Highway Trade and Other Stories

by John Domini

  She lurched free, the gutter bit her instep.

  “Look Nonie, just…once I came home at the wrong time, and suddenly I was history. Suddenly I was a clown…”

  Yet while she couldn’t catch every word, her attention seemed total. She could see the work crews pulling tarps over the homey props down on Main Street. She could read the initials at the edge of the walk beneath her. And under the grime that filled those initials she could make out the radium-trace of her father’s last disease, the glue and nicotine that had ruined his fingers first. Every man’s home is his castle; every old tract house in the Valley was haunted. Meantime, in a holding pattern above the sky, the insatiable sun waited. It rode the tattered cloth of the first serious rain, poised to trap and smother, patient on its winter web. Her attention burned through every surface. This had to be it, then: the furthest reach of her trip.

  Stanley tried for her again. Nonie hadn’t much room. The takeoff was helpless, a slapstick jeté. Her noise was a “No!” that had nothing to do with time and place. Nonetheless while the brown woods turned over and melted she still strained for an echo.

  The Arno Line

  WHO WAS THIS GUY? Sitnell knew that the publicist came from back East. But he hadn’t expected a—what would you call a person in that getup? Even the guy’s baldness was hard to take. It was like another accessory, a khaki-colored slip-on skull. The publicist was a good twenty-five years younger than Sitnell after all. Though no way Kroh was young enough for that tie, either. The thing was an inch wide at most and flecked with what looked like war paint. Plus when the man toed round on his barstool to say hello, Sitnell couldn’t miss the bulge of Kroh’s camel’s humps, especially ugly under his red leather jacket. A Michael Jackson jacket, in this case zippered shut around a sack of dirt. Drew more than a couple of stares from along the bar.

  “I was beginning to wonder,” Kroh said.

  Was that supposed to be funny? Granted, once Sitnell broke off the handshake he discovered that the Happy Hour nachos had gone cold, the cheese gummy. But the publicist was the rude one here. Kroh had called, that first time, after ten at night. Sitnell had found himself sitting through this entire breakneck publicity hard sell while watching his wife get undressed for bed. After the call, the old girl had propped herself upright against the headboard and told Sitnell the stories she’d heard about this guy. She’d said that, if he met with Jimmy Kroh, he might as well sit down with their youngest and teach the boy to smoke pot.

  Sitnell ordered a martini. “Very dry,” he said, “and never mind what you’ve got in the well. I want real liquor.”

  Kroh’s smile became triangular. As soon as Sitnell came up with a brand, Beefeater, the guy started to make a fuss.

  “It’s so great,” he kept saying, “to be with a man who likes real liquor.” They found a longer table, by the window. “Most guys my age, you know? They drink nothing.” Sitnell hoped that at this distance the stares from the bar would stop. “I want to tell them, hey. Forget about being sleek and pretty for a minute. Just forget about being pretty.”

  Nor was there the usual breather after they sat. Kroh went straight from the booze talk to saying how excited he was about working with Sitnell. “Really want to do your book up right, Walter,” he said. “The dust jacket too.” The dust jacket? When had Sitnell mentioned that? He tried to keep a distance, starting on his drink, eyeing Mt. Hood. He’d chosen this place because of how much he remembered liking the view. The view was worth the kind of lumber-mill workers and four-wheel-drive cowboys you got in a lounge this far outside the city. But what with the sketchy November rain, Hood itself didn’t cap the landscape the way Sitnell had expected. What he could see of Portland from up here had a null smogged color and too many moving lights. Beyond that, the mountain’s hefty poke appeared more gray than white. And then Kroh was butting in again.

  “Oh yeah, isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it something?” Though he had his back to the mountain. He was jerking a thumb over one shoulder and at the same time clearing the candle jar and the menu teepee off to the side of the table with a stiffarm sweep. “Sometimes when I’m downtown, I swear—“ he slapped his portfolio onto the tabletop—“it seems like old Hood’s up there nodding at us. Saying like, ’Come on, come on.’ Beautiful.”

  Sitnell wondered how many Kroh’d had. But then he must be feeling his gin already himself, the portfolio seemed to have the most raucous zipper he’d ever heard. Of course he hadn’t gone out drinking like this in, what, two-three years now.

