Number 5, the other vacancy, was located between Doreen Tiede, the divorcée who lived with her little girl, and Captain Knox, and was on the lake side of the park, facing the stones and sticks where the lake flowed into the Catamount River and where the Abenaki Indians, back before the whites came north from Massachusetts and drove the Indians away to Canada, had built their fishing weirs. Number 5 was a sleek, sixty-eight-foot-long Marlette with a mansard roof, very fancy, a replacement for the one that burned to the ground a few years ago. A young, newly married couple, Ginnie and Claudel Bing, had moved in, and only three months later, returning home from a weekend down on the Maine coast, found it leveled and still smoldering in the ground, the result of Ginnie’s having left the kitchen stove on. They had bought the trailer, financed through the Granite State Realty Development Corporation, and were renting only the lot and services, and their insurance on the place hadn’t covered half of what they owed (as newlyweds, they were counting on a long and increasingly rewarding future, so they had purchased a new car and five rooms of new furniture, all on time). Afterwards, they broke up, Claudel lost his job, became something of a drunk, and ended up living alone in a room at the Hawthorne House and working down at the tannery. It was a sad story, and most people in the park knew it and remembered it whenever they passed the shining new trailer that the Corporation moved in to replace the one the Bings had burned down. Because the new trailer was expensive, the rent was high, which made it difficult for Marcelle to find a tenant for it, but the Corporation didn’t mind, since it was being paid for anyhow by Claudel Bing’s monthly checks. Corporations have a way of making things come out even in the end.
There was in the park one trailer, an old Skyline, that was situated more favorably than any other in the park, number 8, and it was out at the end of the shoreline side, where the road became a cul-de-sac and the shore curved back around toward the swamp and state forest. It was a plain, dark gray trailer, with the grass untended, uncut, growing naturally all around, as if no one lived there. A rowboat lay tilted on one side where someone had drawn it up from the lake behind the trailer, and there was an ice-fishing shanty on a sledge waiting by the shore for winter, but there were no other signs of life around the yard, no automobile, none of the usual junk and tools lying around, no piles of gravel, crushed stone, or loam to indicate projects under way and forsaken for lack of funds, no old and broken toys or tricycles or wagons, nothing out back but a single clothesline stretching from one corner of the trailer back to a pole that looked like a small chokecherry tree cut from the swamp. This was where Merle Ring lived.
Merle Ring was a retired carpenter, retired by virtue of his arthritis, though he could still do a bit of finish work in warm weather, cabinet-making and such, to supplement his monthly social security check. He lived alone and modestly and in that way managed to get by all right. He had outlived and divorced numerous wives, the number varied from three to seven, depending on who Merle happened to be talking to, and he had fathered on these three to seven women at least a dozen children, most of whom lived within twenty miles of him, but none of them wanted Merle to live with him or her because Merle would only live with him or her if, as he put it, he could be the boss of the house. No grown child would accept a condition like that, naturally, and so Merle lived alone, where he was in fact and indisputably the boss of the house.
Merle, in certain respects, was controversial in the park, though he did have the respect of Marcelle Chagnon, which helped keep the controversy from coming to a head. He was mouthy, much given to offering his opinions on subjects that involved him not at all, which would not have been so bad, however irritating it might have been, had he not been so perverse and contradictory with his opinions. He never seemed to mean what he said, but he said it so cleverly that you felt compelled to take him seriously. Then, later, when you brought his opinion back to him and tried to make him own up to it and take responsibility for its consequences, he would laugh at you for ever having taken him seriously in the first place. He caused no little friction in the lives of many of the people in the park. When one night Doreen Tiede’s ex-husband arrived at the park drunk and threatening violence, Merle, just coming in from a long night of hornpout fishing on the lake, stopped and watched with obvious amusement, as if he were watching a movie and not a real man cockeyed drunk and shouting through a locked door at a terrorized woman and child that he was going to kill them both. Buck Tiede caught sight of old Merle standing there at the edge of the road, where the light just reached him, his string of hornpout dangling next to the ground.
