THE TRAP Read online

  Against the background of the jungle, uncorrodible green against the rusting mechanisms, a man in a camouflage uniform marked with the same insignia as the wrecked dozer and chopper stands like a totem in the clearing. Pocked and seamed, his face is that of a Mongol warrior. Under his visored cap his coarse, straight black hair whips cruelly into narrow, slanted eyes that show no white or anything except their own black fire. He stares at the body of a woman, tied to the rotor blades of the Huey, a razor-edged Catherine wheel. The mottling on the blades may be rust—or blood. The woman's body is pallid blue. Her face is a Noh mask, pouting open lips black against her bloodless skin. She is an Oriental, almond-eyes blank. Dust motes have settled on the silvery black irises like tiny grains of snow. Her black hair is plastered to her finely shaped skull. The delicate bones of her face are disappearing as her tissues swell and tighten the mask of her skin. A fly lands on her cheek and crawls across it. For a long time. Someone has scrawled a symbol on her naked belly, in her blood. It is the same symbol the man wears on the shoulder of his uniform, the jaws of a ravening beast.

  Then she is gone. The jungle becomes a rainy city street at night. Streetlights reflect over the wet surface of the pavement like the glaze of dead eyes. The red fangs of the XIIITH CAV insignia, just seen on the dead woman's belly, bubble in lurid neon over a honky-tonk bar across the street. The barbaric-looking man cradles a shotgun. He watches the bar, people going in and out. Mostly men, a few women. The women are cheap and whorish-looking and drunk. The men wear bits and pieces of military uniforms with their civilian clothes, as if unable to give up their military identities. They are young, tough-looking, drunk or stoned or both.

  A camouflage painted Trans-Am, jacked, with a glass-packed muffler, screeches around the corner and brakes violently in front of the bar. Its front grill and bumper have been transformed into a mouthful of canine teeth.

  A lanky blond man, with the small but prominently boned features of Appalachia, unfolds himself from the car. He is drunk, staggers, stops to piss on the front wheel. Kids in a passing car jeer at him; he tosses off a clumsy bird at them.

  Then, for a moment, the street is almost silent, even the drunken hilarity in the bar seems muffled. The two men have the street to themselves.

  "Jackson," the man with the shotgun says clearly, flatly.

  The lanky man looks up, too drunk to be startled. "Huh?" He squints into the night but can make out only shadows in the glare of the street lamp and the neon.

  There is no answer. Jackson shakes himself off, zips up.

  "Jackson," the man with the shotgun says.

  Now Jackson sees him, and terror flashes across his face. He tries to disguise it.

  "Hey, old buddy," he says, his accent now clearly border-southern. "Long time, no see."

  "This is for May," the man with the shotgun says and raises it.

  "I didn't have nothing to do with it," Jackson cries. He begins to back away, holding up his palms in self-defense.

  The man with the shotgun is silent.

  Jackson laughs a high nervous laugh. "You got me all wrong, buddy. I tried to stop it," he says.

  The man with the shotgun sighs. "You never could bluff for shit," he says, and pulls the trigger.

  The lanky man screams and is blown against the side of the Trans-Am and up over its hood by the force of the gunshot.

  The Play button popped up. Pat Russell reached over and depressed Rewind.

  He got up and opened the curtains that covered the window wall, admitting the mellow light of late afternoon reflected from the lake. The back of his neck was stiff with tension.

  Liv felt an impulse to get up and hug him. Travis was half in and half out of her lap.

  Pat continued to stare out at the water, but he wasn’t seeing it. He patted his breast pocket idly, reassuring himself his cigarettes were still there. Then he went through the nervous ceremony of scraping the pack out of his pocket, shaking out a butt, inserting it between his lips, locating his lighter, lighting the cigarette, inhaling it. All to put off the moment when he would have to face them and gauge their reactions.

  If she dumped Travis out of her lap and jumped up now, she would be putting herself between him and his cigarette. So she just waited.

  “Well,” he said, “what do you think?”

