John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

He felt under the seat and found what had poked him. A record album, that’d do to change the subject.

“Hey Rob, what’s this?” He came up holding the LP, and her hand fell away. “Ain’t this a little old for you?”

“Oh.” She laughed. “That was my boyfriend’s — I mean my ex-boyfriend’s. I’m not seeing anyone now. Wow, that guy was so into the blues.”

Bro grinned, setting the album on his lap. The grin was all he could manage.

“That’s Howlin’ Wolf,” she said eventually. “You really don’t know?”

“He looks like my father,” Bro said. Meantime making up his mind: okay. The media was a tool, they even said so down in Instructional League. Plus anybody on the club could have told him this girl was a newcomer. Okay, so use it like a tool, and pay the price next time her game gets a little clumsy. Talking about the family after all seemed somewhere near what he was after. Except then — couldn’t have been more than a couple minutes later — she was pulling off the highway. She was heading up towards what looked like a farmhouse and stables.

Of course it had to be a farm. Bro could see livestock a field or two away, through the ballgame roar of the driveway gravel. It was just that everything appeared so square and functional. There were none of the nooks and crannies he remembered from field trips in grade school. The satellite dish was planted between a couple naked concrete blocks, the house stood dark and empty. Instead of a garage the owner had nailed pink corrugated plastic to the top of some upright 4 × 4’s. The movieola effect when they pulled in under that plastic was wildly out of place, like the once in a while when a pigeon flaps down in the infield.

The woman didn’t move after she cut the engine. Bro realized he’d been quiet, checking the place out.

“Your father ten years ago, and now your brother.” She exhaled hard and found his eyes.

“Well what it makes me think of, these last couple days anyway, I think of like East Coast, West Coast. I think of the difference between the two, I mean.”

She frowned. “What’s that got to do with you?”

“Well like, my family would have had it different out here.” He raised his eyes to the pink ripples overhead. “We wouldn’t have wound up living such a bad life, out here. Because it just isn’t bad around here the way it is back East. This is a safe place.”

She was silent again, but there seemed an edge on it. He lowered his head in time to see how her frown enriched her eyes, deepened the blue. Then she put in some word just to mark the beat. Bro was left unfolding himself from the car while she headed for the stables.

And inside the building, the brown shadows warmed by the long day’s sun, she became that much stranger. Despite a churchlike ceiling and a center aisle wide as Bro’s arm-span, Robin made the place. Her outfit had a new effect, the boots especially. She knew it too. The woman strutted along crooning. Of course her actual words couldn’t be what Bro thought he was hearing, “Yo mama, yo mama.” But in fact the whole scene had started to feel impossibly familiar. The hay damp from the loft opposite, getting into the eyes as soon as you came in the door; the snortle and hoof-tread within the deep stalls. Some kind of locker-room flashback? Certainly his head was warming again. Random pink and white craziness fluttered alongside Robin’s croon, as it rose and fell through the harsh smoker’s cough of the animals. A butterfly in the locker room?

At the next-to-last stall she opened the bolt. “There’s the boy,” she cooed. “There’s my sweet boy.”

Her explanations went by in a rush. A gelding on lease, “the fulfillment of an adolescent dream.” Bro had never liked being lectured at, and Robin’s slick work with the reins and bridle made the breathless rap seem like an act. But he could see what all the excitement was about. Robin led the horse out between them — and of course Bro fell back as soon as the first awkward foreleg emerged, it’d been a long time since anything had tightened his nuts like that — but he couldn’t stop staring. The face was sharp yet chocolate. Bird-like planes of bone ended in square formal teeth. The shoulders and ribs went by in skinfull ripples, first brown then red, and Bro couldn’t tell where the light came from.

Robin was saying, “Yes Mothra, ye-es Mothra.” At least he recognized the movie. The New York stations had played those Jap monster things all the time. “You didn’t think I’d keep you cooped up all day, did you?”

Actually, getting some fresh air seemed like a great idea. He wouldn’t feel so scared out in the fresh air. After all they were under the loft now, in the worst of the settling hay-dirt. Bro set his face. He was past the high, sculpted butt before Robin had finished rolling back the door.

But when she turned and saw him, she stopped him with a stiffarm to the chest. “Watch it! You don’t ever come up on a horse from behind like that.”

Out in the corral, she was apologetic. “Bro, I’ve wanted to own one of these so long — well I guess I’m overdoing things a little.” But Bro, keeping maybe a yard’s head start just in case, was still into hyper-awareness. Making a mental note that his head and Mothra’s were the same height, doing a Laser Eyes number about the distance to the nearest shelter. On-deck awareness. Whenever he tuned in Robin, it was like she was talking in an echo chamber.

“It’s the same animal,” she said, “think of it that way.” They’d reached the fence now. She was pulling off the bridle.

“Front or back, he’s the same big old Mothra. Just, from one direction he’ll be your best friend and from the other, he might kick your head in.”

Bro tried to relax, cowboy-posing at the rail.

“But listen to me.” She smiled, still apologizing. “Your turn, Bro. Tell me, what do you think of my baby?”

Freed, the horse had moved off, nosing into bulky mounds of grass. When Bro spoke, he discovered the echo was gone.

“Mighty nice,” he said. “Someone like you, not that old, and already you got something you always dreamed of. Mighty nice life.”

“Oh God. Don’t start that again.”

Bro cocked his head differently.

“Don’t start in again about the peaceable kingdom out here in the Northwest. I swear, people have got their heads in the sand about that.” She shook her head, her eyes darkened.

“You know,” Bro tried, “maybe if we just stuck to the interview—“

“No no no,” she said, “this is part of the interview. Honestly. I think this is why I went into journalism in the first place. I was just so sick of everyone always saying that where I grew up, everything was beautiful. Hasn’t anybody heard of the kind of monsters we get in these woods? The runaways up in the hills? Listen, I did a piece on one of them, those guys live like savages.”

Bro had his tongue between his teeth. All he could think of was another bad-boy putdown — I thought I was the one supposed to be upset.

“Now someone like you, Bro. You’ve got a real story to tell, real trouble.” Though she’d lifted her eyes, she was staring past him. “That’s what I’m in it for.”

He turned away, but the view didn’t make things any easier. These last naked hours before sundown. Out here in the farmland, it was as if the mountains east and west were themselves only arbitrary cutoffs, something to give a person a break from the endless air. Bro was in a worse zone than after one of his mother’s calls. Someone else was pouring out their soul to him: a white girl. Just to keep himself located, he had to concentrate on the splinters prickling his palms. He frowned at the rattle of a tractor nearby.