Trailerpark

by Russell Banks

  “I’ll make sure he does,” Marcelle promised, “or he’ll have his ass in a sling.”

  That calmed the woman, but just then two young men dressed in white, the ambulance attendants, stepped into the room, and when Flora saw them, their large, grim faces and, from her vantage point, their enormous, uniformed bodies, her eyes rolled back and she began to wail, “No, no, no! I’m not going! I’m not going!”

  The force of her thrashing movements tossed Carol off the cot onto the floor, and moving swiftly, the two young men reached down and pinned Flora against her cot. One of them, the larger one, told the other to bring his bag, and the smaller man rushed out of the trailer to the ambulance parked outside.

  “I’m just going to give you something to calm yourself, ma’am,” the big man said in a mechanical way. The other man was back now, and Carol and Marcelle, looking at each other with slight regret and apprehension, stepped out of his way as he pushed through with the black satchel.

  In seconds, Flora had been injected with a tranquilizer, and while the two hard-faced, large men in white strapped her body into a four-wheeled, chromium and canvas stretcher, she descended swiftly into slumber. They wheeled her efficiently out of the trailer, as if she were a piece of furniture, and slid her into the back of the ambulance, and then, with Marcelle following in her car, they were gone.

  Alone by the roadway outside. Flora’s trailer, Carol watched the ambulance and Marcelle’s battered old Ford head out toward Old Road and away. After a moment or two, drifting from their trailers one by one, came Nancy Hubner, her face stricken with concern, and Captain Dewey Knox, his face firmed to hear grim news, and Merle Ring, his face smiling benignly.

  “Where’s my brother Terry?” Carol asked the three as they drew near.

  It was near midnight that same night. Most of the trailers were dark, except for Bruce Severance’s, where Terry, after having fed, watered and cleaned the ravenous, thirsty and dirty guinea pigs, was considering a business proposition from Bruce that would not demand humiliating labor for mere monkey-money, and Doreen Tiede’s trailer, where Claudel Bing’s naked, muscular arm was reaching over Doreen’s head to snap off the lamp next to the bed—when out by Old Road the woman Flora Pease, the Guinea Pig Lady, came shuffling along the lane between the pine woods. She moved quickly and purposefully, just as she always moved, but silently now. She wore the clothes she was wearing in the morning, when the men had taken her from her cot and strapped her onto the stretcher—old bib overalls and a faded, stained, plaid flannel shirt. Her face was ablaze with fever. Her red hair ringed her head in a stiff, wet halo that made her look like an especially blessed peasant figure in a medieval fresco, a shepherd or carpenter rushing to see the Divine Child.

  When she neared the trailerpark sufficiently to glimpse the few remaining lights and the dully shining, geometric shapes of the trailers through the trees and, here and there, a dark strip of the lake beyond, she cut to her left and departed from the roadway toward the swamp. Without hesitation, she darted into the swamp, locating even in darkness the pathways and patches of dry ground, moving slowly through the mushy, brush-covered muskeg, emerging from the deep shadows of the swamp after a while at the edge of the clearing directly behind her own trailer. Soundlessly, she crossed her back yard, passed the head-high pyramids standing like dolmens in the dim light, and stepped through the broken door into the trailer.

  The trailer was in pitch darkness, and the only sound was that of the animals as they chirped, bred and scuffled in their cages through the nighttime. With the same familiarity she had shown cutting across the swamp, Flora moved in darkness to the kitchen area, where she opened a cupboard and drew from a clutter of cans and bottles a red one-gallon can of kerosene. Then, starting at the farthest corner of the trailer, she dribbled the kerosene through every room, looping through and around every one of the cages, until she arrived at the door. She placed the can on the floor next to the broken door, then stepped nimbly outside, where she took a single step toward the ground, lit a wooden match against her thumbnail, tossed it into the trailer and ran.

  Instantly the trailer was a box of flame, roaring and snapping in rage, sending a dark cloud and poisonous fumes into the night sky as the paneling and walls ignited and burst into flame. Next door, wakened by the first explosion and terrified by the sight of the flames and the roar of the fire, Carol Constant rushed from her bed to the road, where everyone else in the park was gathering, wide-eyed, confused, struck with wonder and fear.

