Traps (7 page)

“Only in the bruise on my ass.”

Ruth Ann snorts. She punches the keys on the register, holding a bean can up and away from her eyes. “Not a bit in your heart too, though?”

“Nah.”

“I don’t believe it. All that time you spend together?”

Lynn is still looking down, adding her phone number to the card. “Trick is to keep it simple. Bringing up poop duty nips most any serious conversation in the bud.”

“Tch!”
She bats a hand. “I don’t believe you for an instant.”

“—Who’s got fleas and who’s off his food. Tough to knit a sweater out of snippets.” She straightens and hands her the card.

“Nonsense. Those girls love you.”

“Like a bag of chips, maybe.”

“They love you every bit as much as the boys your folks took in for the milking season loved the two of them.”

“Well, that’s just stretching things and you know it. My folks were the best there was. Either one of them was worth six of me.”

“Marla’s girl told me she was going to start a shelter like you after she finishes at State.”

“Poor dear.”

“She wrote her college essay about you.”

“Mixup in the admissions office, I guess.”

“Sounds to me like you gave up some heart real estate.”

“I got dogs for my heart space.”

Ruth Ann takes the card and twists on her stool to pull a tack from the board. “They leave you too, Lynn Doran! You’ve made it your livelihood for them to leave!”

“Fair enough.” She licks a finger and counts out the money for the bean dip. “But a dog never chooses to go.”

Across the room near the grill a cheer goes up. Ruth Ann glances over to see a cluster of truckers high-fiving each other over a table strewn with sugar packets, but Lynn goes on counting change.

Ruth Ann studies her.

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’ll manage.”

“It’s ten o’clock and I know for a fact you just finished your chores because you still smell like Alpo.”

“Maybe that’s just my natural smell.”

“Look at you, it’s all over your coat, even. And I bet that’s with a half day of help before she bolted too, isn’t it?”

Lynn shrugs.

“What are you going to do days you have a vet run or pickup to do?”

“Easy, Chicken Little.”

“Well, tell me then. Name a single idea.”

Lynn slides the money across the counter. “I’ll get Johnny or Bob to stop over if I get in a bind.”

“Both of them have construction jobs now, and you know it.”

“Another girl will come along.”

“There aren’t more than thirty in the whole county, and every one of them that hasn’t already quit you has a warm bed and parents with a full can of marbles.”

Lynn points at the register, and Ruth Ann rolls her eyes and punches a button, popping the cash drawer open.

She licks a finger and starts counting out bills. “Tell me this at least. If I come by on Saturday myself to shovel shit and slop the dogs will you at least put on a clean jacket and come out to the Railhead with me?”

“The artichoke dip at the Railhead tastes like cat food.”

“I admit it would be an adjustment. All the guys you danced with last time you came out with me work the floor in walkers now.”

“Now you see why I save all my dancing for my big nights on the strip.”

Ruth Ann puts her hand with the change on one hip. “All right, a movie then.”

“Maybe.”

“Because I can’t come in for any more of your tea and green smoothies. A girl like me prefers pay in beer or movie candy.”

Lynn smiles.

“And a laugh, for God’s sake,” Ruth Ann says, handing her the change finally. “It’s like a crypt over there the way you keep it. It gives me the creeps.”

To Lynn the house is a bright spot she can see from the dark of the road, and she turns and follows the twin beams of her truck lights down the dirt-and-gravel drive. The dogs greet her with their barking, and she calls out, “Hey now. Hush now, ladies and gents,” and she clomps up the porch steps in her boots and removes them inside so she is in her sock feet.

In the garage, in the corner, is a wall of shelves stacked with flattened boxes. She takes a smallish one, and she crisscrosses the bottom flaps to make it—a box their heartworm pills came in that says “Heartgard” along the side. Then she takes it through the living room to a pair of double doors that stand open to a room too dark to see.

She flips a switch. A king-sized bed with two windows flanking and two matching nightstands holding fringed lamps, and a bathroom with double sinks beyond. A master bedroom once. Lynn sees that the girl made the bed before she left, with the yellow-and-black star quilt smoothed down and the pillows fluffed, but there are traces. A hair clip on the nightstand. A pair of socks balled up near the skirt of the bed. A tube of watermelon lip gloss on top of the dresser. And on the biggest wall two posters—one of a group of three boys with their arms crossed and one of a girl alone with a guitar—with the edges of some older ones sticking out from underneath.

Lynn sets the little box on the nightstand. First she takes fresh sheets from the bottom drawer of the dresser, and she changes the bed, gripping the edges in her different hands in different ways and smoothing it down and covering it again with the black-and-yellow star quilt. Then she gathers the girl’s stray things, setting them in the bottom of the little box—the hair clip and the socks and the lip gloss. She takes a marker from a drawer in the nightstand beneath and across the side she writes, “Charlene.” Behind a louvered closet door is an empty hanging rod and a high shelf above it with a row of other boxes, each labeled with a name: “Karlee,” “Amber,” “Cecelia,” “Jessie.” Lynn places this new one at the end beside them and closes the door.

The room upstairs where she herself sleeps is hardly a bedroom at all—just a narrow corduroy-covered daybed bullied into a corner by an enormous oak pedestal desk. The surface of the old desk is furred with dust and heaped with file boxes and a black sewing machine so old it looks to be an antique. Lynn takes her coat off and lays it over the back of the desk chair. Her mechanical hand has a cable running up the side to a harness that loops around the back of her shoulders. She shrugs the straps off and pulls the hand free so that there is just the smooth bulb of her wrist, and then she takes off the rest of her clothes and puts on a plain long cotton nightgown from a hook on the back of the door.

