Highway Trade and Other Stories

by John Domini

  No major changes. Yet the piece came up highlighted, glowing electronic blocks against which the letters were rivets. That had to mean Knotts had done a final edit.

  After a minute a reflection loomed, a goldfish in the net of copy. Corrillo turned and almost put his nose in the gut of the man who’d come up behind. It was Vic, one of the full-time staff. An absolutely militant jogger. Corrillo had glimpsed the belt buckle, no belly overhang in the way.

  Vic wasn’t the kind to back off. “Knotts liked how you handled that.”

  “He did?” Corrillo said. “He didn’t run it.” “We needed the space. You remember, we had the promo copy on the new Gallería.”

  Corrillo turned back to the screen. Promo copy.

  “He liked how you handled it, Carlos. You know, since it was Bennett.”

  Corillo turned again, staring, chin cocked. The older man flexed his fists in his pockets. Corillo couldn’t think what to say, and Vic’s look gave no clue. Like Dora with an A.A. pledge who’d fallen off the wagon: refusing to make it easy.

  “The piece should run tomorrow, Carlos.”

  Corrillo turned away, trying to clear his head of the man’s morning powder, trying to put words to his question. Was Bennett some kind of…? Does this mean I…? All of a sudden the terminals and cubicles around him lost their tekky thrill; instead they made him think of high school. In school he’d sat in rooms like this, him and a thousand others, filling in SATs. Even then he’d wanted to work in such a place, fluorescents overhead and the noises of paper. White-collar like a Norteamericano.

  Now all of a sudden the setup was no big deal. His keyboard looked like a kitchen utensil, something his wife might use. Corrillo said nothing.

  “You know, Carlos, that Gallería copy is important copy.” Vic remained at his elbow. “If that place fills up we might get Sunday circulation.”

  “Mm-hmm.” He set his fingers in typing-class position.

  “You’ll get a lot more shots at a Pulitzer, you know, if we get Sunday circulation.”

  “Cut me some slack, Vic.” It helped that the guy was aggravated. “I figure we’re all going for the same brass ring.”

  Once more the jogger flexed his pockets; the belt buckle nodded. Then at last Corrillo found out why Vic had stopped by. The man had today’s assignment. Mr. Knotts wanted another interview—and this one was in, positively. They’d already set aside the inches. Corrillo tried not to grin, he looked too Beaver Cleaver when he grinned. But even Vic seemed to realize he’d passed the test. The man propped his butt on Corrillo’s desk.

  “You should like this one today,” he said. “A real weirdo.”

  They laughed together. The subject was one of those, what did you call them? An environmental terrorist. The lumber company people caught him red-handed, spiking trees. The judge had ordered psychological testing over at that place, what was its name? Breakthrough House.

  The clinic lay on the other side of I-5, the older part of town. The man’s name was right there in the foyer. Randolph Bennett, the calligraphy softer than you’d expect for a doctor. It was too much of a coincidence. For them to send Corrillo here was almost as hokey as when he used to set up run-ins with Dora.

  At the reception desk the radio was tuned to public broadcasting. Roots music, grunt and strum. The woman who came for Corrillo didn’t give her name. He followed her into the back and up a flight. The stairway lacked an overhead light, the only window gave onto drizzle. He suffered bad flashes. He saw Bennett and Knotts in one of the near rooms, unsmiling, hardly breathing; they poked a marker back and forth over a map of the suburb.

  Cut it out. You’d think Breakthrough House scared him more than the state pen. The building was Alfred Hitchcock material, neo-Gothic, willed to the clinic by one of the pioneer families. More than likely the musty reek never left the halls. The place teemed with ’60s types of course. The woman taking him in wore knickers and knee-socks, plus those low-heel sandals with the fairy-tale name he always forgot. Red angels on her gray winter socks. Upstairs, the man he’d come to interview was another one: a huge, limping longhair. His patient’s uniform showed some belly. A spook in a spook-house, fraying and hobbled by chains.

  The woman stuck them in what must once have been the laundry closet. No door, and built-in cupboards to the ceiling. She had the nerve to smile before she left.

