John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

The clinic lay on the other side of I-5, the older part of town. The man’s name was right there in the foyer. Randolph Bennett , the calligraphy softer than you’d expect for a doctor. It was too much of a coincidence. For them to send Corrillo here was almost as hokey as when he used to set up run-ins with Dora.

At the reception desk the radio was tuned to public broadcasting. Roots music, grunt and strum. The woman who came for Corrillo didn’t give her name. He followed her into the back and up a flight. The stairway lacked an overhead light, the only window gave onto drizzle. He suffered bad flashes. He saw Bennett and Knotts in one of the near rooms, unsmiling, hardly breathing; they poked a marker back and forth over a map of the suburb.

Cut it out. You’d think Breakthrough House scared him more than the state pen. The building was Alfred Hitchcock material, neo-Gothic, willed to the clinic by one of the pioneer families. More than likely the musty reek never left the halls. The place teemed with ’60s types of course. The woman taking him in wore knickers and knee-socks, plus those low-heel sandals with the fairy-tale name he always forgot. Red angels on her gray winter socks. Upstairs, the man he’d come to interview was another one: a huge, limping longhair. His patient’s uniform showed some belly. A spook in a spook-house, fraying and hobbled by chains.

The woman stuck them in what must once have been the laundry closet. No door, and built-in cupboards to the ceiling. She had the nerve to smile before she left.

Corrillo even forgot about Bennett. How long had it been since this weirdo’d had a decent shower? The environmentalist didn’t answer questions, he followed a private catechism. His gestures widened the V of his shirt, his chest at least wasn’t so scary. Some of these big guys caved in after thirty-five.

“Man,” the environmentalist kept saying, “if I’m bad and crazy, what does that make you?”

Corrillo managed to keep him on track long enough to get a name, Babe. And there were bits of background: “Man, I’m just your basic West Texas badass peyote messiah.” But the echo was oppressive. Before long Corrillo had backed his chair against the doorway, he’d stretched a leg into the hall. What kind of notes could he be taking, anyway? Man, those logging company dudes, they thought this was Star Wars man, they had this laser shit now supposed to home in on the spikes in the trees . Was Corrillo here to record fantasies? Babe explained what the spiking accomplished. In the woods a fragment could fly back in the logger’s face; in the mill a saw could explode. The News had all that in its files. Corrillo rested his head against a groove in the molding. He thought of the drive over, the red lights he’d run, the speed traps he’d beaten.

“If I’m bad and crazy…” Babe began.

His long arms dropped. After a moment he roughed his beard. The sound was mushy, the guy must be pouring sweat. On the small chair he looked mushy, all hair and hospital fatigues. Abruptly Babe revealed that, this last time out, the spikes had spoken to him.

“They speak dolphin language, man. You know, the squeaks. They squeak when you knock ’em in and they go on squeaking once they’re inside.”

Corrillo stood and shoved his pad in his pocket.

“Dolphin talk, man. I swear it’ll break your heart, you have to listen so close. They tell you they don’t want to hurt anybody.”

Corrillo faced the hall, craning left-right.

“But man, once those logging guys catch ’em…”

The staircase remained dark and empty, the other doors closed. He’d always known these hippie-dippie types were hypocrites. They took you in with their gobbledygook — words like “transition” and “incident,” a lot of softcore mumbo-jumbo — but what they had here was dangerous. Babe said that the spikes had told him their names . They’d told him about making the big machine saws burst, about flying out the factory windows and living in the millpond. “They can live forever in that millpond, man.” Corrillo couldn’t look at him. He kept his back to the room till he heard movement, and then he came round with arms cocked.

Babe remained in his chair, sagging, nodding. The noise was from the stairs. And that only proved to be more of the same. A crazy woman was padding down to this level barefoot.

She wore nothing but a long man’s t-shirt. Out of the dark stairwell she carried the seaweed smell of too much time in bed. Crazy: she was like an illustration out of an old dictionary. Yet she was lovely, even the slant tangle of neck-length curls, the cloud-color shirt with the rippled heaviness of wear. College age at most. Corrillo heard another sound, fragile. Had he forgotten about Babe? The environmentalist had his fingers pressed to a cupboard door. He was making them squeak against the wood, to show Corrillo how the dolphin-spikes sounded.

He looked in the hall again. The young woman hadn’t even seen him. She seemed to float before a door at the far end, then a man answered her knock. Bennett.

It was the doctor, the goatee. He closed his office door without noticing there was anyone else in the hall.

Corrillo had his pad out before he was back in his seat. He could see his interview taking shape as if on his monitor. Question: How could Babe have allowed himself to get caught? Had he really not heard the loggers coming, the trucks, the earth movers? Corrillo rapped his knuckles against the metal folding chair whenever the man started to drift. There’d been enough free association for one day. He himself had acted like a kid, lost in a fantasy about some silly test. This guy had asked for pressure tactics. Question: So you felt remorse? Corrillo broke a sweat, his ribs itched. You began to understand the harm you might do, and you felt remorse?

The motive always came down to pain. It was pain by one name or another, and then the urge to make better. First some bug of conscience, and the rest a dream to provide the creature a home.

By the time the aide returned, the woman in knee-socks, Babe had shrunk into a baggy cartoon question mark. The hair on his underlip trembled.

She didn’t smile this time. She might have had words for Corrillo. Can you find your own way out? or something. He didn’t catch it. He was trying to figure staff cutbacks. How else could they leave him alone in this narrow place full of secrets? The aide got her arm round Babe, they bent together like an old married couple.

Corrillo had to flatten himself against a door in the hall to let them by. Through the panels he heard sobbing. The woman and the big renegade went out of sight upstairs, up the way the sexy patient had come. Faintly the hallway resonated, sick people in every room.

How could they just ignore him? Then Corrillo was at Bennett’s door; he was at the keyhole.

He’d had no lunch and he felt the squatting in his stomach. The door was thick, the fitting snug. The laundry closet where he and Babe had talked must have been at the servants’ end of the hall. Bennett had the master bedroom. There was a skylight here, a white shine on the hanging dust, hot weather at last. Corrillo knew what he’d tell the editor if he was caught, too. He’d say they should do a story on this guy. Bennett was like Corrillo’s old Dad: he’d stuck it out and made a life. He was proof that there was no place better than the Willamette Valley.

But then, no way Corrillo was going to be caught. Not with these old floorboards, not with the kind of laser alertness he had going. He flattened his face against the door. He cupped his hands around his single open eye. The keyhole was old-fashioned, its shape promising, like the raised fist on those posters from the ’60s. But the edges of the opening were hemmed in by lock-works, the angle of view was impossible. Corrillo sank to one knee. How could there be so little room? He was as bad off as Dora, the way she had to sling her belly around all the time. The one thing he could be sure of was a window on the opposite wall, a porthole job. He could hear only the rhythms of what was being said, the doctor’s clipped calm, the patient’s fluttering search. He blinked slowly, trying to focus; there were more bad flashes. There was Dora’s hurt look, last night, her stare deepening and darkening. Come on . Why should he be saddled with that? She said he’d brought up the nasty stuff — all right, he’d brought it up—“All right,” he muttered into the doctor’s door, into his own thickening day-smell. But they’d spent the night shadow-dancing through a hundred poses and glances. He’d poured his beer down the drain; he’d presented her with the empty bottle. “You were happy,” Corrillo said, “you were smiling.” He felt the lock-face in his eyeball.