by Baird Harper
“Glennis?” Rick said. “Is something wrong?”
“Not really wrong, no. But I was hoping you’d come check on me.”
“But everything’s okay?” he asked. “Are you sure? I promised your dad I wouldn’t hesitate if you ever needed help, but, well, do you need help?”
“My dog ran away.”
“Kidnap?” Rick asked. “He ran away?”
“I let him out,” she said. “And he just ran.”
He didn’t speak for a moment. There was a clutter of voices in the background, a cell phone ringing. “It’d be an hour for me to get up there,” he finally said. “If you’re looking for someone to help, I have a friend who works in animal control near—”
“He’s long gone, I’m afraid.” Glennis made a sighing noise she thought might befit a woman in distress. “I could come down there.”
“Oh, well yeah. You could do that. Except, I’m still not sure what—”
“I’m in a driving mood anyway,” she said. “You’re still in Wicklow?”
Rick smothered the phone and yelled at someone on his end about what time the inspector would have the report ready. “You don’t mean tomorrow?” he asked, coming back on the line. “Hell, Glennis, you wouldn’t believe the week I’m having. Everything’s gone to shit here. How about the day after? Yeah. I can clear my morning. I’ll buy you a good breakfast and we can set you straight or whatever.”
“We should go to that place,” she said.
“Which place?”
“That lounge at the pink hotel. With the big glass ashtrays.”
“Okay, um, yeah, that one—” He broke off the conversation again, giving more orders. As Glennis understood it, Rick was a big deal when it came to mobile homes. He designed and managed entire trailer parks, each with an elaborate motif—an African safari park with a real tiger in a cage, a tropical paradise park with a wave pool and year-round palm trees. She’d seen the brochure for the one he’d built down in Wicklow too, a Hollywood theme called MovieTown set up on the grounds of an old drive-in theater.
“Then tomorrow,” Glennis insisted, “for dinner.”
“You mean the day after,” Rick said. “For breakfast. Didn’t we just decide that?”
Glennis drew her new Lava lamp out of the box, held the still-warm tube in her hands. “All right, it can wait until then.” She hung up and made herself a drink. There wasn’t any tonic left, but the gin went down all right on its own.
The afternoon grew sticky as clouds moved in and trapped the day’s heat. She made dinner and another glass of gin, watched the scrambled porn channel, trying to figure what exactly she was seeing—a wagging tennis shoe, a mustache, a washing machine? When the bottle was empty, she went to her room and plugged in the Lava lamp. Lying on her bed, she uncrossed her eyes and stared at the Navy poster. The gleaming prow of a destroyer pushed through the ocean, its radar tackle climbing into the sky. Sleep approached, ushering her toward distant dreamscapes, but then she rolled over to find that the wall stain had reemerged, glassy and blue.
//
Mobile homes, Glennis had always thought, were for people who hadn’t been raised in houses. But now, with the highway carrying her toward the man who sold trailers, certain old notions were coming up for review. She wondered if perhaps Rick lived in one of his own developments, finally deciding that he probably liked trailers enough to sell them, but not enough to live in one himself. That did appear to be the man’s style, to dabble without making a commitment. The star quarterback, engaged several times but never married. And whenever he came to visit, he’d crash in the guest room only to pack up in the middle of the night and rush home. Restless Rick, her father called him. Or Slick Rick. Or once, when her father thought Glennis was out of earshot, Two-Chick Rick.
In years past, her father’s old friend had broadcast a mostly platonic interest in Glennis, an innocuous brand of flirtation she took for generosity, or perhaps nostalgia, as she knew that he’d once been in love with her mother. But the previous October, she and Rick had run into each other at a hotel Glennis had wandered into while her soccer team’s bus changed a flat tire in the parking lot. It was a large pink building near the riverboat casino in Triton, not far from Wicklow. When she spotted Rick in the hotel lounge, he invited her to join him on his side of the booth. They talked as she imagined adults did when children weren’t around, with the casual swearing and weather-based cynicism. Rick stowed his gin and tonic between his legs and ordered a second one, and every few minutes he opened up his MovieTown brochure for cover so Glennis could lean into his thick chest and take a sip as his hand slid warmly down the small of her back.