  Corrillo even forgot about Bennett. How long had it been since this weirdo’d had a decent shower? The environmentalist didn’t answer questions, he followed a private catechism. His gestures widened the V of his shirt, his chest at least wasn’t so scary. Some of these big guys caved in after thirty-five.

  “Man,” the environmentalist kept saying, “if I’m bad and crazy, what does that make you?”

  Corrillo managed to keep him on track long enough to get a name, Babe. And there were bits of background: “Man, I’m just your basic West Texas badass peyote messiah.” But the echo was oppressive. Before long Corrillo had backed his chair against the doorway, he’d stretched a leg into the hall. What kind of notes could he be taking, anyway? Man, those logging company dudes, they thought this was Star Wars man, they had this laser shit now supposed to home in on the spikes in the trees. Was Corrillo here to record fantasies? Babe explained what the spiking accomplished. In the woods a fragment could fly back in the logger’s face; in the mill a saw could explode. The News had all that in its files. Corrillo rested his head against a groove in the molding. He thought of the drive over, the red lights he’d run, the speed traps he’d beaten.

  “If I’m bad and crazy…” Babe began.

  His long arms dropped. After a moment he roughed his beard. The sound was mushy, the guy must be pouring sweat. On the small chair he looked mushy, all hair and hospital fatigues. Abruptly Babe revealed that, this last time out, the spikes had spoken to him.

  “They speak dolphin language, man. You know, the squeaks. They squeak when you knock ’em in and they go on squeaking once they’re inside.”

  Corrillo stood and shoved his pad in his pocket.

  “Dolphin talk, man. I swear it’ll break your heart, you have to listen so close. They tell you they don’t want to hurt anybody.”

  Corrillo faced the hall, craning left-right.

  “But man, once those logging guys catch ’em…”

  The staircase remained dark and empty, the other doors closed. He’d always known these hippie-dippie types were hypocrites. They took you in with their gobbledygook—words like “transition” and “incident,” a lot of softcore mumbo-jumbo—but what they had here was dangerous. Babe said that the spikes had told him their names. They’d told him about making the big machine saws burst, about flying out the factory windows and living in the millpond. “They can live forever in that millpond, man.” Corrillo couldn’t look at him. He kept his back to the room till he heard movement, and then he came round with arms cocked.

  Babe remained in his chair, sagging, nodding. The noise was from the stairs. And that only proved to be more of the same. A crazy woman was padding down to this level barefoot.

  She wore nothing but a long man’s t-shirt. Out of the dark stairwell she carried the seaweed smell of too much time in bed. Crazy: she was like an illustration out of an old dictionary. Yet she was lovely, even the slant tangle of neck-length curls, the cloud-color shirt with the rippled heaviness of wear. College age at most. Corrillo heard another sound, fragile. Had he forgotten about Babe? The environmentalist had his fingers pressed to a cupboard door. He was making them squeak against the wood, to show Corrillo how the dolphin-spikes sounded.

  He looked in the hall again. The young woman hadn’t even seen him. She seemed to float before a door at the far end, then a man answered her knock. Bennett.

  It was the doctor, the goatee. He closed his office door without noticing there was anyone else in the hall.

  Corrillo had his pad out before he was back in his seat. He could see his interview taking shape as if on his monitor. Question: How could Babe
have allowed himself to get caught? Had he really not heard the loggers coming, the trucks, the earth movers? Corrillo rapped his knuckles against the metal folding chair whenever the man started to drift. There’d been enough free association for one day. He himself had acted like a kid, lost in a fantasy about some silly test. This guy had asked for pressure tactics. Question: So you felt remorse? Corrillo broke a sweat, his ribs itched. You began to understand the harm you might do, and you felt remorse?

  The motive always came down to pain. It was pain by one name or another, and then the urge to make better. First some bug of conscience, and the rest a dream to provide the creature a home.

  By the time the aide returned, the woman in knee-socks, Babe had shrunk into a baggy cartoon question mark. The hair on his underlip trembled.

  She didn’t smile this time. She might have had words for Corrillo. Can you find your own way out? or something. He didn’t catch it. He was trying to figure staff cutbacks. How else could they leave him alone in this narrow place full of secrets? The aide got her arm round Babe, they bent together like an old married couple.

