Traps (16 page)

Behind her the puppies lap and their nails click on the plastic. When she is finished looking, Vivian is careful to open Lynn’s dog rescue window again, but also not to look at it, and to cover the computer the way she left it to keep off dust, and then she goes to the dark doorway and peers around the corner to see her babies, awake again now from the noise of dogs eating but quiet in their carriers, each of them playing with the plastic measuring spoons on their bellies where she knew to leave them.

Vivian picks their carriers up, lifts them past the mama dog and over the baby fencing. She takes them out into the sunlight and sets them on the porch and sits down on the steps beside them. They squint in the bright, and Vivian looks from the eating dogs to her quiet babies and says, “This is a pretty good place I found for us, isn’t it?”

Sebastian’s eyes widen at her, and he chomps down on the white
plastic tablespoon, drooling. Emmaline raises her fistful of spoons and rattles it, kicking her legs.

Vivian laughs. “I think so too. I think that exactly. Just look at it.” She sweeps a hand out over what she surveys—over the barn in the distance and the bustling dog yard and the garage full of food, and also meaning even the empty land beyond it all, all of Lynn’s wide-open neighborless space, and Vivian takes it in, her gaze tripping over the state highway finally, where she sees a red car approaching and turning in down Lynn’s drive.

She stands.

She snatches up both carriers and hurries into the house, into the dim of the living room past the mama dog and into the dark corner of the old bedroom and stashes her babies there on the floor. She hustles to the hall closet and reaches into the back row of the liquor carton and slips Lynn’s gun into the pocket of the barn coat.

Then she steps back out onto the porch.

The red car is having trouble. It is a low-riding TransAm, made before Vivian was even born, the black wheel hubs exposed and the paint stripped down to its lusterless base coat, and its underbelly drags against the high spots in the drive, scraping rocks here and there. As it gets close Vivian can hear muffled cursing through the open driver’s window, but when he gets out in his shiny track suit, he hitches the waist of his pants and grins.

Vivian crosses her arms.

He says, “What? You think I gave you that little pink phone only so I can call you up and tell you how pretty you are or see if you need more diapers?”

He’s still smiling. He takes a few steps closer. “It good for that, sure, but I also want to make sure I don’t lose track of the best thing ever happen to me. Didn’t I say I would protect you?”

“Marco—” she says.

Behind her, from their place deep inside the house, she can hear the babies begin to cry.

She puts a hand out to stay his progress.

“Whoa now, girl, think a minute.” He takes another couple steps toward the porch and stretches out both arms, palms turned up, but not smiling anymore. He is close enough now that Vivian can see the burn scars hiding inside his upturned collar. He says, “When you gone last night when I get back with my associates, standing like a fool listening to them say, ‘Where she go, man? Where’s this Pebbles? Where’s this candy you been telling us about?’ First I think, I’m going to have to teach her a lesson, and then I think, Wait a minute, no way could she have left on her own. Someone came”—he looks around him—“dogfighter or chicken rancher maybe, you tell me, but some cock knocker come and he try to take her away from me. Someone
make
her go. Now—you just tell Marco that’s the way it went down, baby, and I won’t hold it against you.”

He steps onto the first porch step, and Vivian reaches into her pocket and pulls out Lynn’s gun. She holds it out, trembling, and puts her other hand up to steady it.

Marco raises his eyebrows. “What’s this?”

When she does not answer, or even move, he laughs. He doubles over, making a show of it, and Vivian watches, her jaw set and her arms shaking wildly.

Finally he rights himself and says, “Why don’t you just toss that shit down to me before you hurt yourself. From up there with those jello arms you just as like to hit a dog as any part of me.”

Vivian says, “I’m nervous, you got that right, but I’ve been practicing all morning. You look at that post over there with all the bullet holes in it and see if I haven’t.”

He glances over his shoulder and then back at her. The cries from inside the house are getting louder, and her arms are still shaking wildly.

“Come on, baby. If you such a good shot you must be shaking ’cause you don’t want to shoot me. Put that down and let’s go take care of those babies together. I’m thinking maybe we buy them a bed. Some toys to play with, maybe.”

