Trailerpark

by Russell Banks

  “Don’t turn on the lights. No, go back to your room and turn on one light, then come here. If they know you were coming here and then no lights go on, they’ll figure something’s up.”

  “What the hell you talking about? You high?”

  “Do it. I’ll explain.”

  Terry did as he was told and came back to the darkened kitchen, where the kid, Bruce Severance, was standing at the window peeking out at the entrance to the trailerpark. Terry opened the refrigerator, throwing a wedge of yellow light into the room.

  “Shut that fucking thing!” the kid cried.

  “Take it easy. Want a beer?”

  “No. Yeah, okay, just shut the door, will you?”

  “Sure.” He took out two cans of Miller’s and shut the refrigerator door, dropping the room into darkness again. Handing the kid one of the cans, he slid onto a tall stool at the kitchen counter and snapped open his beer and took a long swallow. Across the room by the window the kid opened his beer and started slurping it down.

  “I thought you was down in Boston,” Terry said.

  “I was, but I came back up this morning.”

  “Where’s your van?”

  “I put it someplace.”

  “You put it someplace.”

  “Yeah. Listen, man, there’s some heavy shit going down. When’s your sister come home?”

  “Around five-thirty,” Terry said.

  They sat in silence for a few seconds, and then Terry said in a low voice, “Your deal came apart, huh? That’s your Jamaican out there, and his friend, right?”

  “Right.”

  “They didn’t want to buy your New Hampshire homegrown? Good old Granite State hemp grown wild in the bushes ain’t smoke enough for the big boys. Funny.” He paused and sipped his beer. “I’m not surprised.”

  “You’re not.”

  “No. When those kinda guys set something up and it’s running smoothly along like it’s been doing, with you doing the dealing and them doing the supplying for as long as this setup’s been working, they get mad if you try to change the rules. But you, I guess you know that now.”

  The kid said nothing. A minute passed, and then he said almost in a whisper, “If you’re not surprised, how come you never said anything?”

  “You wouldn’t have heard me.”

  “They just said they didn’t want to buy, they wanted to sell.”

  “You let ’em try some smoke?”

  “Yeah, sure. We met, just like usual. In the motel in Revere. And I gave them both a joint without telling them what it was, you know?”

  “And first whack, they knew you had something they didn’t sell you, right?”

  “Yeah. But they didn’t believe it was hemp. They thought I was dealing for somebody else. They knew it wasn’t red or gold or ganja or anything they’d smoked before, but they wouldn’t believe this shit is growing wild all over the place up here. I told them all about the war, and the stuff about the Philippines and the government paying the farmers to grow hemp for rope back then and how the stuff went wild after the war, all of it! But they thought I was shitting them, man.”

  “I wouldn’t have believed you, either.”

  “But you know it’s true! You’ve seen it, you even helped me dry the damned stuff and brick and bale it! You even smoke it yourself!”

  “No more, man. The shit makes me irritable.”

  “It makes you high, too,” the kid said quickly.

  “So how come those dudes are up here now?”

  “I told them I have five one-hundred pound bales of the stuff,” the kid said in a low voice.

  Terry sat in silence, took a sip of his beer and said, “You’re stupid. Stupid. You oughta be selling insurance, not dope.”

  “I thought it would let them know I was in business for myself and not dealing for some other supplier, if they knew I had five bales of my own. The Jamaican, Keppie, he just looked at me like I wasn’t there anymore and said I should go to California, and I knew the whole thing had come apart. So I left them at the motel and drove back up. My van’s parked on one of the lumber roads in the state park west of the lake. I walked in through the woods, and then I saw them. I was coming to get you,” the kid added.

  “Me! What do you want me for? I wouldn’t touch this with a stick, man!”

  “I need to get rid of the stuff.”

  “No shit. What are you going to do with it, throw it in the lake?”

  “We can lug it into the woods, man. Just leave it. Nobody’ll find it for months, and by then it’ll be rotted out and nobody’ll know what the hell it is anyhow.” After a pause, the kid said, “I need you to help me.”

  “You’re strong enough to carry one of those bales five times. You don’t need me.” Terry’s voice was cold and angry. “You’re an asshole. You know that?”

