Highway Trade and Other Stories

by John Domini

  Is it my nurse’s training? Is it Angelo? Most of these homeless have some disability or other.

  Don’s seen how caught up I get. On our last trip to Portland, I stood in the middle of traffic like I was asking to be hit. But he knows better than to call me on it. He knows he’s in no position to talk, the way he gets when I so much as mention the labs. He’ll put his back to me. He’ll stand and peer between the blinds as if his increased risk of lymphoma and bone cancer were something he could see coming.

  You don’t want to boil the serum.

  The tilted stool makes trouble, I’m off-balance. When I lift the vial from the water, a dollop of the cheap blood splashes over the lip. Before I can focus, the liquorish spill seeps out of sight into my cut, still open from exposure to the rain.

  Back home, before the bathwater cools, Don and the kids surprise me. The plastic curtain billows, crackles. I pull the washcloth over my breasts.

  “Marna, Marna!” Angelo’s face is on the lip of the tub, already beading with condensation. “We saw a lot of money, it was big as a house!”

  “Gang, hey gang.” For all I know, some infection might be living in the steam. “Mama needs some Mama-time.” But Andrea wriggles in next to her brother, their coats squeak against the porcelain.

  “Oh yeah Mom. You shoulda been with us, we finally got to meet good old Mort. And he showed us his, his wad. Boy.”

  The steam’s evaporating, the Don’s put his head in.

  “The man doesn’t like to talk on the phone.” He thumbs back his hood and I can see at once that he’s sober. “So I told him to meet me at the Road Blossom. And I brought along the two little Buttinskys.”

  He’s sober. I sit up, crossing arms over knees; the gauze on my cut blots the clinging water. “The Road Blossom?” When I got home I came straight upstairs, I assumed the kids were next door. But I can smell it now, strawberry ice cream, strong enough even to cut through the lavender bath oil. For a 24-hour place, the Blossom makes an incredible float.

  “That’s right, Ivy. I wanted somewhere where I could bring the kids.”

  “Bring…the kids? Bring them to meet Mort?”

  “Uh huh. That’s how I figured it. Find a place where you can bring the kids, and everything changes.”

  He speaks quietly, there’s no echo. My hand slips down my leg, my grip melts in the water. Andrea knows enough to let us alone. She picks at her brother’s Transformer, he had some trouble with his float. Still, we’re hardly comfortable. Goosebumps prickle my shoulders. I ask about the money, Mort’s wad. I know my husband, stubborn as sap stains. He’s slow to make friends and once he does, I’ve never seen him let go entirely.

  He explains that old Mort figured the least he could do was spring for the eats.

  “Oh, the guy’s an angel,” I say.

  The Don opens his fatigues so slowly the zipper purrs.

  “Darling,” I say, “he thought he could lure you all the way back over.”

  “Well.” He drops his gaze, the kids have started to fuss. “There was a lot of eye contact.”

  He whispers to Angelo; his Lincoln beard waggles prettily. His eyes are downcast; there’s those long, feminine lashes. The baby’s alive in the martyr’s bones. It’s alive as much as my own hand is alive, though in the panic after my accident I stuck it under the hood and switched on the ultra-violet. And God, this man and I—it’s as if we too were part of some larger face or body—we closet ourselves away and rattle every skeleton in there, but give us a minute away from codes and poses and there’s still something growing. I know what I saw in his look. Tonight he’ll remind me we agreed to have a third. We moved from ocean to ocean, baby; we heard what the doctors had to say and then we made up our minds to recommit.

  Andrea’s too intent on that spilled ice cream. She’s too rough on her brother’s ticklish spots.

  The boy whoops, unearthly sound. Then there’s his tongue, he can’t get a breath. He arches and his arms fly out, his eyes roll back, he’s lost his footing. Don grabs him round the rib cage and jams a rough carpenter’s hand between the boy’s teeth. Once Angelo loses motor control there’s no telling what’ll happen. Andrea backs off, her face huge. “Mama,” she starts, “Mama, I didn’t…” I get an arm round her before she can run. How bad can it be to see her mother naked? The fit knocks tears from the curtain, and I still wonder what that water might mean; but my family tastes it together, we huddle with heads down.