  Corrillo had to flatten himself against a door in the hall to let them by. Through the panels he heard sobbing. The woman and the big renegade went out of sight upstairs, up the way the sexy patient had come. Faintly the hallway resonated, sick people in every room.

  How could they just ignore him? Then Corrillo was at Bennett’s door; he was at the keyhole.

  He’d had no lunch and he felt the squatting in his stomach. The door was thick, the fitting snug. The laundry closet where he and Babe had talked must have been at the servants’ end of the hall. Bennett had the master bedroom. There was a skylight here, a white shine on the hanging dust, hot weather at last. Corrillo knew what he’d tell the editor if he was caught, too. He’d say they should do a story on this guy. Bennett was like Corrillo’s old Dad: he’d stuck it out and made a life. He was proof that there was no place better than the Willamette Valley.

  But then, no way Corrillo was going to be caught. Not with these old floorboards, not with the kind of laser alertness he had going. He flattened his face against the door. He cupped his hands around his single open eye. The keyhole was old-fashioned, its shape promising, like the raised fist on those posters from the ’60s. But the edges of the opening were hemmed in by lock-works, the angle of view was impossible. Corrillo sank to one knee. How could there be so little room? He was as bad off as Dora, the way she had to sling her belly around all the time. The one thing he could be sure of was a window on the opposite wall, a porthole job. He could hear only the rhythms of what was being said, the doctor’s clipped calm, the patient’s fluttering search. He blinked slowly, trying to focus; there were more bad flashes. There was Dora’s hurt look, last night, her stare deepening and darkening. Come on. Why should he be saddled with that? She said he’d brought up the nasty stuff—all right, he’d brought it up—“All right,” he muttered into the doctor’s door, into his own thickening day-smell. But they’d spent the night shadow-dancing through a hundred poses and glances. He’d poured his beer down the drain; he’d presented her with the empty bottle. “You were happy,” Corrillo said, “you were smiling.” He felt the lock-face in his eyeball.

  “Hey, you! Hey. What’re you doing?”

  He didn’t hear the voice clearly. He came round expecting the woman again. But these were stocky male legs, old jeans patched at the knee with paisley. The shock emptied Corrillo’s face. He dropped onto his butt. The orderly only squared his stance, fists to hips.

  “What are you doing? Who are you talking to?”

  His editor had a soft face, a touch fisheyed. His looks didn’t fit in at the News, really. Andy Knotts wasn’t much for staying in shape. But that face of his fit in better at the office than it had where he and Corrillo had first met. The man had coached JV soccer. In the locker room they’d called him Candy Nuts; none of the other coaches came to practice in a jacket and tie. Still, Knotts had put Corrillo in at center forward. He’d said many times that he admired Corrillo’s father, up by his bootstraps. He’d found a place on the News. Today, after Breakthrough House called, Knotts said they should go get a drink.

  Corrillo tried the alibi: Bennett’s worth a story…The editor’s look only softened that much more.

  Worse, the man rejected every watering hole they stopped at. On this side of the interstate you got the new places, windows for walls and high-key decor. “Christ,” Knotts said after the second one. “Might as well be drinking in a goddamn fishbowl.”

  Tough talk. Today’s case must really be eating him.

  “Tell me something, son,” the editor said. “Is it just the Valley? Or can’t you find a decent bar anywhere, these days?”

  Corrillo smiled lamely, head down. This was his own silly fault, him and his imaginary test. And Knotts went on complaining, he didn’t have much time. They wound up buying singles at the new Circle-K, across from the new Gallería. “These places are counting on spillover business, right? So why should we be different from anybody else?” They pulled into the Gallería lot. The engine quit, such silence. Corrillo had hoped to get a car like this one day, a gliding Swedish or German job, an instrument panel.

  But when the old man spoke, he began with the Bennetts.

  “What?” Corrillo asked. “The wife was a what?”

  “She was a free spirit. See, she was his patient first, back East.”

  “Andy, can I just ask—what does that mean, a free spirit?”

