Traps

Alan was getting into the truck to head farther out in the Ridges when he heard Addie’s yelp of pain—not the barking that meant look! or the yips that tried to coax him out of the house, but a canine cry. He hurried down the slope, sweeping his gaze over the pasture, squinting into the stand of trees along the creek. Addie’s cries sounded panicked, and he could hear her thrashing. He reached the edge of the creek bank and ran around the bend. He found her trying to climb out of the dirty water and half-slid down through the faded weeds. Her front right paw was clamped in a steel trap.

Addie was frantic, scrabbling against the side of the creek, covered in mud, keening. The trap was secured by its chain to the bank but slipped in and out of the water as she fought to free herself. On his knees, Alan struggled to get a hold of it. Addie growled and nipped him, but her teeth only caught his coat sleeve. She latched them onto her own front leg and gnawed. He elbowed her away. With an arm over her head, he got a hand on each spring, pushed the trap against the dirt—Addie yelping—and threw his weight into his arms. It didn’t budge. He tried again. Addie’s head knocked him in the jaw, her nose smearing mud across the stubble on his cheek.

He couldn’t release the trap. It was jammed, or he couldn’t apply enough force. Because of the slope there was no way to stand on the springs. Addie, part Labrador but more compact, was solid enough to knock Alan off-balance with her frantic darts. She bared her teeth—the first time since he had brought her home years ago. He tried to soothe her with his voice as he climbed the bank.

It was November, the world cold and washed of color, and as he ran back to the truck, the dry grass felt wiry and nearly tripped him. Farther up the hill, his cattle were watching, motionless but wary. Alan found a crowbar in the truck’s tool chest and sprinted back down to the creek, where Addie’s teeth clacked against the trap, trying to bite it off. He braced one arm against her and wedged the crowbar into the thin gap beside her smashed paw, shoved his boot against one spring to anchor it, leaned with all his strength. Addie tugged free.   

While she licked her paw, Alan used the crowbar to dig and pry out the trap’s anchor, then brushed it free of crumbling mud. No tag. Figured.

Alan wiped a hand, muddy and stiff in the cold, on his coat and took out his cell phone. He dialed his wife, Rose, and told her to have warm water and towels ready. He carried the trap up the bank and called Addie to come. She looked so valiant, hobbling up the slope with her front paw held to her chest. Alan picked her up and carried her to the truck.

*

Four miles away and fifteen years earlier, Alan’s daughter Marissa, age 11, knelt before a foot trap at the edge of a harvested corn field and looked into the yellow eyes of a great horned owl. One talon, thick as her finger, curled and caught in metal teeth. Marissa’s friend Jeremy stood behind the bird, bent over with a hand around each of its legs, gently but firmly holding its wings against its body and its head forward. 

“See the springs on either side? Like levers. Push them down,” he instructed.

Marissa moved closer. The backs of her chapped hands brushed the owl’s soft lower feathers. The owl remained still, eyes round as nickels. The rusted metal felt harsh against her fingers. She pressed down, then inched forward so she could use the heels of her hands.

“Just push hard. It’ll give,” Jeremy said.

The trap flattened, releasing the talon. Jeremy eased up slightly and Marissa slid the trap out from beneath the bird. The owl scarcely moved.

Jeremy held it. He glanced up at Marissa and saw the same awe on her face. He’d called her just after checking his traps that morning. She’d ridden her bike three miles to his house and he’d driven them in the four-wheeler through the flat part of the valley, over the roughage of a faded summer, down near the river. 

“Think it will be okay?” Marissa asked.

Jeremy could feel the strength coiled in the bird, the thickness of its legs, the sharp snag of its beak, the cords in its wings, the slightest tremor. He didn’t doubt that it could rake his body open, yet here he was.

He bent forward until he could feel the owl’s feet against the ground. He released his grip, lifted his arms away and stepped back, at any moment prepared to drop and cover his head with his arms. But the owl didn’t rise in a torrent of flapping wings. It just stood there, watching. Marissa and Jeremy lingered, until finally there was nothing to do but leave it.

“That was awesome,” Marissa shouted to him as they drove home, bumping over broken corn stalks, Jeremy testing speed as he always did on the vast flat stretches, as if afraid the gaping sky would swallow them. Their eyes felt dry as marbles. They squinted. “I want to go with you to check traps sometimes,” Marissa went on. “I want to see some other animals up close. The raccoons and badgers and stuff.”