“You old fart!” Buck, a large and disheveled man, roared at Merle. “What the hell you lookin’ at! G’wan, get the hell outa here!” He made a swiping gesture at Merle, as if chasing a dog.
Then, according to Marcelle, who had come up in the darkness carrying her shotgun, Merle said to the man, “Once you kill her, Buck, it’s done. Dead is dead. If I was you and wanted that woman dead as you seem to, I’d just get me some dynamite and blow the place all to hell. Or better yet, just catch her someday coming out of work down to the tannery, and snipe her with a high-powered rifle from a window on the third floor of the Hawthorne House. Then she’d be dead, and you could stop all this hollering and banging on doors and stuff.”
Buck stared at him in amazement. “What the hell are you saying?”
“I’m saying you ought to get yourself a window up in the Hawthorne House that looks down the hill to the tannery, and when she comes out the door after work, plug her. Get her in the head, to be sure. Just bang, and that’d be that. You could do your daughter the same way. Dead is dead, and you wouldn’t have to go around like this all the time. If you was cute about it, you’d get away with it all right. I could help you arrange it. Give you an alibi, even.” He held up the string of whiskered fish. “I’d tell ’em you was out hornpouting with me.”
“What are you telling me to do?” Buck took a step away from the door toward Merle. “You’re crazy.”
“Step aside, Merle, I’ll take care of this,” Marcelle ordered, shouldering the tiny man out of the way and bringing her shotgun to bear on Buck Tiede. “Doreen!” she called out. “You hear me?”
Buck made a move toward Marcelle.
“Stay right where you are, mister, or I’ll splash you all over the wall. You know what a mess a twelve-gauge can make?”
Buck stood still.
A thin, frightened voice came from inside. “Marcelle, I’m all right! Oh God, I’m sorry for all this! I’m so sorry!” Then there was weeping, a woman’s and a child’s.
“Forget sorry. Just call the cops. I’ll hold Mister Bigshot here until they come.”
And she did hold him, frozen and silent at the top of the steps, while Doreen called the police, who came in less than five minutes and hauled Buck off to spend the night in jail. Merle, once Marcelle and her shotgun had taken charge of the situation, had strolled on with his fish. The cops came and went, blue lights flashing, and later Marcelle returned home, her shotgun slung over her thick arm, and when she entered her kitchen, she found Merle sitting at the kitchen table over a can of Budweiser, reading her copy of People magazine.
“You’re crazy, dealing with Buck Tiede that way,” she said angrily.
“What way?”
“Telling him to shoot Doreen from a room in the Hawthorne House! He’s just liable to do that, he’s a madman when he’s drinking!” She cracked open a can of beer and sat down across from the old man.
He closed the magazine. “I never told him to kill her. I just said how he might do it, if he wanted to kill her. The way he was going about it seemed all wrong to me.” He smiled and showed his brown teeth through his beard.
“What if he actually went and did it, shot her from the Hawthorne House some afternoon as she came out of work? How would you feel then?”
“Good.”
“Good! Why, in the name of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, would you feel good?”
“Because we’d know
who did it.”
“But you said you’d give him an alibi!”
“That was just a trick. I wouldn’t, and that way he’d be trapped. He’d say he was with me all afternoon fishing, and then I’d come out and say no, he wasn’t. I’d fix it so there’d be no way he could prove he was with me, because I’d make sure someone else saw me fishing alone, and that way he’d be trapped, and they’d take him over to Concord and hang him by the neck until dead.”
“Why do you fool around like that with people?” she asked, genuinely curious. “I don’t understand you, old man.”
He got up, smiled, and flipped the copy of People magazine across the table. “It’s more interesting than reading this kind of stuff,” he said and started for the door. “I put an even dozen hornpouts in your freezer.”
“Thanks. Thanks a lot,” she said absently, and he went out.
