Highway Trade and Other Stories Read online

  Robin frowned. Did they have to get nasty in order to move on? They were past the skunk cabbage but the smell had left her dizzy. She fumbled over moguls in the undergrowth.

  “Happens all the time,” Dale went on. “Every day, Robb, somebody sells out their family for a Macintosh.” His voice grew more smoky. “Hey, what do we expect, in this country? It’s called career mobility, right? I mean a person goes to college in one city, and then there’s grad school somewhere else, and after that they take the best offer they can find. Am I right? For the rest of their lives, they go on taking the best offer. Mobility ever after.”

  Was he talking or singing? The slashes of her father’s camouflage, up ahead, jogged like follow-the-bouncing-ball.

  “Career mobility, Robb. It’s the great American scramble. And every day, somebody else decides that a family’s too big a load to haul.”

  He dropped again, the cabbage-smell rising off him as he arranged his joints. She had to clear her head. “Every day,” Robin tried, “somebody else joins the office mice.”

  Dale grinned but went on checking the near slope. Beaten down by the drizzle, his smoke drifted across his stare. “Well it’s no joke, honey. It’s some mean business, we’re talking about.” Even in the woods, Dale whispered, you found people who’d caught the career disease. “Oh yeah, Robb. I know some guys around here who’ll cut their own grandmother if they think she’ll hurt the crop.” Dale knew growers who set bear traps round their holes. “I mean, a bear trap’ll take a man’s leg off.” Or had she ever heard of punji sticks?

  “Daddy, come on.”

  “It works like this. First you dig a pit—“

  “Daddy.” She yanked back her hood. “Are you putting dope in your cigarettes again?”

  A lame move, a dumb joke. And she’d been way too loud, she’d silenced the winter birds. But the look her father showed her was sheepish.

  “Well well, little girl. Is it that obvious?”

  His grin was hard to get a fix on, a pointed thing in flight.

  “Robb, I’m asking. Is it obvious?”

  “You mean you are? You’re smoking pot right now?”

  “Just a taste. It gives me like an infra-red scope.”

  “But I thought, I thought…”

  With her ears bare, the drizzle seemed very cold. Dale remained sideways to her, half an eye on the woods. Robin bit her lips and shook her head.

  “It’s okay, honey,” he said. “If the Man’s going to bust you for seeds, he might as well bust you for smoking.”

  Could they get busted for seeds? Could they, after all? Doping and its complications were still new to Robin. Dale hadn’t started growing his own till after she and Roy had moved out, and she’d only occasionally seen him smoking, while firing up a barbecue or watching the Phillies on cable. Cigarettes like these he called “half-and-halfs,” pot and tobacco. He’d told her he didn’t enjoy them, didn’t “appreciate the high.” Yet here he sat, who knows how many dark miles into the woods, grinning over a trick Marlboro. He’d never seemed more like a bluesman.

  “We could still go back,” he growled. “We could turn around right here.”

  The best answer—the toughest—was to show him her watch. Put it right under his nose.

  The next time they stopped, Dale actually hit her. He got her a stiff poke between the breasts, shoving her back. Robin wound up against the trunk of a pine, under the branches. A smell of cinders, a sore spot where he’d jabbed her. If he was this hyper they must be close to the hole. During the last stretch of hiking their spirals had hooked inward more often, and Dale had laid off the smokes.

  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 unnatura
l 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.”

  The dead forest rats stank, way too close. Between her and her father, Robin didn’t have room to relieve her itch.

  “I mean, no way a grower ever brings a kid along. No way, Robb. The job is cut-throat, in here. But see, I was even meaner than the rest of them: I figured out a way to use my own daughter. See, I brought you along and I brought a couple other things, a couple other tricks. I had a way where I—I figured I was covered.”

  “You were covered.”

  Chin up, chest up, he nodded. Robin realized she hadn’t just repeated his words, she’d echoed his voice. She’d sounded spongy, wobbly. Out of control.

  “Robin, that’s not the worst. The worst was, I kept kidding myself that the trip was for you.”

  Then there was the rainbow, the last straw. Robin couldn’t look at her father’s face any longer, and casting round for better she saw it in an opening between the tallest firs: a double rainbow, breathtaking, beautiful. Bent shafts of red and blue built across cumuli more white than usual for February. She couldn’t stand it, such a corny show of good news at a time like this, and the rainbow was all the harder to take for how it unwound from the tatters of the Wilderness Area.

  “That was the worst,” Dale was saying. “That was where I was totally lost. See, you told me you wanted this, Robb. You said you couldn’t do this with Mom. So then I could kid myself, I could say, see, this whole runaround is really for her. Robb, I mean—when a father’s acting like a rat, he’s got some old, old lines to fall back on…”

  Robin spun away and ran.