Her arms won’t quit. They shake so much the gun appears to be
vibrating. She begins to cry. Just water from her eyes, though. Her jaw is steady, her face blank, and her body does not respond to the swells of panic in her babies’ cries. Her eyes do not even flick to the driveway at the sound of gravel crunching under the tires in the distance. Marco registers this, and because he understands that she will not, he turns to look.

Coming down the driveway is a yellow pickup truck. It stops in the center of the turnaround, and out hops Lynn holding her cell phone ahead of her in her good hand with the knuckling of rings. She is looking not at Marco’s astonished face but at the phone screen as she presses a button.

“That’s one for the yearbook,” she says. Then she slips it in her pocket and pulls out a pistol and aims it right at his face.

“So. Romeo. Looks to me like my new friend Vivian wants you to leave.”

Marco raises his hands for the first time and turns to the side between their two guns. “All right, ladies. I don’t want no trouble.”

Lynn says, “That’s what I thought. Let me tell you about some, though. Whatever she may have told you, that girl is fifteen years old and when she showed up this morning she had a garbage bag full of dirty laundry. I saved out every pair of panties in it just like Monica Lewinsky’s mommy, and I just drove them to my safe-deposit box in Boulder City. Whatever you got going, I’m sure it won’t help to be wanted for statutory rape, so even though you know her new address, you are never coming back.”

He moves to step down the stairs as if she is ready to let him leave, but she cocks the gun with her thumb.

He stops.

“And I’ll tell you what else,” she says. “I called some of my girlfriends in Vegas and told them the whole story and then put my spare safe-deposit key in a little padded mailer and sent it to them for safekeeping. Anything happens to either one of us and you are in for a world of shit because I’m Facebooking your mug shot just as soon as you back your junk out onto the highway.”

“No need, no need for any of that, Cagney, I ain’t coming back,” he
says, his hands calming the air, and Lynn tracks him with the barrel of her gun as he gets into his car and starts his engine, and then he looks out the window at her and grins. “That mall parking lot like a stocked pond. I won’t come back for this fish.”

She lets him go.

On the porch Vivian lowers her gun, watching him back away, but she sees that out in the center circle of her property, Lynn does not. Not until he’s out on the highway and gone. Then she uncocks her pistol and climbs into her truck to put it back in the lockbox in her glove compartment.

When Lynn backs out of the cab of her truck, she sees that Vivian is gone from the porch and that the sound of crying has stopped. Instead she hears singing. Dipping and rising, a seesaw melody she remembers. She goes inside and finds Vivian standing in the dim of the mama dog’s room holding a baby in each arm, the clear plastic dimpled under her weight, the puppies behind her as she pivots back and forth, back and forth, singing “Bicycle Built for Two” in a voice that is still shaky.

“Are they hungry?” Lynn says.

Vivian nods, still singing and swaying.

“I’ll fix bottles for them,” Lynn says.

She can still hear the girl’s voice in the next room as she turns on the heat under the empty saucepan on the stove and fills it from the cold kettle. “Daisy, Daisy …” She washes her hands at the sink, flipping the sliver of yellow soap over and over in her right palm and then cleaning the loops of metal too. The formula container is where she left it earlier that morning, between the blender and her puzzle books. The baby bottles and nipples lie on a fresh towel on the counter where the girl must have laid them after she cleaned them. Lynn measures the scoops of yellow-white powder into the bottles and adds water to the line as Vivian told her to. “I’m half crazy.…” The girl sings, and the pot of water at Lynn’s back makes a soft hissing noise that sounds like sighing.

When the water in the stove pot begins to boil, Lynn checks the bottles, pouring a little from each nipple onto her wrist, and it feels just right. She leaves the bright kitchen, passing through the dark front hall and into the cavelike living room with its drawn shades. Vivian is taking a pillow and setting it at the edge of the first couch cushion and settling there, and when Lynn holds out the bottles in the dim she accepts them, craning her wrists to fit them neatly into the babies’ mouths.

