C Hribal - The Company Car

But our father could do no such thing. The job was given to Wally Jr. It was a reward, I suppose, for having driven the animal into criminal insanity with his scoop shovel. He walked into the pen, the infamous shovel in one hand, a shotgun in the other. He brained Bucko just as he stepped back to charge, and shot him as he was shaking out the cobwebs. “Take that, you fucker,” said Wally Jr. He used a sixteen-gauge and fired a second round into Bucko’s forehead even as the first had him sinking to his knees. Wally Jr. was taking no chances.

There was a certain zeal to Wally Jr.’s murder of Bucko that should have told us something, but we paid it no heed. Wally Jr. was defending his mother and redeeming the family honor, which had been blackened by a deranged sheep. Zealotry in defense of your mother is no vice.

What is a vice is trading places with your mother because you are scared shitless of Bucko, and she offers to take your spot on the ridge, and you get her spot at the pen, ready to close the gate once the runaway sheep are inside. So what happened to our mother was my fault. Everything was my fault—I had gotten my mother’s arm broken, shot my father, nearly given my grandmother a heart attack at the sight of me, cross-dressed and ready for battle, pumping my little stem into spasms of ecstasy and panty hose spackling that might very well result in my having knocked up my own mother.

Not to mention that the true object of my little spasms didn’t even know I was alive. Dorie Braun’s interested disinterest from when I’d smashed up my face had settled into plain disinterest. She was entering Patty Duckwa territory now, off with older boys—a boy named Calvin Brodhaus, mostly—and she was leaving me behind. Not that we’d ever been an item, but she knew I liked her, and that should have counted for something. It didn’t, of course—she was forgetting I existed at an alarming, almost a record, pace—but I’d show her, I would.

I ran for class president. I lost, badly. I joined the cross-country team, figuring to impress her with my Emil Zatopek–like accomplishments. I may as well have been running on the far side of the moon. In an ill-fated bid to demonstrate my masculinity, I briefly joined the wrestling team. In practice I was matched up with Calvin Brodhaus, even though he outweighed me by a good fifty pounds. Calvin pinned me in six seconds, a record that I believe still stands at our school as the fastest pin ever. The only way Dorie would have noticed me at that point was if she owned a copy of that imaginary book A Short History of the Geeks, in which contributions by people like me to the records set by people like Calvin were duly noted. It was no use and I knew it.

The only thing that saved me from making a complete ass of myself was the fact that I’d already done so. Two years previous, when it was first becoming clear to me how little Dorie noticed me, I had concocted, with the curious logic of a twelve-year-old boy, what I was sure was a can’t-miss method for making her mine. I would root for the Chicago Cubs. I’d will them to victory, and the mystical power I wielded would imbue me with desirability, at least as far as Dorie Braun was concerned. Never mind that year after year the Cubs swooned better than a femme fatale in a Jimmy Cagney movie—that year it was going to be different. I could tell. There was an air of inevitability about the ’69 Cubs. They couldn’t lose. Our father said they were cursed, they’d fall apart, it was just a matter of time, but this was their year. Santo, Williams, Hundley, Kessinger, Beckert, my beloved Ernie Banks, plus a pitching staff that included Ferguson Jenkins, Bill Hands (a pitcher named Hands, believe it!), Ken Holtzman, even the submarine-throwing Ted Abernathy—it was a team of destiny, a team of greatness, a team that had a nine-and-a-half-game lead on the hated, pathetic Mets and it was already August. I’d always believed in the Cubs; now I became them. Their drive to the pennant would redeem me in Dorie’s eyes. I would become the boy I’d always hoped I’d be. My shaky status in the male gender would solidify; I’d become accepted, manly. Dorie Braun would notice the change in me. I’d be a winner.

Our father would come into the living room after one of his sojourns to the Dog Out and look at the TV for several minutes. Then he’d announce, “They’re losers. You watch. They’ll tank. They’ll choke. They’re no good.” The way he spat it out he may as well have been saying it of me. Of course he had no idea how closely I identified with the team. How could he? He was never around. But his pronouncements made me will them to victory all the more. I’d show him. They were so good. They were the forces of light, battling the forces of evil. I—they—we would triumph. Over history, over adolescence, over the various demons bedeviling them, me, us.

History has chosen to record the success of the Amazin’ Mets of ’69 more so than the late season collapse, the total breakdown, of the Chicago Cubs, who in a matter of some six or seven weeks, managed to blow a nine-and-a-half-game lead and finish the season eight-and-a-half games behind the Mets, finishing, in fact, in third place. They weren’t even runner-up. This is as it should be. The Mets were winners, and history is written by the winners. And our father was right. The Cubs were losers. Choke city. Complete collapse. “They’re bums. They’re looooosssss-eeeerrrrs. ”

I was crying. I was crying and I could not stop. If only he’d just shut up, let me watch the stupid game in peace. But he kept it up, fueled by Miller High Life and the joy of his own invective. “You watch,” he said. “They’ll find some stupid, boneheaded way of giving it away.”

“Wally,” said our mother, who’d been listening to the diatribe for seventeen years now.

“What?” barked our father.

“He takes it seriously,” our mother said quietly.

“How can he take these losers seriously? How can anybody take these losers seriously? They’re a joke.”

“Wal- ly. ”

“Oh, right. Sorry.” For the next inning our father tried to be on his best behavior. “That Banks kid can hit. Only decent player on the team. Been that way since the fifties. You know that? Always a gentleman. Let’s play two, he used to say. And whoa, did you see that? Another single for Ernie. What is that today? Three singles? He keeps dinging them in the exact same place. He must have cut a groove out there.”

He was trying, but it was too late. I couldn’t stop crying, and my father—old habits die hard—couldn’t stop berating the Cubs. When Abernathy gave up a bases loaded double in the ninth and the Cubs lost both halves of the doubleheader—they hadn’t even come to bat yet but you knew that they were going to go meekly—my father lost it. “ Loooosssseeerrrs! Looosssseeerrrs! They’re nothing but a bunch of fucking losers!”

I lost it. Something welled up in me and burst out, and I tore out of the house, completely hysterical. The back-door screen had its storm window down. My arm went through that. There wasn’t a lot of blood until I yanked my arm back through the broken glass.

“Good God,” screamed our mother as the shattered glass continued to fall. “What was that?”

My parents came lumbering from the living room, but the door had already banged behind me, more glass shattering, and I was running, out into the field. About two-thirds of the way down the field I sank to my knees, my arm throbbing. I had it clutched to my T-shirt. And there I gave vent to all the anguish inside me, turning my insides out as I screamed until I grew hoarse. There were some sheep in the next field over, and their “MmBaah!” was either assent or disagreement, but then they, too, fell silent. I screamed to the bright blue sky and the cottony white clouds drifting like ships in that sweet open immenseness. “I’m a failure! I’m a failure! I’m a failure! Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” All my rage had turned into defeat, and the clouds, the green grass, the sky, God—nobody, nothing answered. It was mockery. It was worse; it was indifference.