C Hribal - The Company Car

“Sorry about that back there. Usually if they don’t like you they at least let you wait out the rain.”

“You had no way of knowing,” I said.

“Yeah,” said our father, “that’s the way the cookie crumbles.” He took the handkerchief from me and pressed it against the back of his head. Then he put on the blower to clear the windshield. Just before he put the car in gear, he turned to me. “Thanks for getting me out of there.”

I grinned, then said something that scared me. Was this how it started, the words simply coming out of your mouth? “I’ll put it on your bill,” I said, sounding just like our father.

That evening all I wanted was for us to have a good laugh over our adventure and maybe run into a remorseful Celia, who would want to make up for her mother’s bad behavior with some bad behavior of her own. But over dinner—it was a supper club, but the rush hadn’t come in yet, nor had the staff, so we were eating at the bar—our father started putting away Rob Roys at an alarming pace. I had often seen our father drunk or with a drink in his hand, but I had rarely seen him drinking. Even on our many expeditions to the Dog Out and Banana’s Never Inn, expeditions that began with our father running out “to get a loaf of bread,” his drinking seemed to occur while I was in the bathroom, or my mind was engaged by other things—the size of the barmaid’s rack, for instance. Oh, sure, I’d seen him regularly sip his beer, even throw back a shot or three, but that evening our father wasn’t giving the ice in his glass a chance to get soft.

“It wasn’t always like this, Emcee,” he told me, shaking his glass to get the barmaid’s attention. The cubes, bereft of company, rattled hollowly. “God damn it, it wasn’t always like this.” The barmaid came and wiped the bar down, and my father slid his glass toward her. She nodded with a sad smile on her face like she knew just what he was thinking, and she was sorry there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

Then I got to thinking that maybe there was. She was no great shakes in the looks department—chunky, with frizzy blond hair, a pasty face, and too much lipstick and blue eye shadow—but then my father was no great shakes in the looks department, either. She was not wearing flattering clothing—a green blouse that puckered at the shoulders and black tights that a woman with chunky thighs probably shouldn’t be wearing—but we were a long way from home, and I was constantly checking the door myself, hoping to see a young woman walk in whose mother earlier that afternoon had tried to beat us to death. Loneliness and need make for strange partners, I thought. And our father had always, always, been a long way from home.

“It’s a different culture, Emcee, selling like this. It’s not even selling. What’s to sell? Nabisco’s got all the shelf space, and Keebler’s got what they don’t. And I can’t get the margins low enough for the managers to give me their aisle ends. Nabisco got there first. Forty-five years ago they got there first. The fucking National Biscuit Company. And who do I sell for? Pewaukee Cookie and Biscuit. PCB. Christ. It sounds like one of them drugs you kids are always taking. Like the insides of my cookies are gonna send you into tizzies.”

“Maybe you should use that as a selling point, Dad. Get marketing to rethink the demographics. PCB—cookies for stoners and hippies. You got the munchies? Don’t want to lose your high? Buy PCBs, in the bright Day-Glo box.”

Our father wasn’t listening to me. He was thinking about customers, not consumers, and his were the store managers. That was who he was selling to—not the public but guys like himself, little guys trying to stay afloat between the devil and the deep blue sea.

“And who’s there to sell to?” A rhetorical question. He wasn’t expecting an answer. He was going to supply his own. “Nobody fishes after work in this business. Nobody goes out for dinner and drinks. It’s not part of the culture. They work nights, or they beat it home to their wife and kiddies. Not that HQ gives me anything to seal a deal with anyway. I don’t have that kind of expense account. And where are the premiums? Here, take home a box of cookies? Please.” Our father rattled his glass again. “How am I supposed to sell when I’ve got no leverage?” His exasperation brought over the barmaid. She was bearing a fresh Rob Roy.

“You’ve had a tough day, huh, honey? Look, I feel for you, I really do, but you’re scaring away the other customers.” I looked down the bar. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. There weren’t any other customers. She put my father’s drink down, then leaned over her folded arms, her elbows on the bar. “Pretty soon, if you don’t watch it,” she said, “it’s going to be just me and you.” She held out her hand. My father took it. “Wally,” he said. “Madeleine,” she said. “People call me Maddy.”

I cleared my throat.

“And Sonny makes three, eh?” Madeleine went to the sink and started dunking glasses. She hadn’t introduced herself to me. I didn’t like the way Dad was looking at her. I thought of Shirley, lo, those many years ago. Before she married Louie, what had happened between her and our father? Anything? How long had he kept that card in his wallet? Had he passed her on to Louie, damaged goods (though she seemed plenty damaged already when I met her at the Office), or had he settled for simply introducing her to someone who might appreciate her offers, knowing that nature would take its course, nature being the requisite coupling and uncoupling, with Shirley flying the coop eventually, as every woman did with Louie? I had no way of knowing, and my good thoughts to the contrary, it was something I wondered about, the nature of our father while he was on the road. I’d imagined him both good and fallen, noble and not so noble, and here was Temptation with a capital T, her boobs staring my father in the face.

I thought I knew something about that. I was dating someone right then that I was “practically engaged to,” as people used to say. I’d gotten tired of waiting for Dorie Braun—she was long gone from Augsbury, had left even before I graduated high school. The last I’d heard she was living in either Milwaukee or Minneapolis, and one rumor was she was living off her rich boyfriend, and another rumor was she was living off her friendships with rich homosexuals (though in Augsbury nobody called them homosexuals). So I stopped hoping and fell in love with the first woman nice enough to sleep with me. Jane Brohm, one of my college classmates. Cute, curious, freckled, neurotic. That should have been fine, but it wasn’t. The only thing we had in common was parents who drank too much. Where was Nomi to tell me I was making the same mistake as Cinderella? Maybe I was trying to tell myself that with Celia. It wouldn’t have been the first time that summer that I’d been tempted to stray. There’d been a woman, too, in the canning factory where I was working—Rita Sabo. A few years older than I and a mom already a couple times over. I think we’d have hooked up, only she was pregnant. What was it with me and pregnant women? Patty Duckwa redux. Only here the temptation was not only real but possible. And if I was all but engaged to Jane Brohm, what was I doing lusting after Rita Sabo and Celia no-last-name? Was it like this for married people, too? Was it like this for our father? For our mother?

Our father seemed to suspect what I was thinking. “I have never cheated on your mother,” he told me, lifting his glass to his lips. He often swore to this statement; either he suspected I was thinking it quite often or he had a guilty conscience.

“What about Mom? You think Mom cheats?” This was new territory. If we didn’t want to believe it about our father, how could we possibly entertain the idea about our mother? Still—