Traps (6 page)

Vivian cocks her head, thinking. “I’m not sure. I found the spider in the back bedroom there where we sleep. Besides that there’s just this room and the kitchen.”

“Let’s try the kitchen,” he says.

From the threshold he looks the little white-on-white space up and down a second. Then he sets his bag on the floor and muscles the refrigerator out into the center of the room, revealing a thick black cord, a
furring of dust at the baseboard, and a small cupboard door cut into the wall.

“Bingo.”

He fishes a pair of gloves and a carpenter’s white face mask out of his bag and puts them on. Then he switches on a flashlight, swings open the cupboard, and disappears into the dark of the hole. Vivian creeps down the hall and lays the two babies sleeping in their infant carriers, and by the time she steps back into the kitchen he is already backing out again.

He sits down heavily in her vinyl-covered kitchen chair and yanks down his face mask, his eyes wide with surprise. “Do you have any Scotch?”

He looks stricken.

Vivian opens the cupboard and takes out the big jug of Cutty Sark. She pours it into a juice glass, and the man drains it and sets the empty glass on the table with a thunk. “Now then,” he says. “Do you have any friends you can stay with?”

“Friends?”

“What I want you to do is take your babies and leave.”

“Leave?”

“Go to a motel for a few nights.”

Vivian blinks at him.

“Never in thirty years have I seen anything like what is in your crawl space. It’s”—he squeezes his eyes shut and then opens them wide and shakes his head—“it’s like Hell’s own nest in there. Spiders on top of spiders. I’ve never seen so many in one space in all my days.”

“Can’t you get rid of them?”

“ ’Course I can. It’ll be the job of a lifetime, but I can do it. What I’m saying is meantime this is no place for you and those babies. It’s like something out of the Old Testament. A B-movie nightmare. You get out of this place, do you hear?”

•   •   •

The babies are still sleeping in the white-noise-filled room as she packs. The space is lit with moonlight through the two dormers, and a little clip lamp shines on the condoms from the headboard of the bed. She closes the flaps of each of the liquor cartons and carries them softly one by one out into the hall, and then down the stairs and out into the street at night where his dog is still barking. A bark like the ticking of some slow clock.

Her car is an old brown Pinto with a stripped metal hood parked in front of the hydrant and a plank fence with a furring of weedy grass below. As she hefts the boxes into the hatchback the barking continues, so queer and regular, and she leaves the door open, like a wide mouth yawning, to step to the fence and peer between the slats.

A German shepherd dog. Black and brown with soft-looking ears. He looks up at the yellow windows of the attic apartment, his body recoiling like a gun as he releases each of his barks. The brown grass is long and matted and covered with his turds. In one corner is a whole bag of kibble torn open, and a pile of the brown food pebbles lies mounded in the dirt. He barks again. Vivian steps away and closes the back of her car and hurries back up the stairs.

In the kitchen she mixes two bottles of formula and slips the can of powder and the bottles into a dirty yellow backpack with black straps. She slips in the glittery little phone and the
People
magazine too. And her cigarettes in a zipper pouch with flowers. In the bedroom she unplugs the white noise, and in the sudden quiet, she wraps the cord around the machine and looks at her babies. The girl lies with her arm slung above her head like a dancer, and the boy keeps his arms flat at his sides like a doll. The dog barks, a sharp report now in the silent room, and both babies stiffen. Vivian checks her watch—11:15.

Outside she sets the carriers on the backseat. As she fiddles with their safety buckles they stir, but they do not wake, and when the boy begins to whimper, struggling against her, she smooths a wisp of his hair from his forehead. She tests the straps with two fingers and straightens the clip. She laces the car’s seat belts through the slits on each carrier and leans down on the back of each one with the heel of her left hand as she
buckles to make sure they will be tight. Then she stands back and takes a deep breath in the dark street. The dog is still barking, but there are stars above and the lighted windows around are just shapes. No one she knows anywhere nearby except these babies.

She gets in behind the wheel and takes a little pink Velcro wallet out of her backpack. She opens it up and takes out the bills to count them. Fourteen dollars. She turns the ignition key and watches the needle on the gas gauge rise to a quarter tank. Then she pulls away, driving out past two blocks of houses with their chain-link fences and garbage-filled yards, past the Popeye’s and the Kmart and the Poker Palace to an open frontage road that runs parallel to a highway bearing south. Once she has merged, she turns on the radio, not too loud, to something soft and heartfelt with just a strand of guitar and a lone girl singing.

T
he last is an older woman. Soft gray curls twining down into a lengthy braid. Eyes a popsicle blue. She stands alone in her barn coat by a window looking out over an empty plain of creosote bush and dry red-brown soil and one distant barn beneath a strip of bright blue sky in the barren scrublands of southern Nevada.

On the wooden workbench she is taking plastic tube vials of flea treatment from a case box. Her left hand is a bulb of flesh-colored plastic topped with a pair of steel loops. She grips with these and cuts the tops off the vials with a pair of scissors in a good right hand knuckled over with turquoise-and-silver rings, and then adds them to a long line, propped a little, tips up, against the wooden backsplash—fifteen of them maybe; more than twenty when she finishes. Then she slits the bottom of the box with a razor and flattens it down on the concrete floor with her high green rubber boots.

Coming through the low doorway out of the garage, she steps into a living room split down the middle with white plastic baby fencing. Inside the fence line the gold shag rug is covered in a thick clear plastic tarp and crawling with yellow puppies, plus a heavy-teated mother dog asleep in a whelping box in the corner next to an old white-painted coffee table
with bite-spindled legs. She passes on into a tiny dark front hall and then into a bright small kitchen, calling out, “Charlene?”

