Highway Trade and Other Stories

by John Domini

  Gillard’s trying to think. The others over there too, that arts-and-crafts witch-woman seems to be gone but I can make out some other faces. I’m up by the rosebushes, I can see their looks changing. Of course it’s hard to keep up the volume when he grabs Carrie’s arm. She’d been pointing, starting to head my way, and it’s hard to work with how my lungs clutch. But I can face her now. I can keep on blowing even when one of the day-glo biker boys whips by the bench, impossible to miss, and snatches up my Diet Coke one-handed and whooping.

  Senior Transfer

  ROBIN COULDN’T stay on her feet. She and her father weren’t ten minutes off the hiking trail, and for the third time she was down in the undergrowth. The vines and creepers got under her Gore-Tex. Robin came up with her machete. She laid into the brush around her, whip whip whip, till she wore herself out against her pack-straps.

  Her father turned, drawn up to full height for the first time since they’d left the truck. He had the heavier pack. He wore the real camouflage, greasy jungle-issue synthetics, rain gear older than Robin herself. Dale looked every long inch the renegade. Deliberately he tasted his cigarette. Her own coat was burgundy, a catalogue item, and under its sleeves she itched from the wet touch of the plants.

  “I know, I know,” she said. “We’re not supposed to leave tracks.”

  “Do you want to quit?” her father said. “In two hours we could be back in front of the VCR.”

  Around her the cut branches dangled by their winter skins, their exposed pulp like new stars sewn into the drizzle. This was a designated Wilderness Area, above the Willamette River valley. The timber here had gone so long unharvested that there were stretches of primary forest, easy travelling. But Robin and Dale had to stick with the ground cover. They had to think about the county sheriff, the men who’d like to find her father’s crop. Dale grew high-grade marijuana in these hills. He’d warned Robin, this wouldn’t be like one of her senior-class hikes. No trails, no creek beds, and up at the “hole” they’d have to do the planting. So early in the year, putting in the seeds was bound to be ugly. Only after that—only if it was safe—could her father show her where he’d hid the money. The cash was sealed in a coffee can, buried and camouflaged.

  “I want to go on,” Robin said. “I want to see.”

  “Well, I’m not insisting.” Under his hood he softened, grinning. “I’m not forcing you.”

  “Dale, I want to.” She worked the machete into its sheath. “I mean,” Robin went on, “this isn’t the kind of thing I do with Mom.”

  He swung off again through the undergrowth, leaning into his pack-straps. He was carrying the rock phosphates. Dale had that great outlaw stride, almost a swagger. Nonetheless he must be thinking about her mother; one mention was all it took. His walk had some stomp to it. Robin could hear the mulch crackle under him even through the white noise within her hood. And her father began to gab. “Well honey, your mother’s still down in the valley. She’s down in that mind-set, she’s one of the office mice.” He knew those office mice. “That’s why I keep my ill-gotten gains in the woods, you know. Put it in a bank and those mice can get it.”

  At a low scrub oak, feisty but webbed with lichen, Dale crouched to stub out his cigarette.

  “Robin, listen. Have you ever come up on one of them like, unexpectedly?” Elbows on knees, he made claws of his hands. “Have you ever like, surprised a mouse in its lair? Man, it’s a terrible thing to see.” He took out the Marlboro box, an eye-catcher, vivid against his camouflage. “They show you their teeth. They show you their claws, oh yeah. They’ll fight to the death for the burrow.”

  Robin allowed herself to laugh, scratching under one cuff.

  “They believe in the burrow, Robin. They actually think they’ve got the good life.”

  She laughed, refastening the Velero at that wrist.

  “Man oh man. The things we let our children see.”

  “Oh Daddy. Come on. You work in the valley.”

  Dale tucked his butt into the Marlboro box. He snapped the bright thing back into his pocket. “Okay, I’ve got a title on my desk. I’ve got a billboard on the highway. But I’m keeping my dope money in the woods.”

  He strode off again, in a sudden wash of sunshine. Robin kept her eyes down; she couldn’t let him see how he got to her.

