C Hribal - The Company Car

Okie II ran away crying. Cinderella’s shoulders collapsed. She was shaking and crying into herself. Okie Sr. was nonchalant. “What?” he was saying. “Can’t a man relax on a Saturday afternoon without somebody making a federal case out of it?”

“What is it, Okie honey? What’s wrong?” Kathy Neesmer asked.

“My wife,” replied Okie. “I guess we got her all bent out of shape.”

Sarah let loose with another wave of caterwauling. Okie’s fingers resumed their little drumbeat on Kathy Neesmer’s thigh. “Well,” he proclaimed to nobody in particular, “if she knows, she knows—that’s the price of admission, right, babe?”

Wally Jr. stepped forward. He was responding to something Okie’d already said. “Bent?” Wally Jr. seethed, his fists rising. “I’ll give you bent, you fucker.”

“Wally, don’t!” Cinderella wailed.

“What, are you going to punch me or something?”

“Or something,” said Wally Jr., and his fist landed in the middle of Okie’s face before Kathy Neesmer could get off his lap. You could hear the nose breaking even before the blood burst from it.

“Okie, Okie honey! Are you okay?” asked Kathy Neesmer, who’d spilled over backward with Okie and was now bent over him. Okie, her hero. Okie didn’t try to get up. Wally Jr. was still standing over him, fists at the ready, daring him to. Tony Dederoff and his Dairyland Dreamers launched themselves into a fast polka, the musical equivalent of “Okay, everybody, show’s over,” and people went back to whirling away. It was a strange tableau. As a scene it lasted maybe two minutes, but as I stood there, it seemed to take on the arrested timelessness of a Brueghel painting: the dancers’ nervous, sweaty smiles, the blotches of color, the laid-out Okie, the attendant Kathy, Cinderella standing close by, her arms crossed over her sunken chest, hollow-eyed and crying, waiting for her chance to give aid and comfort to the enemy. Had we not led her away, I believe she might have gone to him, too, and tried to elbow aside the woman who’d already replaced her. Oh, her fallen knight! He needed her!

That night we had a family powwow and decided to pursue that benighted Vietnam strategy of destroying the village in order to save it. If Cinderella would agree to leave Okie, we’d each take one of her children while she put her life back together. If Cinderella couldn’t do it, we would call Social Services and charge her and Okie with being unfit parents. We’d been in their house—no food, no hot water, a gas heater in the middle of the living room for heat. Okie had money for beer and women but nothing for his own family. Robert Aaron, a few years out of college, was the assistant director of social services for a county in central Wisconsin. He knew the ropes.

“You’d do that to me?” asked Cinderella.

“We’d do that to you to save the kids, yes,” replied Robert Aaron. We couldn’t tell if Cinderella was listening or not. Her face wore the shocked, vacant expression of someone whose interior regions are empty.

“Does it have to be this way?” asked our mother.

“Yes, it has to be this way,” said Robert Aaron. “Otherwise, the county steps in and the kids will be placed in foster homes and we won’t have any say in the matter at all.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Cinderella.

“Try me,” said Robert Aaron.

Our father just kept shaking his head. Our mother bit back tears. They were mortified. Had our parents really believed that in moving the family to the country they would be able to deliver us from evil? Yes.

They were wrong. But we understood. We had wanted to believe it ourselves.

Is it any wonder that later, when she was making her own late bid for happiness with Mel, we couldn’t bend our minds around the thought that earlier our sister had relished her martyrdom? How dare she not be a victim now? Even though Mel is a relatively nice guy, seems genuinely to care for her, we call him the Prince, as though he had inherited the title worn by the dung-covered village goatherd. Cinderella is a failure in our family—a failure at being happy, a failure at being a victim. She became our sacrificial offering. We turned our backs on her, leaving her to her fate, then we intervened, landing on her like a pile of bricks. Did we do that because we believed that maybe then fate would, if not smile, at least be lenient with us?

Or did we beat up on her because she was like our father, and because we could?

