C Hribal - The Company Car

“Einstein?”

“Yeah, that one about God not playing dice with the universe. They may be scientists, but they go to church. You want to know a better one to lay on them? ‘If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?’ That’s Einstein, too. He was into six of one, half a dozen of another if you ask me. That’s what relativity’s all about—same difference.”

“Say again?”

Our father would have a finger to his lips. “Shh. Loose lips sink ships.” And drive on, his protégé taking notes, sometimes with question marks after the more inscrutable comments. Loose lips sink ships? Look up ref.

And our father would explain to the new guy the salesman’s habit of talking to himself: “Sometimes you’re just thinking, and it comes out your mouth. It’s okay. You’re not going crazy. You can only spend so long thinking about your wife and kids, and what you’re going to say at the next mill and who you’re going to see and where you’re going to eat and after a while your mind goes blank.” Our father would trail off then, the thought burning away like morning mist in sunlight, his brain a movie screen against which all the projected scenery clips past. He has entered that finite, scrolling universe of the Hamm’s beer sign, and he sees the same thing over and over and over. Road, highway, river, sky. Rocks, clouds, fields, trees. Undulating blue, undulating green, undulating black-gray highway. Telephone poles whipping past. Cattails looking like cigars on sticks. Corn and trees a blur, the clouds changing but infrequently. It’s like they’re not moving and then they have. You blink, come back to yourself. What happened? You check mileage markers, the tenths ticking off, then come to the next whole number and it’s been forty-some miles since you last knew where you were. Do the math—it’s another seventy-eight miles to the Spotted Heron Motel on Highway 13, where you’ll stay the night. Besides the Super 8, the Spotted Heron, the gas station/bait shop, the Dipsy Doodle Diner and Gift Shop, a campground and a couple lodges, the town’s nothing. Good people, though. Margie behind the grill will recognize you, flirt with you over the pie, a flirting that won’t go anywhere even though there are times you’d like it to. But Margie’s stuck with her alcoholic husband just the same as Susan Marie is stuck with hers. Funny how you can see yourself as somebody’s alkie husband once you see somebody else’s alkie husband, and you find yourself wondering, What the hell is she doing with that loser? And then you think you’re that loser, too, only you belong to somebody else, and generally you’re able to maintain, and Margie is one of the reasons such a thing is possible. She’ll call you Sugar, pour you coffee, and say things like “It’s deader’n a doornail in here, sugar. What say we go out back for a quickie?” and you both know she’s kidding. She’ll go home to Mack, who fixes cars at the garage when he’s not drinking under them, daring fate by smoking cherry cigars while he works, and you’ll look over your reports in your room, and dull the illicit ache with a couple-three stiff Rob Roys until the room’s orange carpet and green bedspread lose their focus and you find yourself wondering what Margie’s last name is anyway, and where she might live, and could you find her if you just drove around for a while. You’re jogging the keys in your hand when you realize you’re being silly. What are the chances that you’re going to find Margie at nine o’clock on a Tuesday night just driving around? Then you realize she might still be at the Dipsy Doodle and you could just drive by there, or check out Len’s Hideaway. You could use the beer. You could use the fuck. And it’s only when your brain utters that word that you realize your need, feel the fuel of the Rob Roys pushing you out the door, wondering what you’ll say to her, wondering if your need is so obvious in your face every time you drive up here. Does she see that? Is that why she flirts? She sees your need plain upon your face and wants to do you a kindness? Hopes you’ll recognize the need naked on her own face when she talks about a griddle quickie, disguising the obviousness of her intent with its obviousness? A chummy little fuck in a north woods town, two people ministering to each other’s needs? She has needs, too, right? Mack with his gin fizzes and cherry cigars is no prize, right? Though what do you have to offer her that’s better except maybe you shave, and your tongue isn’t littered with bits of tobacco? That’s a treat, right, your tongue in her mouth won’t leave cigar detritus? And oh, sweet Christ, now you’re imagining it plainly, picturing the two of you reclining here, in the Spotted Heron Motel, your home away from home, two whiskeys on the bedside table, the two of you cuddled up post-fuck (you don’t even want to think about the lovemaking because you do, you do want to think about it), stroking each other’s flanks, her skin pebbly as a basketball beneath your fingers, her nipples still erect from the air-conditioning.

And you can tell your protégé about how you deal with that, about how you walk away from that temptation, how you’ve been doing it for over twenty years now, denying yourself the simplest of illicit pleasures, the meaningless fuck, because you believed in the sanctity of your marriage, and knew the enormity of the stupidity you were tempted to commit before you attempted to commit it. Or maybe you don’t say anything about that, ever, to anybody, because the traveling salesman jokes just assume you have, and denying it would simply confirm it for some people, but you carry it in your heart, how you almost fell, and there is shame enough in that. And a part of you is kicking yourself, too, because maybe she really wanted you to make a move, maybe that flirtatious invitation really was that, an invitation, no strings attached, and even in infidelity you are a failure. But no, no regrets. You walked away from that, and the only real regrets you’d have would be because you had pulled something stupid, like you are now, cruising back roads off Highways 13 and 77 outside Glidden in late twilight trying to find someone you’re really hoping (not) to find. But still, you wanted to—want to, want to—and the wanting itself is a sin. Christ, don’t you get any credit for saying no? For turning away? For driving around roads where you know you won’t find her rather than going to Len’s, where you most certainly will? And the next time you’re in the Dipsy Doodle—tomorrow night, even—when the bells jingle over the door she’ll greet you with “There’s my lover” and a knowing, sad, necessary smile, and you’ll both know what it was you passed on. And you’ll instruct him, your young sidekick, who’s never at a loss for bedside companions, on the finer points of fidelity and loneliness, and how, if you believe in the former, then the latter is necessary and unavoidable.

He could instruct them on it all, how to sell and how to live in the world—in short, how to act as though you believed the world was a better place than it was—but the suits had no interest in that. They never took him up on his offer, never gave him the one honor he thought they owed him, the single mark of respect he wanted accorded him in his old age—to be seen as a font of wisdom on the finer arts of selling. Not what they give you out of a book, but what you need to know if you’re going to make it out there —out in the world.

They weren’t interested, had no intention of honoring him like that. And so it continued. His best accounts taken from him. His commission rate dropped. His quotas upped. His territory chopped or rearranged, parts of it given to others. When he got tired of it he went to a competitor, Dewless Chemical. Dewless was a family operation. Hands-on and homey. The employees like family. A problem: lots of the employees were family. So promises were made about advancement that were clearly not going to be kept when there was a son-in-law that our father was “taking under his wing.” And as the company fell apart, they expected the company’s nonfamily members to forgo, during this time of financial contingency—“just like family”—things like bonuses and paychecks. In fact, the nonfamily members of Dewless were seen as more familylike in this regard than the family itself. This was made plain to our father when the son-in-law, driving past Park Falls with him, had the temerity to open up a pay envelope, something our father had not seen for weeks, and do some math on the back of the envelope, referring as he did so to the uncashed check he held in his other hand.