The Empty Trap

by John D. MacDonald

  “I think I understand.”

  “There is a thing in a book, but it was long ago and I do not say it right. It is perhaps changed. I say it this way. For a man he must die on his feet because if he lives on his knees he is not a man. I have two bloods.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Two bloods. De España y de las Aztecas. I know the history. Not much. I am ignorant. But I know this thing, Lloydito. The Spaniards were men, men in armor who came on little wooden ships from a far place and fought and won this country from many thousands of Indians. The Indians were brave and cruel and had much civilization, but not the things of war. So the two bloods are here, in me. With those two bloods, we have made ourselves free, just like your country. On each side the men were mucho hombre. On each side much honor and bravery, not so much with leaders, but with the little men. Now I will dance again. You think. In a little time I will bring more for the cup, no?”

  He watched her dance with big-chested Roberto, her skirt swirling, braids snapping. She had kicked off her sandals and her bare feet stamped the floor in time to Rosario’s guitar while the watchers clapped and snapped their fingers in a complicated flamenca rhythm.

  Two bloods, he thought. Just a trace of the Spanish in the suggestion of the oval in her face, the hint of a hollowness in the cheeks, a slight arch to the black brows. She was the color of a penny. Not the fresh minted copper, but an old penny, paled into a fingered gold. Two bloods, and a code of blood. The sand of Mexico had quickly soaked up the steaming blood of honor for many years. A land of pride and of quick violence without mercy. Also a land of sullenness and the glorification of death. A land where they ate candy skulls, where brass marched in the funerals of children, where fireworks exploded under church pews on Christmas morning, a land where a baker from Monterrey, a bullfighter of neither nerve, grace nor talent, can finally achieve his goal of performing in the Plaza Mexico and filling its fifty-five thousand seats by a public proclamation of his intention to permit his first bull to kill him.

  Though he was slightly drunk, his mind was working with a curious clarity, and he knew that in no other way could he have come as close to these people so quickly, could he have been privileged to see the working of their minds, the uncompromising qualities of their ethical standards. There had to be the language, even though he was as yet clumsy in it. And he had to have been there, helpless, for week after week, gaining through his helplessness a kind of acceptance. He knew his recovery had awed them. They knew of wounds and sickness, and they had an atavistic awareness of the closeness of death. Now they knew he had lived because he had to live, because there was a mission of honor involved. They could understand that. There was, in them, an instinctive knowledge of the interaction of mind and body. They knew of the bullfighter, one of the greatest ones, who, after escapes bordering on the miraculous, had finally been gored and, in fear, in humiliation, in superstitious terror, had looked at his own blood and had said, “I die,” and had died of a horn wound not superficial, yet not nearly grave enough to cause death.

  These people had stood atop pyramids at dawn and with an obsidian knife cut the living heart from an enemy, holding it up toward the rising sun, still pulsing in the hand of the priest. And, on the other side of the blood, they had stood bound in fire and died without scream or terror.

  He watched them and felt his own blood was watery, his emotions pallid, all his angers merely spite, all his loves like spun sugar, all his juices like thin gruel.

  Finally, wearied, he slept with his face to the wall, slept through the dancing and the singing and the time of the telling of stories that came later and lasted until the most distant peaks, the highest ones to the west, were touched with the first fire-glow of morning.

  Soon he was able to walk to the other huts. There were eight altogether, as well as some outbuildings for storage. When he knew where the others lived, it was much easier to remember names and to sort out the confusing relationships. No one seemed unwilling to talk of the night of death and terror five years before. All told of miraculous escape, and he guessed that the difficulties of each individual escape had been enhanced in each retelling. Armando and Concha had, he thought, escaped as a family, with less loss than others. Then he learned that Armando’s wife, who had been older, and grown sons and their wives and children had perished. Concha had lost her husband and one child, but had saved the two elder boys and had given birth to Felipe on the way to the valley.

  When he learned that, he asked Rosario how Armando and Concha had been able to marry. Rosario thought that a great joke. He said that Roberto, who could read, had read what seemed to be an appropriate passage from the holy book and had, in the name of the exiles from Pinal Blanco, pronounced them man and wife. He asked Rosario what was funny and it took him some time to understand Rosario’s explanation. It seemed that Concha had not been married before. True, she had lived with a man and called him husband and he called her wife, and the children had taken the proper name from such a union, but really there were very few couples in Pinal Blanco who had been married. You see, the priest came for one mass very late each Sunday, and he was always in a hurry. A civil wedding was possible if one cared to travel by bus all the way to Zimapan, but the buses did not run often, and it was expensive. The priest would marry, but at a fee of ninety pesos, and that was far beyond the reach of most couples. So it happened that by the time a couple had the money and the chance to be married, there were children to be cared for, and it was odd to go with one’s children to be married, and anyway the situation was accepted by the others, so few bothered. And, he said, it was the same in all the remote villages of Mexico. Here, in the valley, marriage was easy and very cheap. Yes, the Mayor of Pinal Blanco could have performed marriages, but Rosario could remember five mayors and not one of them ever acquired the necessary forms, nor could they have completed them had they done so.

