Trailerpark

by Russell Banks

  Captain Knox was the first to leave his trailer and try to quiet Terry. In his fatherly way, embellished somewhat by his tousled white hair and plaid bathrobe and bedroom slippers, he informed Terry that he was waking up working people. He stood across the road in the light from his window, tall and straight, arms crossed over his chest, one bushy black eyebrow raised in disapproval, and said, “Not everybody in this place can sleep till noon, young man.”

  Terry stopped banging for a second, peered over his shoulder at the man, and said, “Fuck you, honkey!” and went back to banging on the tin wall, as if he were hammering nails with his bare fists. Captain Knox turned and marched back inside his trailer, and after a few seconds, his lights went out.

  Then the girl, Noni Hubner, in her nightgown, appeared at the open door of number 7. Her long, silky blond hair hung loosely over her shoulders, circling her like a halo lit from behind. A woman’s voice, her mother’s, called from inside the trailer, “Noni, don’t! Don’t go out there!”

  The girl waved the voice away and stepped out to the landing, barefoot, delicately exposing the silhouette of her body against the light of the living room behind her.

  Now the mother shrieked. “Noni! Come back! He may be on drugs!”

  Terry had ceased hammering and had turned to stare at the girl across the road. He was wearing a tee shirt and khaki work-pants and blue tennis shoes, and his arms hung loosely at his sides, his chest heaving from the exertion of his noise-making and his anger, and he smiled over at the girl and said, “Hey, honey, you want to come beat on my drum?”

  “You’re waking everyone up,” she said politely.

  “Please come back inside, Noni! Please!”

  The black man took a step toward the girl, and suddenly she whirled and disappeared inside, slamming the door and locking it, switching off the lights and dumping the trailer back into darkness.

  Terry stood by the side of the road looking after her. “Fuck,” he said, and then he noticed Flora Pease standing next to him, a blocky figure in a long overcoat, barefoot, and carrying in her arms, as if it were a baby, a small, furry animal.

  “What you got there?” Terry demanded.

  “Elbourne.” Flora smiled down at the chocolate-colored animal and made a quiet, clucking noise with her mouth.

  “What the hell’s an Elbourne?”

  “Guinea pig.”

  “Why’d you name him Elbourne?”

  “After my grandfather. How come you’re making such a racket out here?”

  Terry took a step closer, trying to see the guinea pig more clearly, and Flora wrapped the animal in her coat sleeve, as if to protect it from his gaze.

  “Listen, I won’t hurt ol’ Elbourne. I just want to see him. I ain’t ever seen a guinea pig before,” the man said.

  “He’s a lot quieter than you are, mister, I’ll tell you that much. Now, how come you’re making such a racket out here banging on the side of your house?”

  “That ain’t my house. That’s my sister’s house!” he said, sneering.

  “Oh,” Flora said, as if she now understood everything, and she extended the animal toward Terry so he could see it entirely. It was a long-haired animal shaped like a football with circular, dark eyes on the sides of its head and small ears and almost invisibly tiny legs tucked beneath its body. It seemed terrified and trembled in Flora’s outstretched hands.

  Terry took the animal and held it up to examine its paws and involuted tail, then brought it close to his chest, and holding it in one large hand, tickled it under the chin with his forefinger. The animal made a tiny cluttering noise that gradually subsided to a light drr-r-r, and Terry chuckled. “Nice little thing,” he said. “How many you got, or is this the only one?”

  “Lots.”

  “Lots? You got a bunch of these guinea pigs in there?”

  Flora looked at him suspiciously, the way you’d look at someone accusing you of deliberately withholding information. “I said so, didn’t I?”

  “Suppose you did.”

  “Here,” she said brusquely, “give him back,” and she reached out for the animal.

  Terry placed Elbourne into Flora’s hands, and she turned and walked swiftly on her short legs back around the front of her trailer. After a few seconds, her door slammed shut, and then the lights went out, and Terry was once again standing alone in darkness in the middle of the trailerpark. Tiptoeing across the narrow belt of knee-high weeds and grass that ran between the trailers, he came up close to Flora’s bedroom window. “No pets allowed in the trailerpark, honey!” he called out, and then he turned and strolled off to get some sleep so he could leave this place behind him again early in the morning.

  Either Terry didn’t find the opportunity to tell anyone about Flora Pease having “lots” of guinea pigs in her trailer or he simply chose not to mention it, because it wasn’t until after he had returned to the trailerpark, two months later, in early October, that anyone other than he had a clue to the fact that, indeed, there were living in number 11, besides Flora, a total of seventeen guinea pigs, five of which were male. Of the twelve females, eight were pregnant, and since guinea pigs produce an average of 2.5 piglets per litter, in a matter of days there would be an additional twenty guinea pigs in Flora’s trailer, making a total of thirty-seven. About two months after birth, these newcomers would be sexually mature, with a two-month gestation period, so that if half the newborns were females, and if the other mothers continued to be fertile, along with the four other original females, then sometime late in December there would be approximately one hundred fifteen guinea pigs residing in Flora’s trailer, of which fifty-four would be male and sixty-one female. These calculations were made by Leon LaRoche, who lived at number 2, the second trailer on your right as you entered the park. Leon worked as a teller for the Catamount Savings and Loan, so calculations of this sort came more or less naturally to him.

