Trap

The sun beat down like a hammer stroke on the day Angie found her husband’s car in the driveway again. She sunk back under the shaded ledge of the porch, uncertain whether she was about to fall over or to vomit in the trough of flowers under the nearby windowsill.

In the end she did neither, only scrubbed her dry mouth with the curve of her fist and muttered between her teeth.

“Shit.“

A young police officer stood at the end of the drive, looking at Angie with the feigned indifference of a house cat eyeing a blackbird. His shirt was too tight across the chest, and he had a military haircut trimmed so short at the sides that Angie thought he might as well have shaved the whole head bald and been done with it.

“What,” she said, gesturing to the Chrysler with an unsteady forefinger, “is that thing doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be keeping hold of it?”

The cop shrugged. His right hand fiddled at his belt with a smoker’s agitation, the fingernails stained yellow as brass.

“The investigation’s over,” he said, blandly. “We don’t need the car anymore. Goes back to you.”

Angie leant her face into one balled fist, a migraine beginning like a cowboy’s spur behind one eye.

“Christ,” she said. “Of course it does.”

Evidently no one had considered that she might not want the car back, washed though it had been of the bone shards and strings of flesh that had mantled the back seat.

Angie had never heard of anyone keeping a vehicle with that sort of history, although she supposed it wasn’t the sort of thing you’d be quick to talk about, if you had.

“Well,” said Angie, aloud. “What the hell do I do with it now?”

The cop yawned, making no attempt to disguise the gesture.

“Sell it,” he said. “Or scrap it. Give it away. Whatever you want. It’s your property.”

Irritated, Angie asked, “Why’s the car even here? I thought it was impounded. I didn’t go to pick it up. Did you drive it here?”

Her intent had been to leave it at the station to be destroyed, as all unclaimed vehicles apparently were, a sacrifice to the gods of the junkyard.

Though she could drive, Angie had steadfastly committed herself to the notion of taking the bus everywhere rather than gorging what was left of her savings on another unwanted car.

That this choice, like so many others, had been overruled was a wearying kind of hurt.

“It’s been checked out,” said the cop, vaguely. “Not our problem now.”

Angie stared, bewildered, at the vehicle, holding for it the distrust with which she’d regard something not quite dead.

Had Angie been to collect it in a broken haze and driven it home, only to forget? Surely not.

“You alright, ma’am?” asked the cop, and Angie clapped a hand over one eye, behind which a throb had begun like that of a turned wound.

“You know what? No, I’m not alright. Jesus. I just don’t want that thing on my driveway. And if you didn’t bring the car over why are you even here?”

The cop patted his back pocket, emerging with a pack of foil-wrapped gum between his fore and middle finger. He stuck a cylinder to his back teeth and began to chew slowly.

“It’s just a wellness check,” he said, at length. “We’ve heard reports you’ve been in some distress. Had the neighbours worried. Is everything okay?”

Angie laughed aloud. She couldn’t help herself; it was like a conversation in a child’s dream, nonsensical and cruel.

“No,” she said. “Not really. Why would I be?”

The heat, the scent of peppermint gum: it made Angie think of long car journeys, travelsick and road bruised, numb from the hips down from sitting so long.

She ached for her bed, to sleep for endless days until all was forgotten of the world and all its happenings.

“If you need any assistance, call us,” said the cop.

“I won’t,” said Angie. “Thanks.”

She went into ash coolness of the house and lay down with a sodden washcloth across her brow, waiting for the mercy of night to come.

*

Angie was afraid of the car, she soon acknowledged, a hunched dog-shadow guarding the driveway immovably. She’d found the keys to it—another surprise—but couldn’t bring herself to use them. They lay in the junk drawer like loose baby teeth, a grisly memento of times past.

One night Angie had gotten up to close the living room curtains, and had nearly pulled them down from the rail as she saw movement in the driver’s side of the car.

It was the back of a head— a man’s head, obscured by the seat behind it, but very much present.

Angie had gone out of the front door with Sam’s baseball bat—never used, either for sport or brutality—and had crept up to the car to find it empty, the doors locked. Untampered with.

It had been a mistake, or tired delusion. Something of the sort.

But then there was another evening, an identical start of fear that did away with the notion of coincidence.

Walking home from the bus stop after work Angie saw a light on in the Chrysler, outlining a figure in the backseat. It turned suddenly towards her, like a paper cut-out twisting, jagged, in the wind.

