Trailerpark

by Russell Banks

  A week later, Merle woke late after having spent most of the night out on the lake in his ice-house, and because the sun was shining, casting a raw light that somehow pleased him, he decided to visit Flora Pease and determine if all this fuss over her guinea pigs was justified. Since talking with Nancy Hubner, he had spoken only to Marcelle Chagnon about the guinea pigs, and her response had been to look heavenward, as if for help or possibly mere solace, and to say, “Just don’t talk to me about that crazy woman, Merle, don’t start in about her. As long as she don’t cause any troubles for me, I won’t cause any troubles for her. But if you start in on this, there’ll be troubles. For me. And that means for her, too, remember that.”

  “Makes sense,” Merle said, and for several days after he had succeeded in going about his business—ice-fishing, eating, cleaning, reading the Manchester Union-Leader, puttering with his tools and equipment—slow, solitary activities that he seemed to savor. He was the kind of person who, by the slowness of his pace and the hard quality of his attention, appeared to take a sensual pleasure from the most ordinary activity. He was a small, lightly framed man and wore a short white beard which he kept neatly trimmed. His clothing was simple and functional, flannel shirts, khaki pants, steel-toed work shoes—doubtless the same style of clothing he had worn since his youth, when he first became a carpenter’s apprentice and determined what clothing was appropriate for that kind of life. His teeth were brown, stained from a lifetime of smoking a cob pipe, and his weathered skin was still taut, indicating that he had always been a small, trim man. There was something effeminate about him that, at least in old age, made him physically attractive, especially to women but to men as well. Generally, his manner with people was odd and somewhat disconcerting, for he was both involved with their lives and not involved, both serious and not serious, both present and absent. For example, a compliment from Merle somehow had the effect of reminding the recipient of his or her vanity, while an uninvited criticism came out sounding like praise for having possessed qualities that got you singled out in the first place.

  Though seasonably cold (fifteen degrees below freezing), the day was pleasant and dry, the light falling on the bonehard ground directly, so that the edges of objects took on an unusual sharpness and clarity. Merle knocked briskly on Flora’s door, and after a moment, she swung it open. She was wrapped in a wool bathrobe that must have been several decades old and belonged originally to a very large man, for it flowed around her blocky body like a carpet. Her short hair stuck out in a corolla of dark red spikes, and her eyes were red-rimmed and watery-looking, as, grumpily, she asked Merle what he wanted from her.

  “A look,” he chirped, smiling.

  “A look. At what?”

  “At your animals. The guinea pigs I heard about.”

  “You heard about them? What did you hear?” She stood before the door, obstructing his view into the darkened room beyond. An odor of fur and straw, however, seeped past and merged warmly with the cold, almost sterile air outdoors.

  Merle sniffed with interest at the odor, apparently relishing it. “Heard you got a passel of ’em. I never seen one of these guinea pigs before and was wondering what in hell they look like. Pigs?”

  “No. More like fat, furry chipmunks,” Flora said, easing away from the door. She still had not smiled, however, and clearly was not ready to invite Merle inside. “Mrs. Chagnon send you over here?” she suddenly demanded. “That woman is putting me on a spot. I can’t have any friends anymore to visit or to talk to me here, or else I’ll get into trouble with that woman.”

  “No, Marcelle didn’t send me, she didn’t even want to talk about your guinea pigs with me. She just said as long as they don’t cause her any trouble, she won’t cause you any trouble.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Flora said, defiantly crossing her short, thick arms over her chest. “People come around here and see my guinea pigs, and then I get into trouble. If they don’t come around here and don’t see nothing, then it’s like the guinea pigs, for them, don’t exist. That kid, Terry, the black one, he started it all, when all I was doing was trying to be friendly, and then he went and dragged the other kid, the white one, in here, and they got to smoking my hemp, and then pretty soon here comes Mrs. Chagnon, and I get in trouble. All I want is to be left alone,” she said with great clarity, as if she said it to herself many times a day.

