C Hribal - The Company Car

Eddie fared no better, though he died of kindness. A turtle, we believed, needed a moist environment. So we lined his tub with wet newspapers and drenched them daily. His feet grew a white cottony fungus, and the skin came off in pale white strips. When he died soon after, I buried him in a shoe box with a Popsicle-stick cross lettered: “Here lies Eddie, a good turtle.”

Our father, despite playing the accordion at Lucky I’s funeral, had little patience for our or our mother’s demonstrations of grief. “Kids bounce, turtles don’t,” he said when our mother brought up the idea of a replacement turtle. And just before Eddie died our father told us, “You know what they do with horses, don’t you?” He made a gun out of his thumb and forefinger. His thumb went down like a trigger and he winked. He said the same thing to us when we were sick, and he said it to our mother after Ernie was born. As though death were a comical threat you could hold over someone’s head.

When his own fish went belly-up, he put this theory into practice. No shoe boxes in the backyard, no Popsicle-stick grave markers, no “Taps.” It was strictly burial at sea, our father standing disdainfully over the toilet, hosing them down with his own pee. Capone, our father said, did this over the graves of his enemies. We didn’t think these fish were his enemies, but they had disappointed him by dying, these fish. What did they expect? And then he pulled the trigger and flushed them out of his, and our, memory.

More unsettling, perhaps, than our inability to keep our pets alive was what was happening to our town. Elmhurst had begun its life as a sleepy prairie town at the end of the trolley line. Post-Korea, it had turned into a modest, then teeming suburb. If you looked only at what you wanted to see, you could ignore its lurchings into sprawl, its open spaces filled in, the playing fields sprouting houses. We were home one day when a bulldozer was unloaded in the last empty lot—the lot where we’d constructed a ramshackle clubhouse—our fort, our jail, our place for privacy. Years later Robert Aaron and I created another such space in the air above our house. And Dorie, I suppose, creates it when she is bicycling by herself across the country. Everyone needs such a place, and most of us will go to great lengths to protect that sacred spot. We ran over to protest. “But that’s our clubhouse,” we said, pointing. Said the bulldozer operator, “It’s okay, kids, we’re just going to move it over to the corner of the lot here.”

You should not lie to kids like that. We would have taken it a whole lot better if he’d simply said, “Hey, we’re going to crush your precious little fort into unrecognizable sticks of kindling.” But he didn’t. We watched as the bulldozer trundled into position, snuffled, huffed, lowered its blade, and without so much as a pause to indicate uncertainty, leveled our clubhouse.

We ran home crying, but when our father came home, he shrugged. “Town’s growing,” he said. “What can you do? It used to be Indians here. Now it’s us. That’s progress.”

“Wally,” said our mom, “destroying their clubhouse without apologizing is not progress.”

“Would it have been better if he had apologized? Look, the kids just have to get used to things changing.”

“Like you do at the Office every evening?”

If you wanted to, you could pretend that a sea change was not taking place, but it was. And our father, despite his stiff-upper-lipping with us, could feel it. We heard him at night, railing about how the town wasn’t what it used to be. He wasn’t much crazy about his job, either, spending the better part of each day stuck in Loop traffic trying to get from one doctor’s office to another. He wanted a change. He didn’t mind the selling, he told our mother, he actually liked that—he was good at it, he said, it suited him—it was all the goddamn driving around in traffic. If only Dinkwater-Adams would give him a new territory, and not just outside the Loop. Our father meant territory. “Like up in Wisconsin,” our father said to our mother late one night. Let him operate out of a small town, and he could call on the doctors and hospitals in other small towns. “And the kids, Marie”—when our father got excited he called our mom by her middle name; we’d heard him sigh “Marie, Marie, Marie, Marie” during “you know”—“you think they’d be crying about a smashed clubhouse if we lived out in the country? They could build a million forts, a million tree houses.” Our father was into it now. Once he started saying “a million this, a million that,” there was no stopping him unless our mother physically put her finger on his lips. Our father said, “The way it’s going right now there’s no space for them to play in, Marie, and it’s not likely there’s going to be any trees left for them to climb, either—you read that in the paper, Susan—Dutch elm is wiping out the trees, and pretty soon there won’t be any more goddamn trees, and who—”

“Walter?” Our mother placed a finger on our father’s lips.

“Yes?”

“And what would I do?”

Our father is silent a moment. It’s clear he hasn’t thought of this. But then you can almost hear his face light up. “Why, you’d hold down the fort,” he says and adds, as though our mother hadn’t gotten the joke, “Get it, hold down the fort? And it wouldn’t be just any fort, either, no, they could build tree forts, tree houses. A whole city in the trees,” says our father, warming up to it again. And sitting on the stairs above them, hidden, we are carried away with him, imagining a forest of trees with big, sturdy branches, each of them supporting an elaborate, multistory tree house, with rope ladders and bridges and swings leading from tree to tree.

“You know I’ve always wanted to live in the country, Susan.” Our father’s voice was quieter now, calmer. What was happening down there?

“Well, Wally-Bear, I haven’t. What would I do in the country, Wally? I’ll tell you—nothing. I’ll have nothing to do, and you’ll be traveling all the time, and I’ll go stark staring mad. I’ll be so crazy you’ll have to lock me up.”

“I have to lock you up now.”

“That’s lock me up, Wally, not knock me up.”

We could picture the scene now. Our mother had moved into our father’s lap. She had her arms around his neck and she was kissing him. Then our father said, “Mmmph!” the chair got pushed back, there was a clatter, a crash, and an ow! from our father, and then our mother, of all people, said, “You know what they do with horses, don’t you?” And then they were laughing, and there were more mmph! mmph!’s and a sighed “Marie!” and Cinderella said, “C’mon, show’s over,” which meant it wasn’t, but as far as we were concerned, it was.

The last thing we heard before we crept back up the stairs was our father saying to our mother—and we could picture her in our father’s arms when he said this, just before he pushed open the door to their bedroom with his foot and then closed it, just like Jackie Gleason with Audrey Meadows in The Honeymooners —“Susan Marie, you’re the greatest!” And we knew then that whatever was being decided, it would be decided under the influence and afterglow of you know, which meant that it would occur in an absence of reason, that it would be undertaken quite happily by our mother, and that it would be thoroughly flawed.

He was right about the trees. Elmhurst was aptly named until Dutch elm disease denuded the city. The full devastation took place after we’d left, but the days of biking beneath those huge intertwining crowns, those days when even on hot, bright July afternoons you bicycled in a cave of dark coolness, the boughs above you a shimmering translucent green, were numbered. Already holes were showing in the crown, gaps in the firmament.