  In her father’s voice Robin picked up echoes of his record collection, half a hundred lowdown singers with baggy black faces and knockabout teeth. Plus he was scamming, talking trash, and that got to her too. In these woods, scamming came as a relief. On Robin’s hikes with the senior class, just the opposite, everybody got into that hippy-dippy granola goop. Everybody started waving the flag for “the wilderness” and “the planet.” Robin’s boyfriend, Anu, didn’t like the hippy-dippy stuff either; he said it was a chemical reaction to the landscape. Anu said that anyone who grew up in Oregon had to be permanently stoned on the highway overlooks. Oh Anu. Robin’s father was the only other man she knew with such a smart mouth.

  Except Anu didn’t always come back to the same damn thing. “Yeah,” Dale was saying, “I can just see your mother.”

  Come on, Dad. Get off it.

  “Robin, I mean, your mom has bought the whole fantasy, the office and the good life. Your mom’s a believer.”

  Robin almost wished he’d brought his gun. Dale had some serious iron, a square and colorless .45. Even in her day-dreams, My Father the Outlaw, the gun had always made her nervous. But now Dale was just another grumping old hobo bent under a pack. The sun had gone back behind the clouds, and he was carrying nothing but farm tools and fertilizer.

  “I can see her, Robb. As plain as if she’s here.”

  According to Robin’s mother—she preferred to be called Roy—the breakup was a done thing as soon as they’d moved West. Back in Philadelphia she and Dale could kid themselves that the trouble was money. Dale had fallen just short of promotion, her mother’s people just short of the contract that would make the agency. The scholarship that had carried Robin through sophomore year at the Park School had lost its funding. Meantime out in Tangent, Oregon, a former nobody in Dale’s office was doing seven thousand a month designing solar homes. Her father hadn’t stopped talking the whole way West. Robin honey, try to understand, people like Dale and Roy aren’t that old. People like Dale and Roy still have dreams. Then that same September, her mother had heaved the coffee pot through the glass panels in the alcove.

  Tangent is right, her mother had screamed.

  “I just wish your mother could meet Sharonna or Flo,” Dale said now. “One of the younger women I’m seeing.”

  They were sidling through brambles and hip-high stands of fern. “It would be good for Roy, I think.”

  Right, Dad. Good for Roy. Dale might as well have been pointing at the sky with one hand and reaching for her purse with the other. Nothing about the divorce got to Robin like that, like she had to cover up and get tricky. Of course there’d been hard places for her. Eating alone had been the worst, jar after jar of Paul Newman Spaghetti Sauce while Roy was on job interviews up in Portland. But she’d talked it all out with Anu, the whole soap opera of the last year and a half, and she’d only started crying once. These days, when she visited Tangent she was happy about it, happy for the change. In the mornings the louvers in her father’s skylight lit up in stripes.

  What was the problem with the adults? God, the way Roy had carried on when she’d learned about Dale’s buried money (Robin’s mother had some outlaw contacts of her own, through a coffee shop in downtown Salem). Thousands of dollars! Roy had screamed. Thousands! Enough to move back to Philly! Robin had taken in the tantrum with hands on hips, concentrating. Likewise last night, when her father had invited her to come see his hole, Robin had nodded, avid, squinting. In both cases, it wasn’t just the money that had her hooked.

  She could use the money. She’d be eighteen in July, and she and Anu had plans. But more than that, she had to learn this stuff. She had to learn what made these two
poor diseased creatures tick. Robin liked to read murder mysteries, the more hard-boiled the better, and in them she always looked forward to the scene in the morgue. She always enjoyed the conversation with the coroner, a doctor with an attitude, a death-pro making wisecracks over the victim. These days, Robin figured, she had to be the coroner. She had to get smart and icy, with the dead marriage on the table before her.

  Last night, Dale had kept warning her that the trek to his hole wouldn’t be easy. He’d said he would leave behind his .45, but there might be other trouble. Robin at last had fallen back on an old family line, something Dale had picked up from a movie: I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble. And the fact was, she wanted trouble. Not that she’d told Dale, oh no. If she’d learned one thing about keeping control, it was to let him do the talking.