  “I mean Walter, just your sitting here tells me what I want to know. Just your sitting and looking at Hood. That tells me you’re a man who knows what he likes.”

  Sitnell took a swallow that lifted his chin.

  “I mean most guys, when they retire, they don’t go write a book.”

  Sitnell undid his reversible, fitted on his bifocals, and frowned. Kroh never broke stride. Bent over the half-open portfolio, doing some preliminary fiddle and sort, he moved on to Sitnell’s taste in bars. “Those cowboys over by the TV, I love it. And the basketball sneakers nailed to the wall? Exciting. Tiger stripes even. And I’m not even talking about the posters with the prices, those great old Peter Arno champagne glasses. I mean when I saw those, I knew you and me could set this up.”

  Peter Arno champagne glasses? But just a few days ago Sitnell’s editor, another New York type, had pulled the same stunt. He’d thrown around a lot of names Sitnell had never heard of, when what they’d been talking about after all was the title of Sitnell’s book. New York preferred catchy vagueness like Underbelly. Finally Sitnell had put his foot down. He’d said he hadn’t written the book in order to go on TV. It didn’t matter how they’d gussied up the jacket photograph, Sitnell had said: he was no Lorne Greene. The editor’s silence after that felt almost as good as the letter of acceptance. Except then Sitnell’s wife had used the same argument against him when he’d told her he was thinking of getting together with Kroh. First she’d repeated the awful stories about the man’s marriage. But when that had failed to change Sitnell’s mind, she’d asked him straight out: if he didn’t want any TV sort of publicity—if the truth of the book was what mattered—why was he meeting this guy?

  Kroh slipped a couple samples of his work across the table. Sitnell raised his eyebrows, pouted approvingly. Talent had never been a question. At the hardware store where Sitnell shopped, over the cash register, they’d even glued a couple of Kroh’s cartoons together and hung them on fishing line from the ceiling. Nonetheless the publicist’s third sample took him by surprise. Sitnell had to cup his drink to his belly with one hand, pick at his hair with the other. Kroh had drawn a map of the U.S. in the form of hundreds of naked babies. The infants were crammed together coast to coast, often with just a part of the torso showing. Florida hung upside down, a bawling head and shoulders only, its hands trapped by the crush above it. New England was mostly a pair of kicking legs. And Cape Cod—Sitnell needed another long swallow—was the boy’s exposed genitals. He thought of the propaganda flyers dropped over his positions during the war. The piece was in black and white, but the wall of babies appeared to have all its natural suddenness and pudge.

  “It’s for pro-choice.” Kroh threw back the last of his drink. “You know that—“

  “I know the abortion people, yes, thank you. I live in the same century you do.”

  And then the barmaid stood over them, awful timing. Worse, now that he’d got his glasses on, Sitnell could see that the girl was pregnant. Her belly rose almost to her pigtails. It was all Sitnell could do to keep from slapping his arms across the publicist’s latest piece, and he wound up taking a refill.

  Kroh busily made peace. More one-liners, more of that eyewash about “most guys these days.” Sitnell wondered if back East this kind of shake-and-shimmy actually worked. Now the man was insisting that Sitnell call him Jimmy, making it into yet another nervous joke. “Out here Walter, whenever I call people, like trying for an assignment? They think
I’m an Indian.” A very nervous joke: the guy patted his lips with a flat hand, woo-woo. “And then they think I’m dreaming, right? They think I’m trying to hide the fact that I’m an Indian by spelling it the way I do.”

  But Sitnell cracked a grin at that, and Kroh followed up well. “I’m telling you, Walter. These days I’m death on the phone.”

  And the second drink helped. The pricklier edges on the give and take got lost more easily in the country-and-western out of the speaker overhead. Sitnell even began to see the pattern in Kroh’s talk: first something pushy, then something apologetic. Even the gestures changed: first all knuckles, then a loose wrist. So after another one of those—while the younger man was still saying he was sorry and tugging at the tip of his jacket’s single lapel—Sitnell thought he understood why he’d come tonight.