  Merle nodded sympathetically. “I sure understand how you feel. It’s like when I won the lottery, that was back a ways, before you come here, and everybody thought I had a whole heap more money than I had, so everyone was after me for some.”

  That interested Flora. She had never met anyone who had won the lottery. In fact, she was starting to believe that it was all faked, that no one ever won, that those people jumping up and down hysterically in the TV ads were just actors. Now, because of Merle’s having won, her faith in the basic goodness of the world was magically restored. “This means they probably went to the moon, too,” she said with clear relief.

  “Who?”

  “The astronauts.”

  “You didn’t believe that, the rocket to the moon? I thought you used to be in the Air Force.”

  “That’s why I had so much trouble believing it,” she said and stood aside and waved him in.

  Inside, when his eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light of the room, this is what Merle saw: large, wood-framed, chicken-wire pens that were waist-high and divided into cubicles about two feet square. The pens were placed in no apparent order or pattern throughout the room, which gave the room, despite the absence of furniture, the effect of being incredibly cluttered, as if someone were either just moving in or all packed to move out. As far as Merle could see, the rooms adjacent to this one were similarly jammed with pens, and he surmised that the rooms he couldn’t see, the bedroom at the back and the bathroom, were also filled with pens like these. In each cubicle there was a pair of grown or nearly grown guinea pigs or else one grown (presumably female) pig and a litter of two or three piglets. Merle could see and hear the animals in the cubicles a short distance away from him scurrying nervously about their cages, but the animals nearer him were crouched and still, their large round eyes rolling frantically and their noses twitching as, somehow, Merle’s own odor penetrated the heavy odor of the room.

  Flora reached down and plucked a black and white spotted pig from the cage it shared with a tan, long-haired mate. Cradling it in her arm and stroking its nose with her free hand, she walked cooing and clucking over to Merle and showed him the animal. “This here’s Ferdinand,” she said. “After the bull.”

  “Ah. May I?” he said, reaching out to take Ferdinand.

  Merle held the animal as Flora had and studied its trembling, limp body. It seemed to offer no defense and showed no response to the change in environment except that of stark terror. When Merle placed it back into its cubicle, it remained exactly where he had placed it, as if waiting for a sudden, wholly deserved execution.

  “How come you like these animals, Flora?”

  “Don’t you like them?” she bristled.

  “I don’t feel one way or the other about them. I was wondering about you.”

  She was silent for a moment and moved nervously around the cages, checking into the cubicles as she moved. “Well, somebody’s got to take care of them. Especially in this climate. They’re really not built for the ice and snow.”

  “So you don’t do it because you like them?”

  “No. I mean, I like looking at them and all, the colors are pretty, and their little faces are cute and all. But I’m just taking care of them so they won’t die, that’s all.”

  There was a silence, then Merle said, “I hate to ask it, but how come you let them breed together? You know where that’ll lead?”

  “Do you know where it’ll lead if I don’t let them breed together?” she asked, facing him with her hands fisted on her hips.

  “Yup.”

  “Where?”

  “They’l
l die out.”

  “Right. That answer your question?”

  “Yup.”

  Merle stayed with her for the next half-hour, as she showed him her elaborate watering system—a series of interconnected hoses that ran from the cold water spigot in the kitchen sink around and through all the cages, ending back in the bathroom sink—and her cleverly designed system of trays beneath the cages for removing from the cages the feces and spilled food, and her gravity-fed system of grain troughs, so that all she had to do was dump a quart a day into each cage and the small trough in each individual cubicle would be automatically filled. Because she had constructed the cages herself, she explained, and because she was no carpenter, they weren’t very fancy or pretty to look at. But the basic idea was a good one, she insisted, so that, despite her lack of skill, the system worked and consequently every one of her animals was clean, well-fed and watered at all times. “You can’t ask for much more in this life, can you?” she said proudly as she led Merle to the door.

  He guessed no, you couldn’t. “But I still think you’re headed for troubles,” he told her, and he opened the door to leave.

