Highway Trade and Other Stories

by John Domini

  Stanley read this part with terrific feeling. Alden was saying goodbye to his daughter, the shape of the sentence was itself soft from bruising. Nonie faced him again at last. Such a voice, such a stare—Stanley couldn’t have known what had gone on. He couldn’t have known the letter was from the man with whom she’d cheated. Instead the job of reading well was for Stanley another dip into the tool kit: it was his own above-it-all sanctuary.

  Good God, why didn’t the damn drug take over? Out the window, she noticed only the bits of hard color visible between the trees. The film company’s color, the fakery down on Main Street. She waited to see what Alden would reveal.

  He claimed that Nicaragua wasn’t enough for him. He belonged in another time, Alden said, a time when a man could take an honest leap off the edge of the world. These days it was nothing but meanness any way you went. You blundered into old lives, you stirred up old pain. Beg, borrow, steal. Nonie was still sorting out the emotions when Stanley began to refold the letter.

  He pinched the folds, the paper squeaked.

  The out-of-place table, the autumn cold.

  Of course Stanley began to talk. Old Ollie, man, so many ideas. He even used to take acid for the ideas, when the rest of us just took it for the thrills. Nonie let him go. She was goofy with relief. Some clottage inside had burst and set free a thousand skittery creatures, every one of them made of relief, every touch of their feet another tickle. She had to laugh. She sprawled in her chair. Every time she caught her breath she saw more of the whacky outdoors invade the house, visual overlaps flip-flopping from Stanley to the kitchen and back. His mustache blipped across the fridge and linoleum; the mugs and dry rack settled web-like over his head. His noise was a chatter on the edge of sleep. The chair itself made more sense, creaking Alden didn’t tell, he didn’t tell as she tried not to fall. Certainly she was too busy with laughing to finish the new questions coming to mind: Were they already…? Was it all going to be like…? Certainly she couldn’t be bothered trying to read Stanley’s gestures, or what it meant when he hiked his chair closer. At least the dry rack’s grid had left his face. She could see the strain in his grin. Finally she caught what he was saying, enough to understand. Easy babe. Stay within….

  Soon as he touched her, she tackled him. Just erupted from her chair and tackled him. Her ankle clipped a table-leg, and the clatter of furniture behind them was pain as well, but she put it all into her bolt and grab, into a squeal of delicious need and power. She intended to kick over a lot more than tables and chairs. She’d had enough of everything boxed up and subtle: same old, same old. By the time the trip peaked she wanted a free fall. She wanted a revolution. No more lies forcing her into formal talk, strict posture, aching feet. Alden didn’t tell; she’d get to tell. She’d get to tell; nothing else was going to take over for her after all. That was her relief. If Stanley couldn’t handle the freedom, she’d find some place where no one so weak and ordinary could ever touch her again.

  They were halfway across the living room before they fell. Nonie’s nose was full of rug as she hauled herself upright. She straddled his tummy, she wanted him pinned, she needed a moment. The grating on the space heater loomed at her side like a tin net, while the trip lifted off in rushes that carried her awareness higher each time.

  Stanley looked stunned but grateful. His cap was gone, his hair so wild it covered his bald spots.

  “Stuntzie,” she began, “Stuntzie…”

  No good, the love name sounded mean. Past the giddiness, this new level was trouble.

  Stanley…she thought through the words, she said some of them at least. Always remember, I was in love with you. Honestly I was—

  “Hello? Are we in the right place?”

  Was that him? She blinked but couldn’t ask; unexpectedly she was almost crying.

  “Hello? Oh! Oh, sorry. We were told the place was empty.”

  The front door was open. The chill proved this was real. In the brief entryway, bordering the living room, stood a man about Stanley’s age. Other than that his looks were dark. Nonie let her face shrink again. She fisted her skirt together behind one leg and lifted herself off Stanley. But this man had a whole army with him. A woman as dark and striking as himself, and a boy and a girl. They all were burdened with soft, bright luggage. Though the children still fiddled with their grips and shoulder straps, their looks were even worse than their father’s, honestly frightened. Nonie butted against the space heater and fell into a squat. Too close, the grate buckled against her spine. But she couldn’t let on how the tin thunder shook her, and she could only cross her arms against the wind ripe with the coming of rain.