Merle heard about Flora’s guinea pigs from Nancy Hubner, the widow in number 7, who heard about them from her daughter, Noni, who was having a love affair with the college boy, Bruce Severance. He told her one night in his trailer, after they had made love and were lying in darkness on the huge water bed he’d built, smoking a joint while the stereo played the songs of the humpback whale quietly around them. Noni had been a college girl in Northern California before her nervous breakdown, so she understood and appreciated Bruce more than anyone else in the park could. Most everyone tolerated Bruce good-humoredly—he believed in knowledge and seemed to be earnest in his quest for it, and what little knowledge he had already acquired, or believed he had acquired, he dispensed liberally to anyone who would listen. He was somberly trying to explain to Noni how yogic birth control worked, and how “basically feminist” it was, because the responsibility was the man’s, not the woman’s.
“I wondered how come you never asked me if I was protected,” she said.
“No need to, man. It’s all in the breathing and certain motions with the belly, so the sperm gets separated from the ejaculatory fluid prior to emission. It’s really quite simple.”
“Amazing.”
“Yeah.”
“Overpopulation is an incredible problem.”
“Yeah. It is.”
“I believe that if we could just solve the overpopulation problem, all the rest of the world’s problems would be solved, too. Like wars.”
“Ecological balance, man. The destruction of the earth.”
“The energy crisis. Everything.”
“Yeah, man. It’s like those guinea pigs of Flora Pease’s. Flora, she’s got these guinea pigs, hundreds of them by now. And they just keep on making new guinea pigs, doubling their numbers every couple of months. It’s incredible, man.”
Noni rolled over on her belly and stretched out her legs and wiggled her toes. “Do you have the record of Dylan’s, the one where he sings all those country-and-western songs, way before anyone even heard of country and western? What’s it called?”
“Nashville Skyline?”
“Yeah, that’s it. Isn’t it incredible, how he was singing country and western way before anyone even heard of it?”
“Yeah, he’s really incredible, Dylan. Anyhow…”
“Do you have it, the record?” she interrupted.
“No, man. Listen, I was telling you something.”
“Sorry.”
“That’s okay, man. Anyhow, Flora’s guinea pigs, it’s like they’re a metaphor. I mean, it’s like Flora is some kind of god, and the first two guinea pigs, the ones she bought from the five-and-dime in town, were Adam and Eve, and that trailer of hers is the world. Be fruitful and multiply, Flora told them, and, fine, they go out and do what they’re programmed to do, and pretty soon they’re like taking over the world, which is the trailer, so that Flora, who’s like God, can’t take care of them anymore. No matter how hard she works, they eat too much, they shit too much, they take up too much room. So what happens?”
Silence.
“What happens?” Bruce repeated.
“A flood, maybe?”
“No, man, it’s not that literal, it’s a metaphor. What happens is, Flora moves out. She leaves the trailer to the guinea pigs. Twilight of the gods, man. God is dead!”
“That’s really incredible.”
“Yeah,” Bruce said, drifting into still deeper pools of thought.
After a few moments, Noni got up from the bed and drew on her clothes. “I better get home, my mother’ll kill me. She thinks I’m at the movies with you.”
“Naw, man, she knows where you are. All she’s got to do is walk three doors down and see my van’s still here. C’mon, she knows we’re making it together. She’s not that out of it.”
Noni shrugged. “She believes what she wants to believe. Sometimes I think she still doesn’t believe Daddy’s dead, and it’s been over four years now. There’s no point in forcing things on people. You know what I mean?”
Bruce understood, but he didn’t agree. People needed to face reality, it was good for them and good for humanity as a whole, he felt. He was about to tell her why it was good for them, but Noni was already dressed and heading for the door, so he said good night instead and waved from the bed as she slipped out the door.
When later that same evening she told her mother that Flora Pease was raising hundreds of guinea pigs in her trailer, it was not so much because Noni was interested in Flora or the guinea pigs, as because her mother, Nancy, was quizzing her about the movie she was supposed to have seen with Bruce.
“That’s not true,” the woman said.
“What’s not?” Noni switched on the TV set and sat down cross-legged on the floor.
“About the guinea pigs. Where’d you hear such a thing?”
“Bruce. Do you think I could study yoga somewhere around here?”
