The Empty Trap Read online

  Tulsa reached a heavy arm through the window, a spring-handled sap in his hand. “This’ll make it easier,” he said. He snapped the lead end of the sap against Lloyd’s forehead with a backhanded twist of his wrist. Lloyd moved instinctively, and just quickly enough so that it glanced off the side of his forehead, just ahead of the temple. One of the familiar pain-flowers bloomed and burst in gaudy blue and white and at the other end of an echoing tunnel he heard Tulsa yell, “Push!”

  He could not move, but he could see straight ahead. “Wait,” Tulsa yelled and he held the car back with his great strength. Lloyd was only partially aware when Valerez reached in, cut the nylon from his wrists. Again they pushed. The car moved forward. The right front corner dropped first. It happened so very slowly. Now, he thought, that thing they talk about is happening!

  I argued with the salesman about this car, about his offer. The red and white hardtop convertible. He wanted fourteen hundred difference and I wanted to trade for a thousand. When I went into the sales manager’s office, the air conditioning was turned very low. There was an award certificate on the wall. We could not get anywhere until I told him I was the manager at the Hotel Green Oasis, and then the atmosphere was more cordial and we traded for eleven fifty and I drove it back, and it smelled new and it ran well, and that was the week Harry Danton brought Sylvia back from Los Angeles and they moved into the hotel.

  It dropped on the right side, and he was thrown against Sylvia’s body and for one moment he could look down the long cruel slant of steep brown rock, at small wiry trees that grew out of the rock, and then the roll and fall continued a clanging and crashing and a steep sickness, and then he spun high and free and he saw the car and the mountains turn around him and knew he was apart from the car. Then, in the turn, the brown rocks came up to a smash of whiteness against his face, a floodlight whiteness that dwindled down and away like the last white spot on a cooling TV picture tube.

  He knew he was cold. There were great sounds around him. It was very difficult to think. Needles of cold beat against his face. He turned his face slowly and with great difficulty until his cheek touched a sharp edge. He opened his eyes and he saw wet rock inches from his eyes. The rain drove against wet rock, exploding into silvery mist. There was a blue glare of lightning and then thunder cracked loudly and the long echoes boomed and rolled through the mountains. Slowly he began to know that he was bent oddly, body arched back at the waist, something hard across the small of his back. Lightning was close for a long time, and then moved away and the rain slackened and stopped. He felt rigid with cold. Almost at once the sun came out, a high white glare over the mountains, and the wet rocks began to steam. He could not think why he was here, where this place was, why he should be made so uncomfortable. When he tried to move pain brought a threatening blackness. His right hand and arm seemed willing to move when he willed it. He brought his right hand up close to his face. He turned his hand over and looked with distant curiosity, with a clinical remoteness, at the great tear in the heel of his palm, at the thick flap of skin and flesh that lay back over his wrist. It bled slowly.

  Inch by painful inch he turned his body to the right, toward the cliff face, moving his face back from the corner of rock. The hardness that had been across his back now bit into his waist. After another few inches he turned the rest of the way suddenly and the hard thing was across his belly and he was jackknifed across it. And he looked down a steep sickening slant. There was brown rock and sun on steaming brown rock, and a few trees with knotted trunks no bigger than his forearm. Far below him he saw a patch of color, of red and white. He closed his eyes. The height made him feel sick. When he could look again, he knew it was the car. His car. His mind and memory until that moment had been like a dry stream bed. The single act of recognition of the car was like opening a dam at the head of the stream. The waters came roaring down, turbulent, filling it from brim to brim.

  He closed his eyes again. Blood pounded in his head. Have to think, he told himself. Hanging across a tree. Broken all to hell. Thrown clear. Ought to be dead. Can very easily become dead. Just wiggle a little. Slide off the tree. Never feel a thing after the first bounce.

  But it would be nice to see Tulsa Haynes. And Benny Bernholz. And Giz Valerez. And Harry Danton. Maybe, most of all, Harry Danton.

