The Empty Trap (13 page)

“Try the roof deck first. There’s something wrong with the fountain again.”

He knew Foster would be on the roof. That would give him five to seven minutes. He had timed it. As soon as she had gone, he raced into his office, snatched
the blue bag, dropped it on the floor beside the safe. He pulled the door open, picked up the wedge when it fell. He scooped out the thick stack of envelopes in the big drawer used for guest valuables. Two big double handfuls filled the blue bag. He zipped it shut, closed the safe door, replacing the wedge, carried the bag into his office and put it out of sight on the floor behind his desk. He was breathing hard. He had worked just inside an open door, not quite in view of the lobby. The two desk men were ten steps away from the open door, and came in often during the day. Two girl cashiers were on the front this time of day, and either of them could have stepped, in. The main switchboard was fifteen feet from the open door. It was a calculated risk. When he dropped the bag beside his desk he checked the sweep second hand of his watch and saw that it had taken just forty seconds.

He sat behind his desk and saw Mrs. Boyer return. He went out and asked for her key again. “Sorry. I should have put both of these in at the same time. How is the fountain coming?”

“Between cuss words, I would guess from what he said it will be working before noon.”

“Good.” He retrieved the rubber wedge and this time he relocked the safe. When he gave her the key, he said, “Tell Betty I’ve gone into the village on some errands.”

Guests who checked valuables were informed they could be retrieved between the hours of nine and eleven, unless they were checking out. Mrs. Boyer said, “Suppose I have to get into the safe, Mr. Wescott?”

“Stall them along,” he said, smiling. “I won’t be long.”

He walked out of the hotel, slowly, trying to look casual. His legs trembled. He got into the car, and as he turned around, he looked once at the hotel, looked at it for the last time, and then drove down the road. The blue MG was parked in the supermarket lot. Sylvia stood waiting in a patch of shade. She walked out and got into the car beside him, yanked the door shut. He drove away.

She looked tautly ahead. Her face looked white and shiny.

“Got it?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“I have no idea. Enough, though.”

“My God, I’m scared. I’m scared. I’m scared.”

“Easy, honey. Take deep breaths. Harry is away. This is how it will work. By noon they’ll just be annoyed with me. They won’t start to get upset until midafternoon. Even then, they won’t tie us together. There won’t be any panic until tonight, and I don’t think they’ll get into that safe until tomorrow.”

“I think I’ll be scared all the rest of my life. You don’t know what they’re capable of. You don’t know what they can do.”

“Nothing they can do can be worse than staying there. We’ll cross at Juarez some time tomorrow. It’s further, but it’s safer. We’ll push it hard tonight. After we’re over, you’ll cheer up.”

But she hadn’t. She had stayed in panic. Her love-making had been conditioned by her tension and her fear. Only after they had gotten to Talascatan did she begin to seem a little more like herself. One hundred and ten thousand dollars seemed like a great deal of money. But when you thought that it was only sixty percent of what Charlie had stolen from the two Texans, it did not seem like so very much. All of her life had been cruel and hard, but it had not killed a tenderness in her, a capacity for love which she denied having. They could make some kind of a life, and try to make it good.

“You,” she said, as they walked back in the velvety night from Talascatan to the motel, “You are what I never had and what I wanted and couldn’t let myself know I wanted it. A three drugstore man. A man who grew up on shady streets. A man with some boy left in him. We won’t make it, Lloyd, if we loaf for the rest of our life. I want to work. I want us to work on something together.”

“Like?”

“We’ll loaf for a while, then maybe we can start something. A little place where you can eat and have a clean room and a drink. No staff. Just maybe a couple of local servants. Nothing so big anybody will ever hear of it. Just a little place in a hidden corner of the world.”

“Kids?”

“We’ve never talked about that, have we? Remember when I told you not to worry? I didn’t tell you why. I guess you should know, and maybe it will be important to you and you will feel cheated, but I couldn’t tell you before. I’ve had two abortions. The first one cost sixty dollars and the place was filthy and I felt fine in a week. The second one cost fifteen hundred and the little sanitarium was immaculate, and it nearly killed me, and it fixed me so there won’t be any. Are you terribly sorry?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I always thought I’d like kids around. If I have to have them around, somebody will be able to spare some kids to the reech Americano.”

