John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

Sometimes I think I wouldn’t mind the errands for Mort if the money didn’t have to go to the Sisters of the Word. Of all the things not to have changed in twenty-five years…But the Sisters are the best in town with s.d. kids. Besides, just relax your guard for a minute and the entire Oregon scene can take on a ’50s sweetness. Suddenly it’s like Sunday with Mister Rogers. Even the misting is sweetness. We share the drive with a retired couple, the Daleys, and in this weather their groomed stands of spring flowers are Magic Marker hilarity. The house lots out here still look like Toy Town to me anyway, nothing larger than a quarter-acre. And what is it about kids’ faces under hoods?

“Do we have something to bomb them?” Magda is blinking, dopey in the gray light.

“No no no. Just, give me a minute here.”

I lay out the plan. Down on the drive Andrea hauls Angelo round behind the Don. The two men are still squatting, conferring over what appears to be one of those humongous G.I. Zippo lighters.

“Right,” I say. “One, two, three—“

Magda’s scream isn’t at all what I expect. She howls like something out of a Nazi rally. I hold my own the best I can, hey you or other words just as empty. Certainly not the words that flare in the back of my mind as the noise goes on, how could you or what are we doing here , none of that ferocity; only the noise, the mist coiling round my overheated head and shoulders, while the group on the drive turn to red shapes against my shut eyelids. When Magda collapses, she catches my hip. The shapes go white with the thought that I’m going to fall.

I brace against the frame, the metal sash-fittings.

Then Magda’s giggling at my feet, I’m an adult again. One good look below and I feel like a monster. Don’s sprawled back over Angelo’s Big Wheel; Angelo’s face down and spreadeagle across the driveway concrete.

Sonny stands back, a hand on the Daleys’ drainpipe. Andrea’s headed for the Daleys’ flowers, she can’t stand to watch when there’s a chance her brother might go into a fit. I’m a monster. I put my own family under the microscope. The boy’s neck has a hump and his fingertips poke from his slicker, helpless. His tongue is a germ touched with dye so we can see it under the microscope. I can’t move, I can’t even look at Don again till he rolls onto his knees.

Magda’s underfoot, still fighting the giggles. A coat hanger falls, a racket in this space.

Those shapes against my shut eyes were precisely the collapsed figure-eights we study in the labs. It’s as if the very thing that makes me marketable out West has turned me into a freak for pain. I hit the stairs at a run. My ears burn as if I never stopped screaming, and I can see how my little game must have been for Don. The flame from Sonny’s Zippo erupting in his face, while machine wheels thundered nearby and all hell broke loose overhead. Of course he and Sonny were reminiscing in the garage. He was the Don again, brimful of himself, the only way to be when you drew perimeter duty in the dying Ho Bo Woods.

When I reach the back stoop he’s bent over Angelo. He cradles the boy and stands, too quick and in too tight a bear hug for me to check either of their faces.

Sonny’s a big man. He shrugs his fatigues together and the zipper-pull rattles. When he closes in on Don and Angelo, the movement feels like a threat. It’s got to be the mist, the run; I can taste sensamilla again. But my husband keeps his back to me, he shows the boy to his new friend. When Magda comes up behind, I fumble off the stoop.

Sideways down the steps, backwards down the drive. Andrea hustles past with a flower for Angelo. She doesn’t want to look at me either. In her case it’s guilt: when her brother went bad, she couldn’t face him. God, maybe she’ll grow up associating flowers with guilt. Certainly she’s picked a pretty one, a stem willowy as the bone in her arm, a bloom pale as a Petri dish. How should a person in cell biology know their names? But Magda takes the flower, she smiles. The picture’s complete. It’s children and fathers and a pretty young Mom, their faces that many more flowers in the fog, everyone clumsy with the loving sickness of brunch. My boot steps — moving backwards, heavy on the heels — echo between the two close homes.

It isn’t long before I’m yelling again. We’re back inside, I’m over the dishwater and yelling. Magda and Sonny haven’t been gone ten minutes. The mess in the sink is like my noise made tangible: fingered with grease and vomitous. Isn’t it nice to make friends, isn’t it nice. Now maybe our new friends can meet our sweet old pal Mort!

Really, I don’t know why Don stays in the kitchen. The few times I turn his way he’s working the long cupboards so stiffly it’s as if he wants to fold himself inside. Andrea at least knew enough to get out of the way. Angelo announced that the hearth bricks were warm and she let him lure her off. But the Don just tucks his chin. He works the dishtowel so hard the wine-stained corners fly.

Yelling: You act like defoliating those woods was the last thing you did in your life!

It doesn’t end, it goes beyond words. Fumbling in the dishwater, I catch a knife the wrong way. I stamp off for my rain gear dripping blood. Never mind a bandaid, I want it to hurt all the way to the labs. Of course he’s right behind me, the Don’s on the job. He touches my shoulder, my elbow. But at the front closet I have to see the kids on the hearth. Another battlefield scene. Andrea cowers over Angelo, her ear to his chest and her eyes swollen; behind them it’s napalm.

I can’t face any of them. The man folds his arms in front of me, there are words. “…that out of your system?” I put my mouth to the open skin above my thumb, sucking so noisily that it flushes bits of popover from between my teeth.

All the way to the research park I keep after the gears and pedals. That and the oncoming drizzle fill my hood, the seashell hiss of arguments going on ten years now. I mean, out of my system? I need to get something out of my system? Look who’s talking. We met at a Veterans’ rehab clinic. He’d worked his way up from patient to counselor — though at the time I liked it that he’d been a patient. Usually when I heard the counselors talk, I was glad my talent was in the hard sciences. Their hipness was secondhand; they’d just heard a lot of stories. Health to them was nothing more than keeping the surfaces orderly. The Don was never so smug. We didn’t date so much as start reading Thomas Merton together. Then one Friday, instead of the usual Happy Hour, he took me over to the Fenway Motor Inn. I thought, I’m not ready for this. But it turned out that somebody in his old platoon worked as a roadie for Muddy Waters.

The effect would have been impossible any other time, with any other man. Don still can’t say “funky” without laying an awful gravity on the word. Granted. Yet as sundown came on I had to keep turning to the motel windows, taking the measure of my ecstasy against the Fenway maples rag-patched with fall. The old musician’s obscenities were thick and genial as bread. His boozing was gold in his eyes, but you had to watch every glance to see it.

And from there somehow I wound up here. Working Sundays, the handlebar hell against my wound. More than likely Mort’s call has come by now and the kids are with Mrs. Daley.

As I walk the empty corridors to Giptill’s labs the doors behind me echo, da-Don, da-Don.

It would help if my reason for coming in on a weekend weren’t so routine. All I do is test the cultures in a medium. The medium itself is just blood serum, your basic human soup. And today even the door to the containment room has that echo. Last thing I need: lately, around here, I’ve been trying to keep away any thought of Don. I mean, he won’t let me say a word about the work at home. Right from the first, the shoptalk got to him. Me: “Well want to keep the cancer cells growing.” Don: “Oh sure. On Vulcan we respect all forms of life.” The man I married was never so quick with the one-liners.