Eventually, the big idiotic school bus pulled up in the barroom windows and the moment died. But now, as Glennis hit the outskirts of Wicklow, some remainder of those aborted passions reignited, and she said, aloud, “So what if he does live in a trailer.”
//
Wicklow’s town center consisted of a single intersection where a motel, a pharmacy, a bar, and a Planned Parenthood faced off at a stoplight. The air smelled burned and a wide curtain of smoke divided the southern sky. In the parking lot of Motel Wicklow, a tall teary-eyed woman in a Bears jersey moved car to car tucking flyers under windshield wipers. When the woman saw Glennis, she lifted her stack of papers and waved for attention.
Glennis hurried into the office, where the clerk offered a pitying smile. “Are you displaced by the fire, ma’am?”
“I’m just visiting,” Glennis explained.
The man closed the reservations book. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This week I can only give rooms to people displaced by the fire.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s the owner’s policy,” he said. “He’s very concerned about the community.”
Glennis turned and looked out the window. The troubled woman in the football jersey had gone back to distributing her flyers. “What kind of fire was it?” Glennis asked. “Did anyone die?”
The man waved off her questions. “What if we start over? I’ll ask you again, and you’ll try a different answer.” He cleared his throat. “Hello there, miss. Are you displaced by the fire?”
“Yes,” said Glennis, “I am.”
“Awful thing, that fire.” He spun around to rummage into a small steel cabinet on the wall behind him. “I’ll get you a room right away.”
“Is number eight available?”
The clerk looked sharply back over his shoulder, his face seeming to regret the consideration he’d been affording her. “No,” he said slowly, not taking his eyes off her as his hand chose a key. “No, it is not.”
The door to number twelve had a gap in the jamb where an old dead bolt had been kicked in. There were new locks above and below the damage, but when she pressed the door the entire wall flexed and a crack in the front window grew longer. Inside, the room met lower expectations—a bathroom recently cleaned by a coat of tacky paint, TV controller bolted bedside, yellow sheets full of lint and moth wings. The room must have been, she imagined, identical to number eight. Same clunky TV, same bland farm art, same feeble door.
//
At the bar across the street, Glennis ordered a gin and tonic.
“How old are you?” The bartender was a man about her father’s age, with tight-cropped hair and a U.S. Army T-shirt tucked forcefully into his jeans.
“That’s sweet of you to ask,” Glennis said in the voice of an older woman. “How ’bout this shitty weather, huh?”
The bartender made the drink and brought it over on a battered cardboard coaster. “But seriously,” he said, setting the glass just out of reach, “I do need to see some ID.”
Glennis marched across the street to the pharmacy and bought the largest box of condoms, a variety pack with stallions all over the packaging. “Where’s MovieTown?”
The elderly man at the register didn’t look up. “Movie what?” He dragged a plastic bag over the box as though trying to catch it from behind.
> “The trailer park.”
“Oh,” he said, nodding as if things were finally making sense, “the trailer park.”
The flyer pinned to her windshield had a grainy photocopy of a dark terrier lying on a slightly less dark carpet. Lost Dog, it read. Five Years Old. Answers to “Muggins.” But there was no phone number or contact information. She wondered how Kidnap was doing on his own, whether he was seeing the world yet.
In the car, she separated one of each color of condom and put them in her purse. The descriptions on the wrappings—numbing, ribbed, spermicidal—made promises about the experience Glennis couldn’t fully anticipate. Pleasure and complication at once. She thought of Tad Bucknell, sweet simple footballing Tad, forever yoked to Astrid Sallingham.
She put the Lumina in gear and slid slowly through Wicklow—the rusted yards and browbeaten garages, the residents like loiterers on their own porches. Eventually she came to the small white house in which she’d spent her earliest years. Her father still owned it, renting to strangers. She could only vaguely recall living there herself—earthy brown shag in one room, a splintery deck out back. Most of her memories came from an album of her own baby pictures, her so-young parents with their infant child, forever yoked.