  “Please. You can take your sister’s car and we can do it in one trip. It’ll take me all night alone on foot, maybe longer, and someone may see me.” He was talking rapidly, like a beggar explaining his poverty. He whined, and his voice almost broke with the fear and the shame. He was a nice enough kid, and most people liked him right away, because he enjoyed talking and usually talked about things that at first were interesting, organic gardening, solar energy, transcendental meditation, but he tended to lecture people on these subjects, which made him and the subjects soon boring. Terry hung out with him anyhow, smoked grass and drank in town with him at the Hawthorne House, mainly because the kid, Bruce, admired Terry for being black. Terry knew what that meant, but he was lonely and everyone else in town either feared or disliked him for being black. The kid usually had plenty of money, and he spent it generously on Terry, who usually had none, since, except for the occasional chores and repair work tossed his way by Marcelle Chagnon, the manager of the trailerpark, it was impossible for him to find a job here. Outside of his sister, who was his entire family and who, through happenstance, had located herself here in this small mill town in New Hampshire working as a nurse for the only doctor in town, Terry had no one he could talk to, no one he could gossip or grumble with, no one he could think of as his friend. When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike. In that way Terry had attached himself to Bruce Severance, the kid who sold grass to the local high school students and the dozen or so adults in town who smoked marijuana, the kid who drove around in the posh, black and purple van with a painting of a Rocky Mountain sunset on the sides and the bumper stickers attacking nuclear energy and urging people to heat their homes with wood, the kid who had furnished his trailer with a huge waterbed and Day-Glo posters of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, the kid who, to the amusement of his neighbors, practiced the one hundred twenty-eight postures of T’ai Chi outside his trailer every morning of the year, the kid who was now sitting across the darkened kitchen of the trailer owned by Terry’s sister, his voice trembling as he begged Terry, four years older than he, a grown man despite his being penniless and dependent and alone, to please, please, please, help him.

  Terry sighed. “All right,” he said. “But not now.”

  “When?” The kid peered out the window again. “They probably went back to town, to drink or for something to eat. We should do it now. As soon as your sister gets home with the car.”

  “No. That’s what I mean, I don’t want my sister to know anything about this. This ain’t her kind of scene. We can go over to your place and wait awhile, and then I’ll come home and ask her for the car for a few hours, and then we’ll load that shit into the car and get it the hell out of here, and you can tell those dudes you were only kidding or some damned thing. I don’t care what you tell them. Just don’t tell them I helped you. Don’t even tell them I know you.” Terry got off the stool and headed for the door. “C’mon. I don’t want to be here when my sister gets home.”

  “Terry,” the kid said in a quick, light voice.

  “What?”

  “What should I
tell them? I can’t say I was only kidding. They know what that means.”

  “Tell them you were stoned. Tripping. Tell them you took some acid. Beg.”

  “Yeah. Maybe that’ll cool it with them,” he said somberly, and he followed Terry out the door.

  Keeping to the shadows behind the trailers, they walked to the far end of the park, crossed the short beach there and came up along the lake, behind the other row of trailers, until they were behind the trailer where Bruce lived. “Go on in,” Terry instructed him. “They couldn’t see you now even if they were parked right at the gate.”

  The kid made a dash for the door, unlocked it and slipped in, with Terry right behind. When the kid had locked the door again, Terry suggested he prop a chair against the knob.

  “Why? You think they’ll try to break in?”

  “A precaution. Who knows?”

  “Jesus, maybe we should’ve waited out in the woods till your sister got home!”

  “No, man, forget it, will you?” Terry walked through the room, stumbling against a beanbag chair and giving it a kick. “You got any beer here? I shoulda grabbed a couple of beers from my sister.”

  “No. Nothing. Don’t open the refrigerator. The light.”

  “Yeah,” Terry said, his voice suddenly weary. He sat down heavily in the beanbag chair, and it hissed under his weight. “Jesus, it’s cold in here. Can’t you get some heat into this place?”

  “I can’t make a fire. They’ll see the smoke.”

  “Forget the fucking stove, you goddamn freak. Turn up the damn thermostat. You got an oil heater, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but no oil. I only use wood,” the kid said with a touch of his old pride.

  “Jesus.” Terry wrapped his arms around himself and tried to settle deeper into the chair. He was wearing his orange parka and knit cap, but sitting still like this had chilled him. Bruce had gone down the hall to a window from which he could see the entrance to the trailerpark.

  “Hey, man!” Terry called to him. “Your fucking pipes are gonna freeze! You can’t put a woodstove in a trailer and not have any oil heat and keep your pipes from freezing! It’s a known fact!”

  There was a knock at the door, softly, almost politely.

  Terry stood up and faced the door. He whispered Bruce’s name.

  When the second knock came, louder, the kid was standing next to Terry.

  “Oh, my God,” the kid said.

  “Shut up!”