  Each day he forced himself to walk farther, working the stiffness out of his foot, limbering the long muscles of the thighs. Constant washings, accomplished by beating the clothing against the stones of the stream, had turned his clothes to rags, and so he adopted the dress of the others.

  At times he was discouraged at his own slow progress. December came, and in that cold month many things of importance happened to him.

  4

  In the valley, no matter how low the temperature, everyone in the settlement bathed in the clear cold water that came down from the cleft in the cliff face. Winter or summer, the shock of the water was considerable, both in weight and coldness. The first few times Lloyd had bathed there, Armando had gone with him to see that he came to no harm. A single fence of thatch protected the bather from the patient stares of those waiting to bathe, yet offered no protection against the curiosity of any of the women who might be washing clothes downstream from the bathing place.

  When he first stepped under the stream it promptly knocked him down, and Armando pulled him, chilled, thrashing and sputtering, out of the turbulence of the pool carved out by the falling water. Soon he had become used to the force and weight of it, accustomed to its coldness, almost indifferent to the discomfort of washing himself with the harsh soap, drying his body on the rough scratchy texture of the serape before pulling on his trousers. Earlier he had been ashamed of the flaccid whiteness of his spindly body, the bones like an illustration in anatomy, and he knew that the women who washed clothing looked up the slope and marveled at the whiteness and the frailty. But even after the weather became cold, one could toast in the sun in a protected spot. He had found a niche in the rocks far from the huts and he spent time there when the sun was highest. He had always taken a tan easily, and in this clear air he took a deep tan. For a long time he had been spindly, knobby, under the waterfall, but at least tanned. Now he was filling out, and without softness. He guessed he was at about a hundred and fifty, still much too lean for his height, but the webs of muscle were rebuilding.

  On one day he stood drying his thick curl of ginge
r beard and his short brown hair on the serape. Concha had recently cut his hair with a pair of shears so primitive he felt she was pulling it out rather than cutting it. She objected to his desire for such shortness, but did as he wished, reluctantly. Now he wondered how he looked with the heavy untrimmed beard. As he thought of it, it seemed odd to him that he had felt no desire to see how he looked. He knew his face had been badly damaged, and it gave him a curious feeling to touch the strange shrunken nose. He had always wondered about a beard, and it had surprised him that it had come out such a reddish shade. Red mixed with yellow, so the final product was like a pale toffee.

  He put on trousers and shirt, put his head through the slit of the serape, and tried to find a pool where his face would be mirrored. The water was all too turbulent. He found one place where there was a pool, but it was in continual agitation from the current near it. He built a small dam of rocks and mud and the pool became quiet. He looked into it. He looked for long unbelieving moments and then sank back on his haunches, sick at heart. He looked again, cautiously, and the mirrored image was the same. He sat beside the stream and put his face in his hands.

  Lloyd Wescott had been a presentable man of twenty-nine. He realized suddenly that he was now thirty: the birthday had been in June, a month he had no memory of. Some women had called Lloyd Wescott handsome. He had been a man with a rather long face, a square jaw with a cleft in the chin, brows that jutted a bit, deepset eyes of a grey-blue shade, a long straight nose, slightly flattened at the tip. He had been a good athlete, he moved well. He liked people sincerely, and so his charm had not been forced. He had been very good at his work, and that had given him an air of confidence and self-respect. Sometimes he had felt, as everyone does, a definite dissatisfaction with his face when he looked in the mirror. It did not seem to reflect what he felt he looked like.

  But this mirror showed him horror. He saw a man he had never known. The high forehead was burned dark bronze by the mountain sun. The tiny irregularities he had felt under his fingertips turned into a great triangular scar, whitish pink against the bronze. It started at the outside edge of his right eyebrow, moved irregularly up on a slant to the middle of his forehead, and then cut back up into his hair on the right side. At the point of entry of the scar, the hair was dead white.

  The eyes were deeper than he had ever seen them, and they seemed to have the staring glow of madness. The entire end of the nose was gone, almost to the bridge. It was a sickening thing to look at. In spite of the concealment of the great bushy beard, he could see that the lower part of the face, under the beard, was distorted. In the nest of the beard, between scarred and parted lips, he saw the broken fragments of teeth.

  It was then that he came to an understanding of the true courtesy of these people. Not even the children had given him any sign by which he could know that he was monstrously ugly.

  When he went back to the hut, Isabella was alone there, sewing. She sensed that something was wrong and she put her work aside.

  “What has happened?”

  “I saw my face in the water. I saw ugliness. A monster.”

  “That is not true!”

  “It is what I saw.”

  “It is not what I see. It is not what anyone here sees, Lloyd.”

  “It is what I see. It is in my mind and I can’t get it out.”

  “It is not as bad as that.”

