C Hribal - The Company Car

We were at the Dog Out. Louie had come up for a visit. Shirley had left him. Our father indicated me sitting on the other side of him. I was old enough for a beer but made a point of drinking sodas when I was out with my father—my petty self-righteousness in action.

“Oh, sorry. Virgin ears, I forgot.”

I let that remark pass.

“Anyway, she’s going, she’s gone. Took her suitcase and threw some things into it. Not everything, but I’m guessing when I get back the place will be pretty much cleared out. Too much drinkin’, too much fuckin’, that’s what did us in.”

“You should have just set her things out on the stoop when you first found out what she was like.”

“What was she first like, Wally? When you first met up with her, what was she like? Was she like that all the time? She was plenty sweet to me, I can tell you that. So when did she get this hankering for other men’s dicks? Maybe I couldn’t satisfy her, you know what I’m saying? That’s what she always told me. ‘Louie,’ she’d say, ‘I got a big heart and a bigger pussy, and you’re just not doin’ it for me like I thought you might.’ ”

“Don’t talk like that.” The way my father said it, I got the feeling it was something men didn’t own up to even if it was true. It would be like betraying the brotherhood. Certain truths shouldn’t be uttered. They might scare the horses.

“She changed, Wally. I don’t know why but she changed. All of a sudden my being a dentist wasn’t enough for her. Raising chinchillas and having the damn little things made into chinchilla fur coats for her—it wasn’t enough either. She had such need, Wally, it was written right on her face. A big heart and a bigger pussy. I failed her, Wally.”

“Don’t talk like that,” said our father.

Louie got up from the bar, plunked some quarters in the jukebox. Ray Charles’s “Born to Lose” started playing, and Louie played along, his fingers finding the notes on the bar top.

“I gotta own up to something else, Wally. Shirley—she didn’t just leave me.”

“No?”

Louie shook his head. “She left me months ago. Some he-man seaman down at Great Lakes, some chief petty officer with a big dick. She moved in with him. This after I sent her all the money from the house. I lost my house, Wally. Sold it for a song. I couldn’t stay there anyway. Too many bad memories.”

“Where are you staying, Louie?”

“I’m a free man, Wally. I got me a trailer. I’m okay. I even get chicks to come back with me if I give them cab fare home.”

“Cab fare,” said our father.

“Plus a little something for their time.”

“For their time,” said our father.

“Hey,” said Louie. “When you pay for the company you keep at least you know what you’re getting, right?” He grabbed our father’s forearm. “Am I right or am I right? Right?”

“Louie—” said our father, but Louie put his finger up to his lips and said, “Shh, shh.” “I Can’t Stop Loving You” came on the jukebox and they sang along with that, sotto voce at first and then louder. Then it was Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife.” I thought of that Frank Sinatra movie that featured the song “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” and had that great sad moment in the bar where Frank says/sings, “So set ’em up, Joe. I got a little story you oughta know… .” I don’t remember how that movie turns out, I just remember that sad romantic moment, the low lighting and the camaraderie of the bartender and Sinatra. It was like that now, only the bartender was taking a backseat to my father, who was singing about Sukie Tawdry and Lotte Lenya along with Louie. The desperate jocularity of the moment struck me, and I recalled a scene from another movie, one that featured Fred Astaire being all depressed and ended with Astaire dancing on the walls and ceiling. Amazing. I was hoping for something like that now. Louie was going to announce he was in love again; Shirley was all wrong for him, but he’d finally found somebody right, the sadder but wiser girl, as Robert Preston sang in The Music Man, and he was once again settling down. Those rebound girls—that was all behind him now.

And for a minute it looked like that was exactly the case. Louie said to our father, “I got options, Wally. This ain’t the end of me. Not by a long shot. My woman leaves me, okay, fine. Who needs a wife, anyway? I got options. I got plans.”

“Plans?” said our father.

“I’m applying to be recommissioned.”

“With who?”

“The Navy.”

“The reserves?”

“No, the reserves are for fat guys who want to relive their youth. No offense, Wally”—our father was still in the reserves—“but I’m talking about being where it means something. I’m joining the regular Navy again.”

“Louie, you’re forty-eight years old.”

“They need my experience.”

“They don’t need that much experience.”

“I’m a dentist. They have to take me. They need dentists.”

Our father’s voice got very quiet. Either this was urgent or he didn’t want me listening. I listened anyway. “Why in Sam Hill do you want to be a Navy dentist, Louie?”

“Chicks,” Louie breathed back to our father. “The chicks always dig a guy in uniform. I figure a guy like me could use the cachet to, you know, get him started. With the chicks, I mean. It worked on Shirley. Hell, it works on everybody.”

“And what if they don’t take you, Louie?”

Louie looked into his beer. “Then I’m going to blow my brains out, Wally. You wait and see.”

Louie was as good as his word. I was in college when Louie received a letter stating that the United States Navy, with regrets, would not be recommissioning Lieutenant JG Louis John Hwasko. He had served his country admirably when called upon, but they no longer required his services. I was called home when our parents received the phone call informing them that their best man, our father’s best friend, Louie Hwasko, was found in the trailer he’d lived in since Shirley left him, his brains blown across his kitchenette with his service revolver. He’d been scrambling eggs. The coroner said you’d be hard-pressed to tell what was eggs and what was brain.

“Why’d he do it, Dad?” asked Peg Leg Meg. If anyone had been handed a bum deal by life, it was Meg—born with one leg shorter than the other—but she couldn’t understand how anybody could be a pessimist as long as you were still breathing on God’s green earth.

“Because he was a failure,” said our father. He kept saying it, too: “A failure, a failure.” His voice was trembling. His shoulders shook. His gaze started to fall on us, but then he shifted it, out the window and over the fields for which he’d always had such grand plans.

We’re still bad-mouthing Cinderella when she arrives. Meg’s saying, “She’s not here, is she? Where is she? Why isn’t she here? Tomorrow is the second most important day in our family’s history and she’s not here?” when Cinderella pokes her pale head inside the tepee and says, “Mom said you were down here.”

“Oh, Sarah. We didn’t hear you come down.”

“I guess not.”

“We were just talking about Mom and Dad.”

“I heard.” Cinderella’s face still has that game, haunted look, as though she were apologizing for having intruded on our bad behavior. But there is an edge to her voice. We feel ashamed. It’s also apparent she’s been crying, but then she often looks like that.