  The man’s name was Anthony Marcella. He’d arranged the rental with a realtor. Stanley got to his feet grinning, apologizing: Man, we never thought we had to check first with the realtor. Not in this market. The father didn’t smile. He said he and his wife were with the movie, they needed a quiet place to unwind. The movie! Stanley did a big chinny take, he slung his thumbs in the scoops of his undershirt, he was onto a party wavelength already. Did you hear that, Nonie—the movie! Anthony Marcella interrupted before she had to answer. His look was the opposite of Stanley’s, his voice ragged with smoke: So who are you guys?

  “Tonight’s the only night we need the crib,” Stanley began. “And we’ll be cool, we’ll be just fine.”

  He had to fish out Nonie’s license. See man, Winona Burnslides. But her father, man, get this: he was Joshua Burns Old Hides. Nonie couldn’t believe Stanley’s willpower. He’d made an instant commitment to ride out the complications. But she’d gone into this thinking it would be simple. Buying the acid had been less trouble than buying liquor. Nobody’d asked for ID; there’d been no whispering. Now however the mother pulled the father back into the doorway. And Stanley was making another offer, something about dinner. They wouldn’t need to haul the kids around, they’d have a couple slaves for the night.

  The parents’ gestures at the children left fleshy trails that turned brown after the first second or so. When Anthony Marcella frowned, Nonie thought of a Disney stevedore. His whole family was that way, dark on dark. The mother, Lucy, might have had Indian blood herself. The boy was named Tonto, the girl Posey. Except their mouths didn’t look Indian. They pouted somberly, their lips were twitchless staring tropical fish. Then it appeared an agreement had been reached. The parents handed Stanley the plastic card with her name.

  He hefted a pair of suitcases. He led them past Nonie towards the stairs. A ripple of smiles and satiny backpacks: she suffered another surge of giddiness. She cupped her mouth and nose, she choked.

  God, how had she ever handled living here? The stairs were so narrow that the troop had to go up single file, clomp-clomp right over the open snout of her giddiness. The place was a shoe box with gables. And when she’d lived here, there’d been family all the time. Clomp-clomp a lot louder and more regular. She’d been one of those girls who could spend forever perched on the bedroom window sill. In the spring she’d actually sit out on the brief gable downslope, she’d watch for the ghostly night visitors: the baby spiders that rode their webs on the breezes. But it was autumn now. Autumn, and upstairs they were dragging round furniture.

  Nonie scooted away from the space heater and stood. The blood-rush triggered another kind of openness, a terror spasm. The time remaining till her trip peaked yawned ahead out of control. A chatter from the edge of sleep rotated the living room clockwise round the treetops and scrap of sky visible out the front door. Nobody had thought to close it.

  She had more important things to do, herself. While the room settled she got her face in line. Forget the stretching: she went into her workshop program.

  She went for the holding pattern. Nonie wanted to be up there again, up where she could judge distances and keep count, while the movement and noise around her were no more than radar. And the withdrawal seemed speeded by the drug. It started to come over her even as she finished her first brief jeté. Yes brief; too long a
jump would carry her right out of the house. The space was better suited to the sauté. Nonie turned, she skipped back and forth between the fallen kitchen chairs and the facing sofa. She slipped further onto her safety level each time she repeated the chorus she and Stanley had sung in the car on the way up. Another of his favorite blues: You got to move, you got to move.

  By the time she began her fouettés she’d broken a sweat. The chill from the open door was a useful control. Kept her from getting giddy again, because she’d always been best at fouettés, her body snapping round prettily, prettily, while one leg remained locked and extended as if the foot were netted in mid-air. Her body was a perfect match for the line-drawing across the walls of keeping count. There…there. The inward tuck she was after.