The kitchen is clean. A drying rack bears a single clean pan and a blue-and-white enamel mug turned upside down and white-and-yellow curtains framing another view of that barn on the plain.

She opens the kitchen door onto a half-acre rectangle of dry dirt yard fenced in with chain-link and filled with grown dogs of every type and measure. Wrestling and playing, tugging at shreds of toweling, digging holes, just sleeping in the sun, or running. And barking: sharp and quick, low and even, growls and bays and little yelps like the squeaks of a squeezed toy. A good half of them leave their occupations to crowd her, and she pats them, talking to them in a singsong voice, saying, “Aren’t you an angel?” and “That’s a good cutie,” and spurning the ones who jump up on her coat by crossing her arms and saying, “Not a bit of that, mister” in a flat lower voice like the one she’d used to call the girl.

This is Lynn.

She stumbles a bit among the dogs, her boots invisible in the tangle, until she slips out, blocking them with her knees, through a chain-link door leading into a big rutted turnaround, and she cups her silver-ringed hand to the side of her mouth. “Charlene!”

She visors her eyes and then looks around the circle, at her porched house and garage, and two shed buildings opposite, and in the distance a brown barn with a tin roof, and finally down the long drive. It is there at the far end of it, near where the gravel thins and meets the highway, that she sees it: a truck with a little exhaust coming out the back.

She sets off in her green boots, her hands stuffed in the pockets of her coat. Her long braid swings a bit across the back of it, and as she gets close she can see a young boy at the wheel and next to him a dark-haired young girl. They are talking intensely. The young girl looks into the boy’s eyes and nods. Even when this older woman, Lynn, gets right up next to the truck, so close she can hear the country music inside the rolled-up windows, the girl doesn’t see her.

Lynn taps on the boy’s window with her metal loops.

He wheels around, and the girl looks up. The boy’s mouth gapes a little, and he rolls the window down, cranking with his arm and revealing the heartfelt music—a girl’s voice and an earnest single strand of guitar.

“Sorry, Lynn,” the girl says.

“What for? For sitting in a truck a minute with a boy and a radio?”

The girl shifts her eyes at the boy.

The boy looks down in his lap.

Lynn cocks her head. “No, I didn’t bet so. Is there something else then?”

“Yes,” the girl says.

Lynn waits.

The girl slips her hand into the boy’s. Lynn sees a duffel bag now on the floor. And on the dashboard, a map.

The girl raises her chin and in a voice she might have practiced says, “Bobby and me have a dream we need to follow.”

“Oh?”

“We’re going to Los Angeles. To be actors in a restaurant near Disneyland.”

Lynn nods. She sees now that the map on the dash is not a map of Nevada but of California.

She watches the girl’s eyes cut past her toward the dogs in the distance. The girl lowers her chin. In a less certain voice she says, “I can wait, though. Until you find someone to help out with the dogs.”

Lynn shakes her head. “No call for that. You know how I do.”

“You’ll be okay, you mean?”

“Come here,” Lynn says. She beckons with her good right hand. “Come here out of that truck.”

The girl darts a look at the boy, who gives a little shrug and looks back down at his lap. She gets out of the car and walks to the older woman, crunching the gravel in her cowboy boots with a miniskirt above them, her hands stuffed deep in her puffy down coat.

Lynn gives her a hug, just a quick squeeze, and then lets her go. “I
can see you worried over telling me. I’m happy for you, couldn’t you have guessed I would be?”

Later in the chain-link yard, Lynn pets each dog first a good long while before kneeling beside it and hugging it around the neck with her arm with the loops for a hand. She has the open flea-treatment vials set standing up in the hollows of a partitioned liquor carton beside her, and she takes them out one at a time, spilling it into the fur between each dog’s shoulder blades. It takes a long time. When she is finished she takes a break, standing in the kitchen doorway watching them, clasping a plastic hummus tub in the metal loops and dipping a piece of bread into it with her hand while the sun sinks lower in the sky. Her eyes drift off toward the distant barn and its long shadow, and her face dulls, but then some of the dogs come up and sniff the air beneath her snack, and she smiles and shakes her head, chewing. One sets a paw gently on her boot. She laughs and wipes her lips with the back of her wrist. “You’re next.” Her voice is high and loose again. “You’re next I promise, sweet sillies, do I ever forget about you?”

And she doesn’t. Over the next hour, she rolls the cans out into the turnaround in the failing light—big cans, the size of cooking pots—and makes a line of twenty bowls, and as night begins to fall she takes a little flashlight from her coat pocket and holds it between her teeth.

It is fully dark when she slips into the cab of her truck. She is still wearing her work clothes, and when she starts the engine, the light from the dashboard reveals the sleeves of her coat to be streaked with something dark. She reaches across herself to pull the door shut with her good hand and heads down her long gravel drive and out through the empty land along the state highway toward the town lights in the distance. It is not a big town. She pulls into a full lot next to a gas station and a building beside it with a high sign above that says
COPLEY’S
. Inside next to a single cash register are a few rows of grocery items and then some diner booths beyond with a sizzling kitchen on the way other side. Lynn goes to the chip aisle and grabs two shallow pull-top cans of black bean dip.

The woman at the register has an updo of hair dyed the buff color of
bandaids, and she sits on a stool filing her nails. There is a bulletin board behind her fringed with notes and flyers and a few canceled checks, and on the counter next to the register sit a bowl of peppermint candies, a March of Dimes donation can, and a rack of
People
magazines, the one with mothers and children on the cover.

“Got something for your board, Ruth Ann,” Lynn says. She sets down the bean dip and takes an index card and pen from her tote.

Ruth Ann looks up from her nails to watch her write.

Ruth Ann says, “Lord—one of your girls ever last longer than three months?”