Bent Heavens Read online

  There was one reason Bloughton didn’t wipe Doug’s family from its mind. Unless you wanted to truck your ass to the Missouri line, the Monks were it when it came to illegal fireworks. They were stored in a separate garage, the only building on the Monk property kept watertight, air-conditioned, locked, and free of critters, and because Doug’s dad set the prices, Doug had no room to haggle. It also meant he had no leeway to deny kids who forked over insults along with payment. Liv hadn’t been to Doug’s place in years and was glad. She couldn’t stomach the notion that the Fleming household had caught up to the Monks’.

  “I think he was nervous because he had this little boy with him. I think he was worried the kid would say the wrong thing at the party and expose him as an illegal-fireworks-buying criminal and he’d end up serving life in prison, hard labor. People are so dumb.”

  Fireworks sales were what kept the lights on and the toilet flushing. Doug’s dad, a trucker, touched down in Bloughton six or seven times a year to dole out truck-stop trinkets and drop off fireworks gathered from across the country. He’d stay for a couple of weeks before getting itchy for the road and his various girlfriends. Doug’s mom had never been in the picture. The only role model Doug had ever had was Lee Fleming. Now all he had was Lee’s memory. Liv carried the responsibility of that, which was why she was here, kicking through stickerbush at dawn.

  “So the kid starts crying how he wants to see something explode, and Mr. Tooney definitely didn’t want this kid crying all day about it, so he asked if I could just shoot something off for an extra twenty. And I was like, ‘It’s two in the afternoon, man, you won’t be able to see anything,’ but he was practically begging. I didn’t want to burn good fireworks no one could see, but remember when I cleaned out my car?”

  Two years of Sunday safaris had tramped a thin trail through the woods. Liv banked right at the dry gulley, circled a towering black ash, and ducked under a marquee of threaded branches, eyes squinted for the flash of metal that marked their first stop.

  “I found a flare in the back seat. I didn’t know I had a flare. So I said, ‘Here, how about I shoot this?’ and Mr. Tooney said fine, and I did it, and we could even see it for a second. Pretty boring, but the kid liked it, and then they left, and I went back to my game, and then like an hour later I smell smoke and I look outside and there it was. A fire. You know that field of dry grass across the road? There’s this whole line of fire where I guess the flare went down. I almost shit.”

  Liv looked over her shoulder at Doug. He was talking past gorp, grinning to his tale. Doug was on the short side, but not bad-looking, with a fox face and shoulder-length black hair so thick you couldn’t see scalp, not even when wind split it. In middle school he’d bought dumbbells at a garage sale and, in classic Doug fashion, committed to a workout routine of pointless rigor, developing tennis-ball biceps while ignoring every other muscle of his body. Today, and nearly every day, he wore a sleeveless T-shirt to show off his arms.

  “I went out there to stomp it but it was too big and I only had flip-flops, so I had to call the fire department. I’m not even kidding. They asked what happened, and I couldn’t remember if I’d sold fireworks to any of them before, so I said I didn’t know. But I must’ve sold one of them something, because he covered up for me and said it was probably lightning. I spent the whole next day out there making sure there weren’t pieces of flare I had to hide. I don’t need the FBI on my ass. Now I’m out a flare and my flip-flops are melted. Fucking sucks, man.”

  Doug pointed, his preposterous biceps flexing, as if Liv didn’t know exactly, precisely, down-to-the-square-foot where they were headed. She faced front again, though her eyes dragged behind. Looking upon this ugly metal contraption hidden in the woods was as close as she got to looking at the corpse of her father.

  3.

  It was a trap. Trap One, as Lee Fleming called it, or, when stirred by the fever of creation, Amputator. Based on the centuries-old model used by fur trappers, it was a stainless-steel spring-loaded set of jaws chained to a tree trunk that, when triggered by pressure upon the center plate, would snap shut, its triangular teeth driving into both sides of the trespasser’s leg. Whether the prey was fox, coyote, bobcat, raccoon, or possum, the pain would make it pull, digging the trap’s teeth in deeper, tearing tendon and muscle until the animal could only try to gnaw off its own leg.

