Trailerpark

by Russell Banks

  This time the words seemed to have been understood. Flora stood still, hands extended as if for alms, and cried, “What will I do with them, then? I can’t put them outside, they’ll freeze to death, if they don’t starve first. They’re weak little animals, not made for this climate. You want me to kill them? Is that what you’re telling me? That I have to kill my babies?”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re going to do with them!” Marcelle was angry now. Her head had cleared somewhat, and she knew again that this was Flora’s problem, not hers. “It’s your problem, not mine. I’m not God. What you do with the damned things is your business…”

  “But I’m not God, either!” Flora cried. “All I can do is take care of them and try to keep them from dying unnaturally,” she explained. That was all anyone could do and, therefore, it was what one had to do. “You do what you can. When you can take care of things, you do it. Because when you take care of things, they thrive.” She said it as if it were a motto.

  “Then I’ll just have to call the health board and have them come in here and take the guinea pigs out. I don’t want the scandal, it’ll make it hard to rent, and it’s hard enough already, but if I can’t get you to take care of these animals by getting rid of them, I’ll have someone else do it.”

  “You wouldn’t do that,” Flora said, shocked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ll have to get rid of me first,” she said. “You’ll have to toss me out into the cold first, let me freeze or starve to death first, before I’ll let you do that to my babies.” She pushed her square chin out defiantly and glared at Marcelle.

  “Oh, Jesus, what did I do to deserve this?”

  Quickly, as if she knew she had won, Flora started reassuring Marcelle, telling her not to worry, no one would be bothered by the animals, their shit was almost odorless and would make good fertilizer for the several vegetable and flower gardens in the park, and she, Flora, took good care of them and kept their cages clean, so there was no possible health hazard, and except for their relatively quiet chitchat, the animals made no noise that would bother anyone. “People just don’t like the idea of my having guinea pigs, that’s all,” she explained. “The reality of it don’t bother anyone, not even Captain Knox. If people were willing to change their ideas, then everyone could be happy together,” she said brightly.

  In a final attempt to convince her to give up the guinea pigs, Marcelle tried using some of Leon LaRoche’s calculations. She couldn’t remember any of the specific numbers, but she understood the principle behind them. “You know you’ll have twice as many of these things by spring. And how many have you got now, seventy-five or a hundred, right?”

  Flora told her not to worry herself over it, she already had plenty to worry about with the trailerpark and winter coming and all. She should forget all about the guinea pigs, Flora told her with sympathy, and look after the people in the trailerpark, just as she always had. “Life is hard enough, Mrs. Chagnon, without us going around worrying about things we can’t do anything about. You let me worry about taking care of the guinea pigs. That’s something I can do something about, and you can’t, so therefore it’s something I should do something about, and you shouldn’t even try.” Her voice had a consoling, almost motherly tone, and for a second Marcelle wanted to thank her.

  “All right,” she said brusquely, gathering herself up to her full height. “Just make sure these bastards don’t cause any trouble around here, and make sure there ain’t any health hazard from … whatever, bugs, garbage, I don’t know, anything … and you can keep them here. Till the weather gets warm, though. Only till spring.”

  Marcelle moved toward the door, and Flora smiled broadly. She modestly thanked Marcelle, who answered that if Flora was going to smoke pot here, she’d better do it alone and not with those two big-mouthed jerks, Terry and Bruce. “Let me warn you, those jerks, one or the other of ’em, will get you in trouble. Smoke it alone, if you have to smoke it.”

  “But I don’t know how to make those little cigarettes. My fingers are too fat and I spill it all over.”

  “Buy yourself a corncob pipe,” Marcelle advised. “Where do you buy the stuff from, anyway,” she suddenly asked, as she opened the door to leave and felt the raw chill from outside.