A proud-looking woman in jeans and a flannel came out onto the porch of the house, and for a moment Glennis felt a monstrous secret poised to reveal itself—that her mother wasn’t dead at all, but living out the life she’d wanted all along, here in Wicklow with her first love, Rick LaForge. But then a fat man in a pit-stained undershirt came out onto the porch too, and the reverie melted, and the house was drifting out of sight, the smoke in the sky drawing nearer and nearer.
//
Instead of trailers there were only rows and rows of scorched black shells, every single mobile home gutted by fire, some still smoking. At the entrance, a sheet of plywood had been propped up along the curb, spray-painted with the words MEETING TONIGHT! 6 P.M. MOTEL WICKLOW.
The old movie screen rose up at the far end of the lot, its corners coming unpeeled and smoke damage making a smudge up the center. Dozens of metal posts that had once held speakers stood stunned-looking among the blackened trailer carcasses. Their hulls had split open like torn Coke cans, the ravaged faces of toys and clocks and plates peering out at Glennis as she walked down the lanes between.
Coming around a double-wide, she saw a group of men standing together at the far end of the aisle. They all wore suits except for one man in tight jeans and a hard hat. They pointed here and there, made notes on clipboards, shook their heads, all parties arriving at the consensus that the trailer park had indeed burned down. To keep from being noticed, Glennis ducked into the double-wide. The smell of combustion still lingered heavily. Family possessions had merged with the floor, and the ceiling was cratered with the caramelized contents of burst soup cans.
“Glennis?” a voice called. “Is that you?”
She looked out onto the yard where one of the surveyors stood among plastic furniture melted halfway into the lawn. A tangle of charred wind chimes swayed in the foreground. As she stepped outside, her eyes adjusted to the light and Rick’s face materialized under the hard hat. He looked taller somehow, his gut paunch had lifted into his shoulders, and his teeth held the sun in a startling way.
“Glennis,” he said, “it is you. I thought we weren’t meeting until tomorrow.”
“I came down early to see the sights.” She put her hand on his bare arm. “For nostalgia’s sake.”
“For nostalgia.” Rick looked down, nudging something with his toe until a metal chain rose from the ash. “But what’re you doing here?”
“I remember you talking about this place and I wanted to see it.” She scanned the wreckage. “Do they still show movies on that thing?”
Rick looked up at the screen. “The whole place is burned down, Glennis.”
“Right,” she said. “I can see that. I mean, did they show movies?”
“What? Maybe. I don’t know.” He glanced at the group of men in suits who stood at a distance trying not to watch.
“These are all your men?” Glennis slid her hand up his arm, feeling the ridges of scar tissue on his biceps. “Very impressive, Richard.” She tried to figure if he liked being called Richard. His eyes gave no indication. Dick?
“Look, Glennis.” He pulled away from her touch, casting a frown over the scorched yard. With his boot he lifted the metal links out of the ash and the full length of a dog chain showed itself, extending to a stake in the center of the yard. “I’m having a hell of a week here, Glennis. Someone drops a cigarette and they blame the landlord.” He lowered his voice. “These trailer people, let me tell you, they’re just trash.” His teeth had been bleached, Glennis thought. And capped. And veneered perhaps. They perched on his gums like Legos.
One of the suits cleared his throat. “Rick, we’ve got the fire marshal in ten.”
“Tomorrow, then,” Rick whispered to her. “At the hotel lounge.”
//
Back in town, she parked in front of the pharmacy and walked across the street to the Planned Parenthood with the bright blue roof. Tall chain-link fences surrounded it. A security guard paced the sidewalk. The building had been a diner in its previous life, a greasy spoon she remembered eating at as a child, sharing a corner booth with her mother on a Saturday morning.
“I’d like to discuss my options,” Glennis told the woman behind the glass. “Is there someone I can just talk to?”
