C Hribal - The Company Car

Doing it to myself would have been a pretty good guess. Especially since I was doing it to myself, the gun in one hand, the other inside the panty hose, and it was right as I started to spasm, my first real come, with an emission and everything, that Nomi’s face appeared in the mirror behind me. She was at an odd angle, bent over her walker, so her face appeared between my legs. “Good God!” thundered Nomi. “What are you doing?”

I could have died. I pulled my hand out of the panty hose as fast as I was able, the goop on my hand smearing on the panty hose, a dollop landing on the mirror. I had a sudden inkling of my mother putting on these son-spackled panty hose and getting pregnant by me. That was the way girls got pregnant in our high school. There was never any intercourse. Too many kids crowded in cars going to drive-ins, that was the problem. The girls sat on the boys’ laps and the boys came in their jeans, but fluids leaked through. Immaculate conceptions all. The ways of the Evil One were many and various. A warm lap now, an eternity of hellfire and damnation later, flames licking at the very laps you once so innocently sat on. Girls! Sit on those phone directories! Do not give in to the pleasures of the Evil One!

But it was too late. I already had. The evidence was everywhere—in what I was wearing, in what I was doing, in what I had expelled from my body in excruciatingly sweet and sinful relief. I cried out to Nomi, “It was an accident! I swear!”

But Nomi was already backing up in her walker, and closing the door on me as soon as she felt it was safe to do so. “I’m sure it was,” she told me. “I’m sure it was.”

I washed and rinsed and washed and rinsed those panty hose before I put them back on the curtain rod with their brethren. Brethren—should I even think thoughts like that? The little seedlings milling around in that pat of ejaculate were microscopic—ninth-grade biology told me that. What if one hadn’t been washed away? What if one made it? What rough beast, what abomination would result from that? And what ring of hell was specifically reserved for boys who knocked up their own mothers? Would it be Oedipus and me sitting in the box seats, munching on dried dung beetles and mealy worms and grubs like they were popcorn, watching the murderers and rapists at hard labor? Or would it be the other way around?

I had plenty of time to think about what I had done. I thought about it every shower, and every waking moment outside the house. Nomi had said nothing to me, bless her; but still, I knew how she’d found me. And even if Nomi hadn’t caught me, I knew what I was doing was a sin. All my bad thoughts were sins. And I was caught between the guilt of doing them and the desire to do them again, as soon as my privacy allowed me. Horror—that my blind worm could stiffen at the drop of a hat. Delight—that it was so easily appeased.

Like most good guilt-wracked, masturbating, and wet-dreaming boys of the period, I started having accidents with such regularity they no longer seemed random. It began with my bike accident. A year later, I tumbled off the barn roof and broke my forearm. The year after that, Wally Jr. and Ike dared me to climb to the top of our mercury lamppost. I slipped. A nail caught me underneath the rib cage and the nail head opened me up like a zipper. After each accident our father said to me, “You know what they do with horses, eh, Emcee?”

I knew. But I couldn’t stop it. My yearly present to him, it seemed, was somehow doing damage to my person. A leg broken falling out of a tree house, a broken nose, a dislocated shoulder—our father surveyed the wreckage of me in my hospital bed as though he were a carpenter checking for knots or worm marks in a length of lumber. He shook his huge head, disappointed in what was obviously an inferior product. “We should have put you out of your misery years ago,” he said, chucking my shoulder, assuming my shoulder was not in a sling.

This was how our father handled Nomi’s illness as well. He was uncomfortable around Nomi, and he thought by telling jokes he could make everyone feel better. Mostly, though, he was trying to make himself feel better about things he had no control over. But a woman with lung cancer does not want to be asked by her son-in-law each time she sees him, “You know what they do with horses, don’t you?”

Said Nomi, “Wally, shut up already.”

This didn’t stop him from saying the same thing the day the sheep stampeded our mother.

Sheep are not normally marauding animals. We kept them in a pen attached to one of the sheds, but the box-wire fencing sagged with vines, and their ringleader, a dry old ram called Bucko, kept pushing it over and they’d step through. Then we’d play tag with a half dozen sheep in an open field, trying to direct them back toward their enclosure. Most of the sheep complied willingly. Bucko didn’t. He resisted herding, taking off like a spooked fire hydrant whenever one of us came near. We finally got a rope around him and dragged him back. A Massey-Ferguson tractor was equal to his stubbornness. At that point we should have sold him. Tony Dederoff told us, “Once a sheep goes bad, it’s bad. There is no rehabilitation for sheep. They become hardened criminals. They go after the cow feed, they start scattering chickens. Pretty soon they’re all hanging out at one end of the pasture, smoking unfiltered clover and making lewd baaing noises at the passing heifers.”

What we had on our hands, according to Tony, was the Cool Hand Luke of sheep. Wally Jr. had the job of feeding the sheep, and every time he stepped into the pen Bucko backed up a couple steps and charged him. He played havoc with the backs of Wally Jr.’s thighs. Bruised the hell out of them. So after the first couple of Bucko’s charges, Wally Jr. went into the pen with a scoop shovel, which he cocked and brought down like a baseball bat across Bucko’s forehead. This would stun Bucko, who’d stand there for a minute, dazed, shaking off the cobwebs, and allow Wally Jr. to break open a fresh bale of hay for the other sheep. I feared the blows were making Bucko retarded. A likelier theory was they were making him mean. Regardless, he kept breaking out and getting into the clover just beyond our garden. Wally Jr., shovel in hand, went to get him.

Our mother was positioned at the top of the rise near where the old lumber piles used to be. Sheep normally veer away from humans and, given some direction, trot docilely toward where they’re supposed to go. With the small cliff of the ruined barn on one side, and our mother on the other, the sheep’s natural course would be down the path and back into their pen. This might have worked fine had the sheep not been led by a sociopath like Bucko. He came up the rise, chased by Wally Jr., Ike, and Robert Aaron, and instead of veering away from our mother and trotting down the path, he lowered his head and charged her. It looked like a bad scene from the streets of Pamplona. Bucko bowled over our mom, breaking her forearm, and the other sheep followed. It was a sheep stampede, and all our mother could do was cover her head as the sheep ran over her and crashed through the garden.

Our father was traveling. When he came back and saw our mother’s arm in a cast, her eyes blackened, the first words out of his mouth were “This will reflect on your merit review.”

“Piss on your merit review,” said our mother.

Our father tried to keep it light. “You know what they do with horses, don’t you?”

Our mother had ingested several painkillers, and her self-editing function must have short-circuited. “Fuck your horses,” said our mother. “I want that sheep dead.”

“Shouldn’t it be ‘Hold your horses’?”

“Shoot him, Wally. Shoot that goddamn sheep.”