  The setting sun caught a few silver strands in Pat’s hair and shone in Travis’ fine spun mop. Liv, in dark shorts and a halter that were too big for her now, sat on the big comfortable sofa she had covered herself in a high-spirited pattern during their first summer on the lake. Travis had been sitting in her lap through the several minutes of the rough cut from Pat’s movie. Now he lounged against her thigh, playing with several of his G.I. Joes, the miniature soldiers that had become his favorite toys in the past year. Sarah, her round face flushed with excitement, sat cross-legged on the floor near her mother’s bare feet.

  “It’s great,” Sarah said. “It’s fantastic. Isn’t it, mom?”

  Liv smiled. “It looks good. It looks like a real movie.”

  “What did you think, Trav?” Pat asked the boy.

  “Is that guy a Bad Guy?” he asked.

  “The one that got blown away? You bet,” said Pat.

  “No, the Kung Fu guy,” Travis said. “Was he a Bad Guy?”

  “Ah,” Pat said. He stared at his cigarette with distaste and then abruptly ground it out. “As usual, Travis has gone to the heart of the movie.”

  “I think he wants to know which side he was on—was he Cong or American?” Liv said.

  “Oh.” Pat shrugged. “U.S., of course. Didn’t you see the patch he was wearing on his shoulder, Trav?”

  “Yeah,” said Travis. “But he looked like a Cong.”

  Pat chewed his lower lip. “Do you think maybe Travis has identified a serious problem with this picture?” he asked Liv.

  “No,” she said. “He only knows Kinsella from that Kung Fu flick you took him to see. He was a Good Guy then, but he was also a Chinese warrior or something, wasn’t he? I don’t think all those millions of Kinsella fans out there will have any trouble recognizing he’s One of Ours.”

  Pat chewed his lower lip. “He does look awfully Oriental. Actually he’s just another Mick. Like me.”

  “Well, the girl’s a Cong, isn’t she?” Travis asked.

  “Not exactly. She’s a friendly,” Pat said.

  “Who killed her then?”

  “That guy Jackson that Kinsella blew away, and some other guys. Some other Americans,” Pat said.

  “Why?” Travis persisted.

  “Because they’re Bad Guys.”

  “But they’re Americans, you said they were on Our Side!”

  Liv reached out and pulled Travis, still clutching his brace of G.I. Joes, into her arms. The hard plastic of little hands and boots and heads pinched her breasts.

  “Sometimes guys on Our Side are bad, too,” she said. “Sometimes they do bad things.”

  Pat paced. “Was this a mistake,” he said to Liv, “letting Travis see this clip?”

  She shrugged. The question had occurred to her previously, if it hadn’t to him. It had seemed important that he know what his daddy’s work was, what Pat had been doing during the long absences. “He has to find out sometime the world is not black and white.” But she didn’t really know if now was the right time. It was a distinctly doubtful proposition.

  Travis pushed out of her arms. “I’m not a baby.”

  “That’s why you sat in your mother’s lap the whole time?” Pat said, taking the cassette clip out of the VCR.

  Liv winced and started to rise. The degree of hostility, real jealousy, in his tone of voice shocked her. “Pat,” she said.

  Pat jumped at her touch. He stared at her, suddenly conscious of how tight the skin over her high cheekbones had become. The skin looked fragile, as if it might split if he dared to touch her.

  Travis elected his only defense—direct denial of the truth. “I did not,” Travis said. “
I did not.”

  “Did,” Pat sang. “Did. Beeg Guy.”

  “Jesus,” Liv muttered. She shook her head wearily and passed a hand through her hair.

  “Did not!” Travis screamed.

  Pat stood stock still, his face open with surprise as he realized what he had provoked, then quickly closed with guilt.

  “Don’t scream at me,” Pat said in a low voice. “Don’t you scream at me, mister.”

  “I hate you,” Travis screamed. “I hate your stupid movie! Go away! Leave me alone!”

  Travis’ lips were blue, his skin livid. His fists were clenched like little maces, parts of the G.I. Joes extruding between his fingers.

  “That’s enough,” said Liv, and picked Travis up. “No more,” she said softly to him, and carried him out of the room.

  Pat sank into a chair and looked helplessly at Sarah.