  Since they’d left the trail, he’d been taking her in spirals. Robin couldn’t be sure if, overall, they were moving uphill or down. Occasionally there’d be breaks in the forest, but the view left her confused. So early in the year, these woods offered a dishrag beauty, rumpled green and grease. The wrinkles of clear-cut and growth kept shifting, dreamy under the rain. The only clarity in the landscape was either a thousand feet down or a thousand feet up. Above, the sunshine now and again opened a wound in the clouds’ beard, exposing red and blue bloodlines in the puffy upper reaches of the cumuli. Below, one time, they saw the fringes of a town.

  A town? A mock-up, more like it—the sort of thing her mother did for the Bureau of Tourism. A sprinkling of geometry in the lowlands. Robin tried to pick out a landmark while Dale turned away and squatted. She heard him searching through the small leaves.

  “Yep,” he said. “Yep. Come and take a look.”

  His old suit stank, a human mulch. Bent beside him, Robin saw the broken ivy and pine cones, the gravel trod into the ground. Yep. It looked like more than one person, too. Half-legible boot prints lay in a V of aboveground roots.

  “It’s got to be the sheriff,” her father said.

  Oh right. It couldn’t be anybody except the sheriff. But while he and Robin fell into step again, corkscrewing away from the overlook, Dale kept insisting that the tracks were the worst kind of trouble. The troopers, Robb.

  His proof seemed to be based on the cycle of the seasons. “In the woods,” Dale said, “you don’t measure time by the weather, the way you would back East.” He took her into thicker brush, ropy salmonberry. “Here it’s just, some days are a little colder and wetter, some are a little warmer and dryer.” And so, he explained, a grower measures his year by people and their movements. “Like September first, Robb. That’s a key date, that’s when hunting season starts.”

  Or had he said October first? What kind of trash was he talking? “Robin, I’ll tell you. You don’t want to be in here when there’s men walking round carrying guns.”

  Then: “See, Robb. See there!”

  Dale dropped into a squat, his cigarette-arm stiff behind him. “See the cuts?”

  Her itching flared up again. Her father gestured across cuts in the greenery, broken branches, plainly the work of a machete. Whoever had done it, Robin couldn’t blame them. The way was blocked by a holly tree, a thorny red-speckled miracle. The exposed pulp had already gone dark and sapless, and underfoot the runoff had reduced the prints to a jumble.

  “Doesn’t look too recent,” she said.

  “You wish.”

  She worked her hands under her sleeves, her fingernails cold against the rubbery veins.

  “Listen, little girl.” Dale was picking through the grass beneath the holly. “In the woods it’s easy to see what you want to see. It’s like the ’Nam that way.”

  “Give me a break, Dale. You were at Penn State the whole time.”

  No response. He fingered something off the ground. “Yep, yep,” he said finally. “It’s the troopers.”

  Facing her, he held it up: a black chip about the size of his palm. At first she thought that whoever had come through here had lost a piece of their machete.

  “Candy bar,” Dale said.

  It had to be the cigarette that made him look so fierce. Certainly his find was nothing to get worked up about. Nothing but the little dark cardboard sheet from under a Mars Bar or a Three Musketeers.

  “Come on,” she said.

  His face lengthened. “Okay, okay. I know what you’re thinking.”

  Robin scratched more seriously.

  “You’re thinking the old man’s a little paranoid. Right? You’re thinking the old man’s seen too many movies.”

  “Well I mean Dale, even if these were the cops—“

  “if these were the cops? If? Robin, weren’t you listening when I told you about the seasons? The point is, at this time of year nobody else should be around.”

  Oh Dale. So lost in space that he didn’t see it—what could the sheriff do to them? What, even if these were the cops? Dale didn’t have his plants in yet. Nobody had their plants in yet, it was only February for God’s sake, and Robin would never have come out here with him if she’d thought she could go to jail for carrying seeds. As of now, Dale and Robin were just a couple of hikers with an idea.

  “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.”