  Marcelle hollered at Terry and Bruce, ordering them to hook up garden hoses and wash down the trailers next to Flora’s. Then she yelled to Doreen. Dressed in a filmy nightgown, with the naked Claudel Bing standing in darkness behind her, the woman peered through her half-open door at the long, flame-filled coffin across the lane. “Call the fire department, for Christ’s sake! And tell Bing to get his clothes on and get out here and help us!” Captain Knox gave orders to people who were already doing what he ordered them to do, and Nancy Hubner, in nightgown, dressing gown and slippers, hauled her garden hose from under the trailer and dragged it toward the front, screeching as she passed each window along the way for Noni to wake up and get out here and help, while inside, Noni slid along a stoned slope of sleep, dreamless and genuinely happy. Leon LaRoche appeared fully dressed in clean and pressed khaki workclothes with gloves and silver-colored hardhat, looking like a cigarette ad’s version of a construction worker. He asked the Captain what he should do, and the Captain pointed him toward Bruce and Terry, who were already hosing down the steaming sides of the trailers next to the fire. At the far end of the row of trailers, in darkness at the edge of the glow cast by the flames, stood Merle Ring, uniquely somber, his arms limply at his sides, in one hand a fishing rod, in the other a string of hornpout.

  In a few moments, the fire engines arrived, but it was already too late to save Flora’s trailer or anything that had been inside it. All they could accomplish, they realized immediately, was to attempt to save the rest of the trailers, which they instantly set about doing, washing down the metal sides and sending huge, billowing columns of steam into the air. Gradually, as the flames subsided, the firemen turned their hoses and doused the dying fire completely. An hour before daylight, they had left, and behind them, where Flora’s trailer had been, was a cold, charred, shapeless mass of indistinguishable materials—melted plastic, crumbled wood and ash, blackened, bent sheet metal, and flesh and fur.

  By the pink light of dawn, Flora emerged from the swamp and came to stand before the remains of the pyre. She was alone, for the others, as soon as the fire engines had left, had trudged heavily and exhausted to bed. Around nine, Marcelle Chagnon was stirred from her sleep by her telephone—it was the Concord Hospital, informing her that the woman she had signed in the day before, Flora Pease, had left sometime during the night without permission and they did not know her whereabouts.

  Marcelle wearily peered out the window next to her bed and saw Flora standing before the long, black heap across the lane, and she told the woman from the hospital that Flora was here. She must have heard last night that her trailer burned down, over the radio, maybe, and hitchhiked back to Catamount. She assured the woman that she would look after her, but the woman said not to bother, she only had the flu and probably would be fine in a few days, unless, of course, she had caught pneumonia hitchhiking last night without a hat or coat on.

  Marcelle hung up the phone and continued to watch Flora, who stood as if before a grave. The others in the park also, as they rose from their beds, looked out at the wreckage, and seeing her there, stayed inside and left her alone. Eventually, around midday, she slowly turned and started back toward the swamp.

  Marcelle saw her leaving and ran out to stop her. “Flora!” she cried, and the woman turned back and waited in the middle of the clearing. Marcelle trotted heavily across the open space, and when she came up to her, said to Flora, “I’m sorry.”

  Flora stared at her blankly, as if she didn�
��t understand.

  “Flora, I’m sorry … about your babies.” Marcelle put one arm around the woman’s shoulders, and they stood side by side, facing away from the trailerpark.

  Flora said nothing for a few moments. “They wasn’t my babies. Babies make me nervous,” she said, shrugging the arm away. Then, when she looked up into Marcelle’s big face, she must have seen that she had hurt her, for her tone softened. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Chagnon. But they wasn’t my babies. I know the difference, and babies make me nervous.”

  That was in September. The fire was determined to have been “of suspicious origin,” and everyone concluded that some drunken kids from town had set it. The several young men suspected of the crime, however, came up with alibis, and no further investigation seemed reasonable.