She stops singing now, and Lynn stands there a moment above her, listening more than watching in the dark. Little smacking sounds of the babies’ lips; a ticking of pressure in one of the bottles; the shift of the mama dog on the plastic sheet. As her eyes begin to adjust she can see better the outline of the girl with her babies, and her own boots next to the girl’s and the baby fencing. Finally she sees her pistol lying there on the end table next to an unfinished game of solitaire, the rows of red and black building up, the four suits interlacing. She picks up the gun and takes it back to the front hall where the coat closet door is still ajar, the spare boots lie downed like bowling pins, the carton of Jack Daniel’s boxes pulled out to the threshold, one lying open-flapped in the back row. Lynn sets the safety and then slides it down in.

She fixes a pot of coffee and takes a blue enamel mug from a hook and sets it on the counter. She pours it most of the way full, and takes a spoon from the drawer and stirs it, tinkling the sides of the cup with a shaking hand and staring at an empty whiskey bottle on a high shelf next to her puzzle books. She reaches up and past it, and pulls out from behind it a stick of yellow paper—a sheet of legal pad folded and folded and folded until it is so thin it could be slipped in a bottle. She stares at it a moment and thumbs a furled edge, but she doesn’t open it. She sets it back in the corner and the bottle in front of it, just as it was. Then she opens a cupboard and takes out a sleeve of rice cakes and a jar of natural peanut butter and she fixes herself a snack, spreading a thin layer with the knife. She takes a bite, crunching and licking her lips clean of the sticky butter as she looks down into her dark coffee.

She is sitting on the top porch step with the mostly uneaten rice
cake and her cup of coffee when Vivian finds her. The girl does not sit down right away herself, but stands just behind and to the side, one hand on the post that supports the low roof above them, and before she can speak, Lynn stands and drains her coffee cup in one long draught. “It’s time we tended to Sweetie Pie.”

“Sweetie Pie?”

Lynn sets the mug on the porch rail and clomps down the steps to the rear of her pickup. When Vivian meets her there, she is looking in through the dirty brown window of the camper shell. She says, “If you open it slowly, I can reach in through the crack for the leash and catch her before she jumps out.”

She doesn’t wait for Vivian to answer. She pops the release on the tailgate, and then moves her hands down to the opening, leaving Vivian to catch it as it falls, which Vivian does. There is no sound from inside, and when it is open, there unmoving lies a young dog with long silky red hair and a basket muzzle.

“There we go,” Lynn says, that sweet soft voice returning. She draws the leash forward as the door opens, and the dog jumps down onto the dry rutted earth.

Vivian says, “Why does she have a muzzle on?”

Lynn keeps her eyes on the dog. In her normal voice she says, “They say she bit an attendant at the shelter. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, though. Locked up in a strange place and blind to boot? Some dogs will do fine once they’re in a familiar environment and see a pattern of kind treatment. We’ll put her in a separate pen right next to the other dogs and see how she does—whether she growls or draws back or seeks them out. She’ll be able to get used to the smell of them, and have a little nose-to-nose contact with them along the line. It will help us decide whether she can mix with them.”

The dog holds perfectly still between them, the leash slack and her long hair shining. Lynn says, “Why don’t you go ahead and clear the path of things she might trip on. That hose near the water troughs, for one.”

Vivian holds two hands up like a shed roof over her eyes and sees it—
a green coil in the path to a small fenced area she had not noticed before on the far side of the pen. She walks ahead in Lynn’s big boots and squats to drag it across the concrete, and moves a plastic garbage bin as well, and the shovel Lynn uses for cleaning up after the dogs. Then she waits at the fence Lynn showed her—a high eight-by-four rectangle of chain-link that shares one of its walls with the far boundary of the dog yard.

Other dogs approach the water line as Lynn and the new dog pass, Lynn cooing, “Good girl, that’s a good girl, you’re such a big beautiful girl,” all in her high sweet gentle voice. Some of them bark, and the blind dog lowers her head at the noise. She stumbles only once, on the lip of the concrete as she approaches. Vivian stands aside to let her get to the door, and once she is in, Lynn takes a handful of moist-looking treats from her pocket and lays them on the dry earth. “There we go, Sweetie Pie. Those are for you. Isn’t this a good place? Can’t you tell how much I care about you? Can you tell how much I want to help you? I’m going to take such good care of you.” Then in one swift motion, Lynn unfastens the buckle behind her ears, steps out of the pen, and the basket muzzle slips forward a bit and the dog paws at it, pushing it aside and off so she can eat the treats.