“You’re nice, Lloyd. Now I think we’re going to have a long and happy life, and I’m going to try to stop being afraid, really.”

“Long and happy,” he said, and stopped on the shoulder of the dark road and kissed her, and they went on, hand in hand, swinging their clasped hands. That was the night Tulsa, Benny and Valerez waited. So her life was short indeed, and as unpretty as a short life can be made.

His legs began to feel chilled. He sat up and saw that the shadow of one of the western rocks lay across them. He sat up and scratched his beard and stretched until his shoulders creaked. He had been far
away, and had thought a long time, and had remembered many things vividly. Perhaps there could never be a single explicit answer to the question of why it had happened. Infatuation, the feeling of being trapped, pity, sexual auto-hypnosis, perhaps all had conjoined to provide him with a rationalization. It served him at the time, and carried him along through a series of acts he would once have thought impossible even to contemplate.

As he dressed slowly, he thought of what all the people he had known would think of him. Even though Harry wouldn’t call in the police, he could not keep it from the staff. The staff would know, and then it would become known throughout the special world of the big resort hotels. “You remember, Wescott? Real tall guy. Good operator. Young. Know what the son of a bitch did? Ran off with the owner’s wife and a couple of hundred grand. It was all hushed up. Isn’t that a hell of a thing?”

And they would talk about it on the late desk shifts and in the linen rooms and behind the bars. And shrug and say it goes to show you can’t ever really figure people out.

There would be talk too, in another world, in a shadowy world of hotel rooms, race tracks, private rooms in road houses, back rooms in bars. They would talk about it from another angle. “You know what happened to Harry? He married that Sylvia, the one that was married to Frenchy. He had this kid running his big new hotel. So the kid takes off with Sylvia and a big chunk of the take. How far did they get? How the hell should I know how far they got? Are you stupid or something? The only thing I know is one thing, pal. The word isn’t out. Nobody at all is looking for that pair. So you figure it out your own way.”

He walked slowly back to the hut. There would be other people talking, too. His brother and his wife. His parents in the trailer in Bradenton. Sad talk. Speculation. He knew they would go to the police. He could see them talking to the police—or to Harry. And he would see Harry’s spread hands, the wide-eyed look of complete innocence. “How the hell should I know where
your son went, Mr. Wescott? I was away. I come back and I find he’s walked out. I did a hell of a lot for that boy, and he took off without even giving notice. What’s that? They traced him as far as the Mexican border? Then maybe you better look down there instead of asking me questions. I’m a busy man.”

He thought of his own people and tried to feel sadness and regret. He could, but the emotion was muted. They were far away. They mourned a man who was dead. That was a sad thing and it could not be helped. They could take no pleasure in the man who the son and brother had become. They would not even be able to recognize him. There could be no talk between them, nothing in common. The boy part of the man died in a Mexican motel. The Lloyd Wescott of other years, the efficient, smiling host was like somebody he had once known, and not known very well. They could never understand or condone what this man planned to do. One turned the other cheek. Revenge was barbaric. Murder was unthinkable.

He began to be able to work harder and longer. One high school summer he had worked on a road gang, pick and shovel work. But the hours had been shorter, the breaks more frequent. He had never done manual labor this difficult. The men and boys he worked with seemed tireless. He knew he would never again think of a Mexican as a man dozing, leaning on a wall, sombrero tipped over his eyes. He could not yet do as much as they did, but he could take pride in being harder and stronger and more tireless than ever before in his life. He slept when dark came, and got up in greyness when the chickens were making the first sleepy sounds of awakening. His hands grew hard. He gained weight very slowly. His muscles were like ropes under hide that was nearly as dark as that of anyone in the settlement. He knew that soon he would be able to leave.

