John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

Sitnell felt the roots of his hair tug, he realized he was at it again. Yet the small pain made him grin that much more. He even started to nod. It was the astonishment of finding himself still here — and knowing for certain, at last, that he could never have pitied Jimmy Kroh. No, not even at the guy’s whiniest, over the phone. You didn’t pity a sharpie like this, so much body English all the time that the lighting here left a black outline around him. So loud and handsy that the lugs along the bar still gave a look every now and then. It’d been fun, Sitnell had to admit. Fun enough to set him aching. In fact between the tug at his scalp and the olive sting in his gums, Sitnell had rarely felt so aware of his skull. A bony oval jigsaw so close to the skin. But this guy, this cartoonist. You could almost imagine Kroh twirling the narrow tip of a long mustache. “Walter,” he was saying now, “compared to most men these days? You’re going to be like the last of the gunslingers.” Sitnell had to laugh. He dropped his chin, looked over his bifocals.

“You got the picture, Walter? You see how it can happen?”

“Oh God, Jimmy. You are a con man.”

“Hell sure. How do you think I made it this far?”

“A con man and a liar.”

“And I’m working for you.” Kroh kept grinning, his face a booze-bright moon. “So tell me. Where’d you like to have the first performance? In town?”

Sitnell shook his head. “Come on, Jimmy. We understand each other better than that by now.”

The publicist of course still tried to slick around. He talked about “smaller gigs, Corvallis maybe.” Sitnell had to say no four or five different ways. He flattened his bifocals and got them back in his pocket, hulked up with his elbows on the table so he could use his height advantage. He pointed out that he’d tried to tell Kroh nicely, he’d tried to explain how he felt. “You’re the performer here.” Sitnell said. “In fact I should never have let things get this far, I should have known that a faker like you would want me to put my own face on the line.” The publicist didn’t so much give in as run out of room to maneuver. Sitnell once or twice allowed himself to sweep one stiff hand across the tabletop, out from the crook of his elbow and back. Otherwise he stonewalled it. Nonetheless he may have said more than necessary — made a couple more wisecracks about con artists than necessary — before he realized that Kroh had gone silent.

At once he was sorry he’d taken off his bifocals. Something had changed, Kroh had gone still. Squinting, Sitnell saw that only the man’s mouth was moving. Kroh sat gnawing a cuticle, so wet and active about it that Sitnell checked the man’s drink. Surprise: still almost full. But then he should have known the man wasn’t drunk. A drunk couldn’t have kept his look so flat and simple.

“What about that fine speech you just gave, Walter?”

Sitnell straightened his back.

“What about it, hey? All that fine talk about brave men dying. Didn’t you mean it when you said that?”

“Now, Jimmy, I just admitted that I let things go too far…”

“Call me a liar. Walter, the way it looks to me, you’re the liar. Your whole pretty little speech was a lie. It was probably just something you plug in whenever anyone crowds you. I mean, what’d you write the book for?”

Sitnell leaned closer, making fists in his lap. “How dare you. How dare you talk to me about lying. That book’s more honest than anything you’ve done in your entire fast-talking life.”

“Oh yeah? Then what’re we even doing here if you don’t want to get out and sell it?”

Sitnell wished the zipper on his reversible were as loud and final as the one on Kroh’s portfolio. He regretted how the liquor had slowed his hands.

“Oh, would you answer a goddamn question for once? Jesus, I swear I’ve never seen a man pansy around as much as you do. Staring at the girls, staring at the wall. Would you for once show some balls and give a person a straight answer?”

Sitnell had been taking a squint at the rain. But after that last shot — well what did Kroh expect? Plus now the publicist had worked up a glare that seemed to pull his whole upper body into it. The gleamy forehead, that fist still at his teeth, those flattop padded shoulders. Sitnell felt his own chest and arms fluttering, tightening. He figured it’d be best to begin with a lie.

“I came here,” he said, “because I pitied you.”

Not bad. Kroh started working his thumbnail against an incisor.

“You see this isn’t New York, Jimmy. You should have realized.”

“Realized what, Walter? What are these chickenshit—“

“You should have realized that when anyone behaves as wildly as you did, out here it’s news. It’s news all over town.” He made sure of the noise level, cocking an ear to the overhead speaker: something cheating something hurting. “New York is big, Jimmy. Big and crowded and nasty, and that’s why people have always moved out here. They’ve always wanted to get away from all that and build a new life, a respectable life. Respectable and solid. So when someone starts crashing around like a bear in the woods, the way you did — well as I say, it’s news.”

“You mean my marriage, right?”

“No Jimmy, I mean you.” Kroh was keeping up a good front, fist and shoulders holding steady. But the folds round his eyes had softened. “I mean the way you ran off when your wife was pregnant. You ran off a couple of times, once for more than a month, and I do believe there are people in town who could give you the specific dates. Oh, and there doesn’t seem to have been any particular woman involved, not just then at least. You simply couldn’t take it and ran.”

Definitely softened. Kroh’s fist had started to open.

“Though after the baby was born, auspiciously soon afterwards in fact, you did start to shack up with someone else. But the most revealing part of the story, the punch-line I’d say, is what comes next. The punch-line is, as soon as your wife went back to New York with the baby, you up and left the other woman as well.”

“That one,” Kroh said, “was more like we both saw the light.”

What? The guy was making jokes? But the publicist had spoken more quietly than Sitnell had expected, as well. Kroh had almost whispered. And his look had wobbled off, the hand at his lapel appeared to tremble. Sitnell told himself it was all another trick. He kept frowning, hard enough to feel it in his ears. After all, how long had they spent telling the truth? A minute and a half? A minute and a half, and now Kroh looked so slapped and gut-shot, how was Sitnell supposed to take that? Too many tricks and switches, crowding him, crowding him.

He was back at the bar before he could think why he’d gone there. But even with his boot on the rail and his fists on the naugahyde, the rack of liquor behind the bar was no more than a colorful dim array. Battle ribbons or totem poles. When the pig-tailed young mother stepped in front of him, Sitnell had to look somewhere else. Again, somewhere else. But up on the soundless TV they had a city in ruins, the mill-worker nearest him reeked of sweat and machine oil, the girl repeated “Sir?” with such insistence: he was back in the war again. The barmaid had brought it on. Sitnell used to picture his wife that way, pregnant and with her hair too long, just before going into combat. He’d chase that picture across the enemy line, so blindly sometimes that later he didn’t know where the nightmares had come from. But tonight, in a lounge like this — it was the last thing Sitnell needed. It had to be the gin flashes. Even the businessman and his pin-up seemed to be part of the action. The couple was bent together over the present she’d given him, as if huddling for protection against the bursts of crumpled bright wrapping paper on the tabletop. Sitnell asked where the Men’s Room was. Of course he didn’t have to use it, he wound up reading the walls. “Kill the faggots,” “Kill the niggers,” all with the glare pinching his eyes. It was something he’d always hated about Oregon, how fast neighborliness and the good life gave way to prejudice and a quick trigger.