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.
She unlatches the porch door and steps out, holding the gun low but ready at her side as she had seen Lynn do early that morning facing the shadow of her own car. Then she raises her arm and sights along the sleeve of her borrowed coat. She can see the post in the distance with the cans below it, and she wonders if Lynn stood back here this far, and how good it would be to know you could shoot something you aimed at from this distance. She puts up her other hand now, because her arm is shaking, and she squeezes one eye shut, and she thinks she can see it right there where the barrel points—the series of holes Lynn made in the post when she herself was trying to learn.
Vivian lowers the gun and goes inside, hurrying a bit, and puts the pistol back where she found it. She closes all the box tops, patting them, as if they might pop open on their own, and slides the carton back in. She tips her head this way and that as she arranges and rearranges the boots in front until she is satisfied. She closes the door.
In the kitchen she takes Lynn’s breakfast drink out of the refrigerator. It has thickened a bit, into something almost solid. She takes a spoon from the drawer and stirs it. Then she sits down at the table. Her yellow backpack is still open, and her things are still spilled out around it—her wallet with no money in it and the zip purse full of cigarettes she will not smoke until later, outside, because this house is not her own—and she draws the People magazine toward her through the sea of tissues and picks up the sparkly pink phone. She skips the first three messages to play the last, sitting perfectly upright as she listens:
“Vivian, this is Carla Bonham calling again. I just want to make sure you understand that calling me back doesn’t mean you have to testify. I just want to hear your story. I know it was a long time ago and you might want to leave it there, but what you say could really help a girl who is hurting a lot right now. She’s very scared herself to get up there and say what happened, and she asked me to pass along to any girls he might have done the same to that you could change her life by helping her win this trial and also help her make sure this never happens to any other girl again. Whew! That’s a mouthful. Sure would be easier to talk voice-to-voice. Call me.”
Vivian sets the phone on the scarred wood table. The little rhinestones catch late morning light through the dog yard window. She reads the article about movie-star mothers now. It’s just pictures mostly. Pushing their babies in swings and smiling. Or crouching to point at ducks in a park. All of them pretty, and the captions say things like “Uma Plays Mama,” and “Jessica Jokes with Jaya.” Vivian studies each one before she turns the page. She doesn’t read anything else. She closes the magazine and rolls it up and opens the cupboard under the sink where Lynn keeps a garbage can, and she slips it in among the skins of the avocados, and then she takes all her old tissues off Lynn’s table, heaping them in on top in three loads, and shuts the cupboard door with almost no sound.
She drinks the smoothie finally, doing it all in one long series of gulps, leaning back. Her eyebrows knit together as she adjusts to the strange flavor. Then she wipes her lips as Lynn did, forefin
ger and thumb, and she rinses the glass in the sink, and soaps it too, and rinses it again and sets it in the drying rack beside the old woman’s.
6
Unpleasant Surprises
It is still dark out when Dana pulls up to the big gate in her white Jetta. She rolls down her window and presses a four-digit code into the keypad on the pole, and the big black iron halves swing open slowly and she eases through, past the white Spanish housefront and through an arch, past the garage bays in back and down a little hill to a small pea-gravel parking area where two black Suburbans are parked beside a little cottage with a terra-cotta tile roof, its shuttered windows bleeding seams of light. Behind her in the car, her dress with the peach-colored flowers hangs inside a clear bag for the wedding. She shuts her engine off.
She shoulders her backpack and steps out, and she looks up at the house. The lower floor is dark, and up above are two bright squares, and then two with the sort of soft blue glow that night-lights make in a room. The rest is dark.
Dana walks the path to the cottage, her feet crunching in the gravel. Crickets chirp and sprinklers hush against the thick green leaves of the camellia bushes that hem it in. She presses her code into a keypad on the wall, and when the door swings open, the room is empty. Just a wall of folding tables laden with computers and monitors partitioned into grainy black-and-white quarter-screen views of the property. On the fourth monitor she can see a blurry figure heading uphill toward the house, and then in another quadrant crossing into view next to the tennis court, and then on screen three opening the door to a shed next to the greenhouse. “Hi, Larry,” she hears through a speaker on the table. “Dana just keyed in at the gate. I wanted to go over a few things with you before I check her in.” She reaches to turn one of the volume knobs down.
There are still sounds in the small room after she does this. Street noise from one of the speakers: the passage of a car in front of the gate. She can also hear the cricket noise she had heard in the yard, and the hush of the sprinklers, and she leaves these on, setting her backpack on the floor with her eyes on the screens, and sitting down in the empty chair in front of them.
Traps Page 7