  “Settle down, Carlos.”

  “Well am I supposed to know what all these things mean?”

  “Settle down. If I’ve heard this story, there’s been enough broadcasting it around already.”

  The doctor had inspired the wife, Knotts explained. She’d gone for her Masters in Counseling, and the only place they’d applied for work was the Valley. “Having the kid was part of it. They were the kind of people, everything’s part of a plan.” Corrillo wondered what the plan was now, letting him in on this. A last treat before execution? But why would the old man worry about Corrillo spreading the story around, if he wasn’t going to be in the office any more?

  “Anyway,” Knotts said, “it worked out. The Bennetts took their act to Oregon.” Then before the wife had been three months on the job—the editor’s voice was matter-of-fact, but his hand was busy with the knot of his tie—two of her patients filed harassment charges. Two of the women.

  Corrillo recalled his own half-naked visitor, her sweat and madness. A memory like a kick in the spine.

  “You’re alone with them,” the editor was saying. “All alone in that office. And you’re hearing about their ghosts and monsters, it must be hard not to come out with your own.” The wife locked herself in the garage the night she got the news.

  Corrillo couldn’t catch the man’s eyes. “That’s why she killed herself?”

  The editor shrugged. “She was his patient, back East.”

  “That’s pretty flimsy. Just two people complained?”

  “Flimsy, listen to him. Flimsy. Do you still believe that if somebody’s got a degree, they must be hard as nails?”

  Corrillo felt a blush rising. He shook his head.

  “I didn’t have to tell you this story, you know.”

  His cheeks were hot, his baby fat showed. But who worried about baby fat?

  “Andy, I just think, she must have had some motive—“

  “Forget the motive, Carlos. Look, there’s probably some, some wormy little cluster of secrets at the center of every story. It’s always the same old shit, isn’t it? Guilt, or whatever? There’s always some little fistful of worms the person finds it hard to talk about.”

  “I know that, Andy.” He had to grin. “After today, I swear, that’s like the only thing I know for sure.”

  “Yeah, but you can’t be charging around looking for that. You can’t be a goddamn bull in a china shop.”

  “Well I’m trying to find out what I can be.”


  Still the grin, and never mind Beaver Cleaver. A lecture like this must mean he was still alive at the News. The old man kept on, he talked about why he’d moved out to the suburbs. He even used the expression “learning experience.” Corrillo swigged his beer. He took in the work vans in the parking lot, bright with company logos, and the darker alphabet of the men at work behind the tinted shop windows. He would get another crack at these places after all, he’d find out what they were made of. This was his chosen work.

  Rain-spatter clung to the wide Galleria, a glimmering fishnet. Knotts paused, drank. Then he asked, did Corrillo appreciate what had happened here? Did he really, fully appreciate it?

  “Hey,” Corrillo said, “Andy. You better believe I appreciate it. You could have eliminated my position.”

  “Well I figured that wouldn’t be right. After all, I never expected my little plan would turn out like this.”

  Plan? Plan? Corrillo needed no more than a glance at the man. Those hurting, out-of-kilter eyes. He turned back to the Galleria furious.

  “Son—you do realize, I’ve been testing you?”

  Dora, where was Dora?

  All Corrillo had to go on was the lounge chair unfolded on the deck. The rubber cross-strips were wormy under the drizzle, and an empty tumbler stood beside the chair. Empty. He stood out on the soaked planks, turning the heavy cup between his hands. Glazed clay, slick and glinting.

  His wife had left no note, no word. Her purse hung from the bedroom knob, the wallet inside. Maybe she figured she had enough to lug around these days. The weather was gentle, the development quiet; a person could practically go naked if they didn’t use the car. Out on the deck, Corrillo quickly lost the metal-plated ferocity he’d come home with. Five minutes ago he’d come screeching into the driveway, raging into the house. D., we’re out of here! We’re moving! He’d gone straight for the phone—Babe, don’t we have the Oregonian’s number? And of course he went on talking to Knotts, every word another brittle satisfaction. Well what was I supposed to do at Breakthrough House? Just see the doctor’s name and like, shine on? Just like, play along, play the game…