  How many hundreds of times had Liv looked at this thing that Lee had hammered, jointed, screwed, soldered, and sharpened in the shed? And still she flushed with shame. If the rust blotches and the weeds threaded through the spring eye were real, and they were, then everything else had to be real, too, from her father’s original town-square calamity to his plunge into delusion, paranoia, psychosis, and sickness.

  Amputator was only the first of six traps Lee had placed at cunning intervals across the thicket, each one guarding an avenue of approach to the house. Reproducing a single trap design six times would have taken less effort, but who was to say which sorts of traps would be effective against his alleged abductors? He was determined to cover his bases. He’d rather die, he’d often said, than be dragged back into their hellish realm.

  Trap Two, Hangman’s Noose, was the simplest and, when triggered, the most dramatic. Constructed from wood Lee had sawed from nearby trees (to ensure that it smelled native to the location), the trap did, in fact, resemble an archetypal hanging post. It was tripped by a wire noose hidden in the grass. A camouflage-painted cinderblock acted as counterweight, so that when the wire cinched tight, the weight would sink and the boom would spring upward, and the prey would find itself dangling upside down.

  Trap Three, Crusher, was brutality incarnate and scary to manage. A six-hundred-pound log studded with nails, each one sharpened to a point by Lee’s diamond-stone file, hung ten feet in the air from a galvanized reeling cable wound through a mountaineer’s carabiner to serve as its own trip wire. It was the only trap never to have gone off and that was lucky. Liv doubted that she and Doug could hoist the log back into place.

  Trap Four, Hard Passage, was the only trap featuring bait, a stiff wad of Lee’s unwashed clothing that, when the wind was right, still gave Liv a whiff of her dad’s smell. It was a cage trap, the sort park rangers used to capture live animals, and the enemies of Lee’s imagination would have to crawl inside it. This would disrupt a magnetic field and a guillotine-style door would drop. The only option then would be to move forward through a series of sharp, slanted rods that turned even an inch of retreat into a flesh-rendering nightmare.

  Trap Five, Neckbreaker, was the woods’ most elegant killer. It was a standard conibear trap blown up man-sized, two rectangular steel frames that sliced shut like a scissors when an invader passed through them, which anyone choosing this route would do, Lee said, since Neckbreaker was positioned beneath a fallen tree that was easier to duck under than clamber over.

  Trap Six, Abyss, was Lee’s tour de force of despair. Constructed beneath a fake “path” he’d created for the sole purpose of duping intruders into taking it—the path led nowhere—it was a seven-foot pit covered with a polyethylene sheet propped up by delicate braces, atop which, in each Sunday’s most laborious task, Doug and Liv styled dirt, pebbles, moss, and sticks to fabricate a natural-looking forest floor. If you stepped on it, you’d fall, and the pit’s floor was covered with dozens of punji spikes, which was why Doug brought the bag of John’s feces. He dumped it over the spikes so that any delivered wounds would become infected.

  Lee Fleming was the gentlest man you’d ever meet. Everyone in town said as much. Liv tried to remember that.

  The illegality of this line of defense was as flagrant as it was moot. No one had any reason to wend their way through this half-mile arc of trees, though were some lost soul to do so, he might be seriously injured, if not killed. Liv’s whole face was cold now. She thought, as she did every Sunday, that she might never smile again. Each of Lee’s traps screamed insanity. How could Doug not see that?

  Do
ug stepped past Liv, holding out a hand for the screwdriver, which she placed into it like a surgeon’s scalpel. He knelt alongside Amputator and set it off with the screwdriver, just to make sure everything worked. Then he levered the shank of the tool until the steel jaws yowled apart. Loosen the spring neck. Pry the jaws flat. Fix the trigger. Liv hissed. There was always a second when Doug got close to getting maimed. More than a second, really. A full minute, a full day, a year, a lifetime. One of these days he’d be torn apart.

  “Check out this rust,” he said. “We need to soak this in oak bark. It needs re-dyed. It needs re-waxed, too.”

  It needs removed, Liv thought. Destroyed, junked, smelted.

  He was up, smearing dirty hands on his shorts, taking the lead down the trail. Liv was hit by a surge of courage. Quick, before they reached the next trap, say something, break through the facade that everything about this was okay.

  “How come you … like this so much?”

  There, she said it. To his back, yes, but still. Doug’s gait didn’t change.

  “Like? I like kung fu movies and porn. This is just something we gotta do, Liv.”

