John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

“I know about Alden,” Stanley said.

She broke for the back door. What he’d said set off a terrible head-chatter. A garble lurching into fast forward, the words like surf and the surf the renewed heat in her face. Yet there was a doomy rightness to him knowing, the perfect final ruin of any hope for secrets and sanctuary. It was what you expected of the drug. At its peak you were past any fall-back. The hallway had no rug, her knees hurt from the first long step. But there didn’t seem to be anyone coming after her, another minute and she’d be out in the soft grass. Except at the end of the hall was the downstairs can — its door open, its mirror exposed.

All Nonie could see were the eyes. They had such mania in them still. Such black desire: an absolute hunger for more and higher. There were tears, her tears, and yet they didn’t seem like hers. Nonie skidded, stopped. Positively not her own tears. Her sadness was distant, the breakup with Stanley would be sorted into parts and extensively rehashed. But the thing in the mirror was bug-eyed, ferocious. It was more than she should have had room for, neverending surges after God knows what. And the Indian in her made it worse. She had no eyelids to speak of; the want, want, want in the mirror came flame-shaped and unshaded. She thought of fire arrows, of the tracer phosphorus in Stanley’s books on Vietnam.

She was at the stairwell. She turned and headed up, she took three at a time. The eyes were out of sight, but she still had to get free of the voices. Lucy was calling after her. Hey Nonie, really, it’s just the gossip . Every day at the studio Anthony has to go in and face the same mean talk.

She remembered when Alden had told her he loved her. Nonie was in her old bedroom now, huddled under the gable. Her breathing was heavy, very loud in this space. Coming in, she’d fluttered the silky remembrances pinned to the walls; a girlish thread or two still floated. But she could hear him. Alden, he’d told her he loved her. He said he’d fallen hard. The memory was the only thing real enough to matter, after the glimpse at the foot of the stairs.

Winona…it’s either love, or we’re both nothing but mean, mean, mean.

But she was starting to pick up her reflection in the gable window. The curtains’ ribbon tie was too difficult, she put her back to the glass. Then she realized someone was actually saying the words out loud. Stanley was the one talking about love or meanness, not Alden. Stanley was coming up the stairs.

Nonie turned again and fought the window open. She wriggled out onto the roof.

Not nearly so easy as it used to be. With her heels in the gutter, her head didn’t fit under the gable’s peak. The brick porch steps below circled swoozily. Plus the rain had started, a tattered cloth coldly sponging her down. When Stanley found her, she couldn’t catch every word. The confusion with Alden persisted: Nonie, please…Too many voices, the place was haunted. Her father too had left a piece of himself in these woods. She could feel his hands on her now, stony and dry with millwork…

Stanley. He was trying to get Nonie by the waist.

“Nonie, I know this looks like a mean trick. Like I wanted the acid to do it for me.…But I love you, baby. I took it too.”

She lurched free, the gutter bit her instep.

“Look Nonie, just…once I came home at the wrong time, and suddenly I was history. Suddenly I was a clown…”

Yet while she couldn’t catch every word, her attention seemed total. She could see the work crews pulling tarps over the homey props down on Main Street. She could read the initials at the edge of the walk beneath her. And under the grime that filled those initials she could make out the radium-trace of her father’s last disease, the glue and nicotine that had ruined his fingers first. Every man’s home is his castle; every old tract house in the Valley was haunted. Meantime, in a holding pattern above the sky, the insatiable sun waited. It rode the tattered cloth of the first serious rain, poised to trap and smother, patient on its winter web. Her attention burned through every surface. This had to be it, then: the furthest reach of her trip.

Stanley tried for her again. Nonie hadn’t much room. The takeoff was helpless, a slapstick jeté. Her noise was a “ No!” that had nothing to do with time and place. Nonetheless while the brown woods turned over and melted she still strained for an echo.

WHO WAS THIS GUY? Sitnell knew that the publicist came from back East. But he hadn’t expected a — what would you call a person in that getup? Even the guy’s baldness was hard to take. It was like another accessory, a khaki-colored slip-on skull. The publicist was a good twenty-five years younger than Sitnell after all. Though no way Kroh was young enough for that tie, either. The thing was an inch wide at most and flecked with what looked like war paint. Plus when the man toed round on his barstool to say hello, Sitnell couldn’t miss the bulge of Kroh’s camel’s humps, especially ugly under his red leather jacket. A Michael Jackson jacket, in this case zippered shut around a sack of dirt. Drew more than a couple of stares from along the bar.

“I was beginning to wonder,” Kroh said.

Was that supposed to be funny? Granted, once Sitnell broke off the handshake he discovered that the Happy Hour nachos had gone cold, the cheese gummy. But the publicist was the rude one here. Kroh had called, that first time, after ten at night. Sitnell had found himself sitting through this entire breakneck publicity hard sell while watching his wife get undressed for bed. After the call, the old girl had propped herself upright against the headboard and told Sitnell the stories she’d heard about this guy. She’d said that, if he met with Jimmy Kroh, he might as well sit down with their youngest and teach the boy to smoke pot.

Sitnell ordered a martini. “Very dry,” he said, “and never mind what you’ve got in the well. I want real liquor.”

Kroh’s smile became triangular. As soon as Sitnell came up with a brand, Beefeater, the guy started to make a fuss.

“It’s so great,” he kept saying, “to be with a man who likes real liquor.” They found a longer table, by the window. “Most guys my age, you know? They drink nothing.” Sitnell hoped that at this distance the stares from the bar would stop. “I want to tell them, hey. Forget about being sleek and pretty for a minute. Just forget about being pretty.”

Nor was there the usual breather after they sat. Kroh went straight from the booze talk to saying how excited he was about working with Sitnell. “Really want to do your book up right, Walter,” he said. “The dust jacket too.” The dust jacket? When had Sitnell mentioned that? He tried to keep a distance, starting on his drink, eyeing Mt. Hood. He’d chosen this place because of how much he remembered liking the view. The view was worth the kind of lumber-mill workers and four-wheel-drive cowboys you got in a lounge this far outside the city. But what with the sketchy November rain, Hood itself didn’t cap the landscape the way Sitnell had expected. What he could see of Portland from up here had a null smogged color and too many moving lights. Beyond that, the mountain’s hefty poke appeared more gray than white. And then Kroh was butting in again.

“Oh yeah, isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it something?” Though he had his back to the mountain. He was jerking a thumb over one shoulder and at the same time clearing the candle jar and the menu teepee off to the side of the table with a stiffarm sweep. “Sometimes when I’m downtown, I swear—“ he slapped his portfolio onto the tabletop—“it seems like old Hood’s up there nodding at us. Saying like, ’Come on, come on.’ Beautiful.”