C Hribal - The Company Car

“Penny for your thoughts,” said our father, holding up his glass as though there were something written inside the bubbles, some pattern or message he was meant to see. Neither one of us had said anything since his crack about our mother, and the silence had gotten uncomfortable. I wasn’t about to tell him what I’d actually been thinking—who does that, ever?—but I did have a question from earlier, before Madeleine started making eyes at our father.

“Why aren’t you selling for Nabisco, Dad?” I asked, and he took a minute in answering. You could tell he was mulling over whether to tell me the truth or not. We had pauses like this before we were informed about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the fact that Molly was the main ingredient in our hamburgers.

Our father made Dizzy Gillespie cheeks and blew out all the air. He sighed, finished his drink. “They wouldn’t have me,” he said and shook his glass.

“Last one and then I’m shutting you off,” said Madeleine. It wasn’t seven o’clock yet. The place was filling up. She didn’t want a drunk at the bar during the height of the rush.

“Nobody shuts me off,” said our father. “I shut myself off.”

Madeleine crossed her arms under her bosom. “Look, I don’t want a scene. Somebody already whaled on you pretty good. My advice is leave now, then later we can treat each other with some tenderness. What do you say?”

“I say I’ll leave when I’m goddamn ready.”

The second bartender, a behemoth in a green T-shirt who’d just come on, walked over. “Problems, Maddy?”

“Naw, this sweet guy was just leaving.”

“You got problems, holler.”

“No problems, Kenny. Nada. Nothing at all.” Madeleine smiled, and I wondered what it was about my father that caused certain kinds of women to believe they could take care of him. Was it that he resembled a fat puppy, the klutz of the litter? Madeleine whispered, “Get some sleep. Come back later. Leave sonny boy back at the motel.”

“He’s my son.”

She straightened up. “Yeah, I know. I get off at eleven.” She went back down the bar to take care of another customer.

“I have never cheated on your mother,” our father repeated.

“It’s okay, Dad.”

“I’m a peddler, Emcee. A drummer. A detail man. A company crier. You can pretty it up and call me a commercial traveler, or a field representative or a field engineer, but what I do is sales. I’m a salesman. Now look at me. I take orders. I fill shelf space. I’m a goddamn traveling stock boy.” He was close to crying. “Nobody knows what it’s like out here. They just don’t know.” Soon tears were streaming down his corpulent face. He wiped them with a bar napkin.

“Are you okay, Dad?” The sight of my father blubbering had a profound effect on me. I was repelled; I was filled with love. I wanted to forgive him nothing; I wanted to forgive him everything. I got him down off his stool and helped him out of the bar. We left plenty to cover the tab and then some. Madeleine, shaking her head, scooped up the bills as we were leaving.

Between the alcohol and the beating he had taken, he was moving pretty slowly. Like he was learning how to walk again after surgery, little mincing steps accompanied by sharp intakes of breath and general unsureness. He winced as I got him into the car.

I drove us back to the motel, the Timberline Inn on the north side of Spooner. He was sawing lumber inside of fifteen minutes. I considered leaving him there, zipping out in the company car, and hitting all the area bars looking for Celia, or at least a younger version of Maddy, someone who might take a shine to me and wasn’t fussy about my address in the morning. But I had the feeling that if I did, when I came back he’d either be gone or have company, and I was too small a person to risk finding out. So I stayed and watched Charlie’s Angels. It was, I knew, the best I was going to do that evening.

I looked over at our father, a whale beached on his mattress, his snores riveting the air. Strangely, I understood now Maddy’s interest in him. He gave off the aura of a good guy, affable and steady, just a little down on his luck, and with patience and nurturing, you knew he’d do right by you. This was somebody a woman down on her own luck, but still plugging away and hoping, could trust. Even if he sometimes did the wrong thing, even if he sometimes screwed up. You could still trust him. He was in this for the long haul. What woman, deep in her own heart, wouldn’t want that?

Dorie, evidently. I want to tell Dorie that we can stay together, we can make it just as our parents made it, on the force of inertia alone, and the thing that scares me is she might feel the same way. Good grief, is that what we’ve come to? Still, it’s something.

Had it always been like this and we just hadn’t been paying attention? I suddenly believed our father. He hadn’t cheated on our mother. And if he had, who could blame him? Who could blame our mother, either? We are weak everywhere. We make mistakes, and other people—our loved ones—make accommodations. We hope the other party is willing to forgive us. We hope he or she is willing to put it on our bill. It scared me—to realize that one of our father’s idiot clichés actually made sense.

The next day we had a lot of territory to cover. It was all red and white pine and blue spruce and green tamarack and blue sky and white birch and quaking aspen, their undersides silver and tremulous in the breeze. And the lakes and rivers glimpsed through the trees were like advertisements for God’s vacation land, the water riffling, shimmering—I expected the Hamm’s beer bear to come dancing out of the trees. On one stretch of highway the trees thinned and all of Lake Superior was open to us, with sailboats and clouds skimming the horizon, and it seemed as though the world was an open and new place. Not so for my father. We had lunch at the Dog ’N Suds in Minong, and I tried to entice him into riding the go-carts next door, but my father had on his thinking-drinking face—pensive, withdrawn, morose.

“C’mon, Dad, lighten up. It’ll be fun.”

Our father shook me off. I poked him in the belly, trying to get a rise out of him. “It’s good exercise,” I said. “Put the pedal to the metal.”

“You think this is just fun and games up here, don’t you?” our father said, suddenly angry. “You think it’s just about going inside these stores and seeing what’s on the shelf and ordering more of it, don’t you?” I wasn’t going to answer him, but yeah, that was pretty much the way I saw it. When I was working for Nabisco, there was the sweet-talking of the store managers to do, but cookies are not a product you need to hard-sell, especially in a resort area. They pretty much leap off the shelf. You’re always wangling for display space, but that you’re going to get some eventually is pretty much a given. You just want to tie it in to the big weekends—Memorial Day, Labor Day, the Fourth of July. But I wasn’t seeing it the way he was, as a Nabisco competitor. As somebody who had to cajole, wheedle, beg, and finesse owners and store managers who, when he introduced himself, would say, “Pee-what-akee? Never heard of ’em.” This was what our father was fighting against, and the ignominy of it infuriated him.

He was still going. “You think it’s about taking orders and getting yourself some poontang, don’t you? Like you’re on leave, and you can schmooze up some nice girl at a bar and she’s going to put out for you. Well, it doesn’t work like that. You’re dreaming if you think it is. It’s nothing like that. It’s—” Our father stopped. He was at a loss for what to say next. He wasn’t selling. He wasn’t doing anything he thought necessary to count himself part of the sacred, holy order of the peddler. He hadn’t tried to sell anything to a soul all morning.