C Hribal - The Company Car

He shook his head, looked away. “Lunch is over,” he said. “We’ve got more orders to take.” I had never heard his voice so settled, so resigned. It continued in the afternoon. Our father went into the grocery stores and didn’t seek out the managers or the owners. There was none of his usual patter, no exuberant greetings, no jokes. He didn’t breathe a word to the people behind the counter in the smaller places unless they asked him what he thought he was doing. He got in, wrote his order, got out. We finished that day’s route in record time.

That evening I managed to get him out fishing after supper, but he took no pleasure in it. He didn’t say a word all evening, just quietly drank himself silly. I can’t say I understood or empathized with him. I couldn’t, twenty-one years old and hopped up with possibility, imagine the world being that foreclosed a place.

The best indication of how young and naÏve I was is that I thought I was the wise one.

The next day we drove Highway 53, the car silent except for the hum of the tires, the occasional bursts of chatter on the CB, bursts of chatter our father left alone. We worked our way down to Highway 29 for the long drive home. Twenty-nine is dotted with towns all built on one side of now largely defunct railroad tracks, each town a tattered carbon of its neighbor and former self. Each has its pitiful grocery and gas station—some still sporting the green Sinclair dinosaur rather than the clean and corporate red-white-and-blue ARCO signs—and each has its feed mill and boarded up hotel and three taverns, which looked like additions to people’s houses, as though drinking were a private pastime taken public, as though they were still in their living rooms, charging for beer and brandy shots. As we flew past we could see each bar had its two or three half-ton pickups parked out front. If I weren’t along, this would have been the start of our father’s long, slow pub-crawl home.

We were east of Chippewa Falls, and we’d not said three words since we’d started driving. We? Our father drove; he always drove. “It’s a company car, Emcee, I can’t have you driving it. The insurance risk is too great.” I chose not to point out that after he’d tied one on after his skull was broken open by Celia’s mother he was happy enough to have me drive, but maybe that was a stupor dispensation. The local road mix was red clay and granite, so the crumbling double-lane highway we were driv-ing looked like a bit of ossified Georgia. Pine trees and open fields, the raised railbed on our right. We were zipping past fluffy white clouds shredded like cotton wadding. It was a beautiful day. Why couldn’t we talk?

“You about ready for a potty stop?” asked my father, and I nearly burst out laughing. How is it that we never lose the language of childhood for certain fundamental pleasures and necessities? Potty stops and “you know.” But it was frustrating, too. I’d been with him all week, and except for his drunken tirade we’d yet to have a conversation. I had been playing the role of our mother—the silent copilot, watching the scenery roll away and disappear behind us while our father silently drove on and on, lost in his own thoughts. It was a private place he went to when he drove, his talk saved for the truckers who’d “keep the front door open” or “watch his back door.” Our father was selling to them, too, getting them to believe that in his company car he was one of them. I couldn’t stand it, the ease of his camaraderie with them. The brotherhood of the road. At one point my father got all the guys on that stretch of highway on the same CB channel, the whole lot of them sawing away through Roger Miller’s “King of the Road.”

“What do you think, Dad, you think those guys make potty stops, too?”

“They do if they’ve got kids.”

“Would they even know if they’ve got kids?”

“They know. Believe me, they know.”

“And how would you know if they did?”

“It depends. Daytime nobody talks much, they’re trying to make time. Where are the cops? What’s the score of the Packers game? Nighttime, though…” He trailed off.

“What?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it’s everything that comes with night driving—itchy eyes, sore back, jittery bones. They’re trying to stay awake. I’m trying to stay awake. We talk. And with nobody else on the road, we talk regular, not CB lingo.”

“About what?”

“Kids, family, wives. Where we live. What we’re gonna do on the weekend. What we want out of life—you know, stuff like that.”

It was as I feared. His relationship with these anonymous truckers was every bit as good as his relationship with us. Better, maybe. Founded on the same clichés during the day, but during the long nights he opened up to them, and they to him, so over time he probably knew some of those haulers better than he knew us. For us to get him to open up, he had to be half in the bag and ready to unload. It helped if he’d just had his head split open by an irate store owner, too. Though what you got then—what you always got, I suppose—was broken rage.

I tried again. Just straight out asked him: “And what do you think about when you’re driving, Dad?” I wanted to know. I really did. I wanted him to tell me something, anything, that wasn’t prepackaged, canned, a riff from his never-ending rap of taglines and clichés.

And he said, “What?”

“While you drive,” I said. “What do you think about?”

“Oh, the usual things. Nothing much, really. The next day, the next customer. I think about your mom. You kids.”

“Specifically, what do you think about?”

“Specifically?” He seemed distracted, like something on the road ahead of us really required his attention.

“Yeah, specifically. What do you think? About us, for example.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Things. The road sort of zips by me, Emcee, and I think about things. Nothing much, really. My thoughts just kind of wander.” He nudged the car off the highway and into the gravel drive of Ed’s Roadside Inn. “Let’s stop in for a taste.”

It was more than a taste. By the time we were coming down the long sweeping hills and climbing the rises east of Eau Claire, the sun was turning the telephone poles orange. We could almost hear those delicately curved wires singing. All that talk in the salmon-and-black wire, and I knew he’d never say it, what he thought about all those days behind the wheel. He hadn’t offered up anything in the bar, and I knew whatever he was likely to say now would be the usual lines. “Your mom is gonna kill me. Well, you know what they do with horses, don’t you?”

It was driving me crazy. I wanted to tell him I had doubts about my upcoming marriage. I wanted to ask him how did he know it was right with Mom. I wanted to ask if he thought Jane was a good match for me. But I couldn’t get through to him.

Correction: I said nothing to him about any of it. Not a word of it. Still another indication that, for all my loathing of his reticence, I was learning silence at the feet of the Buddha of Repression myself.

So okay, another missed connection. We’re going home now, and it’ll be like always, another skirmish between our father’s stewed indulgences and our mother’s frayed nerves. Our father trying to sneak into the house—his home, his castle—like a lumbering bull, our mother pouring acid onto his flanks trying to keep him out, but then she drops the bucket, raises the drawbridge, and just starts wailing. And the seven of us will hear the fight, or pieces of it, and will pray for reconciliation, pray our mother will lower the bridge so we can all race across, into forgiveness, into family happiness. Or, in whispered conferences—more and more now—we will wonder why they don’t just admit they are on separate shores and get a divorce.