Traps (9 page)

“Oh!” Vivian says, and “Hello there!,” laughing and petting the big dogs who jump up to sniff her face.

Lynn says, “First thing is, you have to turn away when they do what you don’t want, and only pet them when they do what you like.”

“Okay,” Vivian says, laughing nervously. The paws of an old yellow Lab are up on one shoulder of her coat.

“You can cross your arms too, to say no.”

Vivian crosses her arms, and the Lab slips but jumps up again.

Lynn says, “And if they keep at you, you can walk away.”

They start to walk then, with the pack of dogs crowding them, tripping on one another, and Lynn and Vivian tripping too, both of them laughing a bit, but Lynn knowing which dogs she can reach and pet and talk to in a high sweet voice and when to say, “Hey now, not a bit
of that, mister,” flat and low. When they get to the far side, she opens another door in the chain-link a crack, waving Vivian through while she blocks the dogs with her knees, and then passes through herself, walking backward to keep them from coming with her.

“There’s not much to any of this, really,” she says. “Just watch how I do and you’ll learn it straightaway.”

There is a row of water troughs along the driveway, and she walks the fence line now and reaches through the chain-link to unscrew a drain cap, stepping back from the gurgle and splash of water onto the muddy red-brown dirt.

Vivian says, “What’s wrong with the dog you’re going to pick up?”

“Not a thing. She’s just been at the shelter for more than a year, and it’s a kill shelter. She’s blind, and that makes most people think a dog can’t get by.”

“Can it, though?”

“Sure, you’ll see. Most it takes a few days of bumping into things before they have a layout in their heads. Our pen is a rectangle, and nothing in it but other dogs that have a smell and make noise, so most likely the only thing she’ll bump into is the hose bib in the middle there.”

She points at a pipe rising up out of a low place in the center of the yard. Three dogs are crowded in around it, digging. “No matter how many times I fill it in with sand they dig it out again.” Their heads are bowed, low and purposeful over their work, just touching now and then as their forepaws churn and the loose sand flies out steadily behind them.

She unscrews another drain cap and steps back from the flow of old water.

Vivian says, “Can the other dogs tell if a dog is blind?”

“Some can. Some will help it out by barking to warn him. Like before a car coming down the drive makes noise, and you’ll see one of the dogs go right next to a blind one and bark.”

“That’s sweet.”

“Does as much good for the one who does the helping, I think,” Lynn says.

All the troughs are empty now, and Lynn pulls the green hose, yanking and dragging it to get it up out of itself where it’s coiled near the shed, and she puts the nozzle into the first trough. At the squeak of the faucet handle cranking, a few more dogs get up and come over to nose into the trough. The bottom of the trough starts to fill, the clean fresh water running down the side in a clear sheet, and right away the dogs begin drinking.

Then from the pocket of Lynn’s borrowed barn coat, Vivian’s cell phone rings.

“Uch,” she says. “I’m so sorry I forgot to switch off the ringer.”

Lynn turns toward her battered yellow truck. “You can finish this. I better get going.”

“It’s just that same caller again.”

“If I’m gone past two, you might as well feed them. There are cans of meat in the garage, and you can bring them out here and open five and divide them up in twenty-four bowls. They go between that double layer of fence, and then there’s a way to raise it when you’re ready. You’ll see.”

Vivian is looking down at her phone. “I don’t know why they don’t stop.”

“The mama dog and pups get a mix of puppy food and milk replacer from under the kitchen sink. You can mix it with warm water in the blender.”

“Just ringing and ringing half the time when I’m feeding the babies. Wouldn’t you give up if someone never answered? Would you ever just keep calling a person like that?”

Lynn opens the door to her truck and slips in. “And there probably won’t be any visitors. Most people will call first on the house phone if they’re interested in finding a dog, but every once in a while we get a drop-in. If that happens, you tell them you can show them the dogs, but they’ll have to come back for a matching interview with Lynn.”

Vivian’s phone stops ringing, and she looks at it despairingly. “There’s going to be another voice mail.” She stands right next to her but does not look up at Lynn behind the wheel of the truck she will leave in. “It’s about to give that beep.”