Angie didn’t scream, only jerked so harshly that she pulled some muscle in her shoulder she’d scarcely known was there until it hurt.

The light in the car had gone out before she’d glimpsed a face, but Annie knew with a gelid certainty who it had been from the mere angle of his neck, which she had seen a thousand times in motion when her husband was alive.

It had been Sam’s shape, his skinny physicality. Only something had been wrong with the head, which was now carved out like a segment of the moon in eclipse.

How many times had he—it— watched her pass in and out of the house before she’d noticed him?

Angie skirted past the car, her eyes avoidant of it, afraid even of its emptiness, which seemed to her still corked by that foul presence.

Unlocking the front door, she blundered through to the kitchen and began rifling noisily through the cabinets for any lingering bottles of alcohol tucked away behind crockery or assorted condiments.

In the end she made do with a measure of vinegary white wine generally used for cooking purposes, downing two glasses and topping up a third before her pulse began to slow again.

Drinking was what should have killed Sam, she’d often thought. His father had gone that way, yellow as a frog’s belly from liver failure, and his brother had passed in a hospice with alcohol-induced dementia before he was forty.

Sam had watched the men of his line glut themselves into a glacial suicide, and had gone right along with them. He’d never once attempted sobriety, for all Angie had threatened to leave if he did not.

She’d been with Sam too long to cut herself loose from him. Each time Angie considered it she’d gone into a still panic, her hands and feet like toggles of stone.

Yet she hadn’t loved him for the last seven years of their fifteen together, for all that she’d tried.

Sam had begun as a sad drunk rather than an angry one, alternating between doleful mutism and sobbing into his hands with all the wretched passion of a Dostoevsky man.

Still, as the years crawled by on their open guts his sorrow had formed a nasty edge, calcified by Angie’s weary avoidance of him, and by what awareness remained of what he’d become.

It began with a raised voice, inches from Angie’s face, over a bottle thought to have been moved, or car keys hidden, advancing into Sam feinting sharply at her with the almost threat of a violence that had never quite surfaced.

Then there were the nights he insisted on driving somewhere they needed to go— scarcely drunk, by Sam’s standards, but enough to be quickly reactive to Angie’s stiff form in the passenger seat.

He’d jerk the wheel left and right, glancing at her with a stranger’s grinning malice.

Only later, and more drunk still, would he realise his regret, plucking at Angie in snivelling throes until she took him into her arms in a sort of defeat.

She had waited with a dull patience for Sam to die, from alcohol poisoning or in a car crash, or from suffocating on his own bile in the night.

Daily she thought of it, always with the same bleak expectancy with which she faced customers in the bookshop at whose desk she sat sentinel.

Yet when the police had telephoned the house to inform her that Sam had shot himself Angie was shocked down to the grains of her soul.

It was the how of it that got to her, the notion of Sam turning into some quiet street and putting a handgun to his brow. An act that had been planned, a process that Angie had no longer thought him capable of.

The gun must have been hidden in the car for some time; Angie often went over the house in meticulous attempts to oust Sam’s ever-expanding arsenal of alcohol, and she’d never once found any kind of weapon. That it had lain like death crouched small in the glove box unnerved her.

How many times had Sam considered taking it out while Angie had been in the passenger seat beside him?

She remembered his eyes, cold as pinheads in his face, flat and crazed.

She thought of the car door locked at her side, the garrotte of the seat belt across her.

The glimpses she’d seen of Sam since were like a drawing of a man’s evil upon the darkness. In daylight something had to be done to be rid of him, when ghosts and old memories alike would be less real.

Throwing out the empty wine bottle, Angie went to bed, thinking she’d see to the car in the morning.

She didn’t look at it again for five days.

Rather than pass the vehicle she’d go around to the back of the house and let herself in through the yard. It was only late Sunday afternoon, tense with the weight of the car beyond the curtains, that Angie rallied herself to task again.

She’d never placed much stock in the supernatural; life had, to her, been blandly practical since childhood, having last set foot in a church when she was ten.

Gods and spirits had seemed to her then a trite comfort to the lonely, or else an acceptable display of madness. Now Angie saw that they were not that, but something men suffered out of fear of worse, should they turn away from them.