“You know I shoot them, don’t you?” Jeremy flung back. “And I’ve never caught a badger.”

“You could teach me,” Marissa said. “To use a gun. My dad doesn’t trap. Or hunt.”

The owl was gone when Jeremy checked back the next day. He did teach Marissa to shoot—junk off the top of a round bale, a couple of squirrels. But he gathered up all his traps within a week of freeing the owl. For a long time, that owl was enough.

*

Alan hung the bent trap by the gate to the Ridges, along with a sign that said, “NO TRAPPING.” A few days later, the trap was gone, so he thought whoever it was had gotten the message. Either that or someone got a free trap. Figured.

He heard Rose telling Marissa about it on the phone one night while he was flipping channels. “Your dad was pissed,” Rose said in the kitchen. “That dog is like his baby—like his bear cub.”

Dad’s a momma bear? Alan imagined his daughter saying with her wry snort. She was perpetually amused at both parents.

“I’m just saying she’s his daughter now, you know. Since you left. Addie’s your replacement.”

Rose was fond of saying this, though it was hardly true, just timing. Their old dog, Rupert, had passed away the first fall Marissa went to college, and the following spring Alan decided just for fun to visit the shelter. Of course you couldn’t go there and not bring something home. Unlike Rupert, Addie didn’t sit and soulfully beg through the glass to be let into the house. When Alan got home from the insurance office, she could hardly wait for him to change clothes and come outside to tend his hobby herd, acquired years ago as an investment for his daughters and because he’d always wanted cows. Shannon was married now and had two boys. Marissa—well, still getting on her feet, but once she had that law degree, she’d be fine. He tried to remember that.

Addie was an outside dog and loved to ride the four miles to the 120 acres where he kept most of his herd, a rumpled line of hills someone in the family had named “the Ridges” long ago. When the girls were little and rode with him, Alan had liked to gun the truck up and over the crests, their stomachs lifting at the sudden drop, their little-girl squeals.

It had been several years now since Marissa had gone off to college. But while Rose didn’t like to admit it—and of course had always wanted, even expected, Marissa to attend college—Alan always heard the slight accusation in her voice, that underlying unhappiness at Marissa’s absence, resentment that her daughter had willingly gone so far from home. Alan liked to tell her she should be happy that Shannon had come back and settled in the same county, when her husband was from the other side of the state.

“Let me see if your dad’s still awake, and I’ll put him on the phone,” Alan heard Rose say. “Oh. Okay, sweetie, I’ll let you go then. I’ll tell him you say hi.”

A couple of weeks later, Alan and Addie were again checking cattle down at the Ridges. Alan had just called Addie and was watching her run toward him when the second trap snapped and caught her. For a split second, it was almost comical the way the dog, jogging, about to break into a run, was suddenly and swiftly yanked back and down, her chest plunging into the ground. In different circumstances, Alan might have mused about the fine line between humor and sadness. Instead, Addie’s shriek pierced him, and he took off running. This time the trap wasn’t coated in mud, and Alan was able to stand on it to free her quickly. It was the other front paw this time. Addie staggered away, limping. Alan dropped to his knees and she circled back, curling herself against him, licking her paw and then his hands.

Alan blinked at the pressure of the blood rushing behind his eyes. He stroked Addie’s bobbing head, so angry his hands were trembling. He wanted to shoot someone. At least, he wanted to beat someone on the head with a heavy board. He cursed fiercely until that didn’t help.

Checking fence and counting cattle later, Addie still determined to trot by his side, Alan went over in his mind what he could do about the traps. That one, nestled in the grass along the flat land by the creek—he could have stepped in it. A cow could have stepped in it. What asshole would put traps there? He didn’t care so much about the trespassing—land was land. Traps were another thing. He looked again at his dog, squatted down to inspect her paw. He’d had enough. 

*

Marissa was the reason for Jeremy’s short-lived acting career, otherwise known as the spring musical, Bye Bye Birdie, his senior year of high school. They shared an odd (and in Jeremy’s case, secret) fondness for cheesy old musicals, cultured by grandparents’ care in their formative years. Riding bikes together as kids, they’d belt out “Bless Your Beautiful Hide” from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and “With a Little Bit of Luck” (in their best Cockney) from My Fair Lady. Marissa begged Jeremy, who never went out for anything, who’d always opted for shop class as his elective, to audition since it was his last chance, and he was given the lead role, “Albert.” Unfortunately, Marissa, a junior, did not land the part of “Rosie” despite three years in choir. The girl who got the part was the second girl Jeremy ever kissed.

