THE TRAP Page 6

  “She helped me out of a tight spot. No way in hell was I going to find anyone to change a tire for me on a Sunday afternoon. If she hadn’t come along when she did and stopped, Travis and I would have had a long walk home in the heat and been without a car until Monday. What would I have done in an emergency?”

  “Called the Rescue Squad,” Pat said. “But she was a trooper to help you out. Where’d you get the flat?”

  “I hit that rock at the first bend in the road. The tire just seemed to explode. I went out Monday and painted the rock orange to warn people to look out for it.”

  “Oh,” said Pat, and dropped the subject.

  Chapter 3

  FIREFIGHT

  Rough Cut #2

  The neon outside washes red over the narrow interior of the bar. It bleeds over the faces of the clientele, already high colored with drink, the exertion of dancing to the music blasting from the juke, the lack of oxygen, hustling each other for drinks and sex, the determination to have a good time if it kills them. The crowd, rowdy, suffocating, crammed into too little space, is neither young nor middle aged, but in that no-man's-land between. The men signal their military service with bits and pieces of old uniforms, or psychotically sentimental T-shirts that advocate killing everyone and letting God sort them out. The women have bad teeth and play country and western music when the men give them quarters for the juke.

  A very large man taps beer into glasses and flicks them down the bar with intimidating control. Even when he is not laughing, as he often is, he bares his fine, small, white teeth in a grin that despite its constancy is not reassuring. His is the face of a satyr, as sketched in white or red on the black ground of a Greek vase of great antiquity. Though set in a web of laugh lines, the blue eyes are small and melancholy. Tight curled coppery hair covers his large skull and beards his chin, but his upper lip, under a long and beautiful nose, is clean-shaven. His body though is not satyric; not half-man and half-horse, but rather entirely bull: from the thick column of neck widening into massive shoulders and deep broad chest, matted with red hair showing at the open neck of his white shirt, torso widening in turn into a bulge of belly that shoves out his shirt so he looks to be in the seventh month of a healthy pregnancy, and blooming, and despite the belly no bottom to speak of but heavy muscular thighs, a little short and thin in the calf, an elegant almost female turn of ankle, and small, wide, stubby feet, the next thing to cloven hooves, in leather sandals.

  The sound of the shotgun freezes them all like a spell in a fairy tale. The bartender's head comes up; his ears all but stand up to catch the noise: ka-boom. And under the explosion, the scream of the man being murdered, and then the thud of his body against metal, a hollow thumping and low pop of sheet metal such as might be heard from a hit and run, except this time it is the man hitting the automobile, not the other way round. And at once, the bartender goes over the top of the bar on his gorilla arms, an amazing, Olympian defiance of gravity, the customers diving left and right out of his way, beer mugs breaking, spilling, so the top of the bar is instantly slick and dangerous as a wall topped with broken glass, but he is already over it and across the room, knocking down the many who are not quick enough to get out of his way, and hitting the row of light switches next to the door, bringing down in an instant the limbo state of After Hours not only inside, but outside. The neon sign disappears amid the shrieks of the women and not a few of the men frightened by the sudden dousing of the light. Someone strangles the juke by unplugging it. And then there is a ripple of nervous laughter.

  "Shut the fuck up," the bartender says. Though his voice is low, it carries through the room, and they do.

  Neither total dark nor total silence, but a limbo state like an ambush waiting to happen in the jungle. The streetlights outside spill thin yellow light like moonlight into the room; the drizzle reflects it like sleazy sequins on a stripper's G-string. A keening sound grows louder, the police arriving, quickly obliterating the stertorous breathing of three dozen frightened, less-than-sober people. When the blue lights wash the room, like ghosts of the red neon, the bartender switches on the lights again. He stands by the door, staring out, as policemen spill out of cars, clot around the body, which has come to rest on this side of the Trans-Am, driven over the hood and upside down by the force of the load, flipped over the farside and curled up on itself, head down, like a baby being born, in a puddle of gore that the rain dilutes but does not wash away, and then the cops are flowing toward the bar, toward him. In the blue light, the bartender's face seems bloodless, as if he were one of the walking dead.