  By the middle of October, Flora Pease had built a tiny, awkwardly pitched shanty on the land where the swamp behind the trailerpark rose slightly and met the pine woods, land that might have belonged to the Corporation and might just as well have belonged to the state of New Hampshire, but it was going to take a couple of lawyers and a pair of surveyors before anyone could say for sure, so as long as neither the Corporation nor the state of New Hampshire fussed about it, neither the Corporation nor the state of New Hampshire was willing to make Flora tear down her shanty and move.

  She built the shack herself, from stuff she dragged down the road and into the woods from the town dump—old boards, galvanized sheet metal, strips of tarpaper, cast-off shingles—and furnished it the same way, with a discolored, torn mattress, a three-legged card table, an easy chair with the stuffing blossoming at the seams, and a moldly rug that had been in a children’s playhouse. It was a single room, with a tin woodstove for cooking and heat, a privy out back, and for light a single kerosene lantern.

  For a while there were a few people from the trailerpark who went out there to the edge of the swamp and visited her. You could see her shack easily from the park, as she had situated it right where she had the clearest view of the charred wreckage of old number 11. Bruce Severance, the college kid, went fairly often to visit her, especially in early summer, when he was busily locating the feral hemp plants in the area and needed her expert help, and Terry Constant went out there, “just for laughs,” he said, but even so, he used to sit peacefully with her in the sun and get stoned on hemp and rap with her about his childhood and dead mother. Whether or not Flora talked about her childhood and her dead mother Terry never said, but then, no one asked him, either. It quickly got hard to talk about Flora. She was just there, exactly the way she was, the Guinea Pig Lady, even though she didn’t have any guinea pigs, and there wasn’t much anyone could say about it anymore, since everyone more or less knew how she had got to be who she was and everyone more or less knew who she was going to be from here on out. Merle used to walk out there in warm weather, and he continued to visit Flora long after everyone else had left off and had gone about his and her business quite as if Flora no longer even existed. The reason he went out, he said, was because you got a different perspective on the trailerpark from out there, practically the same perspective he said he got in winter from the lake when he was in his ice-house out on the lake. And though Marcelle never went out to Flora’s shack, every time she passed it with her gaze, she stopped her gaze and for a long time looked at the place and Flora sitting outside on an old metal folding chair, smoking her cob pipe and staring back at the trailerpark. She gazed at Flora mournfully and with an anger longing for a shape, for Marcelle believed that she alone knew the woman’s secret.

  Cleaving, and Other Needs

  WHEN DOREEN TIEDE MARRIED BUCK TIEDE she did not have to change her name. Her grandfather Sam Tiede, a well driller from Northwood, and Buck’s father Norman Tiede, a house painter from Catamount, were brothers. They had been born and raised in Catamount, along with a half-dozen more Tiedes of the same generation, and when Sam had moved to Northwood ten miles away and had become a well driller and after a few years had managed to borrow enough money from the bank in Concord to set him and his son up with their own drilling rig, he was regarded from then till now as the successful son of old Warren Tiede, for none of the remaining children had moved that far from Catamount and made money. Doreen, then, was descended directly from the Tiedes who had risen in the world, whereas her second cousin Buck was from the Tiedes who, generation after generation, had plowed the same old row. This is important to know, because it helps explain why Doreen didn’t have to change her last name when, a seventeen-year-old virgin, she married, and it also helps explain why they acted the way they did after they were married and divorced. It doesn’t much help explain Buck’s alcoholism, of course, and it doesn’t tell you why Doreen had such a craving for sexual love that Buck, who wasn’t much interested in sex in the beginning, got to be obsessed with it, but it does tell you why Doreen thought Buck was a better man than he perhaps thought he was, and it tells you a little something about his anger.

  In the first year of their marriage, Doreen made love with three men other than her husband, who knew about only one of the men, Howie Leeke, and when it came right down to it, didn’t know about Howie for sure and was made to think that he was imagining the worst parts, the parts, that is, where Howie rides wildly atop Doreen on the waterbed he’s supposed to have out there in his trailer on Cush Meadow Road, rides her bouncing, arching, tautly sprung, eighteen-year-old body as if it were a horse he were breaking, rubbing and drifting through her while she works against him the other way in perfectly thrilling counterline, until she can’t control her movements any longer and… Well, you know the rest.