Glennis sat down in the waiting room, which was like any other, except you could guess what everyone was suffering with. A freckled girl sat between her mother and grandmother. A blond girl with a man who might’ve been her father, or perhaps was not her father at all. On the form, Glennis wrote Astrid Sallingham at the top, followed by the number and address of a mattress outlet that advertised on TV.
When the nurse called her, she walked down a hallway into a room with two chairs and a small oval table. A poster of a woman cut in half hung on the wall, her organs in different colors like a still life of odd-shaped fruit.
“So you want to consider your options.” The nurse’s eyes lifted from the clipboard. Chains dangled off her glasses.
“My name is Astrid,” Glennis said. “I’m pregnant by a boy named Tad Bucknell. He has a scholarship to Notre Dame to play linebacker.”
“And this is a problem,” the nurse asked, “that you’re pregnant?”
“Actually,” Glennis said, “I’m thinking of having sex for the first time.”
The nurse tilted her head, the chains wobbled. “Do you mean for the first time since getting pregnant, or just for the first time?”
“The man I’m interested in,” Glennis said, “he has these scars on his upper arms. Big self-inflicted cuts in the shape of my mother’s initials. Her initials before she was married to my father. Apparently, back then, practically everyone was in love with her. But it’s not going to be weird or anything, my being with this man. That’s not the problem. My mother’s been dead since I was very young.”
The nurse blinked. “Then what is the problem, dear?”
Glennis looked at the halved woman on the wall. “I think there used to be a corner booth right in this spot. The pancakes were good, I remember. My mother used to bring me here as a little girl, just the two of us, on Saturday mornings.” Glennis could almost smell the bacon in the air, the sweet tang of her mother’s coffee topped off with a slug of bourbon from the flask in her purse. “You should probably know that she was murdered. Perhaps by a serial killer. The TV called him the Soyfield Strangler because that’s where he left his victims.”
The nurse eyed the poster too, as if curious what Glennis was seeing on it.
“But my mother wasn’t found in a soy field,” Glennis continued. “She was found in a motel. Room number eight. But there was a soy field behind the motel. Now it’s corn. I checked it out on the way into town. Anyway, no one ever figured out if it was the Strangler or not.”
“There wasn’t a box to check for that,” Glennis said, gesturing toward the chart on the nurse’s lap. “Under patient history. But I thought it might be important.”
“It does sound important.”
“But really, it’s the Navy I’m having doubts about. I’ve been thinking of joining up next week when I turn eighteen. My dad thinks I’m going to college.”
The nurse’s chains wobbled again. “I’m afraid I still don’t understand.”
“It’s about options.” Glennis stood up. “I suppose I’m still weighing mine. Thank you. This has been sort of helpful.”
//
Across the street, the displaced residents of MovieTown were streaming out of their motel rooms around the building into a dusty courtyard surrounded on three sides by the motel’s brick walls. An old hot tub had been sunk into the center, big pale carp breaching the algal top water. Dozens of families milled about in front of a panel of men in suits. Still wearing his hard hat, Rick sat in a lawn chair with his arms folded across his chest, ankles crossed.
Glennis hung toward the back, finding herself beside the disturbed woman who’d been disseminating lost-dog flyers.
“What’s this meeting about?” Glennis asked.
“It’s about MovieTown, hon.” The woman hung her hands on the collar of her jersey. “Now we get to hear a bunch of lawyers explain exactly how far we gotta bend over and where they’re gonna stick it.”
Rick stood up and roused the meeting to order by clapping his hands. The adults took seats on the grass while the children ran off to play. Glennis hid behind the woman’s teased-out hair.
“First of all,” Rick began, “I want you folks to know that I respect you.” Someone up front made a comment. Laughter sputtered through the crowd. Rick shushed them with another clap. “I respect you people,” he went on, “but I won’t be made a scapegoat for your shit-ass lot in life.”
The crowd began shouting. The tall woman looked for someone to talk to, eventually finding Glennis. “When my husband hears this he’s going to kill that man,” she said. “He will. I won’t even be able to stop him. I won’t even want to.”