  A clear voice spoke on the other side of the door. “Seberonce! Come, now.”

  Then there was the sound of a metal object working against the latch, and the lock was sprung, and the door swung open. The Jamaican stepped quickly inside, and the white man followed, showing the way with a flashlight.

  “Too dark in here, mon,” the Jamaican said.

  The man with the flashlight closed the door, then found the wall switch and flicked it on, and the four men faced each other.

  “Ah! Seberonce, we gots to hab some more chat, mon,” the Jamaican said. Then to Terry, “So, my brudder soul-bwoy. You gwan home now, me doan got no bidniss wid you, mon.” He flashed his gold teeth at Terry. Inside the small space of the trailer both the Jamaican and his companion seemed much larger than they had in the car. They were, indeed, both taller and thicker than Terry, and in their presence Bruce looked like an adolescent boy.

  “I was just telling him you were asking for him,” Terry said slowly. Bruce was moving away, toward the kitchen area.

  “Wait, mon! Stan still!” the Jamaican ordered.

  The other man switched off his flashlight and leaned his sweatered bulk against the door. “You,” he said to Terry. “You live here?”

  “No, man. Across the way, with my sister. She’s a nurse in town.”

  “Whad a black mon lib up here wid rednecks for, mon?”

  “My sister. She … she takes care of me.”

  “Gwan home now, mon,” the Jamaican said, suddenly no longer smiling. The sour-faced man opened the door for Terry, and he took a step toward it.

  “Wait, Terry!” the kid cried. “Don’t leave me alone!”

  “Shut you face, Seberonce. We gots to hab some more chat, me and you. Dis bwoy, him gwan.”

  Terry stepped out the door, and the sour-faced man closed it behind him. It was cold outside. He stepped to the hard, cold ground and walked quickly across the lane to his sister’s trailer and went inside, locking the door carefully behind him. He crossed the room and stood by the window where Bruce had stood earlier and in the darkness watched the trailer he had just fled. After a few moments, he saw the two men leave and walk down the lane, past the manager’s trailer and through the gate. For a second they were silhouetted by the headlights of a car coming from the other direction, and after the car had passed the men, Terry realized it was his sister’s.

  Swiftly, he left the window and then ran from the trailer and across the lane. The lights were still on in the living room of Bruce’s trailer, and the door was wide open, and as he came up the steps he looked into the room and saw the kid slumped over in the beanbag chair, the back of his head scarlet where the bullets had entered.

  Terry turned around and walked away. His sister was pulling a heavy bag of groceries from the front seat of her car. He came up behind her and said, “You want help?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Was that you just now running over to Bruce’s?” she asked over her shoulder as she backed away from the bag of groceries.

  “No,” he said. “No. I was just getting my pay from Marcelle. I… I haven’t seen Bruce, not for a couple of days. Not since he went down to Boston.”

  “Good,” she said. “I wish you’d stay away from that kid. He’s trouble,” she said sighing.

  What Noni Hubner Did Not Tell the Police about Jesus

  SHE DID NOT REVEAL THAT two days prior to His arrival at the trailerpark she spoke with Him on the telephone. She was alone in her mother’s trailer at the time, which was approximately 10:30 PM, and because she expected her mother, Nancy Hubner, to return from a meeting of the Catamount Historical Society around eleven, Noni had just rolled and smoked a single marijuana cigarette, which she was accustomed to doing when left alone at this time of night, for while she had come to require for sleep the kind of sedation provided by a single marijuana cigarette, her mother had forbidden her to use the weed, particularly since Noni’s psychiatrist had happily provided her with enough Valium to put her to sleep for the rest of her natural life. Noni was in the bathroom flushing down the roach, when the phone rang, and it was Jesus. More precisely, He claimed to be Jesus. He had a surprisingly high voice, kind of thin, almost Oriental, and He spoke in a New Hampshire accent that was sufficiently local for her to think at first that He was originally from around here, but then of course she quickly remembered that He was Jewish and from Bethlehem and that, therefore, His use of a local New Hampshire accent in speaking English with her was merely a typically Christian courtesy designed to make her feel more at ease than she would have with someone speaking in a foreign accent or, as surely would have been understandable, in a foreign language altogether, ancient Hebrew, for God’s sake. She would have thought He was some kind of nut and hung up.

  “This Noni Hubner?” were His first words to her.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Jesus. Been thinking of giving a visit.”

  “Jesus?”

  “Yup.”

  “I must be dreaming,” she said. “You sound like my father.”

  “I am.”

