C Hribal - The Company Car

His own dictum hung heavy in the air. Which made us wonder: How careful would we need to be? And would the rest of us get what we prayed for? We hadn’t even picked out a place to live yet and our mother was unhappy. So we wondered: Did God answer only some prayers and not others? Were prayers answered equally? And what if the answer was no?

We rush to the side of the roof and peer down. Ernie’s on his back, sprawled out beside Wally Jr.’s chair. He’s lucky he didn’t hit it. His belly’s great with hops, and the baseball cap he wears over his receding hair has popped off. It’s like looking down at a younger version of our father. As soon as he dropped, Wally Jr. said, “Christ,” pulled himself over to the edge, shimmied down the aerial fireman-style, and now is bending over him.

“Is he—?”

“He’s breathing, if that’s what you want to know. Funny—it used to always be me taking the knocks. I don’t remember passing the baton to Ernie. Must have been when I entered gimpdom. I preempted myself from more stupidity.”

“What did he land on?”

“Heels, butt, back of the head. He knocked himself cold, but he’s all right.” Wally Jr. turns Ernie’s head this way and that, patting his cheeks. “Your problem,” he says to the unconscious Ernie, “is you cannot stand prosperity.”

Ike materializes out of the dark. “What happened? You clock him again?”

“The drunken sot spilled himself off the roof.” Wally Jr. gets back in his chair.

“Well, bro,” Ike says to Wally Jr., “that’s no worse than we used to do.” And they recall for each other the story of when they used to windshield-walk. During their Dumb & Dumber days—how’s this as a cure for restlessness?—they used to climb out of a moving car from the passenger side and work their way across the windshield to the driver side—hand over hand, three sheets to the wind. They performed right in the middle of rush hour—all those paper mill workers going home at 3:30 for an early dinner and a six-pack. Wally Jr. and Ike did it shirtless, pantless, naked—whatever idiocy struck them at the moment. Then they got two friends equally bored and reckless, and they drove side by side, only they weren’t racing. Instead of trying to beat each other, they tried to stay perfectly even, door handle to door handle, and not only did you walk across the one windshield but then you climbed into the passenger window of the car to your left, and slid over as the driver of that car windshield-walked across his own windshield and entered the car to his right through the driver’s window. The driver of that car slid over to the passenger seat, climbed out, and did the same maneuver. In this way they performed figure eights—the symbol for infinity—from one car to the other, and kept it up for twenty miles, from Appleton to Oshkosh. Their big finale was doing it over the Lake Butte des Morts Bridge at sixty-some miles an hour.

“Lake of the Dead is fucking right!” Wally Jr. screamed as he threw the dead contents of a minnow bucket out the window. If he’d had a good night fishing the night before (a good night on Lake Butte des Morts at the height of the whitefish run was a couple hundred fish), he’d toss the fish themselves. Some sailed over the bridge to freedom far below, but most smacked the windshields of the cars following them.

This would have been all right—a naked teenager hurling fish at you while crawling across his windshield was idiosyncratic and perhaps unnerving but mostly something you shook your head over (“Kids these days”)—had not one of those fish struck the windshield of an unmarked county cop car following them. And even he might have let them go with a verbal warning—a dressing-down followed by an admonition to get dressed—had Wally Jr., still riding the effervescence of his own hydraulic lunch, not tried to beat the rap with an insanity plea.

“We are fishers of men,” Wally Jr. told the cop once they were pulled over on the bridge’s far side. He offered a whitefish to the officer. “Behold the miracle of the loaves and the fishes.”

The officer looked in the backseat, where a collection of empty Pabst Blue Ribbons and Red White & Blues nestled on the floor like puppies. “And I suppose those are the loaves?”

“Drink beer for Christ,” offered Wally Jr.

“Get some clothes on,” said the officer. Rubbernecking had slowed traffic. A naked man standing by the side of the road as the traffic hummed by—it bothered the officer, you could tell, but he had seen worse things than reverse streaking. Way worse.

“We are clothed in the spirit of Man,” said Wally Jr.

“I’d rather you were clothed in the clothes of man,” said the officer. “Can you walk a straight line?”

“Make straight the path of the Lord,” said Wally Jr. He performed a wobbly, loose-kneed prance, but he did it in a straight line.

“Have you got any I.D.?” asked the officer.

Wally Jr. started singing the “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love” song, his voice descending the scale very dramatically for the last phrase.

“Love?” said the officer. “What, son, you think this is 1968? You’re late by almost a decade.”

Wally Jr. started singing again.

“Knock it off with the love, son, you’re getting on my nerves.”

“Make love, not war,” said Wally Jr. That was when Wally Jr. blew it. He didn’t know his audience. This cop was pushing forty. He’d been in Vietnam. This was no time to be trotting out political slogans. He should have stuck with the bastardized Christianity he’d been offering.

“Hands behind your back, son.”

“You’re arresting me?”

“I’m making war on you, son, if those are my choices. I told you, I never went in for that love crap.”

“What fools these mortals be,” said Wally Jr.

“And don’t quote Shakespeare, either. I was an English major before I got drafted.” The officer put on the cuffs. Then he motioned for Ike to get out of the car, too. Ike was shirtless and shoeless, but he had his pants on. “You’re the quiet one, is that right? The strong, silent type? You let Nature Boy be the idiot and you’re just along for the ride, am I right?”

Ike swallowed, nodded. His own craziness was yet to come.

“Well, your compadre here needs to work on his French. When he was bare-ass naked on your windshield yelling ‘Lake of the Dead is fucking right!’ at the top of his lungs—I don’t go in for that kind of talk, by the way, especially from somebody doing a weak-ass impersonation of an addled Jesus freak—he got it wrong.” He cuffed Ike and turned to Wally Jr. “ Lake Butte des Morts means Lake Bluff of the Dead, son, and yours has been called.”

They displayed remarkable loyalty in not ratting out their windshield-walking buddies, who’d disappeared in traffic. But then, their friends hadn’t been lobbing fish at police cars, either. Our mother was mortified, our father shook his head—boys will be boys—and Wally Jr. and Ike neither stopped nor learned from their mistake. Wally Jr. drove without a license; Ike found a new brand of foolishness to pursue. And after kicking around a couple of years after high school, Wally Jr. pursued it with him. They joined the military.