The Empty Trap (17 page)

He was a grotesque sight, a small stocky man with bald spot and clown face, with dark green slacks and yellow sports shirt, with brown and white shoes. He belonged at the corner of Broadway and Forty-fifth, nursing a cigar, watching the women, digesting strawberry cheesecake.

He did not belong in a barren land, strung up in the hot slant of morning sunlight, looking curiously like bait set out to tempt some unimaginable creature.

Lloyd tried to feel satisfaction, to feel the hot delight of the avenger. But all he could feel was a tiredness, and a rather plaintive sympathy for the little man with his pointed and perforated shoes.

The right hand moved first. It lifted tentatively toward the face and dropped again. He saw the eyes open slowly and close, open slowly and close again, and then spring wide open, dilating with horror. The arms and legs made curiously frantic swimming motions and the body tensed. Then the motions started him swinging and the body became rigid, the eyes clenched shut. His breathing was loud and fast.

The eyes opened again and the head turned with great caution and Benny looked into his eyes. Benny’s face was a strange pasty green under the sunburn. “Christ!” he said. “Good Christ!”

“I been wondering about those comic books, Benny. Have you got your anti-grav hooked up?”

“Rosie, for Christ’ sake!”

“Nearly all of those people can fly.” The unsheathed dagger made a silvery flash in the sunlight. Lloyd rested the cutting edge against the taut rope. “The way to teach a kid to swim is throw him into the water, Benny. I want to teach you how to fly.”

Benny screamed. He screamed with each breath he took and then hung slack, eyes closed. He turned his head slowly and Lloyd saw him swallow. “Look, Rosie,” he said pleadingly. “I can’t really fly. Honest. It won’t work.”

“How do we know unless we try?”

“Rosie, you’re sick or something. Honest. Get me back. We’ll go have a beer. No hard feelings.”

“That wouldn’t be fair. We didn’t go have a beer the other time, Benny.”

“What other time?
Who are you?
”

“You remember, Benny. Sure you do. You and Tulsa and Valerez. Tulsa killed Sylvia. Then you shoved us over the cliff in the car.”

Benny stared unbelievingly. His mouth worked. “Wescott,” he whispered. “You couldn’t live through that. I … I saw you. That thing was a mile deep.”

“Lloyd Wescott, Benny. All ready to teach you how to fly.”

“Hold it! Wait. Lloyd, for Christ sake! What do you want? Look! Let me buy out. This won’t do you no good. I know how you feel. You want to get Tulsa and Harry too. Let me help you with them. You got to have help. You can’t do it alone. Look, I’ll help you nail both of them and I’ll give you twenty-five thousand bucks. I swear on my mother’s grave, I won’t cross you. Look, we had to do like Harry said. I always liked you. Honest, I felt bad having to do you like that. It was orders.”

“You were crying while you were burning me.”

“That was Tulsa. He’s half nuts. He likes that stuff.”

“Where can I find Valerez?”

“In hell. He got it in San Antone six months ago. It was a woman thing. Somebody put a knife in him. He lived maybe a week, but they’d cut his gut up too much. I’ll help you with Tulsa, honest. And Harry too.”

“Who else has Harry got hanging around, beside you and Tulsa?”

“Nobody. There’s no trouble. This rope is cutting me in half, Lloyd. Wait a minute. Look. Suppose all of a sudden I disappear. Then Harry will get nervous and he’ll bring some people down, just in case. Then he’ll be too rough for you.”

Lloyd stood up and picked up a rock as big as a basketball. He dropped it over. They watched it hit and splinter. It had seemed to fall for a long time. Benny began to scream again, eyes knotted shut, arms and legs flailing. He sagged once more, panting.

“I guess you’re going to do it,” he said dully. “I get all the breaks. I got all the luck.”

“I’m going to do it.”

“Will you do it another way?”

“What do you mean?”

“Where’s my gun?”

“In the car.”

“From this close you could hardly miss hitting me in the head. Then cut the damn rope.”

Lloyd placed the cutting edge of the dagger against the rope. He knew he had but to make one quick hard slash. Benny would drop away. Benny watched him. Lloyd could not bring himself to slash hard. He could not make that final decisive motion. He sawed gently, tentatively. Some of the fibers parted and then one strand popped and the two ends curled back. Benny began to scream again. The sound was lost in the emptiness of the land. He screamed and his mouth frothed and his body twisted and swung and turned.