  Buck knew the rest, too, but only from what he had read about sex in Playboy and other such magazines, not from what he had experienced with women himself, for he had very little experience when he married Doreen—teen-age sex in the back seat of his Chevy Nomad with girls he had gone to high school with, which meant mainly kissing and biting and then plucking and pulling and poking at each other’s private parts and sometimes sucking on each other’s private parts, which, even though such activities usually brought him and sometimes his girlfriend a deep shudder and a wet spot, nevertheless left him feeling dazed with guilt and overall feelings of inferiority; and then, later, in the service, sex with prostitutes in towns near the bases where he was stationed, in Texas and South Carolina, sex that left him feeling like a man who has just walked out to the neon-lit street from a pornographic movie; and after he had come back to New Hampshire and had gone to work for Doreen’s father and grandfather, his cousin and uncle, drilling wells in Northwood and living at his parents’ home in Catamount, sex with Doreen, who was then a senior in high school, five years younger than he. Because Buck was afraid he would get Doreen pregnant before she graduated from high school, and probably also because he wanted Doreen’s father and grandfather to think well of him, Buck Tiede of the Catamount Tiedes who never amount to a tinker’s dam anyway, sex with Doreen remained more or less of the back-seat kind, enlivened of course with a lot of talk, for they were, after all, in love.

  Both Doreen and Buck were good-looking, and people thought of them as sexy because they looked the way sexy people are supposed to look, clean and healthy and symmetrical. Doreen was tall and broad-shouldered with full breasts and a firm, round bottom. She had silky-smooth, dark brown hair that hung loosely over her shoulders, and in the summer she tanned easily and evenly to a shade that made people think she might have a little Mediterranean blood in her. Her face was large, with a full, broad mouth that was good-humored, and because of the crispness of her full lips, sensual, and her brown eyes, shaded by a prominent but serious-looking brow, were set wide on her face. Her nose wasn’t quite right—a little short and narrow for such a large face, but it certainly was not unattractive. Buck’s most unattractive feature in those days was the wide gap between his front teeth. The gap was wide enough for him to spit through, which he did habitually, wide enough even for him to clamp a cigarette with, which, as a joke, he sometimes did,
so that he could go on talking while his cigarette remained attached to his upper jaw by the gapped front teeth. Then he would pluck the cigarette away, and you would see that the gap was actually kind of sexy, kind of inviting, like an open door or gate, and if you were a man, you’d think, “Hmmm, I bet old Buck gets a lot of women,” and if you were a woman, you’d think, “Hmmm, I wonder what it would be like to run my tongue into that gap between his teeth.” He was also tall, a little over six feet, and in those days in good shape from his work on the drilling rig, and with his ash-brown hair cut in the military style and his clear blue eyes and straight, narrow nose, he was clean-looking, too.

  Their wedding night and honeymoon—a week in a motel near Franconia Notch in the White Mountains—weren’t much fun for Doreen. They weren’t much fun for Buck, either. He was awkward and too quick and then impotent for a while and then impatiently passionate and grabby, his head so full of blood from shame and lust that he couldn’t think, so finally, because she could think, Doreen just gave herself over to him and, without feeling, let him have his ways with her. There were several ways, because of all the false starts and false stops and his difficulties with the condom, and it was with barely hidden relief for both of them when, finally, lodged up inside her, Buck grunted and his pelvis whimpered of its own accord, and he was freed to withdraw from her. Her hymen he had broken easily, without even realizing it, earlier, and though she had felt a stab of pain, it was a hot, quick and almost pleasurable pain, so she had said nothing to him. Then next morning when he got out of bed to pee, he saw the specks of blood on the sheet beneath where he had slept, and he quickly covered them with the top sheet and went straight into the shower, while she lay curled on her side sleeping peacefully.