“Of course not. Don’t be silly.” Nancy lit a cigarette and sat down on the sofa, where she’d been reading this month’s Book-of-the-Month Club selection, a novel that gently satirized the morals and mores of Westchester County’s smart set. “Bruce. I don’t know about that boy. How can he be a college student when the nearest college is the state university in Durham, which is over forty miles from here?”
“I don’t know.” Noni was sliding into the plot intricacies of a situation comedy about two young women who worked on an assembly line in Milwaukee and made comically stupid errors of judgment and perception. “It’s a correspondence school or something, in Vermont. He has to go there and see his teachers for a couple of weeks twice a year or something. It’s the new thing in education.”
Nancy didn’t know how it could be much of an education, and it certainly didn’t explain why Bruce lived where he did and not at his college or even at his parents’ home, as Noni did.
“I don’t know,” Noni said.
“Don’t you ever ask, for heaven’s sake?”
“No.”
That was their conversation for the night. At eleven, Nancy yawned and went to bed in her room at the far end of the trailer, the rooms of which were carpeted and furnished lavishly and resembled the rooms of a fine apartment. Around midnight, Noni rolled a joint and went to her room, next to her mother’s, and smoked it, and fell asleep with her light on. She bought her marijuana from Bruce. So did Terry. Also Leon LaRoche, who had never tried smoking grass before, but certainly did not reveal that to Bruce, who knew it anyhow and charged him twice the going rate. Doreen Tiede bought grass from Bruce, too. Not often, however; about once every two or three months. She liked to smoke it in her trailer with men she went out with and came home with, so she called herself a social smoker, but Bruce knew what that meant. Over the years, Bruce had bought his grass from several people, most recently from a Jamaican named Keppie who lived in the West Roxbury area of Boston, but who did business from a motel room in Revere. Next year, Bruce had decided, he would harvest the hemp crop Flora Pease had discovered, and he could sell the grass back, running it the other direction, to Keppie and his Boston friends. He figured there must be five hundred
pounds of the stuff growing wild out there, just waiting for a smart guy like him to cut, dry, chop, and pack. He might have to cut Terry Constant in, but that would be fine, because in this business you often needed a partner who happened to be black.
The next morning, on her way to town to have her hair cut and curled, Nancy Hubner picked up Merle Ring. Merle was walking out from the trailerpark and had almost reached Old Road, when he heard the high-pitched whirr of Nancy’s powerful Japanese sedan and without turning around stepped off the road into the light, leafless brush. There had been an early snow in late October that winter, and then no snow throughout November and well into December, which had made it an excellent year for ice fishing. After the first October snow, there was a brief melt and then a cold snap that lasted for five weeks now, so that the ice had thickened daily, swiftly becoming iron-hard and black and smooth. All over the lake, fishing shanties had appeared, and all day and long into the night men and sometimes women sat inside the shanties, keeping warm from tiny kerosene or coal-burning heaters, sipping from bottles of whiskey, watching their lines, and yakking slowly to friends or meditating alone and outside of time and space, until the flag went up and the line got yanked and the fisherman would come crashing back into that reality from the other. The ice had hardened sufficiently to bear even the weight of motor vehicles, and now and then you could look out from the shore and see a car or pickup truck creeping across the slick ice and stopping at one of the shanties, bringing society and a fresh six-pack or pint of rye. No one visited Merle’s shanty, though he certainly had plenty of friends of various ages and sexes. He had made it known that, when he went ice fishing, it was as if he were going into religious withdrawal and meditation, a journey into the wilderness, as it were, and if you were foolish or ignorant enough to visit him out there on the ice in his tiny, windowless shack with the stovepipe chimney sticking up and puffing smoke, you would be greeted by a man who seemed determined to be left alone. He would be cold, detached, abstracted, unable or unwilling to connect to the person standing self-consciously before him, and after a few moments you would leave, your good-bye hanging unanswered in the air, and Merle would take a sip from his fifth of Canadian Club and drift back into his trance.
The Angel on the Roof Page 41