  When a cop asks him if he knew what had happened, he moves his head from side to side. The cop reads this as a negative signal, but it could also mean simply that the bartender is denying what he sees. When the policeman asks him if he knew the dead man, the barkeep's eyes fill up with tears. "Jackson," he says. "His name was Jackson. We were in the same unit. He survived hell for this. That's all I know about it."

  And then there is total dark and total silence, and out of him erupts an agonized scream, not unlike that of the man being murdered, and the bartender sits up in his bed, his face wet with sweat and tears.

  A hand grasps his arm gently. "Paul, my God."

  And then the other, a shadow in the dark, fumbles for a bedside light, and the bed is a field of light no fiercer than candlelight, and the other is revealed, a young man, slim and as hairless as Paul the bartender is hairy. His eyes are wide and naked-looking; he fumbles for a pair of glasses, and once they are on, he looks dressed, even though he and Paul between them have but the sheets. He is turning back to Paul even as he pushes his glasses up his nose, reaching to embrace him.

  "It's all right," he says.

  "No," Paul answers, staring into the dark. "No."

  The young man sighs, squeezes Paul, then releases him. He untangles himself from the sheets, and gets up.

  Paul reaches after him anxiously. "Where are you going?"

  The other giggles. "To piss. I'll be right back." And then bends over Paul. "You'll be all right, won't you?"

  Paul nods.

  The young man flicks on the bathroom light, closes the door behind him.

  Paul looks at the door, slips out from under the sheets. He opens the drawer of the nightstand. Inside is a gun. Paul hesitates, then removes it. He puts it in his mouth. He closes his eyes. A tear leaks out and slides down his cheek. Beyond the closed door the toilet flushes. He pulls the trigger.

  When the right front tire blew, with a wumping sound like the distant explosion of a bottle rocket, the Pacer slewed sickeningly. Liv fought the steering wheel. She knew what it was, of course—an encounter with a nasty outcropping of rock as she swerved too far to the right to avoid Linda Breen. There was no place to pull off the single lane cottage road as it passed between a narrow corridor of trees, so she limped onward to the turnoff around the second bend. Patched with blueberries and poison ivy, it was a far from ideal place to stop, and what the blowout had left of the tire was destroyed by running the car on the rim, but there was nowhere else to go. Linda kept right on going in her Ramcharger.

  “Fuck,” said Liv.

  Travis hung over the back of the front passenger seat, a G.I. Joe in each fat fist. “What’s wrong, Liv?”

  “We just blew a tire,” she said. “Stay in the car while I look and see what the damage is, okay? There’s poison ivy here.”

  “Okay,” he said. He had experience with poison ivy. He went back to his G.I. Joes. “Be careful, Liv,” he said.

  “Sure,” she said.

  Sometimes he was such an old lady.

  The air was so thick and still with the heat that she could not smell the cool water of the lake, less than a quarter of a mile away. It was like being inside a plastic bag. The only things moving were the bugs. Immediately they were all around her, a fierce, localized little storm with her at its eye. She flicked her hands at them impatiently, wishing she had remembered the bug repellant. Usually the little bastards
left her alone. Perhaps it was nervous sweat drawing them, or the scent of old blood in her mouth. She hauled out the jack and the spare and the beach blanket that was in the back of the Pacer. Folded into a pad, the blanket was something to crouch and kneel on, as well as insulation from accidental contact with the poisoned ivy while she struggled to remove the nuts from the ruined tire.

  Half an hour later she was bug-bitten, soaked with sweat, and had succeeded in removing only three nuts and several samples of her own skin, blood, and nails. On top of her toothache, from the tooth extracted day before yesterday, she had a throbbing headache from the sun.

  Travis hung out an open window of the Pacer. “I want to go home, Liv,” he said, for the fourth time in seven minutes.

  “Shit,” said Liv. She threw down her wrench. “So do I.” She wiped one hand across her brow. “Let’s leave this and walk it, okay?”

  “Is it a long way?” Travis asked.

  “Less than a mile. You can do it.”

  He opened the door and climbed out. “Will you carry some men?”

  “Sure.”

