Prose
Trap
Dwight’s wife, Carla, tugs at his arm to pull him toward their house. Dwight continues telling his story to me, this man full of stories. Usually the same ones: raft trips, Dwight saving someone. Roofing accidents, Dwight hanging from a gutter. Farm boy antics, Dwight getting hit by a tractor and landing in a pile of hay. Today in the driveway, he has a new story about raccoons, about how patient and thoughtful he was while some raccoons were mating in the weeping birch tree in front of his house. He allowed them one last tryst before he shot the male between the eyes with his air rifle, then the female, both of them dropping to the ground limp. Carla tugs again.
She's not happy about it,” he says, nodding at her. “I’ll be renting a trap and letting them loose in Forest Park from now on.”
She pulls him toward their door, “She doesn't want to hear your story.”
Dwight steps into the house then pushes his face out the door. “The raccoons,” he explains, “were getting into my water feature.” Carla tries to get around him but he continues. “Joys of home ownership,” he says. It’s one of his catchphrases. “I put this fountain under her window for relaxation. A little waterfall trickle, you know. I noticed it getting dirty so I checked my Nest Cam footage from the night before,” he points up to the camera on his shed. “There was a family of raccoons washing their paws. They must’ve eaten my koi last summer.” Carla is holding back a smile, as if she has a small koi in her mouth. I smile back and look at the ground and figure she’s thinking what I’m thinking. Dwight opened a raccoon restaurant in his yard.
My sixteen-year-old hasn’t left her room since the pandemic started and the schools closed. Martina props herself up in bed on school mornings and turns on her Zoom classes and tries to pay attention but ends up falling back to sleep until my wife or I wake her up with some food, which usually sits there for a day. We worry. Sometimes I tell her something I saw on my errands that could be the least bit interesting like, I saw Esme’s dad at the supermarket or I’m going to make pasta for dinner. She just stares over my shoulder at the wall, then after a few seconds, nods and rolls over in her bed, pulling the cover over her head. Her progress report comes and she’s barely passing a lot of her classes, not turning things in, not getting assignments done. Then she fails math. A pile of dishes grows on her nightstand and spreads to her desk. She only eats in her room. We ask her to bring the dishes downstairs, but we end up doing it, her motivation depleted by her knotted up, anxious mind. Our worry turns to slight panic, and we begin to ride her, making schoolwork plans, bluntly parenting her into alienation. The house is tense and dark. She doesn’t look me in the eye anymore. When I tell her the story about neighbor Dwight and the raccoons and the shooting, she gazes out the window toward his weeping birch, swaying in the dusk. She walks to the desk and stacks the bowls — some encrusted with Gorilla Munch and some draped like tinsel with ramen — then shuffles and clanks them down the stairs to the kitchen. I stay in her dusky room with the smell of sour milk and incense.
Five years ago, I built a treehouse for Martina. It became an obsession for me and took up the whole summer. I wanted to have it ready by her birthday in late August. The old maple, a beautiful canopy that covered the whole backyard, already had a long rope I’d hung from it years before where she could swing her little body from the top of the back porch steps to the fence on the other side of the yard. But the treehouse was a grand project. I went to the lumberyard every day, bought a bunch of new tools and spent days planning, sawing and assembling. I finished the platform. The view was good. The great trunk of the tree poked through the floor where I put the entry to the house. I hung small French doors and cut some old windows into the three walls, and when the breeze blew through and rustled the leaves, it sounded like the sea. At Martina’s birthday party, three of her friends spent the night in it. I peeked out of our house periodically at the treehouse glowing in warm light. I took photos and posted them. But by the next spring, her treehouse interest had waned. She was twelve and thinking of other things. My wife and I pushed her to do more up there, but she resisted. I realized the building of the treehouse was more for me than for her. My wife called it my folly.
Dwight sends me an FYI text. He put a trap in his backyard last night and accidentally trapped a skunk. It’s by my shed near your treehouse. Keep your dog away so he doesn’t get sprayed. At noon the trapper rattles into Dwight’s driveway in an old pickup truck stacked with box traps. She has long gray hair and a rugged face. They talk for a bit, Dwight mansplaining his experience trapping animals. I hear him say “Been there done that.” Another of his catchphrases. The trapper disappears behind Dwight’s shed, then there’s a gunshot. Our dog Otto jumps.
“Hell, I thought she would put on a hazmat and take the skunk to Forest Park,” Dwight says to my wife later in the side yard. “But she doesn’t do that with skunks because, well, they spray.” That’s the best part: the skunk was pregnant. The dying skunk released the entire contents of its stink sack, which spread for blocks. When I tell the story to Martina in her room, she opens the window and sniffs like Otto following a trail. The voice of a teacher calls her name from the laptop on her bed. She slams it closed and ducks under her duvet.
Three days later another text from Dwight. Watch out. Got another skunk in the trap. I tell Martina. Soon she’s climbing the ladder to the old treehouse and pulling open the French doors. Maple leaves and black walnuts litter the floor from the squirrels and crows. She turns a rusty window latch and looks out over Dwight’s shed. The sun is behind the house tops. Down below, the trap sits next to the fence, and the skunk gazes up at her — glassy eyes and a beautiful sheen of black fur with thick stripes of white so bright and perfect. Martina recounts all this when, in a rare appearance, she joins us for dinner that night.
“It’s just waiting to die,” she says.
She shows us a picture of a box trap on her phone. She’ll get a tarp and throw it over the cage to block the spray, she tells us. She’ll use a stick to open the gate from a few feet away.
“Are you sure?”
“He has a camera on the shed,” my wife says.
“Not on the back,” Martina says. “I’ll use the ladder.”
“Do it after eleven when they’re asleep,” I say, cringing at the thought of Dwight catching us red-handed. But I am a little pumped.
At eleven, she comes downstairs wearing a black hoodie and dark pajama pants. I hold my six-foot ladder for her by the fence. My wife stands in our back door and shakes her head, her hand over her mouth. Martina climbs the ladder and steps over the fence onto the roof of Dwight’s shed. I peer through the slats. She jumps down into his yard and crouches next to the shed like a leopard, waits a beat, then pulls a flashlight from her pocket and shines it on the trap. The skunk’s eyes are yellow marbles in the dark. I hand her the tarp over the fence. She eases it onto the back of the cage and uses a bamboo stick to pull up the latch. The gate sticks and the bamboo slips off, clanging and startling the skunk. We both freeze, but there is no stink. She wedges it into the latch again, lifting harder, and the gate opens. The skunk pokes out his head and waddles away from us, across Dwight’s yard, white stripes scurrying into the darkness. Martina swings her head around, her eyes brighten. She gathers the tarp, throws it back to me and brushes her footprints out of the dirt with a handful of twigs, then mounts the fence. I guide her foot to the ladder. My wife jumps up and down in the doorway silently. I fold the stepladder and put away all the evidence in our garage. In the house Martina half-smiles.
“Been there done that,” she says.
The next morning, the trapper’s truck is in Dwight’s driveway. Martina’s up early. We stand by the kitchen window eating Gorilla Munch. Dwight shrugs, points around the yard and picks up the trap. The trapper pulls her long gray hair back into a ponytail. She inspects the trap, pushing the gate in and out. Carla’s there, by the screen door in the driveway. She steps inside and the door squeaks shut behind her.
Marc Cozza is an author from Portland, Oregon. He has been a member of the Pinewood Table writers group and has received an honorable mention from Glimmer Train for his short story “The Errand.”