The Empty Trap (20 page)

“For a time I did not think to return here. But then it became necessary to me. It is satisfying to me to work with my hands. It is satisfying to me to sit here in this manner and drink from this bottle and talk with friends.”

When he walked back through the night to his home, Isabella was waiting for him. She unrolled the pallets and fixed the bedding. He lay beside her in the darkness, not touching her. He told himself that he had retreated from life, that life had defeated him.

Yet he knew he had been drawn back here. Perhaps these mountains had marked his soul as deeply as they had marked his face. Armando had talked of the comforts and excitements. Spurious excitements of television and cinema. Dubious comforts of spoiled women.

For a long time he had kept something locked deeply inside him. He lay beside Isabella and he felt something inside him struggling to be free. It broke free, and there was a warmth in him, a warmth that filtered up and became tears to sting his eyes and thicken his throat.

He turned abruptly to her and gathered her roughly into his arms, and he could not control the hoarse sounds he
made, the frightening sounds of the sobbing of a grown man.

She held him and soothed him and after a time he became aware of what she was saying to him, and when he heard her words he knew the depth of her understanding, and sensed how rewarding their life would be.

“It is all over now,” she kept saying. “You have come home. It is all over now.”

Of all the far places of the world, this was home.

John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel
The Executioners
, which was adapted into the film
Cape Fear
. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.