  They stuffed the pockets of their shorts with G.I. Joes. Liv put her tools inside the car, heaved the spare into the back end, unrolled the windows an inch or so, locked the doors and the hatchback, and pocketed the keys. They left the newspaper they had been out to pick up on the backseat.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Travis walked very slowly. She tried to keep him in the shade of the trees on the sides of the road, but the annual brush clearing party had left long stretches open to the sun. The bugs had a feast. Travis slapped at them and scratched at the bites and worried out loud about poison ivy.

  “I wish we were home, Liv,” he said. “These bugs are killing me.”

  “Walk a little faster, Trav,” Liv said. “Maybe they won’t catch you so often.”

  “They’re faster than anybody,” Travis said. “Faster than a speeding bullet.”

  “Well, pretend you’re in a war and you’re wounded,” Liv suggested.

  He was too. Ragged spots of drying blood and red swellings marked his neck, his hairline, his ears, his arms and legs, everywhere his fair skin was exposed. She had more bites than she could remember having at one time since she was a kid. But worse, her head was threatening to explode from the sun.

  “I wish I was home,” Travis said miserably.

  “So do I,” said Liv. She slapped viciously at her own neck. “And I wish all these shitting bugs were in hell.”

  Behind them, the sound of an automobile grew louder. Liv took Travis’ hand and drew him well off the side of the road. Two cars had passed them already: a white Lincoln Continental, gray with road dust, driven by Claire Winslow, who waved and simpered from behind her sequined sunglasses. Claire’s dogs hung their triangular little heads out an open back window in the slipstream, pointed little tongues flicking. They yapped and yipped hysterically, their bright stupid little eyes permanently frantic. After coughing and choking on Claire’s exhaust, Liv and Travis turned their faces away from the road when they heard the approach of a vehicle. Then Barrie Spellman’s bottle-green BMW passed. Barrie kept her eyes firmly on the road ahead.

  A little later there was another coming their way, and they ducked off the road again, hugging each other, holding their breath. Liv was surprised to hear the car slowing. She turned her face back to the road and tried to smile.

  Miss Alden rolled down the window of her old Plymouth Fury. She was wearing a straw Panama tied under the chin with tulle or some other fine netting. One hand on the steering wheel, she drove with her browned, muscled forearm out the open window, touching the roof of the sedan with strong, blunt fingers. Her nails were rippled and thick; if they had been pointed they might have made real talons, but they were broken and ragged-edged by work. She was known to chop her own wood and do her own maintenance. She brought the car to a stop.

  “Mrs. Russell,” she said, “isn’t that your vehicle back there, with the flat?”

  “ ‘Fraid so,” Liv said. “How are you, Miss Alden?”

  “Quite the same as ever,” she answered. She paused. “I called at your house earlier this year. You weren’t in. I wanted to thank you for the card and the potted plant you sent Betty. The pot was lovely. Your own work, I think?”

  Liv smiled, and squeezed Travis’ hand. He looked up at her, worry huge in his eyes, and drew a little closer. He had heard from Sarah that Miss Alden was an old dragon.

  “I hope she’s better,” Liv said.

  “She won’t ever be,” Miss Alden said, “but thank you all the same. Now why don’t you get into this car and out of the sun and away from the bugs. I’ll take you straight home, if you like, or we can go back and I’ll help you change that tire. Got a spare?”

  Liv didn’t hesitate. “God bless you. I do.” She opened the front door. “Hop in, Travis,” she said.

  He hesitated. Liv patted his bottom. “Come on, you want to be eaten alive?”

  He got in, keeping a nervous eye on Miss Alden, and sitting as far from her and as close to Liv as he could manage. The first sight of Miss Alden’s gold-headed cane, on the seat next to her, seemed to reassure him, as borders are meant to do. It was not impassable, not an unencroachable, inviolable Wall, but a signal, a flag planted to claim territory for oneself: This Is Mine; That’s Yours.

  “You’ve met Travis, haven’t you?” Liv asked her.

  Miss Alden nodded vigorously, and they started off down the road.

  “Quite a long time ago, I’m afraid,” Miss Alden said.

  “Do you remember Miss Alden, Trav?”