In the end Angie forced herself out to the car in short, cagey steps, sweat pealing down her back as though a hose had been stuck down her collar.

The August heat was a drought of air, all the grass on the neighbouring lawns parched near yellow and withered to the texture of sugar paper.

The car—which had gone untouched since it had been returned—was coated with grime and bird shit, like the icing of some jilted bride’s wedding cake. The windows were so greyed by it that very little could be seen within.

Taking the car keys from her back pocket Angie unlocked the Chrysler, sliding by habit into the passenger side. She sat down with her fists clenched, trying to think of something other than those jerking rides that only by a coin flip hadn’t ended in a charred collision with the side of the road.

A gunshot, a car crash: the sounds, to Angie, were almost the same, rendered twins by the deaths at their ends.

Why had Sam turned, at last, to the gun?

Perhaps it had been all self-serving misery, or perhaps it had been the thin spread of his lasting soul, doing what he must to keep himself from killing his wife.

The latter Angie thought unlikely, but couldn’t be sure.

Despite all their years together she found it almost impossible to assume Sam’s point of view. His brain was an alien contraption, mangled from poor use into some irreparable breed of scrap.

The closest Angie came to understanding him was when she drank, and she never intended to go far enough down that road for the gulley between her and comprehension to narrow.

Running a hand across her face, Angie kneaded her fingertips across closed lids, trying to breathe her way through her nerves and the grief, and the knot that had come of it all.

Then she opened her eyes, and from the corner of her vision perceived a slouching figure in the driver’s seat.

Angie turned with the helplessness of a dreamer and saw its face, or what it had become: an opened lily flower of garnet flesh, the gravel of bone, the one eye spared by the bullet clinging to its broken socket like a shellfish to the husk of some ancient shipwreck.

The pupil was narrow, lucid, pinned with a spite that Angie felt as surely as the heat. Though the figure it belonged to neither moved nor spoke, for the moment she stared, aghast, into the savaged rift of its face Angie sensed the answer she’d long wanted from him.

Sam shooting himself, and now haunting her: both were gestures of violence. Meant to hurt.

Angie threw herself out of the car in a sprawl of limbs, hitting the driveway with both arms and skinning them an inch up the elbow.

An elderly neighbour weeding a jaundiced lawn called out to her in a note of wavering concern.

“Angela?”

Angie neither looked back nor answered, only teetered up to the house with blood coursing down her forearms in dual wings.

As she bandaged the scrapes with filthy hands she thoughts how much more interest in her welfare the old people next door had shown than her own family, none of whom had made contact since the funeral.

They believed she’d had something to do with it, thinking her as much a devil at Sam’s shoulder as the drink.

How much more liked he’d been at his worse than she’d ever been at her best, siphoning empathy from the most obscure acquaintance with ease. Angie remembered the distrustful eyes on her at the wake, the odd outright question as to what she’d said to Sam, where she had pushed to topple him from his edge.

Those eyes had never stopped looking, and they stared the hardest from within.

Angie found another bottle of awful wine in a cupboard and worked her way through it until the afternoon spun away in a yellow nausea, a bright, blind bliss.

*

Two weeks stumbled by like a dying horse, and Angie still hadn’t gotten rid of the car.

She’d almost sold it, getting as close as making a few phone calls here and there, but the thought of the oozing hole of human meat sitting in wait of the Chrysler’s new owner restrained Angie from putting it on the market.

The scrapyard was still an attractive choice, but that, too, she held back from. Sam would linger there after the car was crushed, dead king of a steel cemetery, driving mad all the workers that knew nothing of what he was, nor from where he’d come.

Sam had remained for Angie, and it was she who must see him out, and no other. He had, without voice, told her that, she was convinced of it, tasted it in the back of her mouth as the bitterness of remembered fear.

Angie couldn’t remember when she’d last slept well, or when her head hadn’t swum with the blackening potential for agony. She’d been late to work three times in dread of passing the car, and she didn’t think her manager would let another sheepish 10am arrival slide by without comment or reprimand.

In the end it was exhaustion that sent Angie out to the Chrysler again, one eye half shut against an oncoming migraine like an old sailor watching the horizon.

The evening was still light, only the call of jackdaws settling in the nearby trees to roost betraying the hour.

None of the neighbours were about, which Angie was glad of. She had Sam’s old baseball bat under one arm, and although she hadn’t touched alcohol since the night she’d last seen him Angie was so deprived of sleep that she stumbled to the car like an old vagrant.