  “What did I do?” he said. “What did I say?”

  Sarah, her face pale, shook her head.

  “You still love me, don’t you?” he asked, and held out his arms.

  She came to him at once and hugged him, then bounced out of his embrace, blushing. He felt immediately worse, recognizing the incest taboo had at long last fallen between them. It might be years before they would be able to embrace each other comfortably again. Along with everything else, he appeared to have lost his daughter this summer.

  “Sure, daddy,” she said. “The movie’s going to be super. Don’t worry about it.”

  Then she was gone, no doubt to the safe haven of her bedroom, papered with Springsteen posters.

  “Jet lag,” he said out loud. But he was too nerved up to sleep. He decided to take a walk.

  The lake was suddenly quiet, all the water skiers and boaters gone home to slop up martinis and scoff barbecued steaks. The smell of charring meat in the air made him hungry, and a little sick to his stomach. He wandered toward the woods, thinking if he had to toss his cookies, he might as well be discreet about it.

  He found himself on the meandering track that he thought of as the Path of Least Resistance, like something out of Pilgrim’s Progress—not planned, just a convenient way people had taken over from the wild things. He didn’t like the woods very much. They were wall-less, unpaved, and full of untamed unpredictable creatures.

  Dark had already gained ascendancy in the woods. The thick-trunked, middle-aged trees towering over him made him feel like a little kid again in a world of giants. The thick fronds of the evergreens not only spread their fans between him and the light of the setting sun, they actually seemed to absorb it, from green tip to palmlike black midrib. Tree roots extruding through the soil felt as hard and sharp-edged as stones through the thin soles of his shoes. And as suddenly, as it always did, Liv’s studio emerged from the shadows.

  It was the biggest reason they had chosen this particular summer house. During the late sixties, when flower children had bloomed even in such obscure corners of the world as Nodd’s Ridge, the teenage son of the previous owner had built it as a place to paint, and as a refuge from his indulgent but hopelessly obtuse parents. So the old caretaker, Walter McKenzie, had told them. The kid had had some fey talent, for he had built, from scrap lumber and old windows retrieved from the town dump, a one-room gingerbread cottage replete with the peculiar feature of a glass roof. The cheap colors of the original paint had faded, so it seemed as if the little house had stood there a very long time, longer than the house at the other end of the path. It really only needed an old witch to make it complete.

  It was unlocked, as usual. Pat let himself in, thinking about the kid who had built the place. The flower child. By now he would be about their age, early thirties, and perhaps struggling with his own teenage children, if he had any.

  Like a stage set, the gingerbread house was all outside. The interior was unfinished, uninsulated, un-Sheetrocked bare bones of framing exposed like the inside of a barn. The time-grayed boards of the wall were decorated with plastic-sleeved family photographs, pictures Liv had cut from magazines or picked up in junkstore rummages, and odd objects she fancied for their shape or texture or color—feathers, leaves, swags of pine cones and pine needles, birds’ nests. And among them, fine-meshed metal sieves, brushes, trivets, tools, ready to hand. Rocks and pebbles and bits of polished glass lined the windowsills. The unpainted wood floor, much worn now, was dusty and stained with the ghosts of old paint, with Liv’s clays and glazes. All of the meagre furnishings—shelving for supplies; an old, much-painted and chipped kitchen table; a high, three-legged stool; the cupboards—were of wood and, like the battered slate sink and its slate counter that Liv used as a wedging bench to prepare her clay, had been salvaged from junkstores like Linscott’s in Greenspark, or the town dump. Except the wood-firing kiln, which she had built herself. It renewed her, she said, to go back to basic techniques every summer. The place had a decidedly seedy air, but it was full of chemical and earthy smells he associated with Liv at her happiest.

  He walked around the room, poking into open boxes, opening the cupboards where Liv stored carefully labeled glass jars of prepared glazes, dragging other boxes out of the corners into which they had been shoved. From the shelf set aside for Travis, Pat took down the Tupperware container and smelled the sweaty lump of multicolored clay Travis had probably played with all summer. A flat plastic box held little clay figures he had constructed—neat little army men in battle poses. They all had distinct faces, eyes and noses and ears and mouths and beards, shaped out of tiny balls of clay Travis had added on and incised with one of his own small plastic tools. Not bad at all for a little kid. Those fat little fingers were surprisingly nimble.