On stage, Jeremy dazzled, and afterward people said it was such a shame he was graduating, what out-of-the-blue talent. Jeremy and Marissa showed up at the after-party wiping makeup from their smeared faces, giddy as clowns.

After graduation, Jeremy went off to an automotive tech program a couple of hours from home, and whenever he came back, when he wasn’t hanging out with Marissa, he was restoring his grandfather’s 1965 Chevrolet C10 pickup truck. Sometimes he sang show tunes in the shed, his voice bouncing off the metal and concrete.

Jeremy finished the paint job just before Marissa’s May birthday—“Copperhead Metallic Pearl.” The truck shone like a new penny. He went into town to pick up a pizza at Connor’s Kitchen, with pineapples on half for Marissa. Connor looked out the front window and said, “Holy shit, is that the C10?” and a couple of people sitting at the bar looked out, too, and then they were all outside and Jeremy was lifting the hood and explaining everything he’d fixed and replaced. By the time they were done marveling, Connor said, “I’d better heat this thing up again, unless you want cold pizza on your date tonight.”

When Jeremy picked Marissa up, she said, “Wow, look at this. The fabled truck you haven’t let me see.” They drove down to the Ridges to watch the sunset. Jeremy parked on the hill above the creek and spread a blanket in the truck, and they ate pizza in the orange light. He was the happiest he’d ever been, despite Marissa graduating soon and moving to a college six hours away. Still, he’d drive her around in it all summer. He’d plan all kinds of things for them to do and give her the best summer ever before she moved. He loved her so much.

Two years later, he was married to a girl named Shelby.

*

Alan decided to set his own trap. Attack the vehicle. Something fixable, but infuriating. He could justify that in his head.

He found a board studded with rusted nails in the junk pile by his machine shed and added a few more nails for good measure. Then he drove down to the Ridges, and with a spade cut a line through the weeds across the drive that spanned the ditch between the road and the pasture, the obvious place for the trapper to pull in and park. He nestled the board into the dirt, nails pointing up, and disguised it with sod and weeds. 

He hid the board on Wednesday afternoon. On Thursday, Alan left the house at dawn and drove to the Ridges. No one. He continued down the road, turned, looped around two miles over.

He drove by four more times before he had to head into the office. Guy must not check his traps every day. Definitely an asshole. 

Friday, he drove around again. Saturday, Rose couldn’t believe how early he was up, but he just said something vague about checking on the cows and hurried out. Since he didn’t have to work, he took Addie along. It looked to be a day of clear weather, the sky a brilliant gold-and-rose in the east over a monochrome landscape.

When he came over the hill, within view of the Ridges, his heart leapt. A truck was parked in the drive. 

He knew that truck.

Alan parked along the road. He couldn’t see anyone. He opened the truck door and Addie jumped out before he could stop her. She barked and bounded off under the fence and into the pasture. Alan tried to call her back, but she either didn’t hear or ignored him. He went around to the driver’s side of the copper-colored C10. It was definitely pulled up far enough. Shit. He bent over and looked under the truck, brushing back the grass.

Suddenly there was Addie again, right beside him and nosing at the ground. He glanced up but still didn’t see anyone. He sifted more urgently through the weeds, elbowing Addie out of the way—there it was. He yanked, pulling the board out from under the truck and toward the road, Addie bumping against his legs excitedly. Then her ears perked toward the pasture, and he knew Jeremy had come into view. He held the board in one hand. Addie bolted. He lunged for her. The board dropped, snagging on his coat sleeve. He had the dog’s back legs wrapped in one arm but fell and thew a hand back to catch himself. Landed with iron meeting bone through his palm. The board was no longer a separate object, it was attached to his hand, somehow searing up his arm. He scrabbled, braced the board beneath his weight, gripped his wrist with his other hand and wrenched. He staggered to his feet, cursing.

Addie jumped around his legs and now there was Jeremy, a trap slung over his shoulder. “What the hell?”

“The hell are you doing trapping down here?”

“I’m not, anymore. I was trying to find this last trap. It was half-buried… What the fuck is that doing there?” Jeremy said, looking at the board. “What’d you do to your hand?”

“Fell,” Alan said through gritted teeth. Then, since it was no use hiding it, he held up his bleeding hand.

“Jesus, a doctor better see that. Get in, I’ll drive.” 

 “No.” Alan didn’t move. “That’s not a good idea.” He pointed to the front tires.