  “No, I mean my real father.”

  “I see. Your mother’s dead husband.”

  “Oh my God! How could you know about that?”

  “Check your Bible,” He said.

  “Oh, listen, I… I’ve really had problems, my mother says I’m fragile, and she’s right. You shouldn’t call up and fool around like this. I’ve been very depressed lately,” she reminded Him.

  “I know that. That’s why I been thinking of giving a li
ttle visit. Might turn things around for you, Noni.”

  “Okay, fine. Really,” she said, her voice trembling. “You do that. I… I’ve got to go now, I hope it’s okay to go now.”

  “Fine. Good-bye.”

  “Bye.”

  And that was all. She hung up, her mother came home around eleven, and Noni kissed her good night and went into her room at the back of the trailer and fell immediately to sleep, dreaming, as might be expected, of her dead father. It was one of those dreams that are so easy to interpret you feel sure your interpretation is wrong, that is, assuming you respect the intelligence of dreams. Noni and her father were standing in the lobby of a large hotel, the Hyatt Regency in Nashville, Tennessee, and Noni’s father kissed her good-bye, and when the elevator door opened, he led her forward into it, stepping back himself just as the door closed. The elevator was suspended in a round glass tube, and it shot up for forty or fifty floors, then came to an abrupt stop. The door opened, and standing in front of her, with His hand extended toward her in the same position as her father’s when he had led her into the elevator way below, was Jesus. He was wearing a white robe, as He’s usually portrayed, and was smiling. He wasn’t very tall, about her height, five foot six, and He was smiling with infinite understanding and sweetness. She stepped out of the elevator and placed her hand in His. Then she woke up, and it was morning, a late February morning, gray and cold and lightly snowing.

  She did tell the police what day it was that she first saw Jesus, February 22, 1979, but she did not reveal to them when exactly on that day or where exactly at the trailerpark. They probably were a little embarrassed by the line of questioning they were caught in and, as a consequence, accepted approximate answers when exact answers would have been more revealing and possibly more convincing. It was the second afternoon following her phone conversation with Him that she actually saw Jesus. The light snow of the previous day had built to a snowstorm that had abated the next morning, leaving six inches of new powdery snow on top of two feet or more of the old, crusted stuff, and Noni in boots and parka had shoveled a path out to the driveway, which had been cleared early that morning by the kid from town who plowed out most everybody in the park that winter, and afterward she had walked down the freshly cleared lane under a darkly overcast sky, one of those weighted, low skies that make you think winter will never end, that it will surely press on and down, bearing you beneath it, until finally you lie down in the snow and go to sleep. At the end of the lane she came to the lake, and with the trailers behind her and the wind off the lake in her face, she stood and gazed across the silver-gray ice to the island and, beyond the island, to the humped, pale blue hills. The wind had scraped most of the snow off the lake, drifting it against the shore and the trees and here at the trailerpark against the sides of the trailers. Her pale, pinched face grew paler and drew in upon itself as the steady wind drove against the shore, and as she later said, it seemed to her at that moment more than any other that her life was not worth anything, for she was a stupid, unimaginative young woman who had no gifts for the world and who did not believe in herself enough to believe that her love was worth giving. She had discovered in college that she was stupid and flunked out after two semesters, and she had learned on the commune that she was unimaginative and after taking a lot of acid tried to stab one of the people who truly was imaginative, and in the hospital she had found out that she had no gifts for the world because her dependencies were so great, so she stopped eating and almost died of starvation, and then last summer with Terry she had learned that her love was worth nothing so she refused to have his baby and sent him away. She opened her eyes, wishing the lake were not covered with ice so that she could walk straight into the water and drown, when she saw a man approaching her at a distance, walking slowly over the ice directly toward her. Even from this distance she knew the man was Jesus, and trembling, suddenly warm, all her dark thoughts gone, she raised her hand and waved. But when He waved back, she grew frightened. He was more or less the same as He had been in the dream, except that He wore a heavy maroon poncho over His shoulders, and His feet were wrapped in some kind of bulky mucklucks. He was hatless, and His long, dark brown hair swirled around His bearded face. Turning away from Him, she ran in terror back up the lane to her mother’s trailer, dashed breathlessly inside, locking the door behind her, and when she had pulled off her boots and parka, she switched on the television set and sat down in front of it and tried to watch. Her mother was in the kitchen, preparing dinner. “Have a nice walk, dear?” she called. Noni said no, she had seen Jesus walking across the lake toward her, so she had run home. “Oh, dear,” her mother said.