  He looked at her. “Roberto brought all the things from the car. There are some things of mine. A razor.”

  “No,” she said.

  “He did not find those things?”

  “We have them. You should not take away the beard. The way you are, the beard is good.”

  “Without the beard I’d be so hideous not one of you could bear to look at me?”

  Her dark eyes flashed then and she backed away from him. “Perhaps you should be pretty, like a girl?” She walked mincingly, patting her hair. “With a skin so soft and sweet, like goat’s milk. Maybe you want to be in the movies? Señor Roberto Taylor, perhaps, with great white teeth like a graveyard.”

  “I know that—”

  She stamped her foot, and now her eyes were blazing. “Estupido! You fell from a mountain. You fell on the great stones. Should God have come running to hold under you a great bed of feathers? You should be dead. Your face is marked by the nearness of death. Be a man. Stop being a girl child weeping over a pimple!”

  She whirled and left the hut and the goat skins fell back into place. The light in the room came from the chimney hole in the thatch, and around the edges of the goat skins. He sat on his heels. The others often sat that way. He had practiced until he was almost as tireless as they were. After a long time he grinned, and knew the grin showed the splintered teeth. Vanity was what had caused the pain. So he could stop thinking of vanity. There was money. Fortunately, a great amount of money. Money could buy teeth and a new tip for the nose. Those were essentials, reasonably utilitarian. He traced the scar with his fingertips, the scar on his forehead. That one must have been a brute. Hit in the middle and laid the scalp right back.

  And he remembered a man who pulped berries between his fingers and tried to push them past his fractured jaw and down his throat. What sort of face would that man have settled for?

  He knew exactly what he had to do. He found Isabella. He stood tall in front of her, hands on his hips. He looked down at her and grinned his broken grin.

  “Truly, I am of a stupendous ugliness.”

  She started to object and then understood and smiled back. “No man can claim more.”

  “I will begin a new work. I will rent my face to mothers all over Mexico to frighten disobedient children.”

  She made the usual automatic correction of his grammar and said, “You will have much work. It will be successful. Mexico will have only good children.”

  “For love, I will have a mask made. It will be the face of the Señor Roberto Taylor. Then young maidens can fall madly in love with me. I will have great success in that work, also.”

  “For me,” she said, “that is not a needed thing.”

  “This face does not alarm you?”

  “If it does, I have the privilege of closing my eyes, Lloydito. What work did you do? You have never told.”

  “I am sorry. That is a rudeness. I was a manager of hotels. One hotel at a time. I went to a school and learned what must be done, and then had a small job, and then a bigger one, and a bigger one.”

  “Ah, you were good at that work. And important.”

  “Good, but not important.”

  She gave him a brooding look. “This Sylvia, she lived in your hotel?”

  “Yes. She was the wife of the owner.”

  “Then he was not a thief as you said?”

  “I did not lie. The money was made by gambling. The gambling was dishonest.”

  “Oh. Was it a big hotel? With many rooms? With … twenty rooms?”

  He laughed aloud. “The land of the hotel is almost as big as all of this valley. There was a great pool of water to swim in. There were many buildings. There are more than two hundred rooms.”

  “Truly, you are the greatest liar of all.”

  “It is the truth.”

  Her questions had brought back memories. The next morning he worked with Armando, helping to clear land that would be planted in the spring. They felled the trees, dragged and rolled them down into the valley. It was hard work and he tired quickly. He had to rest often. Though he protested, Armando would not let him work longer than a half day as yet. After he had eaten hugely of tortillas and beans, he went off to his protected place in the rocks, stripped, and stretched out on his serape. The basic honesty of these people was an insidious thing, he realized. When you were exposed to it long enough, you were forced to reexamine your own motives. And he knew it was time for self-analysis, to go back over all of the events leading up to his flight with Sylvia, and try to understand completely why he had been able to become thief and wife-stealer.

  Ll
oyd Wescott first met Harry Danton in the late summer of 1963. Lloyd, at that time, had just been promoted to manager of a deluxe resort hotel on the coast of Maine north of Portland. He had turned twenty-seven that summer, and was trying very hard to both look and act older. It was an old hotel, with a regular clientele who had become so accustomed to the sedate ways of the previous manager that they tended to treat Lloyd as though he were a half step higher than a bell hop. This was the first season under new ownership, and the new owners hoped to attract new business. Lloyd, then working as assistant manager of a very large and successful summer hotel in the Adirondacks, and in the winter as assistant manager of a hotel in Jacksonville, Florida, owned by the same people, heard of the vacancy in Maine and applied for the job. He was thoroughly astonished when they hired him. He got to Maine six weeks before opening. A new pool and a new lounge were being constructed. He worked an estimated twenty-hour day for six weeks, lived through the first three days of the opening, and then went to bed for forty-eight hours.

  His delicate mission was to attract younger people without alienating the old hands. The hotel had not been operating at capacity for several years because far too many of the elderly clientele had died, and too many had become unfit for travel.