Then he became sick. They were working on one of the farthest hillsides, chopping out the tough growth, dragging it into the valley. He worked in a place protected
from the wind, stripped to the waist. The cold driving rain came almost without warning, drenching all of them. They found shelter and, after the hour-long rain had passed, began to work again. He felt curiously lightheaded. When they headed for the huts, he knew he was sick. He could not eat. He lay under all the covering they could spare, and he could not get warm. He shivered violently. They gave him remedies. After a time he became so hot he could not stand it under the blankets. Later he slept. When he awakened he knew it was the middle of the night. One of the boys was whining in his sleep. Armando and Concha slept in the other room. Isabella and the boys slept on the pallets in this room. They were rolled up and put out of the way during the daytime. He had never been so cold. His shivering was like a continual shudder, and there was a painful chattering of his broken teeth. He lay fully dressed under the coverings, hugging himself. In spite of the faint red glow of the charcoal, he could see the plume of his breath in the moonlight that came through the smoke hole in the thatch. Others would sleep in coldness this night that he might be warmed.

He lay with his eyes squeezed shut, trying to control the shivering, and gave a start when he felt a light touch on his shoulder. He could make out Isabella on her knees, leaning over him.

“You are very cold,” she whispered.

“I am all right.”

“No. It is not right.” She moved away into the shadows and when she came back he felt her spread more covering over him.

“That is yours. You will freeze, Isabella.”

She did not answer him. She pulled up the corner of his bedding and wiggled quickly under and flattened herself against him and held him in a strong warmth.

“You should not do this.” It was difficult to talk clearly, he was so cold.

“Agh! I did it before, many times, when we thought in the night the life would go out of your body. I felt that I held it there, and it could not go out of your cold
body if I held it very tightly. And you see, it did not.”

“This is a different kind of sickness. You will get it from me.”

“No. I am never sick.”

Still he shivered. She made a small sound of exasperation and held him the tighter, entwining his legs, rubbing his back with her hand, pulling his head down into the warm place between her throat and shoulder. Yet still he was cold. She released him, fumbled with the front of his shirt and opened it to the waist. She did something to her own night garment. Then she held him as before, and their bodies, bare from throat to waist, were pressed tightly and warmly together, and he could feel the round firm breasts against him.

“Now,” she said. “Now be warm, pobrecito, pobrecito, muñeco mio.”

Slowly then, the cold began to leave his body. The continual shivering turned to spasms that came less frequently, and were less severe. His teeth no longer chattered. And he feared that when at last he was warm, she would leave him. He wanted her to be with him in this way, to feel the lift and touch of her unbraided hair on his forehead as she breathed, to feel the pressing firmness of the warm body. His hand was on her waist. He wanted to caress her, but did not dare for fear she would leave. Moment by moment he became more conscious of her as a woman in his arms. He had not held a woman in a long time. In a previous existence he had held a woman, but never in this one.

Slowly he began to sense that she was as aware as he was, that there was a controlled tension about her. He dared then, to make the hand that rested on her waist tighten slightly. Her breathing changed, seeming to become slightly deeper as it quickened. He could not tell if it was something he imagined. And then there was an odd sensation against his chest, a curious sort of movement that at first he could not identify. Then suddenly, with joy and knowledge and certainty of what would come, he realized that her breasts were swelling and tightening against him. He kissed her throat and she uttered a long
whispering sigh with a catch in her breath at the end of it.

The children slept. The moon came down through the hole in the thatch. The straw of the shared pallet shifted, rustled. There came from her lips a quick thin sound of shock and pain, a sharp intake of breath. There was a long silence in the night. Then, slowly, there began a pattern in the barely audible rustle of the pallet, a rhythm as old as the earth and as old as the sea, the rhythm of fruitfulness and the deep promise of life.

In the remote glow of the false dawn he heard the flap of the hanging goat skin, and he opened his eyes. Armando stood three feet inside the door and looked toward him. It seemed to Lloyd that Armando was looking directly into his eyes, though the light was so vague he knew that could not be possible. He was painfully aware of the sleeping dark head so close to his own, her breath in his ear, a shock of the black hair across his throat. And there was enough light to see the emptiness of her pallet.