  “But … you know. It’s a project. You like projects.”

  “Tell that to my Ds and Fs.”

  “But, like, the corn mazes.”

  Doug laughed once, bitterly.

  “That was a long, long, long time ago.”

  It didn’t seem that long ago to Liv. It was no coincidence that it’d been Lee who’d taken Liv and Doug, both ten years old, to Lomax County, where an industrious farmer had carved into his corn a thirty-acre maze in the shape of Abraham Lincoln. Liv thought there had been something sinister about the endless corners, intersections, and roundabouts, all while corn leaves shivered as if the stalks were snickering at her. As the sun began to set, only her dad’s held hand prevented Liv from sprinting a straight line through the corn until she came out somewhere, anywhere.

  Doug, though, had fallen in love. His father supplemented trucking and fireworks income by renting out fifteen acres of family-owned land on the other side of town, which he called the Monk Block. Most of it was being farmed for corn and, to Doug, that was proof enough of destiny. Maybe his wouldn’t be the world’s biggest corn maze, but who cared about biggest? The Monk Block Corn Maze would be the best.

  On paper as small as napkins and as big as the backs of posters, Doug sketched hundreds of mazes. Early designs came in obvious shapes: skull and crossbones, a snake, the X-Men logo. Year by year, they evolved and refined. Doug became a connoisseur of confusion. Never much of a reader before, he checked out library books about patterns that challenged human perception.

  Go slowly, Liv told herself. Build up to it. She raised her voice. “There was some pattern you used? To confuse people?”

  “The Ebbinghaus illusion,” Doug said instantly. “Tricks the mind into confusing relative size.” He chuckled. “And then I blended it with the Ponzo illusion and the Hermann grid. Man, I would have had people lost for days.”

  He sounded too gleeful about this, but Liv couldn’t blame him. People were shitty to Doug—folks who bought fireworks, kids at school, staff at stores who just didn’t like the look of him. Of course he imagined them all trapped inside some brilliant labyrinth of his own design.

  “What did you call it? All the patterns together? The Prank?”

  “The Trick.” He sounded irritated that she’d forgotten, even though, seconds ago, he’d been the one to claim that he’d all but forgotten it. “That’s the thing about most mazes. They were such massive suck-ups. ‘Oh, here’s a big Abe Lincoln head.’ ‘Here’s a salute to our stupid military.’ Mazes are ancient. There’s mazes carved on prehistoric bones. You gotta respect that. I used ancient runes and mathematic fractals in mine. That stuff is pure.”

  “I remember one of yours shaped like a spider. Real pure, Doug.”

  “It was! Humans are hardwired to fear things with long legs. I read that.”

  The conversation was as difficult as Liv had feared. She knew Hangman’s Noose was just around the bend, yet wondered if she’d gotten that wrong, for it felt like the trap had slipped behind her and dropped its noose around her throat, slowly stealing her air as she walked.

  “I’m just saying,” Liv said, “that you left all that behind. Maybe, you know, maybe now’s the time…”

  “I didn’t leave it behind. No one was with me on it. You certainly never liked it.”

  Now he was mad. It could happen that quick with Doug, and though she knew she had to stay firm, she heard herself backpedaling.

  “That’s not true. I thought it was really—”

  “It is true, Liv. I tried to come up with ways for you to be involved.”

  This was bullshit, but just what Liv needed. Irritability fired from her brain, and she could almost see it, a cigarette lighter spark.

  “Yeah, you told me I could sell tickets to the haunted house off the side. Sell cider and corndogs at the snack bar. Perfect for the little woman. Gee, thanks.”

  He stopped with an underbrush crunch and looked back at her. As quick as Doug could be to anger, he was even quicker to be hurt. His startled, wet-eyed look of betrayal made Liv feel awful, all at once, because what she’d said was unfair. Back when he’d made that offer, it’d been because Liv, scared of corn mazes, had been nervous about Doug’s enthusiasm.

  And what had happened after that? Doug’s cardboard tubes of mazes had disappeared, and it had been her fault. Maybe if she’d supported him more, he’d still be working on those harmless plans instead of having shifted his energy to the absurdity of maintaining Lee Fleming’s traps.

  “That’s not true,” Doug said softly. “And you know it.”