“Vivian,” Lynn says. She says it sharply, and waits for the girl to look up at her from her sparkly pink phone.

When she does, she has a stricken look.

Lynn says, “I’m not your mother, or your guidance counselor, or your lonely neighbor lady with the after-school cookies.”

Vivian blinks.

Lynn says, “You don’t owe me any confessions.” She reaches across herself with her good hand to grasp the door handle, ready to shut it. “All the business we need to have in common is those dogs.”

When Lynn slams the door and starts her engine, Vivian’s phone beeps in her pocket. She watches from the turnaround until the truck is gone down the drive and disappears out of view a half mile or so down the highway. Then she takes the phone out and sees that there are now six messages waiting.

After she fills the last two troughs, Vivian takes stock of her surroundings. Lynn’s plot is big, bordered around with barbed-wire fencing at such a vast neighborless distance that Vivian is not even sure where it ends. Next to the house is an attached garage, and the smaller shed where Lynn got the hose, and next to that a plank-and-wire corral where it seems some other animals might once have lived, and in the faraway across the turnaround a long barn with metal walls and roof. She notices a pattern of holes on the corral post near the hose bib, and a few rusty tin cans in the weedy grass behind with holes in them too, and deeper down a scattering of brass-colored shells. She crouches to pick one up, and she slips it into her pocket—not the pocket of Lynn’s borrowed coat, but inside, into the patch of the sweatshirt that is her own.

Then she sets off for the barn. Her borrowed boots make a hard sound on the dried mud, scratching here and there through patches of scabby weed, and her heart beats faster as she nears it, its windows
boarded over with plywood and its doors too, so that she has to walk around it, the blood pulsing in her ears, to find an opening. When she reaches the far side she sees a strange circle in the earth, a ring of concrete like the rim of a cistern, but flush with the earth and long ago filled in with dirt. Beside it are two big sheets of plywood nailed up to the metal barn walls, one of them hanging askew, and Vivian slips in through the crack.

The only light inside is filtered in through the gaps whoever boarded the openings left. When her eyes adjust, she sees that she is in the remains of what she guesses right away must once have been a small dairy operation. There are drains in the floor, and short sections of gate to make stalls, and in the corner a mostly empty platform that still bears one stainless-steel vat. The concrete is thick with years of dry dirt that has blown beneath the plywood. Silent. Deserted. It gives the place a ghostly feel, but she’s still calm enough, until she looks up and sees that overhanging all the steel rafters are the ratty tufts of birds’ nests, dozens of them. It is at this sign of life thriving in the graveyard that her pulse starts to race, as if she anticipates the explosion that suddenly bursts from above, flapping wings and wheeling down to the floor just in front of her, raising devils of dust and making her scream. They settle in their places as if to nest there. Just a clutch of wild brown birds with pure white breasts.

Vivian raises a hand to her heart. Then she slips out between the boards and takes off at a run back to Lynn’s house. She pauses on the top step when she gets there, her ear cocked for any sound from her babies inside, but there is none. Instead she hears a crunch of tires coming down the drive.

She looks up to see a mud-spattered white pickup jacked up high on its suspension, with big lights on top of the cab. When the door opens, a dog hops out first—a sweet brown-and-black coonhound who bolts for the chain-link to sniff at the other dogs. The yard cranks up with barking, but the oldest dogs stay asleep under the shelter at the far end, nestled against one another like a puzzle of tiles Vivian once saw in a picture.

A man in a camouflage hunting jacket and an orange cap jumps down from the seat. He cocks his head and takes a toothpick from his mouth. He grins.

“You sure as hell ain’t Lynn.”

He has to raise his voice a bit to carry to her. She is a few yards from him up on the porch.

“Can I help you?” she says.

“I just bet you can.”

Vivian backs up a step, so that she is standing in front of the door. “I meant, what did you come for?”

“What’s your hurry? You’re supposed to say, ‘Hi, nice to meet you’ first.”

She crosses her arms. “Lynn says if you’re interested in a dog, you’re going to have to come back for a matching interview.”

He laughs, taking off his orange cap. Thin pale hair flies up on top in the breeze. “I don’t need any more dogs. ’Fact I got another one in back I thought she could doctor for me.”