  He believed he’d pitied the man. It wasn’t only those renegade looks that made Sitnell think so. There were mill workers at the bar almost as dark as Kroh. Though they kept their caps pulled low (red Budweiser or white Cat), every time the cowboys looked this way you could see that a couple had Kroh’s Mongol eyes. No, it wasn’t just Kroh’s appearance. Also the man seemed to insist on putting something disagreeable in every piece he drew. And how was that supposed to help him do dust jackets? How was that supposed to help him do publicity at all? The poor misguided clod. Sitnell could even identify what the pity felt like, a booze-tinged seepage down the back of his neck. Interesting to pick it out so clearly. Sitnell began to fuss with his hair again, rotating his head shoulder to shoulder, in order to isolate the sensation better. Kroh was only whining anyway. He’d started to badmouth the Oregon Journal, which had folded under him after he’d moved “all the way out here” to take the job. Sitnell’s wife had told him as much already.

  Besides, while turning his head he’d discovered there was another couple in the lounge. They had a table over by the restrooms. A businessman in a three-piece suit, almost Sitnell’s age, sat across from a redheaded girl in a full-length dress. Rather nightclubby for this place, though they weren’t getting the stares that Kroh had. Sitnell however peered over his bifocals. The couple had some brightly decorated box between them, a present perhaps.

  “Yeah,” Kroh said. “Now she’s my idea of publicity.”

  Sitnell returned to the cartoon on the table. This one featured a torture victim beaten into a human triangle, all backside and broken joints. He tapped the face of a guard in the corner.

  “A lot of your men, Jimmy. They all have the same…”

  “The moon faces? Wingtip mustaches?”

  “Yes, yes. I’m sure you have ah, a whole vocabulary for this sort of thing. But to me, they look almost like the man on the Monopoly board.”

  Kroh’s hands quieted a moment, clasped index-finger-up in front of his smile. “Well that’s the Peter Arno touch, Walter,” he said. “The guy who did the Monopoly board, huh. He got it from Peter Arno. Just like those champagne glasses in the poster there, you remember when I said—“

  “The champagne glass, yes. I remember.”

  At least Kroh didn’t apologize. He frowned at his fingernails, shredded along the cuticle, and seeing that, Sitnell suffered a flashback to his own last couple years at Timberline Printing. Union rules wouldn’t allow them to let him go, so they’d kicked him upstairs. By the time he’d asked out Sitnell had started talking to the walls.

  “Peter Arno,” Kroh repeated. “Well I’m not sure that’s what we should be talking about, but.” He shrugged with his eyebrows and explained that Arno was a cartoonist and poster artist of the ’20s and ’30s. “Say like, your father’s generation, Walter.” The man had done very different work from Kroh’s. “His show posters especially, the Broadway stuff. You oughta see them. Always very ritz-and-glitz, very—a champagne-type lifestyle, Walter. Lots of old Manhattan aristocrats chasing after these gorgeous young showgirls.” Kroh had taken to the style early on.

  “I was attracted to it, Walter. What can I say? It was so the opposite of what I’m into in terms of content.”

  But he’d been attracted to it. And Sitnell thought he understood, in fact with getting to know the man, with the second drink helping—Sitnell remembered that he himself had seen a spread by Arno once. Just a shadow in his mind’s eye by now, but he knew what Kroh was getting at. Seen it in the old LIFE? In one of the magazines that had circulated at the Allied hospital anyway. In those days, after Sitnell’s last action, it had been the name and not the work that got to him. In Italy, the Arno River had been where the Nazis set up their northernmost line of defense.

  Sitnell ran his fingertips down and up one side of his reversible zipper. “You know,” he began—and then didn’t want to finish.

  He didn’t want to share the war with a guy like this. The Arno action had almost killed him. Sitnell clenched his teeth till he could feel the booze in his gums, and he tried Mt. Hood again. The peak was afloat, a disintegrating arrowhead above the twilight fog. He looked around the lounge, but so stiffly this time that the barmaid headed back their way. Nachos/Men’s Room/Date of delivery? But then Sitnell had decided to get a third, and to tell Kroh about where the names connected. The need to say it had come over him like pain catching up to a wound. And once he’d started to talk, he felt good about it, excited; it was more than gin fever. It felt like he’d been working up to this since he’d come in. Though he could keep what he said in line. He’d worked the last two and a half years on the story of his time in Italy, after all. While the next round arrived, Sitnell played it tough. He took off his bifocals, gestured with them in one fist. He made sure to start with “You know.”