  He felt as though the tree was slowly cutting him in half. He could see his legs, ankles, feet. Both shoes were gone. His left foot was twisted crazily to the side, the ankle big as a melon. Blood dripped from the toes of the right foot. He tried to swallow and could not. His entire face felt numb below the eyes. He touched his face with the fingers of his right hand. He could not identify what he felt. Bone in the wrong place. Splintered things that could be teeth. He let the right arm hang. He wept for himself, wept for the broken body. This was the gateway to death; he was a half step away.

  He felt unconsciousness coming, the way a night shadow moves across a lawn. He fought it back. He looked down again. There was the steep drop. Close below the tree was a ledge. It was more of a crevasse than a ledge. The ledge tilted back. He did not see how he could lower himself to it, lower himself gently enough to keep from continuing on down the slope. But life or death had narrowed down to this one lean chance, with the probability that even if he could manage it, death would only be delayed. He knew he was close to passing out. He caught the trunk of the tree in his torn right hand, and using the leverage, he began to worm his way back. The trunk was across his diaphragm, then his chest. He hooked his left elbow over it, moved further. When the trunk came under his chin, the almost useless left arm slipped. The trunk hit him under the chin. His feet swung against the rock and he made a thin squeaking sound when his left ankle banged. His right hand began to slip as his weight slowly opened his fingers. But as his hand opened the toes of his right foot touched the ledge. He found precarious balance, and when he let go with his hand, he fell against the cliff face, supported by his right foot. He caught an edge of rock with his right hand as he started to topple. It delayed him slightly, but then he fell full on his back, head snapping back to strike the rock, and the shadow moved quickly over him, the world turning dark.

  When he came to, it was a world of blue-gray. He could see the sun on the high peaks across the valley. It took him several moments to decide that it must be nearly night rather than dawn. He watched the sun line move up the peaks. He was thirsty and his body had stiffened. He moved gingerly, painfully, trying to make himself more comfortable. If this was the place to wait for death on this night, then be comfortable, if you can. When the blackness came again, it was not like sleep.

  He awoke and stars were high and he felt he was on fire. In the night he babbled and yelled and had strange bright visions. The yells echoed faintly from the far mountain wall of the deep valley. At dawn the visions were gone and he was cold. In the morning there was rain, another heavy rain. He held his face in the rain, and though he did not have enough feeling in his face to know if his mouth was opened or closed, he felt the coolness trickle into his throat and he was able to swallow after a fashion. He pulled his shirt up with his right hand and squeezed the rain moisture from it into his mouth. The water brought him back from the dulled wait for death.

  When he was able to look around, he saw that his ledge went narrowly around a shoulder of the cliff, and slanted down slightly. He worked himself over onto his belly. He could use his left elbow, his right hand and arm, his right leg. The left leg dangled. He inched himself along. He did not know how long it took to reach the shoulder of the cliff, one hour or six. There he could see the rest of the ledge. It opened out, almost as wide as a road, and went down steeply. After two hundred yards it reached a place where the mountain side was a different texture. There was a long sand slide, studded with róund rocks and boulders. He followed it down with his eyes and saw that it ended at the valley floor where tropic growth was more luxuriant, where a rain-fed stream wound between the great stones that had tumbled down the flanks of the mountains
.

  The sun baked him, drying the moisture out of him. From the height of the sun he guessed it was early afternoon when he reached the long sand slide. He looked down at the water far below and knew he had to reach it. He looked back the way he had come and he felt pride. He laughed aloud and it was a curious croaking sound. He tried to say Harry Danton’s name, but he could not articulate. He sensed the bright edge of delirium again, and fought back to logic and precarious sanity.

