C Hribal - The Company Car

But that came later. Let us put him back at the time of the photo from the Divisek School of Music. He is seven. It is February 1934. The Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution has just repealed the Eighteenth, but that hasn’t changed much the way things are run. Liquor licenses have yet to be granted, liquor is still tightly controlled, and Capone, though in jail, is still running hooch in from Canada and northern Wisconsin. Given that nobody was all that crazy about Prohibition in the first place, and given all that Capone had done for Cicero, it is easy to see how the romance and myth of Capone grew, especially if all the shooting was happening someplace else. Even as I’m telling my kids this, I’m lapsing into silence. What do Woolie, Henry, and Sophie know of Al Capone? Their figures of evil are Osama bin Laden and swarthy guys flying into buildings. There’s no romance there, and there never will be. And what do I know of Capone and everything else I’m telling them that I’m piecing together from all those shards given us by our father and mother? I know only what our father told me: in his mind there is a seven-year-old Wally Czabek, with the narrow serious face and haunted eyes, standing in his own backyard. A car comes roaring up his alley and drives full steam ahead into the abandoned cookie warehouse rumored to be owned by Al Capone. A few minutes later the same car, only with different plates, peels out. Seven-year-olds notice things like that. And the drivers of those cars notice seven-year-olds watching them as they speed by. The driver slows down, throws the serious-faced boy a dime. “You didn’t see nuthin’, kid,” the driver says and roars off. Sometimes they exit the other side of the warehouse, and our father runs around front to watch the cars roar by. And they always, always toss him the dime.

“You didn’t see nuthin’, kid, you didn’t see nuthin’.”

Our father played by the rules, but he was fascinated by those who didn’t. His admiration was purchased a dime at a time, and he came to believe that the rules were indeed suspended for those who acted as though the rules didn’t apply. Later, for example, when he was in college, he had a friend in “the syndicate.” Eddie Santucci. Our father double-dated with him at the Spring Formal. They were going to the Top Hat, where Eddie “knew some people.” There was a bouncer out front and valet parking. No cover and a show. Eddie and our father arrived with their dates. The best seats were taken. Eddie whispered to the bouncer. The bouncer went front, whispered something to a couple sitting at one of the front tables. The couple moved. Our father never got over that kind of magic. Maybe that’s why he became a company man. He thought things would happen for you if you just aligned yourself with the right people, people who got things done, and you agreed to look the other way.

No question, our father had a romance about Capone. When we were little he’d drive us all across north-central Wisconsin, and as we watched the countryside—fields, woodlands, marsh—roll across our bleary eyes, he would point out all the places where Capone allegedly had stills or hideaways or camps.

“They used the rivers and the lakes for transportation. That’s why all those communities along the Fox and the Wolf River prospered,” our father told us, his voice warming to the task. “They put the coils for the stills inside of silos, and did the cooking at night so the smoke couldn’t be traced.” And we would dutifully stare at the silos and barns and wonder if that was the one, if that was where it all happened. A lot of old money in New London, our father said, was Capone and Baby Face Nelson moonshine money, but nobody wanted to talk about it. “I suppose you can’t blame them,” our father said, “but if it was me, and enough years had passed, I’d say, Heck, sure we ran moonshine for Al Capone. It was a pleasure and an honor.”

I think he felt the same way about the dimes. It was a pleasure and an honor.

What our father liked about Capone was that he was a man who lived large, who remade the world as he saw fit. Our father wanted to do that. He wanted to be one of those people but knew he couldn’t, so instead he moved us to a place near where Capone did business, and regularly took us fishing where Capone fished. “C’est la vie,” our father would say, as though that explained everything, which maybe it did.

Our father believed in clichés. He had scads of them, which he trotted out with great regularity whether they were appropriate to the situation or not. If you hurt yourself: “Well, you know what they do with horses, don’t you?” On asking you to consume whatever noxious food was put in front of you, be it Brussels sprouts or broccoli or, later, beer mixed with tomato juice: “That’ll put hair between your toes.” At the beginning of all family projects, particularly the ill-fated ones: “We shall see what we shall see.” Or “I see, said the blind man, as he picked up his hammer and saw.” If we protested the lunacy of his latest plan to make us rich, he’d say, “Another county heard from” or “No guts, no glory.” On allowance day, which in the fifties and early sixties meant a dime accompanied by a nickel: “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

Our father’s favorite cliché was “A day late and a dollar short.” He said it often, and we came to understand that, although he was frequently both, he was determined to be neither.

That was certainly the case on the day he married. And while he was determined not to be a day late and a dollar short, in some ways he was always that seven-year-old standing in the alley, waiting for his dimes with both hope and awe. And envy.

The danger is, has always been, what hope steeped in envy sours into. Bitterness? Despair? What? “You’re getting ahead of yourself, Em. We all know what he’s like now. Go back to the story of little Wally Czabek, round-eyed in an alley, waiting for his dime. It’s a cuter story.”

But I skip ahead nearly a decade to pick up the story. With Prohibition off, Cicero is booming. The Sokol gets itself a restaurant with a three-tier bar, and its horseshoe auditorium, complete with balcony, mezzanine, and a parquet floor, is used less for cultural events—folk dancing and such—and more for bands. Big bands upstairs, jazz combos in the basement. The Bohemian Prince (he dropped the “little” once he turned fourteen) plays the Sokol and clubs like it three and four nights a week. Everybody winks at his age because there’s a war on. All the men are enlisting, and somebody has to play the damn accordion and sing. Two years later he lies about his age and enlists himself.

Like many seventeen-year-olds in the spring and summer of 1944, our father fought the Battle of Lake Michigan in a Coast Guard cutter. In the spring of 1945 they attack the state of Michigan, landing on the dunes near Holland, Michigan, and charging up the beach—preparation, our father later found out, for an amphibious assault on Japan. The trainers toss equipment up and down the beach, and after the landing craft hit the beach everyone charges out, picking up equipment as they run. It takes a while to figure out why they might be doing this. “It’s like we’re stripping stuff from dead guys,” somebody tells our father. The antlike spots of families picnicking further up the beach make the idea that they could die unlikely. This is America, how could that happen? “They always use the new guys for these landings,” somebody else says. “They figure we ain’t smart enough to know how suicidal the whole damn thing is.” The drill sergeant’s whistle pierces the air. “Again!” he screams. “Hustle, hustle, hustle!” and again they run up the beach, grabbing what they can.