Trapped Read Free Page A

potent as eagle feathers, he’ll grant you that, but
    Ricky prefers the buzzard to the eagle because buzzards love
    to fly for the sake of flying.
    Oh, baby, how they love to soar on the blurry heat rising
    from the vast casino parking lot. They soar over the malls and
    highways, anywhere there’s an updraft. Of course buzzards
    keep their eyes peeled for food, for something newly dead,
    that’s what they do, how they survive. But it isn’t just hunger
    that motivates the birds. Ricky has seen scores of turkey buz-
    zards far out into the Florida Bay, circling miles from shore.
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    Chris Jordan
    Soaring like that, over water, a buzzard takes its chances. If
    it has to rest in the water it will be unable to launch itself back
    into the air. Feathers soaked, it will drown. Yet still it soars
    in dangerous places.
    There’s only one explanation for such behavior. The big
    ugly bird soars in dangerous places because doing so makes
    it beautiful.
    When the heat on the trunk lid finally becomes unbear-
    able, Ricky Lang heaves himself upright. Five feet ten
    inches of hard muscle, small, fierce brown eyes flecked
    with gold, and the rolling, pigeon-toed gait of a sailor. Not
    that he’s ever been to sea, not really. Airboats don’t count—
    an airboat is more like skidding a slick car around a soft,
    watery track. Got the slightly bowed legs from his dad.
    That and hands like ten-pound hammers. First time Ricky
    ever saw the movie Superman he had to talk back to the
    screen because white-bread Clark Kent wasn’t the Man of
    Steel, no way. Tito Lang was the Man of Steel, everybody
    knew that! Fists like steel, head like steel, nobody messed
    with Tito, back in the day.
    Ricky, five years old, assumed Superman was stealing
    from his father. Thirty years later, the Tito of today—that
    doesn’t bear thinking about, it makes his head hurt. More like
    the Man of Mush than the Man of Steel. Brain gone soft,
    pickled with swamp whiskey, and his trembling hands formed
    into weak arthritic claws that can’t manage his own zipper.
    Thinking about his dad, Ricky clenches his fists so hard
    that his ragged fingernails draw blood. Feels good, the pain,
    keeps him focused. Unlike his father, Ricky doesn’t drink
    swamp whiskey, or any form of alcohol. He gets drunk on
    other things, on liquors that form in his own brain.
    Trapped
    23
    Fear of the dead, rage at the living. That’s what keeps his
    heart beating. Lately he’s learned to sip at the rage, make it last.
    For instance today he’s been enjoying a prolonged confronta-
    tion with casino security. Started at, what, eight in the morning,
    and it’s nearly one o’clock in the afternoon, so he’s had it going
    for five hours, on and off. A marvel of sustain. He loves the push
    and pull of it, the way he makes the security guards all jumpy
    and sweaty. Their eyes bugging when they see him approach-
    ing the main entrance. Hurried yaps into their handheld radios,
    looking for guidance, calling in the reinforcements. They’re
    afraid of him and that makes it sweet, because he can savor their
    fear and use it to organize his own thoughts.
    Being in charge of his own thoughts is very important to
    Ricky. That when he says jump, his thoughts say how high?
    Because his thoughts have been all over the place lately, bounc-
    ing around in his skull like speeding pinballs. Each bounce
    inside his head resonates all the way to the balls of his feet,
    and makes him feel like he can leap buildings in a single bound.
    As Ricky approaches the entrance, shrugging his big
    shoulders like a linebacker, a size-large dude in a lime-green
    blazer hurries out to intercept him.
    “Am I a bird or a plane?” he asks before the guard can
    speak. “You decide.”
    The guard glances nervously at a charter bus unloading
    senior citizens. All those soft, Q-tip heads bobbing slightly
    as they head for the bingo halls and the slot machines.
    “Sir, I told you, sir. You are not permitted