  If he got onto the sand, he would go down. That was evident. But he could not go feet first. The left leg would crumple under him and turn him and he might roll. If that started, he would roll and bound among the hard stones. There had to be stability in the slide. The left arm had only limited usefulness. He would have to be able to see, and he would need some slightly effective method of steering himself. He thought about it a long time. Finally, with great effort, he tore a strip from his shirt. He crossed his ankles, left ankle across the right, and bound them clumsily. That way the left would not flop loose and dig into the sand. He eased himself out onto the sand slope. He moved slowly at first, head raised, elbows digging in. As he picked up speed he began to move directly toward a large boulder. The top inches of sand slid along with him. He dug the right elbow deeper and it swung him to the right. He almost lost control. He passed the rock so closely it gave his left elbow a sharp painful crack. This was the steering method the bobsledders used. He went faster. He was taking more sand along. The sand flowed over the smaller stones. He yelled in crazy triumph. Then there were more rocks ahead, and these were jagged ones. It was harder to steer. He clawed with his right hand, trying to dig himself sideways. He missed the rocks but he had lost stability. He had turned and began to roll. He rolled violently down the last of the slope, across hard ground, finally came to rest in the heart of a clump of dense shrubbery, unconscious.

  In the blue of dusk, in the odd reflected light of the last of the sun on the mountains to the east, he crawled to the brook. He drank until his belly felt tight. He spewed up the water weakly and waited a long time and then drank sparingly. When he knew he would retain it, he crawled into the brush that would protect him from the morning sun.

  2

  In mid-morning he crawled out and drank. He had expected to feel stronger, but he felt weaker. He rolled onto his back, shaded his eyes, and looked up the dizzy cliff face. He tried to pick out his ledge, but he could not.

  I got down from there, he thought. I got down alive. And it would have been a good trick for a whole man. I can tell myself I did that much. I have water and shade. Two ingredients. I need a doctor and food. What is today? It was the ninth of May when they found us. I went over the edge at dawn on the tenth. Yesterday was the eleventh. This will be the twelfth. Sunday morning then. A Sunday in May.

  He tried to guess where he was in relation to the smashed car. He closed his eyes and tried to reconstruct how it had looked from the tree. At least it had not burned. It would be wise to get near the car, but not too far from the water. A man on a mountain might spot the car. He might climb down to investigate. There was that frail chance.

  It should be in that direction, on the far side of the stream. Two hundred yards, perhaps. Maybe more. I can try it. There’s nothing else to do.

  He thought for a moment and then his heart began to pound. The car had not burned. Sylvia had liked to keep things in the glove compartment. Cookies, crackers, candy. Her appetite had never softened the trim lines of her body. There would be something there. Enough to give him another day, perhaps. Or two. He began the laborious crawl. He knew it was the only way he could move. Even if he could find a stick and pull himself erect, the bad leg and bad arm were on the same side. If only it could have been the right leg that was bad …

  From time to time he strained up to see the terrain ahead. When the far bank looked better, he pulled himself through a shallow place in the stream, and took time out to soak himself in a pool a foot and a half deep. Water stung the hurts of his body, the knee and elbows raw with crawling.

  On the far bank he found a bush with dark berries. He plucked several and could not decide how he could eat them. His jaw hung slack, badly broken, he knew. He pulped the berries in his fingers, and stuck them into the back of his throat, worked them down with his tongue. They were violently bitter and he coughed them out. The cookies and crackers would be a problem. Perhaps they could be pulped in water, in some sort of container, possibly a hub cap, and drunk like soup.

  He moved on under the height of the sun. He stopped when he heard a curious sound, a flapping and croaking sound. He moved toward it. He saw a black ugly bird rise, croaking, tilt creaking wings and soar down again. Another bird came up and went down. He crawled and parted the brush and saw them in an open space, tearing, quarrelling, wings outspread, a tumult of hunger. He closed his eyes when a shift of the wind brought him the sour-sweet smell of what they had been fighting over. When he opened them again he saw, under the moving blackness, the soiled shreds of pistachio green and of yellow. He cawed at them, a furious sound of anger coming from the broken mouth at this ultimate indignity. He hurled small stones and crawled with painful haste. They went away and sat like deacons on the limbs of low barren trees, observing him. He could not look at what was left of Sylvia, could not bring himself to look. They seemed to recognize his weakness, and they moved closer.