  His eyes swept downward, rather pitifully, and he continued on, his bare knees not lifting quite so high now, the bag of poop on his belt not flopping so vigorously.

  By the time she caught up to him, he should have been resetting Hangman’s Noose. Instead, he was staring, and her stomach clenched. At least once a month it happened, and naturally it had to happen today: an animal caught. The Iowa timber was rife with underbrush scurriers that, unlike Lee’s intended targets, actually existed. Liv didn’t like to picture all the dead or dying animals they’d extracted.

  They was the wrong word. It was Doug who did the deed while Liv squinted through the protective slats of her lashes. Today it was only a squirrel—only, as if that minimized the suffering, and suffering was what it was doing, the wire pulled tight around its tiny neck, its four feet scrabbling midair. The noose was designed for a bigger creature and hadn’t cinched tight enough for a clean kill.

  How many hours had the squirrel been hanging here? How many days? Doug glanced at Liv, his jaw jutted against reproach, and took the squirrel by the midsection, loosening the wire with the screwdriver and sliding the animal free. Doug stepped over to the oak tree he’d used for this very purpose so many times Liv could see the scarred bark, and brought the squirrel back for the head blow that would kill it.

  Doug hesitated, waiting for Liv to turn away. She always did. But today she couldn’t. She’d had a chance this morning to change things and had blown it. As screwed up as Doug’s trapping and killing was, he did it out of love—for Lee, yes, but also for her. So her apology was this: not turning away. Liv would try again next week. Or the week after that. Surely she would.

  Doug smiled, just a twitch of the lips, before whipping the squirrel forward in a brown blur. The snap of its head was crisp, and without pausing, Doug tromped past the tree and off the trail into brambles, because you had to bury animals away from the devices that killed them. That was just smart hunting.

  Liv watched him disappear, then turned back to Hangman’s Noose. She could reset the trap. She knew how. It would be a nice gesture. She hunkered down, took hold of the snare, and pulled against the weight. Two years had passed since her dad had vanished, but his traps, all six of them, still worked. Just look at the creature they’d trapped today. L
ook at her try to gnaw her leg free, silly thing. The creature’s name was Liv Fleming.

  4.

  It took twenty minutes to get to senior year’s first calamity. After parking her dad’s too-recognizable station wagon far from the building, the first nineteen minutes were everything Liv had dreamed about. This was the thirteenth first day of school of Liv’s life, and the exhilaration of knowing it to be the final one for her and her friends could only be countered by blatant coolness. When Monica fist-bumped Liv hello, Monica was impersonating the jittery theatrics of the younger classes. Liv took the cue, and, while hugging Krista, who’d been out of state all summer, she did so with a bored yawn that made Krista laugh.

  “We’re so over this,” Krista said.

  “We’re doing the teachers a favor,” Liv agreed. “Don’t want to hurt their feelings.”

  Darla and Phil swung by, Phil’s hand already in Darla’s back pocket, placing his usual bet that no teacher wanted conflict on the first day of school, thereby setting the precedent that Phil could have his hand on Darla’s ass all year. Darla kiss-kissed at Liv, who made a facetious yuck face and tossed the kiss back.

  Then Laurie, Amber, and Hank descended upon them in a sheet of excited shouts and hugs so forceful Liv could not tell who she was hugging at any given second. Except maybe Hank, whose hug was quick; the one-night sexual encounter she’d had with Hank last year still hadn’t fully shed its awkwardness. The whole gang’s coolness, so perfectly drawn a few minutes ago, broke apart, and they yielded to it. It was thrilling, being at the edge of whatever came after.

  When the group began to disassemble to find their lockers and unload their stuff, Liv found Krista still clinging to her with two adamant fists.

  “Just once, and then I won’t mention it again,” Krista said. “Just doing my fall check.”

  Liv sighed to convey that this wasn’t necessary, but in truth felt a deep gratitude. Liv was a relative newcomer to this crowd (sports girls, mostly, and the guys who liked them) and sometimes still felt like a fraud: Hank and Phil going on about some grade school prank they’d pulled on an old friend of Liv’s, or Monica, when she was feeling bitchy, celebrating old times with the others without letting Liv in on the joke. Krista, though, had a heart and, when Monica wasn’t around to chide her for it, knew how to use it.