John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

“Robin, hey. This is the lore of the woods.”

She kept her mouth shut. Anu had a name for what her father was into: the Transmit-Only Mode.

“These days, how often does a father get a chance to pass on the lore of the big woods?”

Transmit-Only, software for adults. Dale was back on his haunches, his pack-straps in his elbows. She checked her watch. Past ten-thirty, and it would get dark by four. When would they have time for the money?

“Robin, I know that sheriff.” He leveled the cardboard at her; she thought of his.45. “It’s not paranoia.”

“Roy’s the one who thinks you’re paranoid,” she said.

Dale lowered the paper gun. His mouth opened, then shut. He lowered his head and fished out the Marlboro box.

“You know Roy,” Robin went on, more quietly. “You know how she talks. She’s always saying what a pothead you are.”

He got his feet back under him. He showed a lot of knuckle, folding the black thing and tucking it away. And Robin was sorry for him, him and his nic-stained hands, so helpless since she’d learned where to poke him. But Dad — somebody had to carry the iron, on this trip.

Still Dale kept playing the desperado. Every dozen paces or so he would crouch and peer hawk-like around the edges of his hood. When he lit up another Marlboro, he hid the flame. Stalking the wild Butterfinger? Robin, waiting over him, couldn’t help but think of Anu. Her boyfriend was Vietnam for real, raised in the canals; he could tell her father something. In fact both her folks should spend a few hours with Anu— listening , for once. He could tell her mother how the Communists had impounded his family bank account. They’d taken the luggage, the bicycles, the shoes. Robin would like her mother to hear about that. She’d liked to see if there was any more whining about Dale’s stash in the woods, after that.

In the corners of her boyfriend’s face (the Asiatics she’d known weren’t so sleek, so fine), Robin had found a toughness beyond her parents’ wildest dreams. In the bucket seats of her mother’s Nissan, where she and Anu had to kiss over the gearshift, there were evenings when they floated free of the knobs and latches by means of eye contact alone. There were long uprushes of staring during which Robin could also somehow look down on this girl in the driver’s seat, this tomboy jammed sideways behind the steering wheel. She wouldn’t have believed her eyes, her mind’s eyes, if Anu hadn’t told her he’d seen it himself. And then he’d let her in on his secret plan for getting ahead in this country.

So-o-o tough. Most senior transfers were still trying to learn their way to the cafeteria, and Anu had a plan for getting ahead. In this country, he’d told her, you and I can truly rise above.

Her mother had noticed, because Robin had bought those cowboy boots with the four-inch heels. But Roy had only lectured her on the side effects of the Pill: Honey, I had a hangover every morning. And Robin had gone to Dale, she’d gotten him to rent a video history of the war. But her father too had wound up talking about himself. She doubted if either of her parents knew her boyfriend’s full name, Anu Sher Wud. Certainly neither of them realized that now she and Anu had a plan. No fantasy, a real plan. They were going to elope.

Anu had a chance to hook on in Hollywood. A cousin there had steady work as Gaffer and Best Boy. If you’re from Vietnam, Anu had told her, the family really looks out for you. If he could take her down the coast — and soon, while the job pipeline was still open — by the end of the year they could both be in the union. She’d seen the letters from his cousin, on studio letterhead, with characters like columns of wigwag pennants. That was why she’d come into the Wilderness Area. She had a gold mine down the road. Once she and her father got into that buried can, Robin shouldn’t have any trouble getting him to fork over a couple of thousand at least.

Dale would stop and squat anywhere, once even in a patch of skunk cabbage. Were they actually making headway, between these ticking, faraway stares? They seemed locked into a corkscrew approach, first upslope, then down. Her father’s rap took them nowhere new either.

“So your mother calls me a pothead,” Dale said. “You know it doesn’t surprise me, Robb. That witch sold me out a long time ago.”

Robin frowned. Did they have to get nasty in order to move on? They were past the skunk cabbage but the smell had left her dizzy. She fumbled over moguls in the undergrowth.

“Happens all the time,” Dale went on. “Every day, Robb, somebody sells out their family for a Macintosh.” His voice grew more smoky. “Hey, what do we expect, in this country? It’s called career mobility, right? I mean a person goes to college in one city, and then there’s grad school somewhere else, and after that they take the best offer they can find. Am I right? For the rest of their lives, they go on taking the best offer. Mobility ever after.”

Was he talking or singing? The slashes of her father’s camouflage, up ahead, jogged like follow-the-bouncing-ball.

“Career mobility, Robb. It’s the great American scramble. And every day, somebody else decides that a family’s too big a load to haul.”

He dropped again, the cabbage-smell rising off him as he arranged his joints. She had to clear her head. “Every day,” Robin tried, “somebody else joins the office mice.”

Dale grinned but went on checking the near slope. Beaten down by the drizzle, his smoke drifted across his stare. “Well it’s no joke, honey. It’s some mean business, we’re talking about.” Even in the woods, Dale whispered, you found people who’d caught the career disease. “Oh yeah, Robb. I know some guys around here who’ll cut their own grandmother if they think she’ll hurt the crop.” Dale knew growers who set bear traps round their holes. “I mean, a bear trap’ll take a man’s leg off.” Or had she ever heard of punji sticks?

“Daddy, come on.”

“It works like this. First you dig a pit—“

“Daddy.” She yanked back her hood. “Are you putting dope in your cigarettes again?”

A lame move, a dumb joke. And she’d been way too loud, she’d silenced the winter birds. But the look her father showed her was sheepish.

“Well well, little girl. Is it that obvious?”

His grin was hard to get a fix on, a pointed thing in flight.

“Robb, I’m asking. Is it obvious?”

“You mean you are? You’re smoking pot right now?”

“Just a taste. It gives me like an infra-red scope.”

“But I thought, I thought…”

With her ears bare, the drizzle seemed very cold. Dale remained sideways to her, half an eye on the woods. Robin bit her lips and shook her head.

“It’s okay, honey,” he said. “If the Man’s going to bust you for seeds, he might as well bust you for smoking.”

Could they get busted for seeds? Could they, after all? Doping and its complications were still new to Robin. Dale hadn’t started growing his own till after she and Roy had moved out, and she’d only occasionally seen him smoking, while firing up a barbecue or watching the Phillies on cable. Cigarettes like these he called “half-and-halfs,” pot and tobacco. He’d told her he didn’t enjoy them, didn’t “appreciate the high.” Yet here he sat, who knows how many dark miles into the woods, grinning over a trick Marlboro. He’d never seemed more like a bluesman.

“We could still go back,” he growled. “We could turn around right here.”

The best answer — the toughest — was to show him her watch. Put it right under his nose.

The next time they stopped, Dale actually hit her. He got her a stiff poke between the breasts, shoving her back. Robin wound up against the trunk of a pine, under the branches. A smell of cinders, a sore spot where he’d jabbed her. If he was this hyper they must be close to the hole. During the last stretch of hiking their spirals had hooked inward more often, and Dale had laid off the smokes.