John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

What did I expect, coming here? Word gets around. Just last night at the club, one of the waitresses was talking about Gillard and my ex.

I should have figured she’d go for the same trouble twice. I mean, what’s the difference between Gillard and me, exactly? No question I’ve been every kind of disappointment to women. In the case of my ex, when she first started showing up at the clubs, I had the nerve to say I wanted to be rehabilitated. Where’d I get such nerve? The truth is, when I start to play — like now, I figure I can’t just let the keys go cold — I’m following some impulse or line out there that’s a lot cleaner than I’ll ever be, so that while some woman who’s watching me or somebody else standing back from the dance floor might believe I’ve got the whole crowd blooded up and jumping all for me, the truth is, just the opposite, I’m the most hooked person in the place. The story’s been told a thousand times. But it’s not like we aren’t all of us carried along, carried along helpless except for the damage control. It’s not like, if tomorrow I should see my ex give me that gypsy smile, I wouldn’t start right in thinking about how I might drop a few pounds and stand up straighter when I play. I’m certainly up straight now, off the park bench. I’m doing “The Moon Got In My Eyes,” a little intense but nonetheless a pleasure. And there are some bad feelings in there still. There are some thoughts that don’t belong, like a memory of the first time we took Gillard bowling. He hit two strikes, and then after the third he turned to my wife and said, a real nasty deadpan, “You probably have new respect for me now. You probably see me with new eyes.” Some joke. But I know that if I keep blowing even the nastiest stuff will clear out for a while. For a while I’ll be where I like to be, swinging on a star, only the lamest idea of good or bad or where I fit in there but happy to live with that anyway.

Gillard’s trying to think. The others over there too, that arts-and-crafts witch-woman seems to be gone but I can make out some other faces. I’m up by the rosebushes, I can see their looks changing. Of course it’s hard to keep up the volume when he grabs Carrie’s arm. She’d been pointing, starting to head my way, and it’s hard to work with how my lungs clutch. But I can face her now. I can keep on blowing even when one of the day-glo biker boys whips by the bench, impossible to miss, and snatches up my Diet Coke one-handed and whooping.

ROBIN COULDN’T stay on her feet. She and her father weren’t ten minutes off the hiking trail, and for the third time she was down in the undergrowth. The vines and creepers got under her Gore-Tex. Robin came up with her machete. She laid into the brush around her, whip whip whip, till she wore herself out against her pack-straps.

Her father turned, drawn up to full height for the first time since they’d left the truck. He had the heavier pack. He wore the real camouflage, greasy jungle-issue synthetics, rain gear older than Robin herself. Dale looked every long inch the renegade. Deliberately he tasted his cigarette. Her own coat was burgundy, a catalogue item, and under its sleeves she itched from the wet touch of the plants.

“I know, I know,” she said. “We’re not supposed to leave tracks.”

“Do you want to quit?” her father said. “In two hours we could be back in front of the VCR.”

Around her the cut branches dangled by their winter skins, their exposed pulp like new stars sewn into the drizzle. This was a designated Wilderness Area, above the Willamette River valley. The timber here had gone so long unharvested that there were stretches of primary forest, easy travelling. But Robin and Dale had to stick with the ground cover. They had to think about the county sheriff, the men who’d like to find her father’s crop. Dale grew high-grade marijuana in these hills. He’d warned Robin, this wouldn’t be like one of her senior-class hikes. No trails, no creek beds, and up at the “hole” they’d have to do the planting. So early in the year, putting in the seeds was bound to be ugly. Only after that — only if it was safe — could her father show her where he’d hid the money. The cash was sealed in a coffee can, buried and camouflaged.

“I want to go on,” Robin said. “I want to see.”

“Well, I’m not insisting.” Under his hood he softened, grinning. “I’m not forcing you.”

“Dale, I want to.” She worked the machete into its sheath. “I mean,” Robin went on, “this isn’t the kind of thing I do with Mom.”

He swung off again through the undergrowth, leaning into his pack-straps. He was carrying the rock phosphates. Dale had that great outlaw stride, almost a swagger. Nonetheless he must be thinking about her mother; one mention was all it took. His walk had some stomp to it. Robin could hear the mulch crackle under him even through the white noise within her hood. And her father began to gab. “Well honey, your mother’s still down in the valley. She’s down in that mind-set, she’s one of the office mice.” He knew those office mice. “That’s why I keep my ill-gotten gains in the woods, you know. Put it in a bank and those mice can get it.”

At a low scrub oak, feisty but webbed with lichen, Dale crouched to stub out his cigarette.

“Robin, listen. Have you ever come up on one of them like, unexpectedly?” Elbows on knees, he made claws of his hands. “Have you ever like, surprised a mouse in its lair? Man, it’s a terrible thing to see.” He took out the Marlboro box, an eye-catcher, vivid against his camouflage. “They show you their teeth. They show you their claws, oh yeah. They’ll fight to the death for the burrow.”

Robin allowed herself to laugh, scratching under one cuff.

“They believe in the burrow, Robin. They actually think they’ve got the good life.”

She laughed, refastening the Velero at that wrist.

“Man oh man. The things we let our children see.”

“Oh Daddy. Come on. You work in the valley.”

Dale tucked his butt into the Marlboro box. He snapped the bright thing back into his pocket. “Okay, I’ve got a title on my desk. I’ve got a billboard on the highway. But I’m keeping my dope money in the woods.”

He strode off again, in a sudden wash of sunshine. Robin kept her eyes down; she couldn’t let him see how he got to her.

In her father’s voice Robin picked up echoes of his record collection, half a hundred lowdown singers with baggy black faces and knockabout teeth. Plus he was scamming, talking trash, and that got to her too. In these woods, scamming came as a relief. On Robin’s hikes with the senior class, just the opposite, everybody got into that hippy-dippy granola goop. Everybody started waving the flag for “the wilderness” and “the planet.” Robin’s boyfriend, Anu, didn’t like the hippy-dippy stuff either; he said it was a chemical reaction to the landscape. Anu said that anyone who grew up in Oregon had to be permanently stoned on the highway overlooks. Oh Anu. Robin’s father was the only other man she knew with such a smart mouth.

Except Anu didn’t always come back to the same damn thing. “Yeah,” Dale was saying, “I can just see your mother.”

Come on, Dad. Get off it.

“Robin, I mean, your mom has bought the whole fantasy, the office and the good life. Your mom’s a believer.”

Robin almost wished he’d brought his gun. Dale had some serious iron, a square and colorless.45. Even in her day-dreams, My Father the Outlaw, the gun had always made her nervous. But now Dale was just another grumping old hobo bent under a pack. The sun had gone back behind the clouds, and he was carrying nothing but farm tools and fertilizer.