  Two minutes later, breathing hard, they were down on their knees together in the forest. Busy with their hands, avoiding each other’s eyes. Robin once more fisted together her pack-straps. Dale brought out a floppy leather sack of seeds.

  “For the big evergreens,” he said. “Seeds.”

  The bits of pine cone glittered at the bottom of the pouch. It was like he held a mouth in his hand, a worn and thick-lipped maw, and the seeds were yellow fillings at the back. Why hadn’t she seen this sack before? Why hadn’t she seen, at least, that it wasn’t a gun? As soon as Dale had caught up with her—which didn’t take long, with this load on her back—she’d screamed at him about the gun. “You can’t hide these things from me!” she’d screamed. But when Robin had managed to face him, he’d only looked puzzled. Then she’d dropped. Where was she going to run, anyway? Where? And Dale had knelt beside her, fishing the sloppy black thing from behind his back. It wasn’t a gun.

  “Seeds,” Dale repeated. “It’s for that scam I was telling you about.”

  His plan, he explained, had been to tell the troopers that they were environmentalists. “You know, Robb. Just a father and daughter who care about preserving the splendor of the wilderness.” As for the marijuana, he’d kept those seeds separate, in the coat pocket that was easiest to reach. He’d been ready to chuck them at the first sign of trouble.

  “Then with these pine seeds, see, the rest of our stuff would all fit. Even the rock phosphates would fit.”

  Their breathing hadn’t settled yet. Robin stumped upslope, bringing her face to his level.

  “We’d still be breaking the law,” he admitted.

  “We’d still be breaking the law?” she said. “Dale, just for starters, we’d be breaking the law! I mean, is that your idea of a cover story? Is that your idea of how to get us out? God, an old B movie wouldn’t have such a stupid story. I mean, you talk about people trading in their family for a Macintosh, here you are trading in your family for a B movie. A really dumb B movie!

  “Dale, man oh man. I mean, if anyone ever deserved to go to jail just for having an idea—Dad, listen to me. Listen like I was Mom, okay? Just listen while I do the talking. I mean, who do you think these troopers are? Do you think they’re idiots? People planting trees, I mean, they don’t even use seeds. People planting trees use seedlings. Seedlings, Dad, seed-lings. Even I know that. They come in with trees that have already started to grow!”

  There he was with his Sunday face. “Are you through?”

  “You must have been stoned when you thought up that one,” Robin said. “If the sheriff saw that old sack he’d laugh in your face.”

  She swatted the thing from his hand. The leather went rippling through the weeds, and for a moment it looked like a mouse, some ragged brown life in a scramble. But then it stopped and collapsed.

  “At least I had an idea,” Dale said after a minute. “I had a way we might get sprung.”

  “Oh yeah, a stroke of genius.” Oh no—w
as she starting to laugh? “A legend for wilderness people everywhere.”

  “Okay, okay, that was wrong. A father should never kid himself that he’s a legend.”

  She was starting to laugh, laughing already. It felt like someone kept plucking a bowstring in her gut. “Seeds,” she repeated. “Seeds.”

  “Well, there’s still the can.” He tried to get into the spirit, grinning, hopeful.

  Oh yeah, the can. The cash. She and her boyfriend would take whatever they could get. Maybe Robin would tell Dale about it, too; yeah, okay, maybe—though no way she could manage it now. Not with this bowstring going sproing in her belly. Not while she was hooting, chirping, struggling for a half-decent breath. She was out of it. She was airborne for God’s sake. And as for her father trying to work the pack-straps off her shoulders, his clumsy attempts to make her comfortable, that was the funniest thing yet. He was trying to help, and it was hysterical. Hey, was this a father or a feather? Sproing, sproing.

  Robin tried to swallow, tried to frown, she lifted her face to the cold and wet. But the rainbow was still there. Hey—shouldn’t the colors fade?

  Eastertime Fogs

  THE LAST TWO MIMOSAS have been pretty much straight shots. Nobody’s about to get up and mix more orange juice. Yet I have to sit upright, I have to keep an ear cocked for my kids, they’re out somewhere near the garage. With that, and with the omelettes and popovers sodden and gurgly under my belt, not to mention Magda here beside me, hinting repeatedly that we should go out to the garage ourselves, we should share some sensamilla with the men—with all that, it starts to feel as if my entire time in Oregon has been one long brunch. Seven months of it now, September into March. Like some local ritual where everyone stuffs bread and wine between a person and the work she’s got to get done.

  Even the Don, my husband, seems to have the hang of the ritual better than I. He’s the one who invited Magda and Sonny. And Magda’s with it too, though she’s the real out-of-towner. She brought strawberry preserves her parents sent from Cologne.