Jeremy looked at the board, then at his truck. “Sonofabitch. Guess we’re taking your truck.”

*

They were flying along Highway 59 when Jeremy finally said, “That was a jackass, shitty thing to do.”

“You caught Addie twice in those fucking traps.”

“I didn’t even know you had her! That old dog you had never left the side of your house! How was I supposed to know your dog’s running around at the Ridges?”

“What if I had stepped on one?”

“Oh, come on, none of them were in places you’d walk—”

“The hell they weren’t—that’s my land! You don’t fucking trap on land without asking first!”

“Yeah, fine, whatever, bad me—I’m not the sicko hiding boards with the nails pointing up. What if I hadn’t parked there? What if I’d walked on one? That part’s not even trespassing.”

Addie sat between them, tongue hanging. 

Alan had his hand balled up in an old t-shirt stained with motor oil. He removed it and looked—not bleeding much anymore, but he could see inside his hand. “Christ,” he swore. 

*

Jeremy had the window rolled down and was smoking in the parking lot when Alan came out of the hospital, sterilized, injected, bandaged. “You’ve still got two hands,” Jeremy said over Addie’s excited barking. He reached over her to open the passenger door. “Lucky.”

Alan’s truck smelled like grease and hash browns—fresh McDonald’s wrappers were balled up on the floor. Jeremy started the truck and held out the pack of cigarettes.

“I quit,” Alan said.

“Me too,” Jeremy said, lipping his cigarette as he put the truck into gear and eased them out of the lot. He blew smoke out the window. “By the way, I called Rose.”

“What the hell?” Alan sputtered. 

“Jeez, relax. I didn’t call her. How mean do you think I am?”

Not mean, Alan thought. Never once when Marissa was going with him did Alan think the kid was mean. Jeremy’s parents were decent people, Jeremy didn’t get in much trouble, liked cars a lot, had that crazy spurt at the end of high school where everyone realized he could sing and act.

“Foot traps—that’s a cruel way to kill things,” Alan said. “Why do you do that?”

“I don’t know. For the power of it. Because I can. Because lots of people do. Pick your reason.” Jeremy took another drag.

They were out of town, back on the highway now, everything bright in the late-morning sun. Addie was stretched out between them, chin on Jeremy’s thigh and her tail whacking Alan’s. He remembered now that Jeremy had been married, had a kid even, but it had fallen through. “Where’re you living now?” he asked.

“You know Bill Knudson? That old house he owns south of Irwin.”

“Just you there?”

“Just me. And some stray cats.” Jeremy threw his cigarette butt out the window. “I get Mason on some weekends if Shelby doesn’t throw a fit.”

“Still working for Mike?”

“Yeah. People always have vehicle problems. Most of them,” he added, “are accidents.”

They didn’t say anything for a couple of miles. Jeremy turned on to the gravel road. “Marissa—how’s she doing?” he asked.

“She’s in Chicago now,” Alan said. “At Loyola. Decided she wanted to be a lawyer.”

“Yeah, I knew she was over there. Does she like it?”

“You two keep in touch?”

“Text once in a while. She seems busy.”

“She is. She seems to like it okay, though. She was in Phoenix for a short time after college. Fun place to visit, but too far away. Rose hated that.”

“Yeah, I bet. Chicago’s still pretty far.”

“It is.”

“You hear from her often?”

“Not enough.”

They reached the Ridges, parked and got out. “Yep,” Jeremy said, looking at his front tires, the truck just beginning to sag. “Looks like you got me.”

“Let’s take them in to Mike’s,” Alan said. “I’ll pay for it.”

“How generous.” 

The cattle had gathered down around the gate, spectating as Jeremy retrieved a tire iron from the cab and began to loosen the lugs. Alan fetched his own iron and tried to help, but he soon moved out of the way. The C10 looked great, clean and well-kept. Alan thought about the 1957 Chevy Cameo moldering in his machine shed under decades of dust. Over the years, Rose had pestered him about either fixing it up or selling it for scrap. Somehow he never got to it.

“I always wished Marissa would stay around here,” Alan said.

Jeremy grunted as he started jacking up the truck. “Yeah? What’s she supposed to do around here?”

“I don’t know. But sometimes I wished she had a reason to stay.”

Jeremy paused, looked up. “Now, what’s that mean? You think I didn’t want her to stay?”

