13. Traps

Though Lou lived on our block and was in my grade, I never had much to do with him until the summer his father moved out. Lou told me about it himself. I was out riding my bike around the block, doing the whole circle. Our block wasn’t that big but I seldom went to the other side of circle. All my friends lived on my side. Plus there was a big hill you had to climb to get to the other side. I could never make it all the way up the hill and had to stop and walk my bike, which I hated doing in case any older kids saw. But this day was June and sunny and school had let out the week before and the whole summer was stretching out in front of me and I just felt like taking a trip around the block, seeing what was going on around there.
Lou was standing on the lawn in front of his house. As I pedalled by I noticed he had some sort of weird machines laid out in front of him, two or three of them. I stopped, put up the kickstand on my bike. I stood by the side of the curb watching.

He must have noticed me, but he didn’t say anything.

“What are those?” I called out.

“Traps,” he said.

“What kind of traps?”

“For animals. You put them out in the woods and you can trap animals with them. Raccoons or squirrels.”

“Why would you want to trap a squirrel?”

“For its fur. Or to eat.”

“You can’t eat a squirrel.”

“Can. My father made me eat one once.”

“How did it taste?”

“Horrible. I cried and then I threw up.” Lou took a step back from the trap and grabbed a stick from in the hedges. “Watch this.” He poked the stick into the trap, and it snapped shut with a clang that made me jump.

“That’s dangerous,” I said.

“Dangerous for the squirrel. The only problem is, sometimes even if the squirrel gets caught in the trap, it chews off its own leg to escape. Can you imagine that, chewing off your own leg?”

“You shouldn’t be playing with those. Does your father know you’re playing with those?”

“They’re his. But he’s gone.”

“Gone at work?”

“No, gone. He left. He had some things to work out.”

“He told you that?”

“My Mom told me.”

“He’s coming back, though. He’ll find out you’ve been using his traps when he comes back.”

“My Mom’s not sure if he’s coming back. He may never use them again. Why shouldn’t I use them, if he’s not going to?”

Lou didn’t use them, though. He just played with them with them on the front lawn. I went by a few more times, over the next few weeks, in the afternoon after lunch if none of my real friends were around, and Lou would usually be out there on the lawn with his traps, setting them and then snapping them with a stick. One time he had another kind of instrument, like a square made of wires, that he said you used to dry out the skin of the squirrel. “Your father really did that?”

“All the time,” Lou said. “He used to put them right out there in the backyard in the sun, until my mother told him she didn’t want to see them anymore.”

“What did he do then?”

“He put up a tarp over the clothesline, and hid them behind it.”

“Does he come back at all?”

“No. My mother talks to him on the phone though.”

“Do you talk to him on the phone?”

“I guess. But I don’t like the phone much. I never know what to say.”

“You could tell him you’re using his traps.”

“No, I couldn’t. He’d kill me.”

I looked at the gleaming steel trap, imagined a squirrel getting its neck broken. “Have you ever put one of these traps out? Like in the woods?”

“No. We don’t have woods here.”

That was another reason why our side of the block was the more interesting side. The houses on our side had woods beyond the backyards. Up here, it was all cleared out. The only thing beyond the backyards was another development.

“You could bring them to the woods down near my house.”

Lou shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t want to.”

Lou and I hung out on and off for the next month. Always just the two of us, never together with my real friends. If there was nobody around I’d drive up there on my bike and see if he was home. I had this idea that one day I’d ring the doorbell and his father would answer but it was always his mother. She was a tired-looking lady with black hair and dark skin who, as soon as she saw me, would yell out, “Lou!” She never asked me my name or invited me in.

Lou wasn’t into sports or bike riding or exploring the woods. Most of the time we fooled around with his traps, or if we got bored with that played checkers or Stratego on the front stoop of his house. Lou often beat me at these games, but it didn’t bother me because I knew he didn’t have many other friends or a father who lived at home.

