The Empty Trap by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online

him, the sun dropped behind a mountain. When it was closest he could reach out and touch the edge of the sunlight. It was a long time before he had strength to do that. His hands were too heavy to lift. When the light was strongest, he often looked at his hands. They were pale and trembling and skeletal. His wrists were like stalks. The right palm was deeply scarred. The left wrist was lumpy, and had but limited movement. The fingers worked. The wrist would bend forward, but he could not move it from side to side.
    He often felt of his face. His lower jaw was tied in place. It felt like a piece of rawhide that passed under his chin, over the top of his head. There was no familiarity in the contours under his fingertips. He was heavily bearded, yet there were shiny places where the beard did not grow. His nose felt like a withered button, and the left side of his face felt strangely hollow. His tongueexplored the splintered stubs of teeth, finding the sharp places, lingering there.
    At night six of them slept in the small square room and an adjoining room. They cooked there, on a sheet of metal over charcoal. There was an old lantern lighted only on special occasions. Smoke found its own way out a hole in the thatched roof. Sometimes, when the wind was wrong, they all coughed and choked. It seemed a long time before he could tell them apart clearly, or isolate their names out of the babble of conversation. For a long time he had not had the energy to try, but as the life trickled slowly back into him, and as his mind came alive, he began to listen for the names, try to figure out the relationships, try to pick up words and phrases of their conversation. There were three children, three boys. Pepe was about twelve, Armandito about eight, Felipe about six. They were happy children, with wide brown almost identical faces. They would often come and look down upon him with solemn unwinking curiosity.
    The man of the house was named Armando, a squat brown man with a look of leathery toughness, a shock of startlingly white hair. His woman, the mother of the boys, was Concha who was perhaps thirty, perhaps twenty years younger than Armando, a placid heavy woman who sometimes fed him, spooning soups and thick pastes through the gap where teeth had been, holding him up gently when she held the pottery cup of cold water to his lips, washing his body with brusque efficiency in which there was a leavening of tenderness.
    Usually it was the girl who took care of him. Her name was Isabella, and often they called her ’Bella or ’Bellita. She seemed to be seventeen or eighteen, a sturdy girl with a broad brown face in which he saw a family resemblance to the three boys, with black thick brows, black braided hair coarse and shiny as the tail hair of a black horse. She came to feed him and care for his needs during the day when the others worked, came to him smelling of sun and the fields and of sweat, impersonally gentle, sometimes crooning to him with the reassuring soundsyou make to a small child. He knew she was not directly of this family, yet somehow related. She called Concha Tia, and Armando Tio. It was Isabella who taught the small boys. She made them drone lessons in unison, and she made them draw letters in the packed dirt outside the room with a pointed stick.
    Other people often came to the rooms and there was much talk. And much laughter. And often music and singing. These were poor people, he knew. They worked very hard. Their life had a certain cadence of love. Many times other women, two or three, would come to visit Concha. They would bring flat stones and stone rollers and they would sit for tireless hours on the floor, crosslegged, grinding corn. With water and lime water they would turn the white powder into a paste, then slap it into tortillas. The slapping sounds merged with the sun and the sleepy afternoon, and their light quick voices as they worked and talked.
    They were a clean people. He could hear the sound of