Jessica rubs her temples. Behind the multiheaded beast of her feelings about herself and her past as a girl and a daughter is a backdrop of yearning thrown up by this woman’s mentions of her films. She ignores it over and over, but a dozen times a day, every day, every week for five years, she has wished for a brief escape into the perfect satisfaction of using this mess—this crazy tangle of childhood memory and shame and self-righteousness and hope and fear—to create a character (utterly real but blessedly pretend) who can tell a story that will make others not just weep (she has done that before) but also understand. Understand! And (as if that in itself wouldn’t be enough) afterward clap, stand up, go home, and never think of her again.
“Are you still there, dear?”
“What? I’m sorry—”
“Mrs. Lippincott said she felt she had no choice but to call Animal Control. There’s a notice on the door now. They’re coming by tomorrow to pick her up unless somebody comes and claims her.”
Akhil’s palms are flat on the counter, as if to hold the whole kitchen in place.
Jessica says, “Do you know what hospital my father is in?”
“Summerlin, I should think. But if you don’t mind my asking, how could you not have known about this? Have you been on location somewhere, dear? Somewhere remote?”
3
Spiders
The third is much younger, just a girl standing that night in a T-shirt and panties in front of an open refrigerator in North Las Vegas, eating squares of deli ham from a partitioned package—crackers, circles of turkey, stars of yellow cheese. The top shelf makes almost a halo behind her—a stick of butter, the blue-white ceiling above, a gallon of Sunny Delight. She brushes the blond hair from her damp forehead with the back of her wrist, chewing. The kitchen is small, with white-linoleum floors and chipped white formica counters, and through the dormer window above the sink, she can see the asphalt tile roof of another section of the same building. There are two sounds: from down the hall a din of rushing water—strangely amplified like the crash of some interior waterfall—and through the tiny open window, the metronome bark of another neglected dog.
This is Vivian.
She looks at a doorway at the end of a narrow neck of hall.
She looks at the clock on the stove: 7:15.
On the scratched surface of the metal folding table a pink cell phone studded with glittering rhinestones begins ringing. She closes the refrigerator door and takes a People magazine from the counter behind it and tosses it over the ringing phone. The cover is divided into quadrants, each with a different movie-star mother playing with one of her children: at the top of a playground slide; running after ducks; reading under a tree; laughing over ice cream on a bench. On the stove sits an empty saucepan and a kettle beside it. She gives the kettle a little lift to check it for water, and turns on the burner underneath. Out on the roof a pigeon lands with an airy flap of wings, silent beneath the sound of rushing water from a room beyond the kitchen, and now the cell phone ringing, and still that bark, and bark, and bark of a dog. She watches the pigeon flap again, veering along the tiles to the ridge of another dormer, where it poops. The magazine jiggles a bit each time the phone rings. Finally the phone stops ringing and she eats a star of cheese, waiting, and when the phone chirps out its single beep she flips the magazine off it to look in the little window. “Vivian’s Phone.” One missed call and five voice mails.
Then a baby begins to cry.
She looks again at the hallway.
A second baby’s cry rises in concert with the first.
She is still holding the magazine when she enters the little room. It is a slant-ceilinged place with a swaybacked queen-sized bed and a milk crate for a nightstand with a box of condoms on top. On the floor at the foot of the bed are her own things—a little gray white-noise machine roaring a steady blanket of static, a pair of liquor cartons full of her clothes, and in the corner, in a small closet beneath a row of men’s track suits on hangers, tucked behind a collection of new-looking basketball shoes, two tiny slouch-spined babies in mismatched infant car seats on the cracked linoleum floor. Both babies are wailing—red-faced, bald but for a peach-fuzzing of white hair, one dressed in a pink T-shirt and the other in blue—but what draws Vivian’s eye, what grabs her attention despite all that movement and anguish, is the still figure of a large shiny black spider on the white plastic handle of the girl’s carrier.
The babies are too small to have feared or even noticed it, of course. They’re just crying, but as they cry and kick, they jiggle their carriers, and the spider’s forward leg gives a slow exploratory twitch. Vivian reaches down and picks up one of the basketball shoes and very slowly and steadily, with her hand trembling as she reaches, she crushes the spider against the handle with the sole of the shoe.
For a few seconds she holds it there, frozen. The babies scream beneath her outstretched arm. Then she reaches the magazine out and slides it under the shoe, drawing it toward her between the babies, and flips the shoe over to see the mess that’s left—a tangle of crushed legs and a flattened black body with a red hourglass at its center.
The kettle in the kitchen begins to scream now too, but Vivian walks steadily toward the kitchen and sets the shoe and magazine on the table. She pours the kettle water into the saucepan, quieting it. Then she opens a cupboard and takes out a can of formula and a pair of nursing bottles.
Later the bottles sit empty on a coffee table in a tiny, steepled living room, and the babies lie happily on a pink fleece blanket on the linoleum floor. The water sound is gone, and without it the sound of barking is louder. Vivian is sitting on the back of the sofa with her arm out the dormer window, smoking. She has a short yellow satin robe on now over her T-shirt, and with each bark she flinches. Then she hears a key in the door.