  “What do you mean? What’s going on?” Suddenly she was suspicious of him and frightened of Marcelle Chagnon again, with her suspicion of the one and fear of the other swiftly merging to become anger at everyone.

  “No, no, no. Not troubles with Marcelle or any of the rest of the folks in the park. Just with the breeding and all. I mean, Flora, in time there will be too many of them. They breed new ones faster than the old ones die off. It’s simple. There will come a day when you won’t have any more room left in there. What will you do then?”

  “Move out.”

  “What about the animals?”

  “I’ll take care of them. They can have the whole trailer, they’ll have lots of room if I move out.”

  “But you don’t understand,” Merle said calmly. “It goes on forever. It’s numbers, and it doesn’t change or level off or get better. It gets worse and worse, faster and faster.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said to him. “Everything depends on how you look at it. And what looks worse and worse to you might look better and better to me.”

  Merle smiled, and his blue eyes gleamed. He stepped down to the ground and waved pleasantly at the grim woman. “You are right, Flora. Absolutely right. And I thank you for straightening me out this fine morning!” he exclaimed, and whistling softly, he walked off for Marcelle’s trailer, where he would sit down at her table and drink a cup of coffee with her and recommend to her that the best policy was no policy, in the matter of Flora and her guinea pigs, because Flora would be more than capable of handling any problem that the proliferation of the guinea pigs might create.

  Marcelle was not happy with Merle’s advice. She was a woman of action and it pained her to sit still and let things happen, especially things that seemed to her to have no other possible consequence, if let go, than disaster. But, as she told Merle, she had no choice in this matter of the guinea pigs. If she tried to evict Flora and the animals, there would be a ruckus and possibly a scandal; if she brought in the health department, there was bound to be a scandal; if she evicted Flora and not the guinea pigs, then she’d have the problem of disposing of the damn things herself. “It’s just gone too far,” she said, scowling.

  “But everything’s fine right now, at this very moment, isn’t it?” Merle asked, stirring his coffee.

  “I suppose you could say that.”

  “Then it hasn’t gone too far. It’s gone just far enough.”

  At this stage, just before Christmas the first year of Flora Pease’s residence at the trailerpark, everyone had an opinion as to what ought to be done with regard to the question of the guinea pigs.

  FLORA PEASE: Keep the animals warm, well-fed, clean and breeding. Naturally, as their numbers increase, their universe will expand. (Of course, Flora didn’t express herself that way, for she would have been speaking to people who would have been confused by language like that coming from her. She said it this way: “When you take care of things, they thrive. Animals, vegetables, minerals, same with all of them. And that makes you a better person, since it’s the taking care that makes people thrive. Feeling good is good, and feeling better is better. No two ways about it. All people ever argue about anyhow is how to go about feeling good and then better.”)

  DOREEN TIEDE: Evict Flora (she could always rent a room at the Hawthorne House, Claudel Bing had and, God knows, he was barely able to tie his own shoes for a while, he was so drunk, though of course he’s much better now and may actually move out of the Hawthorne House one of these days, and in fact the man was starting to look like his old self again, which was not half-bad), and then call in the S.P.C.A. to find homes for the animals (the ones that couldn’t be placed in foster homes would have to be destroyed—but really, all they are is animals, rodents, rats, almost).

  TERRY CONSTANT: Sneak into her trailer one day when she’s in town buying grain, and one by one, set the animals free. Maybe you ought to wait till spring and then just set them free to live in the swamp and the piney woods and fields between Old Road and the trailerpark. By the time winter came rolling around again, they’d have figured out how to tunnel into the ground and hibernate like the rest of the warm-blooded animals. The ones that didn’t learn how to survive, well, too bad for them. Survival of the fittest.

  BRUCE SEVERANCE: The profit motive. That’s what needs to be invoked here. Explain to Flora that laboratories pay well for clean, well-fed guinea pigs, especially those bred and housed under such controlled conditions as Flora has established. Explain this, pointing out that this will enable her to continue to breed guinea pigs for both fun and profit for an indefinite period of time, for as long as she wants, when you get right down to it. Show her that this is not only socially useful but it will provide her as well with enough money for her to take even better care of her animals than she does now.