Vivian rises up a bit on her toes to look, but she doesn’t come off the porch.

He laughs again. “Most of Lynn’s mutts would bite you worse than me, girly.”

“What’s wrong with the dog you brought?”

“Ran off on a cougar hunt and found some bait I’d set up in a steel-jaw. Sprung the trigger on her own leg.”

“Is it bad?”

“It’s not bleeding much anymore, but it’s swole up a bit and she won’t walk on it.”

Vivian glances past him again at the back of his truck.

He says, “Lynn’ll be mad if you don’t help a customer. Why don’t you come on down here? Look things over for me.”

“I don’t know how to care for injuries.”

“Aw, now. You look like you’d make a fine nurse to me.”

Vivian takes another step back, pulling open the screen and tripping over the threshold.

“Easy does it,” he says. He starts up the steps, and she closes the screen door and latches it.

She says, “I’m going to have to ask you to come back later.”

He is on the porch now, looking in at where she stands, just the thin screen between them guarding the threshold.

“Well now,” he says grinning. “That might be the nicest invitation I ever got.”

He clomps back down the porch steps then and slaps his leg and calls to his dog. “Dizzy!” he says. “Get in, Dizzy girl.”

The dog whirls around, and he laughs, looking up at the porch and tipping his hat as he puts it back on and climbs in. Then he drives away fast, spraying gravel.

It is a long time after he disappears out of sight down the highway that Vivian moves from her spot gripping the screen door. She looks over her shoulder into the deep dark of the room where her babies lie sleeping, and then she takes off Lynn’s boots and leaves them by the door.

She tries first in the kitchen, throwing open each of the cupboards and drawers, peering in back and shifting bowls and plates to check behind them. The room looks chaotic when she is finished, with all of Lynn’s cupboard fronts hanging open and the contents of her own backpack still heaped on the table in a froth of used tissues, and she stands in the center, breathing hard and thinking, before she closes Lynn’s cupboards and turns to move on. She can see the stairs from here, and she looks up the steep rise, considering them, but then she passes them up and goes back into the little hall. There is a tiny mail table where Lynn keeps her keys, and it has a drawer in it, but when she pulls it open she finds nothing but chapstick and a deck of playing cards and loose change in a little bowl. She closes it and faces the coat closet. She has to stand on her tiptoes to feel around on the top shelf above the coats and there she finds a wide-brimmed sun hat, a pair of woolen mittens, and a basket of
dog leashes. The coats hanging number half a dozen and she reaches into the pocket of each, feeling, coming up with a ziplock bag of almonds in two of them and a handful of dog treats in almost every one.

On the floor behind Lynn’s boots Vivian finds the liquor carton. She crouches and pulls it forward, and it is out of surprise at the volume of alcohol more than anything else that she begins opening the flaps to peer in and pull out the bottles. Then it is the mystery of their emptiness that makes her continue, pulling out each one and finding the neck tape broken and the glass empty and clean and then sliding it back down in. After three, she just opens the box lids, one after another, not pulling the bottles out but just glancing at the broken tape, until she reaches the last row and notices no bottle, and reaches down inside to find what’s there.

When she draws the pistol out, she holds it at first like a letter she is reading, sideways and two-handed, noting the slight waffle print on the grip, and the circle of steel that guards the trigger, and then it seems to occur to her to check to see if it is loaded, although she is not sure how. She holds it up, eyeing the parts that move—the hammer and the safety, and the magazine catch—still careful to hold it only by the tip of the stock and the tip of the barrel, always keeping the muzzle pointed away from her own body, all the while just crouching there in the hall with her head to the dark closet of coats and boots and her back to the world behind her, and suddenly the gravity of what she is doing, snooping and discovering a kind woman’s secrets and the hiding place of a weapon that defends her out here alone, and also too her own first holding of a gun—it builds up on her and makes her whirl her head around, looking over her shoulder and up at the door.

But there is no one there.

She looks down again at the gun. Then she straightens up to standing. She peers into the living room before she goes, seeing just one puppy awake, pulling with a soft ripping sound at a rag in a far corner of the fencing while his siblings sleep, and the mama dog sleeps too, and beyond there Vivian’s own babies still make no sound at all.