  In his childhood, Pat’s mother had hidden the few Christmas gifts she could afford—mostly sweaters and socks and mittens that she made herself and that he needed anyway, but always a few toys, secondhand things she picked up at yard sales and in junkstores—in the back of her closet. She painted and repaired her finds late at night, like the cobbler’s elfin helpers, a profligate investment of time and energy that Ellen Russell, who supported herself and Pat as a practical nurse, could afford as little as she could afford new toys. He was about seven when he discovered her hiding place, and one afternoon when school had been dismissed early because of snow, and he was home alone, he wriggled to the back of the closet and peeked into each and every carefully wrapped present. He never knew whether she noticed the packages had been disturbed, but she never said anything. She was a wise woman; perhaps she knew that after the wild excitement of his peeking, there was a letdown he would never forget. There were no surprises that Christmas, and that was more than punishment enough. And he had never peeked again. Like that naked Christmas, there was shockingly little to be discovered in Liv’s workshop where in previous years there would have been dozens of pleasing little surprises. The disappointment and guilt that he felt were the same as he had known then, creeping away from his mother’s closet with burning cheeks, sick stomach, and tight throat and on Christmas morning, opening the presents he had opened before. Like a sin of omission, what counted was what wasn’t there. Not even a barrel of failures, for Liv was catlike in her neatness. What didn’t work was smashed to bits and either buried or reused.

  He even looked inside the dehumidifier, an electrified tin breadbox, that Liv used as a drying cupboard. Of course, it was empty. This late, she wouldn’t have anything half-finished sitting around. And then, idly, reflexively, he looked in one last cupboard. His heart actually raced for a moment with relief and joy. Three or four pieces huddled in the shadows as if they were waiting for him. A small amber-glazed bowl incised with a swirling pattern clearly related to her current style. A pitcher with a sleek iron glaze like woman’s skin. He took it out and felt of the curving female lines, and smiled. Behind it, almost invisible in the shadows, was a tall vase, twice its size, shaped like a shield. The glaze had been dripped irregularly over the surface to repeat, wavering, the shape of the piece. In some areas, the glaze was so thin it was almost
matte, and in others it had been built up to the gloss of the pitcher with its silky iron finish. The uneven color, shiny black and dull black, was sooty and glinted red and purple as he turned it. It was something entirely new. And last of all, tucked in the very back, a football shape the size of a human head, with a gaping mouth in the top seam. The outside was bisque-colored and unglazed, the inside a thickly, unevenly glazed purple red. He pushed it back quickly. There was something unsettlingly organic about it.

  Surely it was a good sign that she had done these difficult things, and to his eye, not hers or even sister Jane’s, to be sure, but humbly educated by propinquity if nothing else, she had done it very well. Only the bowl and the pitcher seemed remotely commercial, but that didn’t matter nearly as much as that she was working again, and apparently very creatively.

  He sat down on her stool and handled the clean, almost surgical instruments she had left in their tray. He spun her throwing wheel idly. This place had always had such an extraordinarily empty quality—perhaps because no one had ever really lived in it. And when Liv was not in it, the emptiness was underlined by all the evidence of her sometimes presence. But he was comforted when he sat where she sat and when he touched what she touched, especially that, because her sense of touch was so extraordinary. He supposed in a literal sense she was very thin-skinned, and if it made her frequently hard to live with, it also made her a top-notch potter.

  The room had grown very dark, almost darker than the world outside. If he didn’t leave soon, he would have to turn on the lights. So he closed everything he had opened and went out.

  He sat down on the cottage stoop to have a cigarette. It was true, he decided, she had enough sensitivity for them both. He didn’t know how she endured the constant assault of life on her fine-tuned sensibilities. She didn’t smoke, do dope, and drank so rarely she might as well not drink at all. Maybe with her system so virginal and clean the aspirin she’d been taking all summer was like real dope. Maybe it hit really hard for her. He hoped so.