  NONI HUBNER: Bruce’s idea is a good one, and so is Leon LaRoche’s, and Captain Knox has a good idea too. Maybe we ought to try one first, Captain Knox’s, say, since he’s the oldest and has the most experience of the world, and if that doesn’t work we could try Leon LaRoche’s, and then if that fails, we can try Bruce’s. That would be the democratic way.

  LEON LAROCHE: Captain Knox’s idea, of course, is the logical one, but it runs certain risks and depends on his being able to keep Flora, by the sheer force of his will, from reacting hysterically or somehow “causing a scene” that would embarrass the trailerpark and we who live in it. If the Suncook Valley Sun learned that we had this kind of thing going on here, that we had this type of village eccentric living here among us at the trailerpark, we would all suffer deep embarrassment. I agree, therefore, with Doreen Tiede’s plan. But my admiration, of course, is for Captain Knox’s plan.

  CAROL CONSTANT: I don’t care what you do with the damned things, just do something. The world’s got enough problems, real problems, without people going out and inventing new ones. The main thing is to keep the woman happy, and if having a lot of little rodents around is what makes her happy and they aren’t bothering anyone else yet, then for God’s sake, leave her alone. She’ll end up taking care of them herself, getting rid of them or whatever, if and when they start to bother her—and they’ll bother her a lot sooner than they bother us, once we stop thinking about them all the time. Her ideas will change as soon as the guinea pigs get to the point where they’re causing more trouble than they’re giving pleasure. Everybody’s that way, and Flora Pease is no different. You have to trust the fact that we’re all human beings.

  NANCY HUBNER: Obviously, the guinea pigs are Flora’s substitutes for a family and friends. She’s trying to tell us something, and we’re not listening. If we, and I mean all of us, associated more with Flora on a social level, if we befriended her, in other words, then her need for these filthy animals would diminish and probably disappear. It would be something that in the future we could a
ll laugh about, Flora laughing right along with us. We should drop by for coffee, invite her over for drinks, offer to help redecorate her trailer, and so on. We should be more charitable. It’s as simple as that. Christian charity. I know it won’t be easy—Flora’s not exactly socially “flexible,” if you know what I mean, but we are, at least most of us are, and therefore it’s our responsibility to initiate contact, not hers, poor thing.

  CAPTAIN DEWEY KNOX: It’s her choice, no one else’s. Either she goes, or the animals go. She decides which it’s to be, not us. If she decides to go, fine, she can take the animals with her or leave them behind, in which case I’m sure some more or less humane way can be found to dispose of them. If she stays, also fine, but she stays without the animals. Those are the rules—no pets. They’re the same rules for all of us, no exceptions. All one has to do is apply the rules, and that forces onto the woman a decision that, however painful it may be for her, she must make. No one can make that decision for her.

  MARCELLE CHAGNON: If she’d stop the damned things from breeding, the whole problem would be solved. At least it would not bother me anymore, which is important. The only way to get her to stop breeding them, without bringing the Corporation or the health board or the S.P.C.A. or any other outsiders into it, is to go in there and separate the males from the females ourselves, and when she comes back from town, say to her, okay, Flora, this is a compromise. Sometimes people don’t understand what a compromise is until you force it on them. It’s either that or we sit around waiting for this thing to explode, and then it’ll be too late to compromise, because the outsiders will be in charge.

  MERLE RING: Let Flora continue to keep the animals warm, well-fed, clean and breeding. Naturally, as their numbers increase, their universe will expand. And as a result, all the people in the trailerpark, insofar as they observe this phenomenon, will find their universe expanding also. (It’s understood that Merle did not express himself this way, for he would have been expressing himself to people who would have been offended by language like that. Here’s how he put it: “It should be interesting to see what the woman does with her problem—if it ever actually becomes a problem. And if it never becomes a problem, that should be interesting too.”)