John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

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.