  “That’s a minimum!” he told Marcelle. “One hundred fifteen guinea pigs, fifty-four males and sixty-one females. Minimum. And you don’t have to be a genius to calculate how many of those filthy little animals will be living in her trailer with her by March. Want me to compute it for you?” he asked, drawing his calculator from his jacket pocket again.

  “No, I get the picture,” Marcelle scowled. It was a bright, sunny, Sunday morning in early October, and the two were standing in Marcelle’s kitchen, Marcelle, in flannel shirt and jeans, taller by half a hand than Leon, who, in sport coat, slacks, shirt and tie, was dressed for mass, which he regularly attended at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Catamount. It was a conversation last night with Captain Knox that had led young Leon to bring his figures to the attention of the manager, for it was he, the Captain, who had made the discovery that there were precisely seventeen guinea pigs in Flora’s trailer, rather than merely “lots,” as Terry had discovered, and the Captain was alarmed.

  It hadn’t taken much imagination for the Captain to conclude that something funny was going on in number 11. When you are one of the three or four people who happen to be around the park all day because you are either retired or unemployed, and when you live across the road from a woman who announces her comings and goings with loud singing, which in turn draws your attention to her numerous expeditions to town for more food than one person can consume, and when you notice her carting into her trailer an entire bale of hay and daily emptying buckets of what appears to be animal feces, tiny pellets rapidly becoming a conical heap behind her trailer, then before long you can conclude that the woman is doing something that requires an explanation. And when you are a retired captain of the United States Army, you feel entitled to require that explanation, which is precisely what Captain Dewey Knox did.

  He waited by his window until he saw Flora one morning carrying out the daily bucket of droppings, and he strode purposefully out his door, crossed the road and passed her trailer to the back, where he stood silently behind her, hands clasped behind his back, briar pipe stuck between healthy teeth, one d
ark bushy eyebrow raised, so that when the woman turned with her empty bucket, she met him face to face.

  Switching the bucket from her right hand to her left, she saluted smartly. “Captain,” she said. “Good morning, sir.”

  The Captain casually returned the salute, as befitted his rank. “What was your rank at retirement, Pease?”

  “Airman Third Class, sir.” She stood not exactly at attention, but not exactly at ease, either. It’s difficult when retired military personnel meet each other as civilians: their bodies have enormous resistance to accepting the new modes of acknowledging each other, with the result that they don’t work quite either as military or civilian bodies but as something uncomfortably neither.

  “Airman Third, eh?” The Captain scratched his cleanly shaved chin. “I would have thought after twenty years you’d have risen a little higher.”

  “No reason to, sir. I was a steward in the officers’ clubs, sir, mostly in Lackland, and for a while, because of my name, I guess,” she said, smiling broadly, “at Pease down in Portsmouth. Pease Air Force Base,” she added.

  “I know that. You were happy being a steward, then?”

  “Yes, sir. Very happy. That’s good duty, people treat you right, especially officers. I once kept house for General Curtis LeMay, a very fine man who could have been vice president of the United States. Once I was watching a quiz show on TV and that question came up, ‘Who was George Wallace’s running mate?’ and I knew the answer. But that was after General LeMay had retired…”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” the Captain interrupted. “I thought the Air Force used male stewards in the officers’ clubs.”

  “Not always, sir. Some of us like that duty and some don’t, so if you like it you have an advantage, if you know what I mean, and most of the men don’t much like it, especially when it comes to the housekeeping, though the men don’t mind being waiters and so forth…”

  The Captain turned aside to let Flora pass and walked along beside her toward the door of her trailer. At the door they paused, unsure of how to depart from one another, and the Captain glanced back at the pyramid of pellets and straw. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that, Pease,” he said, pointing with his pipe stem.

  “Sir?”

  “What is it?”

  “Shit, sir.”

  “I surmised that. I mean, what kind of shit?”

  “Guinea pig shit.”

  “And that implies you are keeping guinea pigs,” he said.

  Flora smiled tolerantly. “Yes, sir. It does.”

  “You know the rule about pets in the trailerpark, don’t you, Pease?”

  “Oh, sure I do.”

  “Well, then,” he said, “what do you call guinea pigs?”

  “I don’t call them pets. Dogs and cats I call pets. But not guinea pigs. I just call them guinea pigs. They’re sort of like plants, sir,” she explained patiently. “You don’t call plants pets, do you?”

  “But guinea pigs are alive, for heaven’s sake!”

  “There’s some who would say plants are alive, too, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir.”

  “Yes, but that’s different! These are animals!” The Captain sucked on his cold pipe, drew ash and spit into his mouth and coughed.

  “Animals, vegetables, minerals, all that matters is that they’re not like dogs and cats, which are pets because they can cause trouble for people. They’re more like babies. That’s why they have rules against pets in places like this, sir,” she explained.

  “How many guinea pigs have you?” the Captain coldly inquired.