She got in at the driver’s side, taking Sam’s place before what was left of him could. When she gathered the strength to glance around the car she couldn’t see him, only smelled the damp metal stink of his shot-off face congealing within.

Angie wrapped her hands about the steering wheel, resisting the urge to get out of the car and leave it to rot in front of the house. She started up the engine, the sound of it like the growl of a sleeper’s breath, and pulled out of the driveway before she could change her mind.

Any moment she expected the car to lurch aside into oncoming traffic, to overturn and snap her in the teeth of folded metal, as she’d always thought Sam would do in one of his episodes.

But the car grudgingly obeyed her, the thing that occupied its shell electing to observe as Angie struck out through town to the length of fallow road beyond it.

There was a disused stretch of land just off an old industrial park she’d thought of, a plane of concrete used by passing drivers as an unofficial dump for miscellaneous waste.

Occasionally the city council would make a lazy effort to clear it out, only for it to fill up again by the end of the month, a rubble of naked mattresses and dilapidated pushchair frames spilling out on the freeway.

Apparently one of those rare council clean ups had occurred recently: but for a few stray soda cans the yard was clear, a barren grimace of brownfield land.

Angie turned off the road cautiously, avoiding the mangled prongs of broken-down fencing as she maneuvered the Chrysler through a rough opening into the yard.

Parking up, she slumped with the car still idling, plucking a front of sticky hair back from her warm temple. As she did so something touched her shoulder— whether a livid hand, or the lolling trowel of a dead tongue she didn’t know, and didn’t care to look.

Seizing the baseball bat, Angie thrust herself out into the yard, only keeping her balance through the thought of Sam behind her, drowning in the liquid chasm of his own face.

She turned and stared at the Chrysler, taking in the red paint and dark interior, the glint of the headlamp closest to her the silver white of a flat, dead eye.

“Christ,” she said, aloud.

As she looked on, the door she’d left open slammed shut like the hand that had never struck, but had wanted to.

The reek of gasoline struck her in the face, the acridity of alcohol.

Sam.

He was the car, changed by death into this grinning hulk of metal. The vision she’d seen of him had been a shade of this second self, a beast that would live on its drink and still menace her, as he had always done.

Roping her hands tighter around the bat, Angie lurched towards the Chrysler and swung at its windshield, watching cracks splinter like mutant snowflakes across the glass before it gave way.

The car—the thing that possessed it—made no move against her, unresisting as she set upon the flat snout of its hood with the same mad frenzy of blows.

All the hatred that had been kept down by grief, and shock, and by the drudgery of work emerged through the lock of her hands on her weapon. Angie had been allowed to feel nothing that wasn’t ordinary and appropriate, even by those who’d known the way Sam had turned in the end.

It would have taken him killing her for them to allow Angie her loathing, and in time he would have done it, had it not occurred to him to destroy her this second way.

Her anger with it all was a string on her arm, puppeteering her attack on the car until she scarcely knew what she did. She only went on and on until the pain in her arm cramped right up to her jaw in its blaze.

Angie dropped the bat with a clatter and cradled her dominant arm with the other, working her fingertips into the agonised muscle, hard and deep.

The car lay, deformed by its punishment into a coal of crumpled foil. The shattered glass blinked darkly, and there was a smell of oil in the air, still, the blood of a steel animal.

As she gazed at the smoking corpse Angie thought: let him come out of this. I’ll break him all over again.

But Sam did not come, was no longer there. He was a memory cracked across like earth in the night heat, and she had built him a graveyard.

Bending suddenly at the waist Angie coughed up a wash of coppery saliva, spitting again and again until her mouth was parched of it.

She hadn’t thought to bring any water, had thought of nothing but terror in its dread haze.

Angie left the bat where it was and rubbed her back, which had struck up into an ache like an old axe wound. She’d be thirty-nine this year, and felt every bit of it. Not old, exactly, but too old to do away with the dead, it seemed.

And thank God she was done with it. She felt the weight of Sam step off her chest like a sleep paralysis demon done with its evils, and though she hurt all over she soon forgot it in the adrenaline of relief.

Angie left the wreck of the car there to rust, or for the blasted flowers of the old yard to plume from before—like the dead—it was taken away.

Whatever its end, she would not grieve.