  Second Trimester

  CORRILLO COULDN’T believe it was just another assignment. They were sending him back to Bennett. According to the memo from his editor, Corrillo actually had to interview the man.

  Bennett’s new office was a half-hour down I-5. Corrillo headed out muttering. Sending him back to that guy…Someone must be thinking, let’s put it to the new kid, let’s see what he’s made of. Farmland snugged the highway on either side, crops just coming to leaf and rangeland freshened by the long spring. In this drizzle it offered no distraction, only green and green again. The Willamette River Valley in the middle of June. And today couldn’t be just another assignment. Today had to be a test. After a while Corrillo gave up trying to make sense of it; he fell back on box patterns of words, Anglo words, fitting them to the surges of the old Honda. “Pedal to the metal, pedal to the metal.”

  Bennett and he had first met at Christmas-time. Corrillo had been at the News less than a month then. Bennett’s wife had killed herself, asphyxiated herself, in the garage. The News had sent the new kid to get a recent photo.

  Now that had been a test. Corrillo had kept it brisk and polite, avoiding the stare of Bennett’s two-year-old. This was news after all. The family had just moved out from back East, and not only was the husband prominent in criminal counseling, but the deceased had held a position at the local rehab clinic. Without a word, Bennett had gone into the back of the house and returned with a studio portrait of his wife. Good stuff: an attractive woman, still young, with a troubled smile. Three papers had picked up the graphic, including Eugene.

  And that was six months ago. Corrillo had taken their rookie challenge and come out glittering. Granted, he hadn’t done much hard news since. But on a suburban paper, how much hard news was there? Hey, if they wanted a test—wasn’t it a test to have a kid on the way? Corrillo’s wife was in her second trimester now. He’d felt the baby kick.

  At last the penitentiary loomed, a stack of bricks in miles of sheep meadow. Bennett’s new office.

  But once he got inside, the job was a glide. Bennett had been appointed prison therapist. Since last time he’d even grown a classic analyst’s goatee. Eager to please, to conform; apparently losing a wife out in this corner of the country hadn’t put down roots enough for him. He had the professional man’s vanity about his accessories, adjusting his glasses, tugging his watchband. Strictly a glide. For most of the interview Corrillo couldn’t believe that the guy didn’t remember him. It had to be some shrink’s trick, make you forget you were under observation. Likewise this rope-colored office, with its ordinary window. On the wall opposite, the doctor had mounted one of his daughter’s paintings, a knotted scrawl. Make you forget you were in a prison.

  Bennett said that he would continue to put in a couple days a week at the Breakthrough House. “The clinic in town,” he said, “where my wife used to work.” Okay. Corrillo brought up the suicide, doing a few private adjustments of his own. When his mouth was closed he kept his molars apart, he sucked in his baby fat.

  All that happened was, Bennett looked that much more determined to stay. The muscles in his head became visible. Corrillo stared so closely that he thought again of the photo, the dead wife. After the Register-Guard ran the shot, he’d had the entire page sent up from Eugene over the laser transmitter. Now the husband’s face too might have just dropped into the transmitter tray. Nothing but flatness and distance. He hadn’t even seen the young reporter who’d come to his house six months ago.

  Corrillo sat aching from the drive down, the
effort of acting relaxed. This was his chosen work? His notes looked like something from another, dryer dimension. Pay grade, patient load, commuting distance. He left the pad on the chair and went to the window. The unbarred glass was reinforced with thick plastic; it looked down on the exercise yard. Uneasy men moved in clusters, in blue fatigues.

  “You don’t think it was some kind of test?” he asked his wife. “Some kind of new-kid thing?”

  Dora fit the paper plates into woven holders. She continued to sing, humming between snatches of Spanish.

  “I mean, the first test is famous. Getting a photo of the deceased, I can understand that. You have to find out what a rookie’s made of.”

