John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

Wade’s father for instance still came through Philomath now and again, selling office supplies, and lately even he’d made it hard on her. This past summer, they’d wound up going halfsies on a new wheelchair. And beforehand she’d laid it down plain as newsprint that the project this time would be Memory Lane. She plucked the gray hairs from his mustache and called him good old Rustyroo. She reminisced about the blues crowd they’d run with, the record contract he’d been forever on the verge of signing. “How many girls’d you score with that record contract?” But at the end, as they headed up to Salem to get the chair, he turned desperate. He insisted they stop at a motel off I-5. Red-flecked wallpaper straight out of The Wild, Wild West , neon that growled so loudly she couldn’t concentrate. And yet the sex wasn’t the thing for him. The sex was incidental. The whole time there all the father could talk about was following her home after the trip in order to help set the chair up in the trailer.

She was well over the speed limit the rest of the way. When she parked she propped the checkbook on the steering wheel and wrote out one for her half. As she hustled across the lot the screek of passing carts made the perfect soundtrack. Then once he arrived she wouldn’t let him in the store, he had to hear it right there on the entrance ramp. Take a hike, Russell .

“Lighten up, Nellie. Please.” By now he was pathetic, looking for help up and down the nearby rows of cars. It only made her realize that this was another thing she hated about Salem. What kind of a state capital was it, when even in the middle of the city you never heard shouting in public?

“Wade wasn’t any part of the deal, mister. Now just take your money and go.”

“Nellie, Nellie…I realize I’ve always played the bad guy, okay? It went over big with the sorority girls, you know what I mean. But now, please. I haven’t seen the boy in five years.”

“Why don’t you send him your record?” she said.

No, people like Jack and Fitzie didn’t have the whole story. Nellie suffered complications. She suffered breakdowns; she was getting nowhere fast with the Social Security. Her lawyer, forget it. The man at least had finally left his wife. But the next time he and Nellie had gotten together, she’d had to back him off with something almost as mean as what she’d told Rusty. Now whenever she called his office, the secretary said he was out. The last straw came when the girl tried to tell her he was over in Corvallis, watching the Beavers.

Nellie checked the kitchen clock. Not quite 10:30.

“I don’t mean he’s actually watching them play,” the secretary went on. But Nellie wasn’t interested, all she could think was: Basketball already? No more World Series?

“No no, of course he’s not watching the team play. He’s talking with the men in charge over there. He’s—“

Nellie hung up. The men in charge.

Four days remained before the réévaluation. She figured she could swear off the booze that long. She did a thorough fall housecleaning, even raking her turnoff (the trailer park was never more than half-full anyway; she’d taken an isolated lot in the back) and dumping her leaves in the woods. She bought Elmer’s and reglued the maple-colored stickum where it had peeled from the kitchen plywood, the cupboard-doors under the sink especially. And she crocheted. She’d never been able to take daytime TV, the soaps made her sneer and the game shows got her angry. Instead there’d been afghans, dress mesh tops, or magnet-holders like the anvils and cherries that held the calendar to the refrigerator door. There’d been the liner for the dog’s basket, designed so the section that lapped outside the opening bore his name, Lurid Romance. Now she started a new bedspread for Wade. She kept the stitching tight, so his fingers wouldn’t catch in the eyes. Of course it made her think of Christmas, a bedspread wasn’t much of a present, but then the dog got interested, that was fun. The animal would study her hands as they worked the hook and needle. Finally he’d lay one paw on her knee, heavily.

“Try my Mom, Lurid,” Nellie would say. “I think my Mom would let the cows play with the yarn, if they wanted.”

Still the day of the appointment she woke before five, and she couldn’t stand the mirror. Looked like she’d spent the night trying to fit her face in a vise. She decided to drop Wade at school herself, swapping a few one-liners with the boy always steadied her nerves. But he hadn’t slept well either. His eyes — Nellie recalled the doctor’s word, canthus . Another nitpick bastard. So after that first look she couldn’t seem to take the boy in, entirely. As if he’d grown bigger overnight. She saw how the coffee made him tremble, but she took his word for it when he said it was just that he’d never taken it black before.

Once they were out on Route 20, never mind that they had to keep his chair strapped to the wall behind the driver’s seat, Wade held up his end of the deal. Never mind, also, that he didn’t quite know the difference yet between the locker-room gonzo and the man of the house. He made sure she could see him in the rear-view. He worked up some pretty good faces, Bozo to Godzilla. Nellie however couldn’t think of a decent comeback. She couldn’t even be sure of her smile.

“Mom, come on,” he said at last. “Look on the bright side. In five years we’ll all be overrun by the Sandinistas anyway.”

But when he said “Sandinista” it was obvious that his throat muscles were giving him trouble again, it sounded to her like “son hysteria.” Even after she’d returned to the trailer, the winter mung in the floorboards reminded her too much of Wade in the bus. The chill had her aching for a drink. She lit a joint and poured coffee. She wound up out on the back stoop, staring up warily at the coastal hills.

This time of year you had fog every morning. It made the forest black at the horizon, roadless. After a few minutes, she recalled the guy who’d given her the dope. The guy had sketched directions to his place, grinning fiercely as the map took shape, grinning and telling her that every night was party night up in the hills. Every night, girl. After all the troopers might come rapping at your door any time, that’s why you kept the keys in the truck and the Dobermans hungry. Nellie discovered that she was murmuring the stuff’s name. “Red-haired Indica,” tongue-full words, they had her retasting her coffee. Strange that the landscape looked black but what they grew there was red. But her laughter sounded papery, her perspective was off. The hills had grown bigger at the peak than at the bottom. She tried repeating different words: my home, my comfort. There was a throb like a bus engine.

Then Nellie had gotten no farther than bending over the yarn bag when the knock came at the door. So soon? Her hands were still cold, the dog still outside. When she found out it was in fact the Social Security, she could only go for her purse, her compact and brush.

“I’m sorry I’m early, I don’t know the roads yet.” The man’s voice was tin, behind the shut door. “I expected it would take longer, everybody said the place was so far out.”

“Far out? What does that mean, far out?”

“At the office. The people there all—“

“Oh the office, the office!” Now she was starting to catch up. Her lips and mouth looked so young and hot, it made her remember that the compact mirror bulged a little, it made her realize how furious she was. “That’s all you people care about, is the office.”

“Wait a minute, Miss Therow. Please. If you’d just open the door—“

“The office and your goddamn regulations.” Next the hair, why not? Get one thing right this morning at least. “I mean you come out here with your regulations, and meantime I’m on this side doing what I can, on my own — but neither of us is really what this is all about , are we? Really, this is about Wade.”