  Travis looked at Miss Alden wide-eyed and nodded his head. “What happened to Miss Betty?” he asked.

  Miss Alden looked at him, a surprised smile curving her thin lips. She didn’t answer him at once but turned left into the Spellmans’ driveway, looked back over her shoulder and backed out on the road, reversing directions to return to the Pacer.

  “You remember Miss Betty, do you?” she said at last.

  Travis seemed to relax. He took out one of his G.I. Joes and examined it carefully. “Sure,” he said. “She gave me those cookies, what do you call ‘em, Liv? The ones with tops and bottoms and insides?”

  “Oreos,” Liv said. She was surprised Travis remembered Betty Royal offering him cookies. That day seemed such a long time ago now, though it could only have been the beginning of last summer. Travis, not quite three, had been teething, and had made an outrageous mess of himself. Liv had had to dunk him in the lake to clean drool, chocolate cookie crumbs, the gooey cookie filling, and a sprinkling of sand from his face, out of his fine colorless hair, and even out of his ear.

  It was one of the few occasions on which Liv had met Betty Royal, Miss Alden’s companion of many years. She remembered it herself not so much for the mess Travis made, he was always a mess then, but because Miss Royal had, after conversing pleasantly and quite rationally about minor things, the way one does with a new neighbor one barely knows, advised Liv calmly to look out for the wires growing out of the walls. Her condition deteriorated over the summer and she was hospitalized in late August. Miss Alden did not attend the Winslows’ annual Labor Day party. Later, Liv heard that Miss Royal might have Alzheimer’s disease, and that Miss Alden had been forced to institutionalize her. Liv had sent a postcard with a picture of Nodd’s Ridge on it and a plant in a pot she had made herself and received a handwritten thank-you from Miss Alden.

  “Betty cannot write for herself. I’m afraid she does not remember who you are. But she looks at the picture and touches both the ivy and the pot you sent it in and they make her happy. For that, I thank you very much.”

  Miss Alden pulled off the road next to the Pacer. Her hand fell automatically upon her cane.

  “Husband still away?” she asked Liv as they got out.

  “Yes,” Liv said.

  “They do come in handy for changing tires, don’t they?” Miss Alden observed.

 
“Some do,” Liv answered.

  Liv unlocked the hatchback. Miss Alden surveyed the tools and the spare Liv had thrown into the back of the Pacer, poking them with the cane.

  “Got started, did you?”

  “Couldn’t get all the nuts off,” Liv said.

  “And the shitting bugs wouldn’t leave us alone,” Travis said.

  “Travis!” Liv exclaimed.

  Miss Alden threw back her head and laughed.

  “You said it, Liv,” Travis said.

  “Well, I did,” Liv admitted. “They are shitting bugs.” She smiled and blushed at the same time.

  “Let’s get to it, then,” Miss Alden said. “Maybe there’ll be something left of us besides hamburger when we’re done.”

  Travis squatted in the shade of Miss Alden’s car to watch. She handed him her cane. He grinned, handling it as if he thought it might break. She seemed not to need it, striding easily around the car.

  The two women looked around for a patch free of poison ivy and heaved the spare out onto it. They jacked the car again, and Miss Alden squatted, shoulder to wheel, to remove the nuts with the wrench.

  Liv was not surprised at the older woman’s strength. Miss Alden had a military posture, was browned from working in the sun, and brooked chivalry from no man. Working with her hands herself, Liv noticed other peoples’ hands. Miss Alden’s looked strong, and were. She had no trouble with the nuts at all, only grunting with satisfaction when she had one off, as if she were a dentist pulling a tooth. When she was done, she made quick work of removing the flat. Liv rolled the spare up and was allowed to help put it on. Miss Alden squatted down a second time to replace the nuts.

  Miss Alden threw down the wrench and settled onto her haunches like an old Indian.

  “There,” she said.

  Liv thanked her. “I couldn’t have done this myself.”

  “Bosh,” Miss Alden said. “You had those nuts all loosened up for me.”

  Miss Alden rose, one hand on her hip, as if her joints were a little sore, and helped Liv lower the jack and replace the tools in their kit.