translucent, then fell out. Raw, angry skin took up residence beneath the molt. He shat green goop, and his belly distended as though he were a child from some third world country. “Pitiful,” our mother pronounced every morning as she lifted the blanket off Lucky’s cage, and Nomi echoed, “Pitiful.” Then she asked, “When are you going to put that bird out of its misery?” Lucky died before our mother felt she needed to answer. We found Lucky at the bottom of his cage atop page 3 of the Chicago Tribune, his beak posed as though he were searching for goodies up Mayor Daley’s nose.

Our mother promptly got another one. She took each of us in turn, as one Lucky after another died. There were five in all. Each seemed fine for a while, chirping and learning a few words of English, fluttering about the house when our mother let her—or him; we were never strong on bird gender—out of the cage, then becoming ill or despondent, eating little, drinking less, until each one faded quickly and finally died.

The first Lucky had something like a state funeral: a shoe box lined with tinfoil, a worn handkerchief of our father’s, his name lettered on a Popsicle-stick cross. Our father played “Taps” on the accordion, then “Ghost Riders in the Sky” (one of the few times the accordion had come out of the closet since the Kaopectate Wars), then took us out for ice cream. It was a fine Saturday in late September, warm and breezy, and the next day in church we prayed for Lucky’s soul. By Lucky IV or V, though, we were throwing them out with the trash, folded in newspaper so it wouldn’t open until the can was upended over the garbage truck.

Our mother cried, but she also thought Lucky’s death was atonement for Ernie. He’d survived the fall, and if God was going to take it out on her in dead birds, so be it.