C Hribal - The Company Car

“It’s okay,” said my father, “cheaters never win.”

I don’t know if my father believed that or not at the time. In later years he railed quite a bit about all the cheating and fraud and backstabbing that went on at his company, the methods guys used to get ahead, to make more money, to make sales, and our father made it clear he was being screwed by other people’s shenanigans, and certainly by the age of fourteen I had seen plenty of kids cheat with great success, but he said it in the Dog Out that day with the surety of a choirboy, with all the earnestness of a young Horatio Alger, with all the aplomb of Lord Baden-Powell uttering his code to his first troop of Boy Scouts.

Clearly our father’s unruffledness nonplussed the sharpie. He missed his next shot badly, even with his homemade advantage, and soon after that left the bar. “No two out of three?” asked our father. “No guts, no glory?” The sharpie had lost five straight to our father after taking the first two.

“Fuck you,” said the sharpie, and that was the last I ever saw of him, though the Dog Out was one of our father’s favorite bars.

“How did you know he was going to lose?”

“He’s a salesman, like me,” said our father, resettling himself at the bar. “Peddlers always talk a better game than they play.” He sipped his beer. “Once he started asking for special dispensations from the pope of pool, I knew he was lousy.”

The pope of pool? I wasn’t going to ask. But my curiosity about the sign was overpowering. I pointed at the top of the cash register. “What does that mean?” I asked.

Mike the bartender was grinning. “Go ahead, Wally, tell ‘im.”

“Your Curiosity Has Just Cost You a Quarter for the Juke Box, Thank You,” said my father. “Cough it up.”

My father paid for my curiosity, of course, and even let me choose the songs from the jukebox. Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, the Monkees. Our father winced, muttered something about kids today, you couldn’t take them anywhere, but he was grinning at Mike when he said it.

We left the bar that day with me feeling closer to my father than I probably had in ages. My father was a genial giant among men. Fair, strong-minded, indulgent of his children, and a damn fine pool shot.

We came home to discover that Nomi was coming to live with us, and though our mother announced this with a smile, she soon broke down crying. Nomi was coughing up something of a different nature entirely.

The summer Nomi came to live with us we didn’t get a whole lot of wet, and what we got came at the wrong time. Nomi came in May. Artu would stay in Chicago, working, because that was the only way to keep up the insurance for her treatments. “What treatments?” we asked. Our mother stumbled for a circumspect way to tell us. Finally she just came out with it. “Cancer treatments. They’re not sure, but they think maybe they’ll help.”

May. Maybe. Things should have been growing but they weren’t. The corn, the alfalfa—everything was a pale green, heat-seared as though it might be August. Nomi, supporting herself on our mother’s arms, looked over our fields and said, “Looks like the only thing blooming around here is inside me.”

Asked Ernie, “Is it like a Big Max is growing inside her?”

“Something like that,” said our mother.

“So if the weather inside her changed, the Big Max inside her would shrivel up and die?”

“That’s what they’re trying to do, dear.”

“Just don’t give her any water,” said Ernie. “That’ll take care of it.” For the rest of the summer he scowled whenever he saw Nomi drinking iced tea.

In his eagerness to understand and to help, Ernie was confusing the roles of God and Mother Nature. It is a common enough mistake. Most children are paganists before they become theists. And adults confuse the two as well. We found this out when our parents tried to collect on the toolshed the tornado had blown down our fields. Said the insurance agent, “Sorry, Wally, but acts of God are not covered by this policy. And tornadoes are acts of God.”

“Everything,” said our father, “is a goddamn act of God.”

“You need a policy that will say so,” said Og Tieken, our insurance agent. “For a little bit extra you can be covered for acts of God.”

“With or without flooding?” asked our father. “Have you got a Noah policy, a forty days and forty nights rider?”

“Oh, flood insurance is pricey,” Og said. “You’re on high ground, you don’t need that.”

“Oh, you never know,” said our father. “I might get me some of that extra insurance just so God can do what He likes. And so can Mother Nature. The two of them can go sky-bowling with our pumpkins any time they feel like it.”

There it was, that confusion again. As near as I could figure, for things like tornadoes and hail, big events, God and Mother Nature were in cahoots. For regular weather, it was strictly Mother Nature, and for anything unpredictable and freakish, like a calf being born with two heads, it was an accident, an act of God that threw Mother Nature for a loop.

Which meant, I guess, that what befell Nomi was an act of God. Although it wasn’t completely unpredictable: Nomi smoked a pack, a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. The surgeon general had years before come out with his warnings about smoking maybe sort of possibly being harmful to your health. Our mother was more succinct. “I guess what they’re saying is true. Those things can kill you.”

Nomi was given Ernie and Meg’s room across from the bathroom, and they moved into the downstairs rec room with Ike, Wally Jr., and me. Although Nomi was, when she wasn’t in pain, her usual acerbic and jocular self, we avoided that room a lot. Something was going on in there that we did not understand and wanted no part of. Unless you had business in Cinderella’s or our parents’ room at the end of the hall, you avoided going down that hall entirely.

I couldn’t avoid going down that hallway. I was curious about Nomi, for one thing. What was happening to her was scary, but my guilt at neglecting her was far greater than my fear of her pain. For another, in the past couple of years I had discovered a great many things of a private nature, two of which happened to be my parents’ shower and my penis. It was a curious, perhaps necessary dual discovery: my almost obsessive desire to be clean twined with a powerful inclination toward self-abuse. I won’t elaborate on the obvious intersection of the two except to say that the shower stall in our parents’ bathroom was metal and the staccato thunder of water on metal masked my groanings.

“My,” said Nomi, “you sure take a lot of showers.”

“I like to be clean,” I said.

“I understand,” said Nomi. “You like your privacy when Mother Nature pays a visit. Some changes,” she said, “are best explored in private. I trust everything is where it should be?”

“Huh?”

“Is everything going okay with you, Emcee?”

“Yeah, I guess. Is everything going okay with you, Nomi?”

Nomi sighed and lit a cigarette. “No, everything is not going okay with me. But it’s my own fault, I suppose. I like these too much. Always have.” She looked small and shrunken in the double bed, more so than she had when she was recovering from hip surgery in the House That God Built. It creeped me out, but she was Nomi, whom I’d known always.

“Are you going to be okay, Nomi?”

“I’d like to believe so, Emcee, but no one can say for sure.”