The man who comes through it is a little older, but young too, dark-skinned, lean, wearing a shiny red track suit and silver basketball sneakers. He has a plastic grocery bag and from it he pulls a fresh pack of cigarettes and a box of Twizzlers and tosses them on the coffee table.
“For you,” he says. “How’s my lady?”
“Marco—”
“Hold up. There’s more.” He reaches down into the bag and pulls out a black waxed-paper box, the kind restaurants use for leftovers, and a bottle of nail polish the color of cotton candy. He kneels down on the linoleum in front of the sofa. “Let me fix you up. Then you have some steak. I know how my lady love steak.”
He unscrews the long black cap on the bottle of polish. In the shadow of the upturned white collar on his jacket is a track of five scars, pale and small and round such as the tip of a cigarette makes, so evenly spaced they look strung there, like beads.
“Marco,” she says.
“This pink looked just like you,” he says. He draws the brush out and strokes it along the nail on her big toe.
“Marco, I have to show you something.”
“What is it, baby?”
“It was in the bedroom. There was a spider.”
“Aw. I wish I been here to get it for you. That’s no job for a lady.”
“The poisonous kind.”
“You needed your man around to get it. Isn’t that what I told you I’d do when I found you?”
“It was a black widow, I think.”
“All puff up and scared and lonely in your bitty car in the parking lot at the mall?”
“The kind with the red shape on its back.”
“I said, ‘Come back with me, I change my mind, no way do I care you’re pregnant. Backseat of a Pinto no place for a lady to live. I’ll take care of you.’ Next time you save the spiders for Marco, baby. I’ll get them for you.”
“I think we should call the exterminator.”
“Sure thing,” he says, drawing the brush out of the bottle. “Anything for my girl.”
“Do you know one?”
“You just leave it to Marco. I’ll take care of everything.” He applies the polish to the smallest toe
s, one by one, with careful fingers.
She says, “Or I could look one up in the phone book? I could call myself?”
“That’s no job for a lady like you. It my job to take care of you. Didn’t I say so?” He blows on her toes. “Now, how about those babies? They need anything? I’m about to go out again.”
“Some more formula maybe.”
“Diapers?”
“Sure,” she says.
“You got it.” He blows again on her nails. “You stay here and play games on that pretty sparkly phone I got for you. I just be gone a couple hours. I got to meet two business associates of mine tonight. Then I’m going to bring them back here with me, and I need to ask you one more time to do me a favor.”
He blows again, gently.
Vivian is looking at the top of his head. There is a thin spot near the crown where she can see one more of those long-ago burns. She says, “Those same guys who own this building?”
“No, that was just for once with them. These guys are just business associates. I got to do business, baby. Where you think I get money to buy those fancy chairs your babies sleep in?”
Vivian taps her ash out the window. “Okay,” she says.
“Be about midnight probably.”
“Okay.”
“So maybe you have those babies out of the bedroom then.”
“Sure.”
“They not always quiet even in this room, so you see what you can do. Maybe put them out on the flat part of the roof like I did before.”
“Sure, Marco.”
Then he opens the door and shuts it behind him.
Vivian puts out her cigarette on a roof tile and climbs off the couch. In the kitchen cupboard, next to a formula can, a bag of potato chips, and a bottle of Cutty Sark, is a very old phone book. She takes her little pink cell phone from the table next to his white shoe on the magazine and she pages through it: Eviction, Excavating, Extermination: see Pest Control.
By the time she hears the knock on the door, she has put on more clothes—a white sundress with peach-colored flowers, red flip-flops, and a navy blue zip-up sweatshirt with a hood. The babies are drifting off on her two shoulders, one in pink-footed pajamas and the other in blue, and she is doing a soft jiggle step until she can be sure they are fully asleep.
She dances to the door and crouches down almost to kneeling to keep her torso upright as she turns the dead bolt. “Come in,” she says.
The door opens and there stands a white-haired man wearing a blue work jumpsuit, leaning over to slide a heavy-looking black duffel bag through the door. “You called Animal Control yet about that dog?”
“It’s my boyfriend’s.”
“He ever take it for a walk?”
“He got it as a guard dog.”
“You ask me, a man ought to take care of the things he uses,” he says, still struggling with the bag, and then he stands upright and gets a first full look at her in her flowered sundress and rubber sandals, a baby sleeping on each shoulder. He coughs, bringing a fist to his mouth. “Twins?” he says.
She nods.
“My sisters were twins. They lost the same teeth within hours of each other for every blessed tooth in their mouths. In their teens, just before the phone would ring, one would say, ‘Answer the phone, Ma. It’s Kara calling to get picked up early from band practice.’ Magic. You’ve got twenty pounds of magic there sleeping split between your shoulders.”
Vivian’s heart lifts. Before she can think what to say, he cocks his head and wrinkles his brow again. “You forget some water running somewhere?”
“It’s white noise. To help them sleep through the barking.”
“I see.” The patch on his jumpsuit says “Harold.” He picks up his bag. “So. Where’s your crawl space?”
Vivian cocks her head, thinking. “I’m not sure. I found the spider in the back bedroom there where we sleep. Besides that there’s just this room and the kitchen.”