In late July, my father took us both to the carnival they had every summer out behind the Mombasha Firehouse. There were rides and cotton candy and those great white lightbulbs on poles that felt to me like a celebration. I don’t know why I asked Lou to come with me. My father said I could bring along one friend, and when I said I wanted to ask Lou he’d given me a look like, why that weirdo? But my father didn’t really care, he was just going to go into the firehouse and have a few beers while we wandered around by ourselves.

Lou wasn’t much fun. He didn’t want to go on the scary rides. He said he didn’t like the taste of cotton candy. I tried to convince him that no one did, it was more the cool way it felt as it dissolved in your mouth, but he still wouldn’t take a bite. He did go into the spooky house, but it wasn’t that spooky, just a bunch of mirrors and badly-amplified screams and nothing even jumped out at you, which I’d heard from the older kids sometimes happened in spooky houses.

Then, on the way back to get my father inside the firehouse, Lou stopped at one of the games of skill and chance. It was the one where there were a whole bunch of goldfish in bowls lined up on a table, and you had to throw a ping pong ball. If you got the ball to land in a bowl and you could take home the goldfish. Like most of the games of skill and chance, it was completely rigged. The distance from which you had to throw the ball meant that unless you scored a direct hit into the water the ping pong ball was going to bounce off the glass of the bowl onto the floor. They’d probably figured out a way to make the ping pong balls extra bouncy, too.

“I want to try this,” Lou said.

“Don’t bother. There’s no way to win these games.”

The guy behind the counter—he was a teenager, not a guy, with bad acne around his sideburns that he was trying to cover up with a New York Yankees baseball cap—gave me a look. He knew I was right.

“I just want to,” Lou said, and offered up a five dollar bill.

He threw three balls. Every single one of them went into a goldfish bowl. It was some kind of miracle. I’d never seen anyone else win one of those stupid goldfish, and Lou had won three in a row!

The teenager scooped out the three bowls in which Lou’s balls had landed and placed them on the counter. In each, a bright orange fish swam contentedly back and forth. If you watched them for a few seconds, it almost seemed like they were trying to swim in time with each other.

Lou dug into his pocket and came up with another five dollar bill. “No, sorry,” the teenager said. “Three’s the limit. Come back again tomorrow and try again.”

On the car ride home, Lou carried two of the goldfish bowls and I carried the extra one. I offered to help them bring them into his house, but he said he could manage, which he did by pinching two of them together between his fingers. In the few seconds of light while the car door was open, I saw a look of such pride on his face.

The next afternoon I came by to see the fish. I was going to insist on entering his house, promise I wouldn’t look anything else. I really wanted to see those fish.

I didn’t have to make this promise. Lou had all three goldfish bowls outside, on a shady part of the front stoop.

“These are so cool,” I said. “You should go back again tonight and get some more. I’ll bet I could get my father to drive us again. Wouldn’t that be so cool, to show up again and get some more?”

Lou shook his head. “I don’t want to go back again.”

“That’s okay. Three is good anyway.”

“Actually, I’m going to let these ones go.”

“No way!”

“Yes.  I hate the way they look in their bowls.”

“That’s stupid! They’re just fish! They like being in bowls.”

“Will you take me back in the woods somewhere?”

“Stupid,” I said again, but I did what he asked. I left my bike at his house and we walked down to my side of the block. I was hoping we’d see someone, because if someone else talked about how cool the goldfish looked it might change Lou’s mind. But we didn’t see anyone, and we eventually got to a little stream. Lou crouched down and dumped each one of the bowls in the water.

I wanted to punch him, I was so mad.

“They’re going to die,” I said.

“Maybe not.”

“They’re not made for out in nature. They’re made for bowls. They won’t know how to get food.”

“Then they’ll have to figure it out.”

I looked down at the stream. The fish were already gone. There wasn’t a trace of orange left in the water.

“Your father never would have done this, you know,” I said. “He never would have let these fish go. He would set those traps for real, too. He wouldn’t just play with them on the lawn.”

Lou nodded, almost like he thought he deserved being talked to like that. We didn’t hang out again that summer. By October, he’d moved away.