  “Seventeen.”

  “Males and females as well, I suppose.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, smiling broadly. “Twelve females, and eight of them is pregnant at this very moment. If you take good care of them, they thrive,” she said with pride. “Like plants,” she added, suddenly growing serious.

  “But they’re not plants! They’re animals, and they produce … waste materials,” he said, again pointing with the stem of his pipe at the pile behind the trailer. “And they’re dirty.”

  Flora stepped onto her cinderblock stairs, bringing herself to the same height as the Captain. “Sir, guinea pigs are not dirty, they’re cleaner than most people I know, and I know how most people can be. Don’t forget, I was a steward for twenty years almost. And as for producing ‘waste materials,’ well, even plants produce waste materials. It’s called oxygen, sir, which we human people find pretty useful, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir, and as a matter of fact, come next spring you might want me to let you take some of that pile of waste material I got going out back for that little vegetable garden you got going out in back of your place.” She shoved her chin in the general direction of Captain Knox’s trailer, where indeed there was a now-dormant ten-foot by ten-foot garden plot on the slope facing the lake. Then she turned and abruptly entered her home.

  That same evening, the Captain, in number 6, telephoned Leon LaRoche, in number 2, to explain the situation. “I’d take it to her myself,” he said, meaning to Marcelle Chagnon, “but she’s got it into her head that I’m trying to take over her job of running this place, so every time I ask her to do something, she does the opposite.”

  LaRoche understood. “I’ll put a little data together first,” he said. “To impress her. Guinea pigs are like rats, aren’t they?”

  “Very much,” the Captain said.

  LaRoche was eager to please the older man, as he admired and even envied him a little. He had once confessed to Doreen, after her ex-husband had made one of his brutal, unexpected visits and had been hauled away by the Catamount Police Department, that while he was open to the idea of marriage, if it turned out that he remained a bachelor all his life, he hoped he would be able to achieve the dignity and force, by the time he reached sixty or sixty-five, of a Captain Dewey Knox, say.

  That night he researched guinea pigs in volume seven of his complete Cooper’s World Encyclopedia, which he had obtained, volume by volume, by shopping every week at the A & P, and in that way he learned that guinea pigs, or cavies (Rodentia caviidae), a descendant of the Peruvian Cavia aperea porcellus, which were kept by the Indians for food and even today are sold as a delicacy in many South American marketplaces, have a life expectancy of eight years maximum, an average litter size of 2.5, a gestation period of sixty-three days and reach reproductive maturity in five to six weeks. Furthermore, he learned (to his slightly prurient interest) that the female goes through estrus every sixteen days for fifty hours, during which time the female will accept the male continuously but only between the hours of 5:00 PM and 5:00 AM. He also discovered that 8 percent of all guinea pig pregnancies end in abortion, a variable that made his calculations somewhat complicated but also somewhat more interesting to perform. He learned many other things about guinea pigs that night, but it was the numbers that he decided to present to Marcelle. He thought of telling her that guinea pigs are coprophagites, eaters of feces, a habit necessitated by their innate difficulty in digesting cellulose tissue, creating thereby a need for bacteria as an aid to digestion, but he thought better of it. The numbers, he decided, would be sufficient to make her aware of the gravity of the situation.

  The next morning, a crisp, early fall day, with the birches near the lake already gone to gold and shimmering in the clear air, LaRoche walked next door to Marcelle’s trailer fifteen minutes before his usual departure time for Sunday mass and presented her with the evidence and the mathematical implications of the evidence. Captain Dewey Knox’s testimony was unimpeachable, and Leon LaRoche’s logic and calculations were irrefutable. Marcelle’s course of action, therefore, was inescapable. The guinea pigs would have to go, or Flora Pease would have to go.

  “Boy, I need this like I need a hole in the head,” Marcelle griped, when LaRoche had left her alone with her cup of coffee and cigarette. Winter was coming on fast, and she had to be sure all the trailers were winterized, storm windows repaired and in place, exposed water pipes insulate
d, heating units all cleaned and operating at maximum efficiency to avoid unnecessary breakdowns and expensive service calls, contracts for fuel oil and snowplowing made with local contractors and approved by the Granite State Realty Development Corporation, leaky roofs patched, picnic tables and waterfront equipment and docks stored away until spring, and on and on—a long list of things to do before the first snowfall in November. Not only that, she had to collect rents, not always a simple job, and sometime this month she had to testify in court in the case involving Doreen’s ex-husband, since she had been the one to control him with her shotgun while Doreen called the police, and Terry Constant had taken off again for parts unknown, so she had no one to help her, no one (since Terry had a deal with his sister whereby his work for Marcelle helped pay her rent) she could afford. And now in the middle of all this she has to deal with a fruitcake who has a passion for raising guinea pigs and doesn’t seem to realize that they’re going to breed her out of her own home right into the street. Well, no sense treating the woman like a child. Rules were rules, and it wasn’t up to Flora Pease to say whether or not her guinea pigs were pets, it was up to management, and Marcelle was management. The pigs would have to go, or else the woman would have to go. LaRoche was right.