John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

He doesn’t even want to hear about it. And there’s no problem keeping him out of the conversation around the lab, I’m the only native-born citizen in the place. Giptill knows the grants. He knows the odder the group, the bigger the funding. Over coffee or lunch, the talk is usually like Magda earlier: in my country, in your country. There’s an assistant named Mx’bellah, just incredible, I bet he sees wasps in this weather. But today he’s home. Everybody’s home, and the work takes half a brain. I’m like the first white man at the Grand Canyon. I reach into the freezer for a vial of serum, and there’s another echo. “Don’t talk to me about the war, we’ve all got our…” Ducking into my rain gear is no help. The smell is another reminder, all that food and angry pedaling.

Even in the containment room. Actually I should have towelled off before coming in here — the place is a million dollars worth of sterilizer. On the counters along either wall, every board foot has some designated function. Freezer and centrifuge, hypos and dishes, even the water bath where the serum now sits melting. The largest workspace is taken up by the hood, a stainless steel cube of still more sterilizer. When we bring cultures in here, we handle them under the sliding glass that fronts the hood. Our hands are gloved, cleansed with noiseless gas. When we finish we hit the switch for the ultraviolet and kill off everything.

The stool sits so there’s no place to rest your back, but I can jimmy it. Rainwater slips from my Gore-Tex and pings the cold baseboard. I watch the serum melt. It’s the cheapest kind of plasma, they get it from donors off the street. Yet the melting is almost a miracle: it begins as an Antarctic bristle and ends up winey slow blood. I must have had too much parochial school. Or I must be thinking too much lately about the ones who might pass for Christ in this country, the homeless who line up to donate blood. Lately I have to make an effort not to stare. They stand trembling with God knows what diseases or chemicals, but they’re desperate to buy into more. Of course I help, there are drops for food and clothing if you can’t give money. I wrote Congress last month when that bill came up. Still, I catch myself staring. Here in the Valley you don’t see so many fatigue jackets and paratroop boots as back East. The weather allows skimpier gear, sometimes the very sheets and scrap they slept in.

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.

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.”