  Upstairs the noise got worse. They must have been moving the beds, oh Stanley. Up in her holding pattern she could see him so clearly. Him and all the men in her life: they didn’t dominate her, they didn’t tie her in knots. Just her being here proved she wouldn’t be pushed around. She’d had a session scheduled for this afternoon, and the director had warned her last time, if she skipped again she was out.

  But Stanley now, he was pushed around. When he went on staff at Sunset for instance, all he could talk about was the money, how it would help with her tuition. And even after she graduated he remained a slave to the dollar. Sometimes he took assignments that meant he had to be gone all weekend. When she’d begun to work with the company from New York, there’d been no one to pick her up but Alden. She’d come out freshly complimented and ready for a drink, and there would be Alden. Even then she might have been able to handle it if Sunset hadn’t run only the most routine and soulless shots. Stanley would go through four rolls of film over a weekend, and the one shot they’d print would be of a kid leaping after a butterfly. Caption, The Never-Ending Joys of Childhood. How could a grown man allow himself to be used like that? She still had a hard time understanding, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. If it had been her, she’d have kept more of what mattered untouched.

  “Babe? You straightening up in here?”

  Stanley stood in the hallway door. A speckle of hallucination fled across his jacket as she came out of her last pirouette. She tasted hair at the corner of her mouth, she realized how she must look. At least Stanley had kept the others from coming through the hallway door, they hadn’t seen. Now his jacket was mere gray planes of reflection. Keeping her feet in fifth position, her sanctuary snug, Nonie bent and brought up one of the chairs.

  “No no, babe. Don’t bother.” The Marcellas were in when she came up. “The father’s got a little program in mind.”

  Fifth position, tight but comfortable. She fingered the hair off her face, she nodded when Stanley explained that the parents wanted to look at some slides. Something to do with the movie, babe; nod nod. Still she almost lost her balance as the kids darted round finding the curtain pulls, turning the room dark. The sweat from her workout became oppressive when the father banged shut the door.

  The kitchen was normal again, Stanley had moved the table back. Kitchen chores were better still. Holding patterns older than Elements of Dance. But instead of Mom, today she had Lucy. Lucy had insisted on helping, and as they chopped up the vegetables and cheeses the woman talked about Hollywood. The gossip threaded the surface tension with dangerous color. Apparently Anthony had a lot riding on this movie. He was the primary editor, his first shot at that kind of responsibility. The slide show now was something the director had insisted on; the director had a particular kind of horror movie in mind.

  The wife paused, Nonie tried to pitch in. She told the story she knew best, about the day when Stanley had come in to photograph her dance troupe. You should have seen him, this slinky old guy in a biker’s jacket and cap, getting off all these East-Coasty one-liners. Nonie managed to giggle without losing control. When Stanley found out she had Indian blood, she said, he’d called her Princess Summerfallwinterspring.

  But Lucy didn’t follow up. In here she didn’t look nearly so old as she had standing next to her husband. She was hardly older than Nonie. And yet with these kids, this fast-track position—Nonie turned from her stare. She took the mugs from the dry rack and held them under the faucet.

  “Well.” Lucy fell in beside her, took the nearer mug. “I’m sure in Stanley’s business, there are times when he’s under a lot of pressure.”

  Nod nod. She started on the spoons.

  “I’m sure you know what that’s like, when a man’s under pressure—say, where are your dishtowels?”

  “I think there’s one in the bathroom,” Nonie said.

  God, how had that popped out? When Lucy returned from the downstairs can, towel in hand, her stare had deepened. Then the light went out in the living room; Lucy’s face turned to stark makeup, geisha makeup. The idea took over, too fast for Nonie’s inner radar. Both of them might as well be geishas. They could have been doing this kind of thing anywhere on the globe. They’d fallen into the scutwork shoulder to shoulder, and yet at the same time they’d avoided anything more intimate. When the stories ran out, they could only stare. Girls from the escort service. Their men were waiting for them to finish.

  Stanley called, Lucy moved. Still Nonie went into the living room carefully. She couldn’t trust what she could see of how they’d rearranged the furniture.