At the end of the upper hallway is a closed door she does not open or even meet with her eyes. She steps into a tiny low-ceilinged bathroom
and washes her face with one hand and brushes her teeth without watching herself in the mirror and returns to her room and piles both arm bolsters from the daybed next to the desk and pulls back the buckling corduroy spread. She slips in under it, sitting up against the bolsters without dimming the lights or drawing the curtains, and takes a book of sudoku from a pile on the desk and opens a marked page. Then she slides open the bottom desk drawer and takes out a sealed manila envelope, a clean juice glass, and an empty fifth bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and sets them there on top beside the stack of puzzles.

T
he empty bottle and the empty glass still sit clean and empty beside the envelope when she wakes. Moonlight through the uncurtained window shows them to be so. Lynn switches on a lamp, throwing shadows. She is out of bed quickly, standing among them and casting one herself, pulling on blue jeans and a thermal shirt and fitting her wrist into the plastic-and-metal hand. She slips her other arm through the harness strap like a sweater. The clamp on this hand is closed unless she puts tension on the cable to open it. She does this by reaching out, stretching her arm against the harness on her body, and when she relaxes again it always closes.

The house is silent. The dogs have not yet figured her to be awake. But soon she is creaking down the stairs, and when she reaches the kitchen and flicks a light on, one of them outside yelps.

Then her telephone rings.

She looks at it. A cream-colored cordless on the kitchen table.

She looks at the clock. 6:02.

She picks it up. “Dog rescue.”

“Hello?” It’s a girl’s voice. “Hello, ma’am, I mean? I’m sorry to call so early, but I saw you were awake.”

Lynn looks out the window into the dark.

The girl says, “I’m out on the road in my car and I was waiting for the lights to go on. I was calling about your posting at the diner? About the room and the job?”

Lynn squints. She tries to focus out beyond the silhouettes of the dogs stirring in the moonlight. They are barking, and their eyes catch in the light from the kitchen or the moon above, and stare back at her, eerie and hollowed. She can’t see anything on the road.

“Well, then,” she says. “I guess you better drive on in so I can get a look at you.”

She hangs up the phone without waiting for the girl to answer and crosses her arms to watch out the window. A pair of headlights appears in the dark distance and then swings around and comes at her, bouncing down the long gravel drive. The dogs are barking in full now. Lynn passes through the dark, low-ceilinged foyer, just big enough to pull a pair of boots on in, and she does that. Then she flicks on a porch light and steps out to see a small hatchback lumber over the rutted earth to stop in her circle.

The noise of the dogs is like gunfire now—sharp barks overlying one another. A few of them stand on their hind legs at the chain-link wall along the turnaround, their nails tinkling against the metal and making the big wall bow.

“Hush now,” Lynn says. “Hush now, boys and girls.”

The engine on the little car dies, and the headlights go out. Lynn can’t make out anything through the windshield, and the door doesn’t open when it should. She doesn’t wait more than a second. She backs into the house and reaches into the deep back of the hall closet with her good hand and drags out a liquor carton with a dozen slim tall boxes of Jack Daniel’s nestled inside. With her eyes still on the car through the window glass, Lynn flips open the lid of the second box in the back row of four and draws out a pistol.

The dogs are still barking and the car is still dark and closed, and Lynn’s eyes are on it through the screen door. She doesn’t cock it or take
aim, just steps back out onto the porch watching the car jiggle a little with some weighty internal shifting. Then the driver’s door swings open, and out tumbles a girl in a sundress and a hooded sweatshirt and the sound of babies bawling.

Right away the girl sees the gun—not pointing at her, just dangling at Lynn’s side in her hand—but she raises her hands in the air all the same.

Lynn takes no heed of this. She nods her head at the car, her arms still hanging at her sides. “So is it just you and the baby in there then?”

“Yes. I mean, no. I mean no, ma’am? There’s two of them. Two babies, I mean?” A sweet nervous voice rising up and up, like a puff of something.

“You took so long getting out I thought maybe you were up to something.”

“I was just trying to quiet them.”

“Well, that’s a goal I can favor.”

The babies are still screaming, and the girl’s hands are still up. “I woke them coming down the drive. They didn’t sleep so well out there.”

“You slept in your car?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The girl’s arms are shaking.

“Well, put your hands down and tend to them. Come on now, I’m not even aiming at you. I’ll go back inside and put away my gun.”

She turns and goes inside, not waiting to see what the girl will do, and she stashes the gun back in the well of the liquor carton and slides it to the back of her closet. She can still hear the babies while she does it, and the dog noise seems steady and almost calm behind their wailing. She stands alone in her hallway, pausing a little longer in the dark closed space before she goes out again to face it.

When she draws near the car, the girl is just backing out of it with the two carriers, holding them by her sides like buckets of water. Two button faces and bunched bodies. How old can they be? They are dark-faced with screaming, but for a single, blissfully relaxing instant, they both
stop in the moonlight to hitch in a breath of the fresh, cool air. It falls like the weird sudden quiet under an overpass in a rainstorm. Then they start again. The girl expected this though, apparently. She is kneeling on the rutted earth unbuckling them, snip-snap, and then—how does she do it, even?—she places the carriers right up snug against each other to brace them, scoops an arm under each baby and lifts them up toward each other, cocking her arms out suddenly so that there they are, one in each crook. Right away she starts swaying back and forth, back and forth, one little baby face nestled in each arm of her sweatshirt.

The wailing turns to whimpering, and the babies quiet altogether.

“I’ll be damned,” Lynn says.

Then from the back of the little brown car comes the sound of ringing, and the girl gets a panicked look in her eyes. Lynn glances at the car, but the girl keeps swiveling at the waist, like a sprinkler head watering.