___

Habitual action (whether it’s martyrdom or sales)—is it method or madness? I wondered about our father, going to bed every night in a new place, waking up bewildered. Did things seem real if every room he slept in looked different from every other, yet vaguely familiar? Timbered north woods motel rooms or functional HoJos. Hotels with potted palms in the lobby, or drive-up rooms with railed balconies overlooking pine trees and dumpsters.

Maybe it didn’t matter if he knew where or who he was. Maybe he evaporated, became a traveling factotum of his company, and therefore became something larger and more peaceful than he was with us. Maybe in his being on the road all those years, his strongest connection between himself and his steering wheel, the separation between wife and family became complete, and returning to what he nominally called home was a burden.

Odysseus spent all those years trying to get back to Penelope, but when he does, his story’s over. While he’s on the road, his story is still being written. It’s still possible for anything to happen. We have no account of Odysseus in later life. Maybe he hated it. Maybe at home, steering cattle through a field with his sword beat into a plowshare, he longed for the sea the way he longed for home when he was away from it. That could certainly be said of our father. He loved the idea of home, of family, but he was uncomfortable in our presence.

So maybe the years of our father’s travel became his cocoon against us, against the world. In the world but shielded from it. His car was his shield, bright and blazing in the sun. He identified with it, just as he identified with the company he worked for. It was a company car and he was a company man, and though we knew he loved us, his loyalty lay elsewhere. We failed to recognize that. When he came home, we were the unexpected, the unscheduled, the unplanned moil and roil of everyday life, most of which had been going on without him. His routine protected him from that. No wonder he took such care getting ready, packing his sample cases and testing kits, checking his weekly planner, selecting his shirts, his ties. He was packing for a war. In the back of the station wagon he kept two coolers, one for beer (and fish on ice) and one for foodstuffs—cheese, sausages, sardines, sliced ham and polenta, a jar of pickles, a loaf of bread, some Miracle Whip and mustard. Also riding in the back were five-gallon pails of sample product, plastic sample bags, sample jars, a sample briefcase, and a sample kit that he’d outfitted as a traveling bar with bottles of gin, vermouth, bourbon, and brandy.

This was our father, loaded for bear, off to the war.

His days had a routine to them, too. Drive all night, check into a motel, spruce up, be at the mill in time for midmorning meetings he’d set up two or even three weeks previously. If he was cold-calling, sweet-talk the secretary, meet the floor manager, the shop supervisor, try to set up a lunch. If it was an established account, or he was running a trial, be ready to ask about the kids, the wife, the fishing, the hunting, the high school football team, the Packers. Be ready with the mimeographed jokes, either to give or to receive. Have the belly laugh on hand. Have the patter down, then set up your trial, take your samples, do lunch, run the trial, take more samples, meet with the in-house biologists, the millwright, the shift foreman. Do meetings, conferences, presentations, dinner. Take the manager fishing. Be ready, all the time: patter, chatter, laugh. Big laugh. Booming laugh. Ha. Ha. Hahahahahahaha. Commiserate. Sonsabitches. Congratulate. Attaboy. Be quick with the quip, the smile, the grin, the nod, the wink, the tab. Always, always get the tab. After getting back to the motel, call Susan. The kids are already in bed. This is the check-in phone call. The “I miss you” phone call. Go over the day, stare at the light switch while you hear about the kids’ and Susan’s day. Feel the alcohol curling in behind your eyes. Squeeze them shut, feel the room gently sway. This is your life, your life. After you wish Susan a good night, after you tell her you love her, after you hang up, you make yourself a stiff one and settle in to do expense and lab reports. But the receipts for gas, lunch, and dinner can wait until you get home; you push those into an ever-growing pile. You’ll get Emcee and Ike and Wally Jr. to write in the amounts on the blank receipts. You keep track—you know what you spend—and if the booze finds its way onto the dinner bill, well, that’s part of the cost of doing business. You set up your field test in the petri dishes, measuring out the samples, putting them in the traveling incubator with the timer that won’t bing when it’s ready. You make another Rob Roy to help yourself concentrate. Measure, label, sip. You set the timer, wait for the results so you can do a count of how effective this new biocide is.