Lloyd then realized he had come a long way to learn something about himself. He had come a long way, and across more than two years to find out that he could not kill. He tried to tell himself this man was evil, that his crimes made him unfit to live. Lloyd’s hatred and his anger had been the margin that sustained him, that had kept him alive. He had thought he was hardened all the way through, that he could act without mercy. But there was still a softness.

He watched Benny. The convulsions of terror went on and on. He called to him, but he could not get his attention. He realized that something inside the man had broken. He could not leave him there. He could not cut the rope. The only recourse left to him was to bring him back. He decided the simplest method was to get Benny swinging hard enough so that he could reach out and grasp a wrist or ankle. But Benny, in madness and terror, might pull him over the brink. Better, perhaps, to pull Benny up against the limb. Then he could grasp it and turn and pull himself up onto it and work his way back to the trunk.

He pulled the crazed man up. Benny caught at the limb. He half turned and hooked a leg over it. He worked his way up until he lay flat on the limb, hugging it with arms and legs, eyes shut, each breath a sob. Lloyd waited for a long time. He called to him. Benny would not respond. He was frozen there. When Lloyd tugged on the rope, Benny held the limb more tightly. It was
ludicrous to have him so close to safety and have him be so unaware of it. There seemed to be only one thing to do. Benny was securely fastened to the rope. Lloyd decided to brace himself, and pull the man free of the limb, pull him back toward the trunk. If he fell he would not fall far. He would bang against the cliff face and could be pulled up from there.

He braced himself and pulled. The limb creaked. He pulled again. There was a sudden splintering crack, and both Benny and the limb fell. The sudden weight ripped the rope through his hands. Then the weight came hard against the full length of the rope. Some of the turns of rope had slipped off the outcropping, but the end was secure. The rope popped loudly and was limp in his torn hands. He heard the final sound, a fading hoarseness from a throat too punished to scream again. And a thick sound in the arroyo bed, a sound as of a ball of mud slapped against a stone wall.

He looked at the end of the rope. It had parted where he had sliced one strand with the knife. He sat for a long time. Finally he walked to where it was an easy descent to the bottom. He cut the stained rope free of the body. He walked thirty feet away and was sick. He covered the body with sand and stones. He buried the rope in another place.

At nine thirty he was at work. The kitchen sounds were loud. Waiters were laughing and talking. Over all the sounds he kept hearing that final fading shout.

Two full days passed before Lloyd began to come out of it. He did his work with mechanical unthinking perfection, speaking only when it was necessary to speak. During his off duty hours he went to his room and
stretched out on the bed and tried to understand why this had shocked him so deeply. He had thought it would be far different. He had visualized it all so many times. But one basic thing had been left out of his calculations—the psychic aspect of killing. The bloody destruction of the human animal. The stilling of the cleverness of the brain. And he began to understand why the murderer so often gives himself away. Even if the justification seems ample, there is a dimension to murder that cannot be sensed until after the deed. He wanted to go back and look at the place where it had happened. He wanted to try to explain to someone how it had happened, and why.

He had thought himself capable of the same callousness he had experienced at their hands. He had been misled by his own hatred, and by the mores of the tough fiction he had read. The taking of a human life ran so completely counter to the concepts of morality that had been instilled in him as a child that self-revulsion was like a sickness in him. He had learned why some soldiers, in battle, cannot shoot.

The exiles from Pinal Blanco had a simpler approach. Their morality was contingent on a sense of honor and pride. Their approach to life and death was primitive. He had imagined himself capable of using their philosophy as his own. But under it he was still a boy from a small town. Death was something with a sad sick smell of flowers, and the dull gleam of bronze handles, and the solemn intonations of the minister. Death was something that happened, not something to be caused.

He did not know what he would do next. It no longer seemed necessary to him to work in this place. It no longer seemed possible to take any pride in the cleverness with which he had gotten close to the men he had wanted to kill. Even the two years of hatred seemed, in retrospect, self-conscious and shameful.

He decided that he would work here until he had found out what he should do with himself, with his life.

Ten days after the killing of Benny, he awakened and
was aware that someone was leaning over him in the darkness of his room. Before he could react, before he could feel anything except surprise, there was a great whirling flash of light inside his head.