  “Oh, I don’t buy it!” Flora exclaimed. “It grows wild all over the place, especially along the side of Old Road where there used to be a farm, between the river and the state forest.” There were, as part of the land owned by the Corporation, ten or fifteen acres of old, unused farmland now grown over with brush and weeds. “They used to grow hemp all over this area when I was a little girl,” Flora told her. “For rope during the war. But after the war, when they had to compete with the Filipinos and all, they couldn’t make any money at it anymore, so it just kind of went wild.”

  “That sure is interesting,” Marcelle said, shaking her head. “And I don’t believe you. But that’s okay, I don’t need to know who you buy your pot from. I don’t want to know. I already know too much,” she said, and she stepped out and closed the door quickly behind her.

  The trailerpark was located a mile and a half northwest of the center of the town of Catamount, a mill town of about 5000 people situated and more or less organized around a dam and mill pond first established on the Catamount River some two hundred years ago. The mill had originally been set up as a gristmill, then a lumber mill, then a shoe factory, and in modern times, a tannery that processed hides from New Zealand cattle and sent the leather to Colombia for the manufacture of shoes.

  To get to the trailerpark from the town, you drove north out of town past the Hawthorne House (named after the author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who stopped there overnight in May of 1864 with the then ex-president Franklin Pierce on the way to the White Mountains for a holiday; though the author died the next night in a rooming house and tavern not unlike the present Hawthorne House but located in Plymouth, New Hampshire, the legend had grown up in the region that he had died in his bed in Catamount), then along Main Street, past the half-dozen or so blocks of local businesses and the large white Victorian houses that once were the residences of the gentry and the owners of the mill or shoe factory or tannery, whichever it happened to be at that time, and that were now the residences and offices of the local physician (for whom Carol Constant worked), dentist, lawyer, certified public accountant, and mortician. A ways beyond the town, you came to an intersection, or you might more properly say Main Street came to an end. To your right Mountain Road ran crookedly uphill toward the mountain, the hill, actually, that gave the town its name, Catamount Mountain, so named by the dark presence in colonial times of mountain lions at the rocky top of the hill. Turning left, however, you would drive along Old Road, called that only recently and for the purpose of distinguishing between it and New Road, or the Turnpike, that ran north and south between the White Mountains and Boston. When, a mile and a half from town, you had crossed the Catamount River, you would turn right at the tipped, flaking sign, GRANITE STATE TRAILERPARK, posted off the road behind a bank of mailboxes standing like sentries at the intersection. Passing through some old, brush-filled fields and then some pine woods that grew on both sides of the narrow, paved lane, you would emerge into a clearing, with a sedge-thickened swamp on your left, the Catamount River on your right, and beyond, a cluster of somewhat battered and aging housetrailers. Some were in better repair than others, and some, situated in obviously more attractive locations than others, were alongside the lake where they exhibited small lawns and flower gardens and other signs of domestic tidiness and care. The lake itself lay stretched out beyond the trailerpark, four and a half miles long and in the approximate shape of the silhouette of a turkey. For that reason, it was called Turkey Pond for over a hundred years, until Ephraim Skitter, who owned the shoe factory, left the town a large endowment for its library and a bandstand, and in gratitude the town fathers changed the name of the lake. That in turn gave the name Skitter to the large parcel of land th
at bordered the north and west sides of the lake, becoming by 1950, when the Turnpike was built, the Skitter Lake State Forest. All in all, it was a pretty piece of land and water. If you stood out on the point of land where the trailerpark was situated, with the swamp and pine woods behind you, you could see, way out beyond the deep blue water of the lake, spruce-covered hills that humped their way northward all the way to the mauve-colored wedges at the horizon that were the White Mountains.

