John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

Around her, the dangling needle clusters were whisk brooms, green and medieval. Beyond that the forest looked harmless. The most dangerous thing out there was her father. Down on the balls of his feet again, he scoped it out, trembling. The dangling tips of his pack-ties shivered. Bitterly Robin thought of her murder mysteries, the coroner’s steady hands over the corpse. Dale’s hands couldn’t stop. He fingered the moss at his feet, the sapling by his shoulder; he reached crookedly behind him, up beneath the pack and under his jacket. Robin glimpsed a bit of black, maybe metal. Or no — no maybe about it. Not after how he’d fooled her with the half-and-halfs. The thing under the back of her father’s coat had to be metal. He must be packing a gun after all.

The sun reemerged, brightening the underside of his wrist. The birds kept up their idiocy.

Slowly, Dale’s hand withdrew from beneath the rain gear. Robin lost sight of the extra load, the black. And she was talking to herself, when had that started? She was rehearsing the letter for him and Roy, the explanation she’d leave when she took off with Anu.

“I am only seventeen years old,” she whispered, “but I know that the Willamette Valley is not the end of the world.”

“Oh man,” Dale cried. “Oh man man man oh no.”

He was up, his hands empty. He strode towards another stand of brush.

“What were you thinking?” he wailed. “Oh man. You crazy, heartbroken motherfucker, what were you fucking thinking?”

“What?” she said. He usually stayed away from language like that when she was around. “Daddy, what?”

“It’s just a hole, you crazy motherfucker. It’s just a goddamn fucking hole . Were you really thinking it was safer than anybody else’s?”

She shouldered out from under the pine. Relieved just to move, aware again of the machete at her hip. Dale stood with his ear on his shoulder, and in the sunshine and drizzle the brush round his legs appeared somehow off. The plants sat too close together for their size, out of kilter. Her father’s noise was even stranger. He’d stopped screaming at himself. Instead he choked, he snorted, and it had nothing to do with smoking.

“What is this?” The sore spot in her chest expanded. “Are you…Daddy, are you crying?”

He turned his back, kicking aside a fern bush. Talk about out of kilter — Dale kicked the plant over. The stem-bottoms poked up, slashed and pulpy. Someone had laid into the greenery here. What they couldn’t chop, they’d trampled. Vines zigzagged across the floor’s growth impossibly, and a berry bush had been ripped out by its roots. Humping up beside her father, Robin found mountain-boot tracks, ovals crisp at the edges (Dale’s old L.L. Beans left softer indents). The attack had included a spade or hoe. It was five or six square yards of devastation.

“The sheriff did all this?” Robin asked.

Dale turned away again, pulling his hood together over his sobs. Dad.

But at least while he was like that she could see his hands. And Robin might have been halfway to tears herself, suffering flash after flash of troopers breaking from the nearby woods, of gunfire erupting. One bad flash after another, brought on by her father’s grounds, a manmade pond surrounded by places to hide. The water lay at the center of the ruined brush, a brief deep rectangle alive with scum and insects. Two or three rat-like creatures floated, drowned, at the hole’s rim. The rim itself glittered here and there with traces of slick plastic, greeny-black, tent material or a heavyweight garbage bag. A lot of work. It must have taken hours to set in this rain-catch, this buried tarp or whatever. That same day, Dale must have transplanted the ground cover. In the middle of the woods he’d built a self-contained irrigation system, weatherproof and landscaped. And hidden.

“You did all this?” Robin said.

His answer was a mumble, soppy, full of pain. Dad…

She tottered around the hole’s edges, open-mouthed, tasting the drizzle. She’d had no idea a person could do so much damage just by tearing away the camouflage.

At one corner of the pool, where the stomping and chopping looked worst, someone had driven a stake. A simple garden stake, frail and waist-high. Tacked to the top was a white laminated card:

N.T. Hingham

COUNTY SHERIFF

Please call at your earliest convenience .

She couldn’t bring herself to touch it. The thing was an arrow in the ground, with white unnatural feathers.

“Do they…boy. Daddy, do they always do this? I mean, I can’t believe it. He left his card.”

Dale’s eyes emerged, eggy above his loosening fists.

“Daddy,” she said then, “I can’t believe it. I thought all this stuff about the troopers was a fantasy.”

What? Robin jammed her thumbs back under her pack-straps. Hey, enough talking for one day. First she gets all fluttery over his smoking, now she gives away another secret — enough. She knew better than to let a few tears throw her off. She’d seen that iron under his waistband. Robin brought her knuckles together, across her breasts, and she wouldn’t give in to her itch. Control, control. Anyway her father was coming out of it, yanking back his hood, unbuckling his pack. Once the thing was off his shoulders Dale just let it drop, ka-wransh-shh . Rock phosphates.

“It’s okay, Robb,” he said finally.

She kept her knuckles together, her face composed.

“It’s okay, really. Baby, the fact is, you were right. It was a fantasy. Your crazyman father has been walking around in a fantasy.”

She frowned. “I don’t see any fantasy here. This was some place.”

“Oh.” Dale flapped a hand. “Robb, the hole is nothing.”

Nothing? Then what was he crying about?

“Man,” he was saying, “what was I thinking? What was I thinking I—“

“Dale.” She gave it a beat; this had to sound strong. “You better not have been lying about the money.”

He didn’t understand. Squinting, he massaged one shoulder.

“The money in the can, Dale,” she said. “That better not have been one of your funny stories.”

His eyes widened again, differently. “Oh my baby,” he said. He raised his face to the half-lit sky and she noticed his height, a head taller than her still.

“I guess I’ve still got a little mouth to feed,” he said.

Robin waved away a bug. Or she waved, anyway; she needed something to do with her hands. If only Dale would act like a man with a gun! But her father wore a Sunday face, unshaven, battered, and his half-and-halfs had taken a toll. When he assured her not to worry, he threw her off that much more. “The money’s real,” he told her, “eleven hundred and ninety dollars.” He lingered over the syllable breaks. “You’ll get your cut, don’t you worry.”

Every slow word threw her off. Eleven hundred and ninety? She was getting a cut of eleven hundred and ninety?

“I’ll take you to the can,” he said. “I realize you didn’t come into the woods just to play the pioneer girl.”

She dropped one hand to the handle of her machete.

“Dale, I don’t get it. What’s going on here?”

“Lost in a fantasy, honey. A hand-me-down fantasy.”

“Yeah, well, so? So why were you bawling like that?”

“I was lost in a fantasy, and I dragged you along too.”

“What are you telling me?”

“I used you,” he said.

There was the rain, static in the signal between them. Once more Dale’s eyes changed shape. “See,” he said, “I heard my hole was in danger. I heard the sheriff might be on to me. I mean, the Man gets his coffee the same place I do.”

In the strengthening sun, his renewed tears were bits of aluminum in his stubble. “See, I wanted you for my cover. I have to tell you; if I’m not going to be a rat, I have to. In case we got caught, Robb, I–I wanted you for a scam.”