When he awakened he was in a moving darkness. He could hear a sound of metal wheels on stone. There was softness against his face, and he smelled soiled linen. He was curled up, knees against his chest. His head throbbed. The sound of wheels stopped. He heard the sound of a heavy door shutting. Then his world tipped violently and he rolled out across a concrete floor. He sat up, surrounded by dirty sheets and towels. He saw what he had ridden in, one of the wheeled hampers used by the room maids.

Tulsa Haynes stood over him, hard fists on his hips, Indian face without expression. Harry Danton stood beside Tulsa, one step to the rear. Danton stared intently at Lloyd. He held his hand out so as to shield the bottom of Lloyd’s face from his vision.

“Maybe you’re right,” Danton said.

“I don’t see how the hell I can be. I told you just how it was. But I know I’m right.”

“Get up and walk around,” Harry said.

“What’s this all about, Mr. Danton?”

“Get up and walk around like I told you.”

“Yes, sir.”

He walked around while they looked at him.

“You see it?” Tulsa asked.

“He’s the same height. But he’s a lot huskier. He moves slower. His voice is deeper.”

“Right from the minute I saw him, I wondered about him,” Tulsa said. “After Benny disappeared, I wondered some more. I didn’t figure him for Wescott. I figured him as maybe somebody planted here, somebody I seen once or twice long ago. Charlie fingered him. He took a good look and said maybe Wescott. Then the more I look, the more he looks like him.”

“Would Wescott be damn fool enough to come here?”

“Maybe. What happened to Benny. You want the proof?”

“Can you hammer it out of him?”

“I don’t have to. Take off your socks, Wescott.”

As Lloyd had only had a two hour break from duty, he had stretched out in socks, dark trousers, white shirt. He looked at Tulsa and Harry. The room had concrete walls, overhead pipes, a single heavy door. He knew it was one of the side rooms in the subbasement. He knew Tulsa would look for the burn scars on the tops of his feet and see them and know.

“Nice to see you again, Harry,” he said.

Harry shook his head wonderingly. “You poor damn fool,” he said. He turned sharply toward Tulsa. “You bitched it up.”

“If you could have watched it, Harry, you wouldn’t say so. Look at him! Look at his face. You tell me why it didn’t kill him.”

“You’re tough to kill, kid. Thanks for coming back and giving us another chance. Did you get Benny?”

He hesitated. “Yes.”

“How?” Tulsa asked.

“I dropped him off a cliff.”

“Who was next?” Tulsa asked.

“You.”

“And then me,” Harry said. “You boys must have gotten the kid real upset. Take care of it, Tulsa.”

“You want to watch?”

“I’ve seen it before.”

Harry turned again at the door and shook his head and said, “You poor damn fool!” He left, pulling the door shut.

There were two wall lights with pull cords. Tulsa pulled the other one on. He whistled softly. He took off his khaki shirt, folded it, put it on the floor in a corner. He worked his arms and shoulders like a fighter waiting for the bell.

“Benny was a good boy,” Tulsa said.

“I didn’t think so.”

“We been together a long time. I’m going to miss having him around. Nobody is going to miss having you around, Wescott. I’m going to make this last. I never had such a
good chance to make something last. You know, we may waltz around down here for a week. Nobody’s in any hurry. You in a hurry?”

Lloyd stood tensely, shifted his weight warily, turning toward Tulsa as he moved around, shadow-boxing.

“Like this left jab? Lotta snap, hey? Take a good look.”

The jab snapped his head back. He moved away. He wondered how much his face could stand, if the pinned bones would crush easily, if the nose would tear along the stitched line. But he knew this was a trivial consideration. Tulsa meant to kill him. Tulsa had killed Sylvia with his hands. The bare room provided no possibility of a weapon. Tulsa bounded with rubbery elasticity. He moved from side to side, feinting, clowning, grinning, and Lloyd realized he was being maneuvered into a corner.

He tried to slip away, but he could not. As Tulsa came in, he swung a right at his face as hard as he could, but it slipped over Tulsa’s shoulder and again he was as helpless as he had been in the motel room at Talascatan. Tulsa wedged him into the corner, pivoting, grunting, with each blow, and it seemed that the fists were tearing holes in his body and his strength was running from those holes. As before, he sagged against the man, chin bouncing on the sweaty shoulder, teeth clacking, room dancing in his vision. He half saw the ear, a small neat folded ear, like the ear of a trim animal. He caught the rubbery texture in his teeth, ripped hard.