John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

“Uhh. Well he’s who the money’s intended for, yes.”

“So what are you doing here, then? What are you poking around in my private life for?” Her wave was coming out the way she liked, airy and full over her right ear. “Listen, my son has athetosic cerebral palsy. His muscle control come and goes. Sometimes it looks like he could almost go out for the Babe Ruth League, sometimes he has one of his seizures. It’s a birth defect, it happened when I was carrying him. Now what the hell else do you need to know? Honestly. What the hell brings all you people barging in on me all the time?”

“Miss Therow, come on. One thing for sure, I’m not here to blame you.”

“Blame me? Blame me?” Obviously the guy had it in for her. “Listen, brother. You ought to be here when Wade has one of his seizures. I’d like to see what you’d do when it gets that real. I’d like to see if you’d get so picky about dotting every ‘i’ and crossing every ‘t’ then.”

Wetting a fingertip, she did a last adjustment at the edges of her blush-on. If this joker was going to make her go to court to get her money, she was at least going to get the satisfaction of making him ache for what he couldn’t have.

“Now I ask you.” She whipped open the door. “Compared to Wade, what does, does either of us…”

The heat in her face changed. She’d come out shaking her fist, the one with the compact in it; now her hand dropped so limply that when the dog rushed in, the plastic grip was knocked away.

“Ernie?” she asked. “From over at the Drop By?”

He still had that great teenage smile. “I saw the name on the form. I had to come out here, see if it was really what I thought.”

University hours: he said he could stay through lunch if she wanted. “When you work for the state,” he said, “you can always give the apparatus a little fine-tuning.” And there it was, the other university thing about him, talk as slick as a game of Frisbee. A line like that in fact made the guy seem a little spooky. She took him on a tour of the trailer, stick to business, sure. She got the folder of Wade’s medical reports from the file in the bedroom closet. But though Ernie gabbed the whole way, it was all one-liners, nothing she could get a hold of. When they got back to the kitchen, he actually seemed more interested in the dog. She joked back, part red spaniel and part cannonball, but she figured that if they were going to get anywhere it was up to her. As she got out the butter cookies she brought up their last meeting, how long had it been. She tried to keep them headed in the right direction.

“Ahh, Nellie. I guess I might as well ’fess up. The night after I met you, she called me.”

“Still something there, huh?”

“Something — something won’t give, yeah. Oh it’s all on my side, whatever it is, I know that much. I know on her side, she’s just being nice to me.”

“Oh? You just have a birthday or something?”

That got him grinning differently. And the wheels were turning on her end as well, the hangup about his ex might come in handy some time, with Fitzie if not with the guy himself. But then: “Don’t try to be funny, Nellie. I’m the funny guy here. I practically get paid to be funny.”

And with that he was off on a riff about his work, explaining how the job had been part of the trouble between him and his wife. Not that he wasn’t sending other signals at the same time. Whenever he paused, he’d stroke his chest, slowly. She still noticed his belly, that old-folkie turtleneck didn’t fool her. But she played along, hooking an arm over the back of her chair and keeping her chin high. Look me over. And yet she couldn’t be sure that was really what they had going here. Talking about the job and the wife was a way to get intimate, sure. But since when did a guy on the make ever come on so soft and nervous?

“Believe me, Nellie, I’m so sorry my wife never heard what I was trying to tell her.” Shrug, stroke the chest. “See, what other people would call being selfless? I would say that was all just part of my job. I mean just sticking to the rules of my job, I have to be selfless.” At the Drop By she’d liked his hands; now they seemed faggy. “That’s politics, right? According to the rules, you have to be this very nice, funny guy.” This was the second time Nellie had noticed him whipping round his wrist, snap snap, trying to spin his watch back face-up.

“And someone like my wife, she kept expecting that one day I’d break down and start screaming. Like I really hated welfare mothers or something. I swear to God, she wanted me to start screaming at the end.”

Welfare mothers? By the time the conversation shifted to Nellie’s job, she wasn’t sure how to play it. He’d started working his lips, smiling then pouting, but by now the sex question seemed like the last thing she should be worrying about. A parent couldn’t take home much above zero if they wanted to get the Supplemental. She told him the truth, she didn’t make anything near those girls at the university.

“Most weeks,” she said, “I carry my keys in my pocket just so I can feel a little weight in there.” But the joke did nothing for her, her chin had dropped. Here was the hard part. Laying out how little she had and how much she needed — her grin had gone mean, smoke-sour — it threw her so much that at first she missed what Ernie was saying.

“So, Nellie, you don’t even have to worry about that part of it.”

“What?” Though she believed she understood already, her head had come up again. “Ernie, are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Well actually, by the time you finished showing me around I’d made my decision on that part. I’ll sign the approvals before, ah, before we’re through here.”

“S.S.I.?”

“You’ll continue to receive the full amount. Sure.”

Nellie got a little careless. She grinned so wide and happily that it gave him something on her, this was supposed to be business. Her hands wandered too. She was patting his forearm, total turnaround from fifteen seconds ago, while she fumbled her thanks. “Well well, Ernie, well hey….” Though of course the man didn’t have the kind of reactions you’d expect. It all just seemed to make him nervous. “Nellie, come on, I only wanted to get that part behind us.” That part? “Oh yeah?” she asked. “Well what’d you have in mind for the next part?” Why not, after the rest had been so herky-jerky-crazy? Ernie started wringing his watch into place again. “Ahh, I mean I just wanted to put your mind at rest, so far as the state’s concerned—“

At which the dog got into it. Lurid couldn’t take it any longer: Ernie held a cookie in his watch-hand. The mutt sprang and got one of the saucers as well. A blur of hair and teeth, a splatch of plastic, and then Ernie was out of his chair with his fingers curled at his neck and coffee seeping down his thighs.

“I know you weren’t expecting me,” he said.

And she was giggling, making it worse. She wouldn’t have had the strength to haul the animal to the door if the place hadn’t been so small.

“Lurid,” she managed, “Lurid! Get out of here.” Ernie trailed behind her, so close that when she shut the door on the dog she hardly had room to stand.

“You have a dog named Lourdes?” he asked. “Like the place in France, Lourdes?”

The real laughter, too much for an answer. She needed to hang on his neck a moment, a long moment, maybe an entire minute or so regaining her breath while in the contact from neck to knee she made clear to him that before he left today they were going to have to see this thing through. Too fast? She didn’t want to hear it, they weren’t in high school. She could put the impulse in its place — Red-haired Indica, sure sure — and likewise Ernie insisted that they sign the forms first. He even came out with this incredibly formal black pen. She had to ask, “Richard Nixon ever own one of these?” He laughed so wildly she was afraid he’d break her hash-pipe. She went back with that thing, pretty little Moroccan cherry wood. But as he choked down his next hit she believed she had her project for the man: “Who’s the funny guy here, Ernie? You think you’re the smart mouth? Well we’ll just see, we’ll just see.” The wimps who nitpicked about moving too fast, they thought control could mean only one thing. They didn’t realize how far a person could go.