  “I wonder if you can imagine,” he was saying after a minute, “what that last Kraut line looked like. The last, worst bastard of them all.” He swept his bifocals left-right across the tabletop. “The land stripped naked for a hundred yards in front of the river. Not a tree left standing, no cover anywhere this side of the Kraut emplacements.” Left-right, this time more noisily. “I’ll tell you the truth, I’ve never been so frightened. Nothing but you and them and—“

  Kroh took hold of the hand with the bifocals. He pinched the wrist a bit, lifting it aside.

  “Watch it on the samples, Walter,” he said.

  Sitnell wound up concentrating on the lyrics in the latest tune from the speaker overhead. Something last chance, last chance. By the time he got his next swallow he was trying to think of the quickest way out of here. Though Kroh wasn’t long in sensing the change, give him credit. He’d been talking about studying design in Florence one summer. But then his rhythm slowed, his hands dropped.

  “Walter, hey. Lemme just say, I’m coming at this from a different angle, I realize.” He even finger-doodled on the topmost drawing: no big deal, buddy. “See now a man like myself, my age. I’ve been trained as an artist really, and—“

  “Oh stop that. We don’t live in sod huts out here anymore, you know. My own son you know, my youngest, he may be an artist.” Sitnell went through a finger-by-finger rundown of all the work the boy was putting in on the senior-class play, the sets and costumes and lighting.

  “Wait a minute Walter, wait a minute. Senior-class play? You mean you’ve got a kid still in high school?”

  Sitnell shrugged, his fingers still extended.

  “Boy, Walter, you don’t slow down much, do you?”

  “Well that’s my point, you ought to see what I have to contend with. My own son, sometimes he comes home from that play just lost in a dream. Singing and dancing and acting out all the parts, it’s goddamned amazing. The boy fills the house.”

  “I can imagine, Walter.”

  Oh sure. According to Sitnell’s wife, this guy didn’t have the first clue about children. “So don’t try to trick me, Jimmy. Don’t hand me any more of this talk about how different you are, how much younger you are.”

  “Oh well, Walter, then—hey. I’m sorry, Walter.” He tugged the red tip of his lapel. “Honestly man, if it sounded like I wasn’t
giving you credit, hey. I apologize.”

  Sitnell thumbed the rim of his drink, frowned and pouted. That hadn’t gone right. He was still in the meeting, Kroh was still getting round him. Now the guy was buying time with his portfolio. He fit the samples back inside busily, counting and taking the occasional unnecessary peek. Sitnell thought of how his wife had started fussing with his hair. From time to time these last couple years, she’d stood over Sitnell while he was at his desk, picking and stroking and talking about his “wild mane.” It had got in the way of his work so much that finally he’d had to speak to her about it.

  And remembering that, Sitnell had his plan. He waited till Kroh redid his bratty zipper.

  “Jimmy, I don’t believe we can get together on this.” He kept it throaty and regretful. “Not on my book, anyway.”

  “Walter, hey! Gimme a chance here.”

  “No, it’s nothing to do with you, Jimmy.” Sitnell figured he could ignore how his pity for the man had changed, how leaden and achy it had started to feel. “Your work really, really brings people up short, I can see that. I can see you’re special. It’s just that my book, well.” Another mouthful of booze should see him through. He’d made the speech twice after all, first getting his editor to back off, and then his wife. “You haven’t got the picture yet, about my book.

  “It’s just the story of a guy, he went to war. Like a million other guys who went to war. And then he went after those square-headed bastards the best he could, first in Sicily and then moving north up the boot. Just another Joe.” For some reason he couldn’t keep up eye contact. He found the basketball sneakers on the wall. “Some of the men this guy fought with, well, they were some of the bravest men he’d ever known.” But at this distance the tiger stripes were too blurred, they upset him somehow. He wound up scowling into space. “He’d never realized that the world had so many incredible men in it, before he went to war. He’d never realized there were so many of these incredible, brave, wonderful guys out there, and that so many of them had to die.”