  Anthony Marcella at least was grateful for the guacamole, she’d figured that right. He was drinking tequila, he’d commented on the Inca design in her skirt. But she chose to sit on the floor. Stanley perched against the sofa arm like a daddy long-legs. He’d lent the boy his jacket, but he looked worse than cold. He looked as if he’d been giving away pieces of himself forever, as if that were his own geisha-vision, his own global nightmare. Even on the floor Nonie found the paranoia hard to shake. The children were two more ruptures in the safety place. They played at the edge of the projector’s funnel of light, quick as puppets. The boy was huge in Stanley’s coat and the girl was squeally. Nonie tried to stay with the father’s explanations.

  “That’s Pompeii,” he was saying. “That sort of burnt, smudged look, that’s what he wants for this picture.”

  “Sure,” Stanley said. “A horror flick, everything should be smudged.”

  The father dolloped more liquor into his glass. How could he drink so much? Nonie’s one sip had tasted like she was licking a match-head.

  “And those props on Main Street, man, those looked nice.” Stanley was desperate; the chatter had to make up for what he’d given away. “It looked like the ’50s out there.”

  Nonie didn’t want to hear it. She put her head against the heater and closed her eyes. But with that another landscape appeared, its colors secure, its weather simple. She pictured the mockups Stanley was talking about, the props and trimmings just a few short blocks away. Out there—she didn’t want to think about it. But the slides kept changing, the click and whir kept her mind from wandering: out on Main Street, she could have gotten into some truly freeform craziness. What was she doing in here? Why hadn’t she gotten out when she had the chance?

  Click, regret, click, regret. The two kids appeared to be dancing in time, their carefree hops and tumbles mocked her. A romp out on Main Street would have been perfect craziness. Those period sets were made for a trip like this. When she and Stanley had come through town yesterday, the Datsun itself had seemed nuts, a foreign car in Mayberry RFD. Storefronts dark for years were decorated with awnings bright as a clown-face. In one window there’d been a poster, Christmas-colored: Try the latest rage—WHAM-O FRISBEE! The barber pole was spiffed and revolving again. The bench in front of the pharmacy was spiffed, and the man sitting there wore a bow-tie and the gap-toothed smile of a lunatic. Well how did Nonie look herself, now, huddled and uptight on a strip of fake-brick sheeting? How many opportunities to get out was she going to fumble? On the set, she would’ve been able to stay in her holding pattern forever. On the set it was only natural for a person to go crazy.

&nbs
p; “Will you stop it about the set?” The father was loud, his voice rang inside the tin heater like an alarm. “You know that isn’t a playground out there, that’s a movie!”

  When had this happened? All she could see of Stanley was his shirt, aglow in this dark.

  “They’re eating people alive out there,” the father said.

  Tonto came motoring between her and the others. The boy had zipped up the jacket and scrunched down inside; his feet were out of sight and only his eyes showed over the collar.

  “You think the ’50s are fun? To me, when you talk about the ‘50s, it’s mean, mean talk. You don’t know how those bastards keep us stuck on the ‘50s.”

  Lucy laughed. The noise was worse than the father’s carrying on, totally irrelevant, a dent in the atmosphere.

  “I swear to God, every goddamn movie they make, it’s got to be the ’50s. Never mind if you had some ideas of your own for the picture. Never mind how all the little girls have their tits hanging out.”

  Lucy again, like a lawn mower catching and dying. And Stanley laughed too: hey, what a party. Nonie squinted against the projector beam. When had this happened? When had they started…covering up, or whatever this was? It wasn’t funny, certainly. But the couch presented a solid front, three adults. The mother was the least visible, and already her laughter changed shape in Nonie’s memory, it started to sound sincere. Nonetheless the nerves and raw talk were getting to the kids. Tonto’s engine had stopped, he sagged at the beam’s edge. Posey sat cross-legged beside Nonie, and somewhere the girl had found a set of rubber stamps. Now as Nonie watched she began to print one repeatedly, mechanically across her face.