  For the rest of the afternoon, he worked with the furious energy of insanity. He used the stones close to her first, straining with the heavy ones. But there were not enough. He had to go further away each time, and many times he had to go so far they returned to her, the bolder ones, and he had to drive them away when he came back, pushing the stone along in front of him. He worked through the heat of the day with the mindless determination of a half crippled ant, and he made the cairn bigger and stronger than it had to be made.

  Once it was done, his strength ebbed away from him and he lay on his back. The birds seemed to give up; some of them flew away. He watched them work themselves up out of the canyon, laboring up on black wings, circling higher until at last they came into the wind currents off the peaks and circled up there on motionless wings, in evil grace, before gliding off to some unknown place. But there were other birds who waited.

  He turned his head and looked at the cairn. He wished he could speak aloud. But he could make the words in his head, and make them so clear he could read them as though he printed them carefully.

  “This is a prayer. I have not prayed in many years. It isn’t for me. It’s for her. Her name was Sylvia. She sinned. She was a beautiful woman. She was twenty-six years old when she died. She died in terror and in shame and in degradation. She paid more than enough during the last hours she had on earth. She had her hell then. She doesn’t need any more. Take care of her, somehow. Please.”

  He crawled to the stream and drank. He knew he could not crawl much farther. He knew the car would have to wait until the next day, if there would be a next day for him. He crawled into the shelter of the brush and lay on his back and watched, through green leaves, the end of the day. And he thought of how she had been in Mexico City.

  They had driven down from Juarez in three days. The increasing distance had not given her peace of mind. Rather she had seemed to grow more frightened, day by day, pale, nervous, irritable.

  “We’re safe now,” he told her.

  “We’ll never be safe. We shouldn’t have done it. We shouldn’t have tried to do it, Lloyd. We were crazy to try it. We were insane to even think of it. You don’t know what they’re capable of. You don’t know how he’ll feel about this. He can’t let a thing like this go. We’ll never be safe.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Let me take care of things.”

  “You can’t take care of things. You don’t understand them. You don’t know how they are.”

  She refused to be calmed. He found a small and inconspicuous hotel in Mexico City, a hotel with a parking lot in the rear where the car would be well concealed. He left
the money locked in the trunk compartment. It seemed to be the safest place. He took ten of the hundred dollar bills. He had an idea how such things were managed. She refused to leave the small suite. He went out alone. He knew how careful he had to be. When they had been making plans he had managed to find out, without arousing suspicion, the names of those Latin American countries where citizenship could be arranged. There were three of them. He had no luck with the first consular official. His hints were coldly ignored. At the second place he had luck, even though the man made him uneasy.

  The man was named Señor Rillardo, and he had a small unclean office, a look of greed, a rumpled suit, and very small fat white hands.

  “You would like to become a citizen of my country?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “It is necessary first to have a visa and then, after you are there, you make application for an immigrante permit. Then, in two years, if there is approval, after simple tests, you receive first papers. You have a passport?”

  “No sir.”

  “Ah! That makes a problem. What do you have?”

  “This. My tourista card.”

  Rillardo took it and looked at it. “This is your name?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “You could get a passport, Meester Wescott?”

  “I would not care to go back and ask for one. For personal reasons.”

  “For, perhaps, legal reasons?”

  “I am not wanted by the law, Señor Rillardo.”

  Rillardo spread his small hands and said, “Then?”

  “I have an enemy. A very powerful man.”

  “I see.”

  “I have understood that … in cases of emergency … your government is sometimes understanding. Certain shortcuts can be arranged.”

  Rillardo’s face lost all expression. “It is possible. But such things can be very expensive.”