  His wife set out the taco makings. The bright stuff was mounded in terra-cotta pots, also primary colors, decorated with birds and fishes. It was as if she was trying to force summer along, setting the table for a picnic. She sang some folksy sunshine thing, a river and butterflies over and over. Corrillo too hated this Oregon excuse for June, this lingering drizzle. Still the scene caught him by surprise. Signs of impatience in Dora? His own wife, and till this moment he would have thought she took every season of the year the same. Dora lifted the shells from the oven. Corn flour: the smell of a hot evening outdoors, baked-blue skies.

  She put in a word for his editor. “Mr. Knotts wants you to fit in. This will work out, just be patient.”

  “I don’t know, D. Just because my Dad used to fix his car…”

  She turned towards the table, he noticed her belly. Another rush of nerves, he forgot what he was going to say. The whole scene was too much like the old country. The breadwinner drinking and bitching, the wife pregnant and docile.

  These last few weeks Dora’s skin had freckled, thickened, browned. In fact her people were Indian, Quiché, and Corrillo had fallen first for the eyes. That elastic Asian dark. He’d fallen for the old country, computer training or no computer training. But now, so dark? With potions for the weather? Dora might have been one of her own chanting grandmothers. Tonight even Corrillo’s drink was Mexican, the spendy stuff after a rough day. He bought his beer in singles—Dora couldn’t have alcohol around the house—so he could splurge when he wanted.

  She hovered over the tacos, spreading onions and peppers the way she sprinkled food for the angelfish: a flight of skin that wrinkled the tinted water. Corrillo couldn’t watch, he studied the fish. The tank took up almost half the table anyway. What were they doing with angelfish in a rental?

  “I guess it’s Bennett who really makes me wonder,” he said finally. “I mean, Bennett himself.”

  His voice rang off the aquarium, unexpectedly loud. Dora was in her chair now. She folded her hands.

  “Think about it, honey.” God, he didn’t even know if he’d interrupted her. “The man’s staying around, he’s decided to live out here.”

  “Hasn’t he got a little girl?”

  He nodded, taking a bite.

  “Well when you’re older, and you’ve got a child—“

  “If it was me, I’d be gone.” He shouldn’t eat so fast, she put in such fierce spices. “I’d be out of here, man.”

  “Oh, Carlito.”

  The word came out flat, no accent. She’d been raised in Portland.

  “Dora, I’m not kidding around. We’d be out of here tomorrow if you gave me the word.”

  “Car-lito. You sound like something out of Viva Zapata! Do you really think moving would solve anything? In A.A. we have a name for that, we call it doing a geographic.”

  Okay. Forget the Earth Mother; Dora wore her gossip face. She held her cup of soda by her cheek, a glazed tumbler, jungle red. Just now, it could have been the phone.

  “Don’t give me that sardonic smile, Carlito. Don’t look like such a bright boy. You brought this up.”

  Bright boy? Corrillo bent to his taco, he fingered in extra lettuce to ease the jalapeño burn. Dora was older, almost twenty-six. Her days on the bottle, whew. There were women in her family who went flat-faced if you so much as mentioned her name.

  “Dora, I thought we were talking about Bennett.” He sucked his cheeks between his molars.

  “I am talking about Bennett,” she said. “You said he should move, and I’m telling you you’re kidding yourself. Nobody gets anywhere just doing a geographic.”

  “Well lighten up, okay? I mean, you’re the one who said we should be patient.”

  “I said you should be patient. Wherever Mr. Knotts wants you, that’s where you should go. You should log in, and you should sit tight.”

  “Dora—“

  “Till the baby comes, man, that’s the only income we’ve got.”

  She slogged down more Dr. Pepper. Before dinner she’d filled an entire liter jug, careless as she hummed her Baez. Had he misread her, before dinner? Had this tough-guy kick been lurking in the Serenity act? She’d poured so much pop into the jug it fizzed over the earthenware.

  “Dora, listen. The man told me he even took over some of his wife’s people, at the Breakthrough House. He took over some of his dead wife’s old patients.”