“Let’s try the kitchen,” he says.
From the threshold he looks the little white-on-white space up and down a second. Then he sets his bag on the floor and muscles the refrigerator out into the center of the room, revealing a thick black cord, a furring of dust at the baseboard, and a small cupboard door cut into the wall.
“Bingo.”
He fishes a pair of gloves and a carpenter’s white face mask out of his bag and puts them on. Then he switches on a flashlight, swings open the cupboard, and disappears into the dark of the hole. Vivian creeps down the hall and lays the two babies sleeping in their infant carriers, and by the time she steps back into the kitchen he is already backing out again.
He sits down heavily in her vinyl-covered kitchen chair and yanks down his face mask, his eyes wide with surprise. “Do you have any Scotch?”
He looks stricken.
Vivian opens the cupboard and takes out the big jug of Cutty Sark. She pours it into a juice glass, and the man drains it and sets the empty glass on the table with a thunk. “Now then,” he says. “Do you have any friends you can stay with?”
“Friends?”
“What I want you to do is take your babies and leave.”
“Leave?”
“Go to a motel for a few nights.”
Vivian blinks at him.
“Never in thirty years have I seen anything like what is in your crawl space. It’s”—he squeezes his eyes shut and then opens them wide and shakes his head—“it’s like Hell’s own nest in there. Spiders on top of spiders. I’ve never seen so many in one space in all my days.”
“Can’t you get rid of them?”
“ ’Course I can. It’ll be the job of a lifetime, but I can do it. What I’m saying is meantime this is no place for you and those babies. It’s like something out of the Old Testament. A B-movie nightmare. You get out of this place, do you hear?”
• • •
The babies are still sleeping in the white-noise-filled room as she packs. The space is lit with moonlight through the two dormers, and a little clip lamp shines on the condoms from the headboard of the bed. She closes the flaps of each of the liquor cartons and carries them softly one by one out into the hall, and then down the stairs and out into the street at night where his dog is still barking. A bark like the ticking of some slow clock.
Her car is an old brown Pinto with a stripped metal hood parked in front of the hydrant and a plank fence with a furring of weedy grass below. As she hefts the boxes into the hatchback the barking continues, so queer and regular, and she leaves the door open, like a wide mouth yawning, to step to the fence and peer between the slats.
A German shepherd dog. Black and brown with soft-looking ears. He looks up at the yellow windows of the attic apartment, his body recoiling like a gun as he releases each of his barks. The brown grass is long and matted and covered with his turds. In one corner is a whole bag of kibble torn open, and a pile of the brown food pebbles lies mounded in the dirt. He barks again. Vivian steps away and closes the back of her car and hurries back up the stairs.
In the kitchen she mixes two bottles of formula and slips the can of powder and the bottles into a dirty yellow backpack with black straps. She slips in the glittery little phone and the People magazine too. And her cigarettes in a zipper pouch with flowers. In the bedroom she unplugs the white noise, and in the sudden quiet, she wraps the cord around the machine and looks at her babies. The girl lies with her arm slung above her head like a dancer, and the boy keeps his arms flat at his sides like a doll. The dog barks, a sharp report now in the silent room, and both babies stiffen. Vivian checks her watch—11:15.
Outside she sets the carriers on the backseat. As she fiddles with their safety buckles they stir, but they do not wake, and when the boy begins to whimper, struggling against her, she smooths a wisp of his hair from his forehead. She tests the straps with two fingers and straightens the clip. She laces the car’s seat belts through the slits on each carrier and leans down on the back of each one with the heel of her left hand as
she buckles to make sure they will be tight. Then she stands back and takes a deep breath in the dark street. The dog is still barking, but there are stars above and the lighted windows around are just shapes. No one she knows anywhere nearby except these babies.
She gets in behind the wheel and takes a little pink Velcro wallet out of her backpack. She opens it up and takes out the bills to count them. Fourteen dollars. She turns the ignition key and watches the needle on the gas gauge rise to a quarter tank. Then she pulls away, driving out past two blocks of houses with their chain-link fences and garbage-filled yards, past the Popeye’s and the Kmart and the Poker Palace to an open frontage road that runs parallel to a highway bearing south. Once she has merged, she turns on the radio, not too loud, to something soft and heartfelt with just a strand of guitar and a lone girl singing.
4
Strays
The last is an older woman. Soft gray curls twining down into a lengthy braid. Eyes a popsicle blue. She stands alone in her barn coat by a window looking out over an empty plain of creosote bush and dry red-brown soil and one distant barn beneath a strip of bright blue sky in the barren scrublands of southern Nevada.
On the wooden workbench she is taking plastic tube vials of flea treatment from a case box. Her left hand is a bulb of flesh-colored plastic topped with a pair of steel loops. She grips with these and cuts the tops off the vials with a pair of scissors in a good right hand knuckled over with turquoise-and-silver rings, and then adds them to a long line, propped a little, tips up, against the wooden backsplash—fifteen of them maybe; more than twenty when she finishes. Then she slits the bottom of the box with a razor and flattens it down on the concrete floor with her high green rubber boots.
Traps Page 4