“Did you? Did you guys ever talk about—”

“Wait,” Jeremy said, grinding the lugs in his palm. “Are you saying you wanted Marissa and me to stay together? Like, get married and settle down here? Seriously?”

“Why is that crazy?”

Jeremy shook his head. “I never thought you even liked me. Liked her dating me.”

“Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know. I thought you thought she could do better or something. You know, like it was just a dumb high school thing.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t know how much stock to put in high school relationships,” Alan said. “But there’s a possibility, in the back of your mind. At least, Rose and I talked about it sometimes. We always liked you.”

Jeremy leaned the tire against the truck and went around to the other side. “Well,” he said, after a minute. “That’s all nice to know. But Marissa broke up with me, not the other way around. After she was in college three months. Thanksgiving break. Funny, I always figured you were probably happy about that, maybe even nudged her to do it.”

“I didn’t know she was going to break up with you. She didn’t even tell us right away.”

Jeremy removed the second tire. “Yeah, I wouldn’t have gotten to town on these,” he said, wheeling them over to Alan’s pickup.

Without asking, Jeremy got in the drivers’ seat again, Alan and Addie climbing in the passenger side. As they drove to Irwin, Alan asked, “What year’s that C10? ’67?”

“’65.”

“Still driving when you got it?”

“Nope—transmission was shot. I put in a 700-R4. New brakes, power-steering, replaced the dash, Auto Meter gauges, cooling/heating.”

When they got to Mike’s, Jeremy parked in the back. “You can stay here, it won’t take me long,” he told Alan, who held Addie firmly until the door slammed.

Vehicles lined both sides of the street outside Mike’s. Vehicles waiting their turn in the shop, trucks being salvaged for parts, cars that would never be fixed. A few might even be vanity projects, like his Chevy Cameo. Alan couldn’t help thinking what if, those few years ago, things had gone differently. He thought of the Cameo dusted off, tinkered with down in the shed on long winter evenings, in the spring unveiled, gleaming. If he’d had the help.

On the way back to the Ridges for the third time that day, Jeremy lit another cigarette and said, “My parents took us to Chicago when I was growing up, and you know one of the things I remember most? That at night the sky was orange. A weird orange, like a smoky orange. From all the lights, obviously. But I couldn’t get over it.”

They put the tires back on together. Alan picked up the board from the side of the ditch and put it in the bed of his truck. Jeremy let the C10 down and pulled out the jack.

“One time when I was a kid,” Jeremy said, “setting traps along my dad’s field, one of my traps caught an owl, just by a talon. Marissa was with me. I could have freed it myself, but I thought she’d want to see. I held it while she opened the trap.” He leaned his arms on the side of the truck. “You aren’t supposed to catch those kinds of things. I should never have been able to touch it even—the only reason I could was because I hurt it first. There was no way I could keep it. But I just wanted to hold it forever, you know?”

In the distance the cows were lumbering down the slope, black bodies cascading toward the flat. They went everywhere together. Alan watched them reach the bottom and one by one draw up, staring at the entrance as if expecting something from two men and two trucks.

“Well,” Jeremy said, turning and holding out it his hand. “It has been a day.” He took his hand back when Alan motioned with his bandage.

“Yeah,” Alan said. “Hasn’t it.” He nudged Jeremy’s new front tire with his boot. He touched his good hand to the fender, brushing road dust away with the pads of his fingers. The copper paint beneath shone in the late-autumn sun. “You know, if you want to do something instead of trapping, I’ve got this ’57 Chevy…”

Jeremy looked out toward the pasture, hands in his coat pockets. “Don’t worry about any more traps,” he said, before getting in and firing up the old Chevrolet, backing out onto the road. He nodded through the window. Alan stood and watched until long after the truck disappeared over the hill.

*

Eight Novembers ago, Jeremy left Marissa gently pushing herself in the swing on the darkened front porch, humming. Gray skies are gonna clear up, put on a happy face, one of his musical songs. Like she was trying to cheer him up after telling him she didn’t want to date him anymore. Like she understood him better than anyone and she didn’t understand him at all. Jeremy went out into the murky yard as if moving underwater. His truck a shadowy mass of copper before him, a glint off the fender.

Toward the west, Alan was walking up the lane from the machine shed, coming in from chores.

“That’s a really nice truck you’ve got,” Alan called. “You’ve done a lot of work on it.”

Jeremy turned his head to look at him, outlined in overalls against the western sky, backlit by the last coral light of day. He nodded to Alan. For a second, he even felt a little better.