  She ate stiff-backed, carrying the taco tenderly to her mouth. Her smock remained clean. Dora declared that how a person handles major trauma—a death or something on that scale—that was one thing. The day-to-day that followed was the real test. Corrillo left his beer alone, thinking: almost twenty-six. His wife was nearly two years older. He’d fallen for that as much as for the eyes. Dora’s grasp of how things worked had been a challenge, a crackle in his nerves as lively as whatever drove him to run up and down I-5 on assignments for the News. At first he couldn’t get enough of all her buzzwords for hard times; she’d told him about “doing a geographic” before. But tonight it sounded like a lecture. Stiff-backed, telling him what to do. She waved her tumbler around like she was Knotts showing him the office.

  He faced away, towards the rain-spotted deck doors. These rentals were laid out in a straight line: dining space, living space, deck space, lawn. Everyone shared the lawn, and everyone observed dinner hour.

  “Look, Dora.” Never mind if he were interrupting her. “I still can’t see how the man can go back to Breakthrough House.”

  She raised her chin. “I’m working with people at A.A.”

  “Yeah but, alone in a room with some mush-for-brains? When you know that they know about your wife?”

  “A person can’t just glide along on the surface, Carlito. That’s the big thing you learn in A.A.”

  “Look, do you miss drinking or something?”

  He worked his bottle, deliberately. Out of one eye he spotted the angelfish, still and gaping.

  “Really, D. A.A., A.A., A.A., A.A.! It’s like I’m at a goddamn football game. Plus, how many times do you have to call me Carlito? You said it yourself, I’m the one with the income, I’m carrying the load. Do you realize who you’re talking to? Do you realize who you’re talking to?”

  One more swallow. He faced her. After the first moment there was nothing but those swollen eyes, swollen and yet with the darkness in them expanding as well.

  “You brought this up…”

  His hard words went right up his spine. And he’d eaten too fast, drunk too fast, something was stuck above his heart. Corrillo managed. He hitched his chair next to hers, he did what he had to. He put enough into their kisses to draw a smile out of the last. When the baby pressed into his ribs he bent and whispered wisecracks. Listen, poquito, I must be crazy about her—that salsa wasn’t made for kissing. Her hair smelled of fruit, the conditioner she used for curl. Corrillo came up with apologies.

  “I know this is what I wanted,” he said. “The suburbs, the life. I know I have to be a big grown-up boy.”

  Boy? What were these empty phrases? His hands remained cold, the rain, the beer. The lines he spoke had nothing to do with tonight, this spice ball in the gullet. She ran too deep for him. She’d had the extra aging, the worse tragedy; now she contained an additional heartbeat. He found Dora’s hand and fit his fingers b
etween hers. In moments the linked fleshy cluster was sopping with tears. But all he could do was fall back on the cosiest role: her sweet little confused Carlito. Really, they were running through role after role here, from folk songs to psychobabble, and he couldn’t go deep enough for any of them. This was his chosen partner? Corrillo clasped her dripping hand. They rocked, rocked, between the aquarium and the deck doors.

  Corning into the News always picked him up. The place was a cutting from a Rubik’s cube, made of glass. Round the central courtyard Corrillo could see the whole circuit of the day’s production. News, Advertising, Composing, Printing. And the distributors pulled up their vans at the corner farthest from the editor’s cubicle. He couldn’t wait to bring his kid here, to show the place off. The desks themselves had a new-wave tilt, each one made lopsided by a video terminal on a folding swivel arm. There were mornings when it seemed like one or two turned their calm fly’s faces to welcome him.

  Corrillo would have preferred a paper that came out Sundays. He’d like to see some think pieces, some deeper probing. He was tired of the promotional copy clamping a limit on everything; even the syndicate stuff got hacked. But the publishers knew where their money came from—the tech firms and the malls. And he’d chosen not to try for the big papers, the Oregonian especially. Dora agreed, it would be degrading to start as a gofer. She agreed: before they moved up I-5, he had to make a name for himself.

  This morning, the article on Bennett’s new appointment hadn’t appeared. Of course Corrillo hadn’t thought much of the writing. His concentration just hadn’t been there. First thing, he called up the file.