  In the trailerpark itself, there were an even dozen trailers, pastel-colored blocks, some with slightly canted roofs, some with low eaves, but most of them simply rectangular cubes sitting on cinderblocks, with dirt or gravel driveways beside them, usually an old car or pickup truck parked there, with some pathetic, feeble attempt at a lawn or garden evident, but evident mainly in a failure to succeed as such. Some of the trailers, Leon LaRoche’s, for example, looked to be in better repair than others, and a few even indicated that the tenants were practically affluent and could afford embellishments such as glassed-in porches, wrought-iron railings at the doorstep, tool sheds, picnic tables and lawn furniture by the shoreside yard and a new or nearly new car in the driveway. The trailer rented to Noni Hubner’s mother Nancy was one of these—Nancy Hubner was a widow whose late husband had owned the Catamount Insurance Company and was rumored to have had a small interest in the tannery—and Captain Dewey Knox’s was another. Captain Knox, like Nancy Hubner, was from an old and relatively well off family in town, as suggested by the name of Knox Island, located out at the northern end of Skitter Lake where the turkey’s eye was. Captain Knox enjoyed recalling childhood summer picnics on “the family island” with his mother and his father, a man who had been one of the successful hemp growers before and during the war, or “War Two,” as Captain Knox called it. His father prior to that had been a dairy farmer, but after the war decided to sell his land and moved to Florida, where he died within six months and where Captain Knox’s mother, a woman in her eighties, still lived. Captain Knox’s return to Catamount after his retirement, he said, had been an act of love “for this region, this climate, this people, and the principles and values that have prospered here.” He talked that way sometimes.

  Two of the twelve trailers, numbers 5 and 9, were vacant at this time, number 9 having been vacated only last February as the result of the suicide of a man who had lived in the park almost as long as Marcelle Chagnon and who had been extremely popular among his neighbors. Tom Smith was his name, and he had raised his son alone in the park, and when his son, at the age of twenty-one or so, had gone away, Tom had withdrawn into himself and one gray afternoon in February shot himself in the mouth. He had been a nice man, everyone insisted, though no one had known him very well. In fact, people seemed to think he was a nice man mainly because his son Buddy had been so troublesome, always drunk and fighting at the Hawthorne House and, according to the people in the park, guilty of stealing and selling in Boston their TV sets, stereos, radios, jewelry, and so forth. Tom Smith’s trailer, number 9, wasn’t a particularly fancy one, but it was well located at the end of the land side of the park, right next to Terry and Carol Constant and with a view of the lake, but even so, Marcelle hadn’t yet been able to rent it, possibly because of the association with Tom’s suicide, but also possibly because of there being black people living next door, which irritated Marcelle whenever it came up, bringing her to announce right to the prospective tenant’s face, “Good, I’m glad you don’t want to rent that trailer, because we don’t want people like you living around here.” That would be the end of the tour, and even though Marcelle felt just fine about losing that particular kind of tenant, her attitude certainly did not help her fill number 9, which cost her money. But you had to admire Marcelle Chagnon—she was like an old Indian chief, the way she came forward to protect her people, even with nothing but her pride, if that was all she had to put up, and even at her own expense.

  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 Abenooki Indians, back before the whites came north from Massachusetts and drove the Indians away to Canada, had built their fishing weirs. It was a sleek, sixty-eight-foot-long Marlette with a mansard roof, very fancy, a replacement for the one that had 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, had found it leveled and still smouldering 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 newly weds, 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). Afterward, 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 had moved in to replace the one that the Bings had burned down. Because the new trailer had been so 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 shoreside line, 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 underway 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 the man 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, cabinetmaking 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 him 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 anyhow. 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, who happened to be nearby, just coming in from a long night of hornpouting 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 nearly to the ground (he was on his way to offer his catch to Marcelle, who had a deep-freeze and would hand the ugly fish out next winter when, rolled in batter and fried in deep fat, they would be a treat that reminded people of summer and got them to talking about it again). “You old fart!” Buck, a large and disheveled man, had roared at Merle. “What the hell you lookin’ at! G’wan, get the hell outa here an’ mind your own business!” He made a swiping gesture at Merle, as if he were chasing off a dog.

  Then, according to Marcelle, who had come up behind him in the darkness with her shotgun, Merle said to the man, “Once you kill her, it’s done. Dead is dead. If I was you, Buck, 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 some day coming out of work down to the tannery, 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 whiskery fish. “I’d tell ’em you was out hornpouting with me.”