Trailerpark

by Russell Banks

  The same thing was happening with Deke. That’s how Claudel looked at it. Deke started telling how the other night he was coming back to town from Concord in his LTD, hitting ninety-two as he left the traffic circle in Epsom, ninety-seven by the time he passed Webster’s Mill Road where Frankie Marcoux was sitting in the dark, just waiting. Deke was a little bit drunk, but not much. He’d been drinking beer at the El Rancho in Concord since seven, and he was feeling ugly because he’d had a little run-in outside the El Rancho when he was leaving with a girl he’d picked up there. The girl turned out to be married and her husband turned out to be waiting for her in the parking lot, and the husband had given the girl hell and had taken her home with him. “Hey, I don’t want some other guy’s wife. Not like that, I mean. To me she was just some broad I picked up at the bar. To him she was his wife and the mother of his kids. So I just says to the guy, ‘Sure,’ I says, ‘take her home where she belongs. Only next time,’ I tell the guy, ‘next time make sure she stays there,’ I says, ‘or maybe the next guy she walks out with won’t be so agreeable.’ You know what I mean?” he asked his friends.

  They knew what he meant. Everybody took a pull on his beer, and Deke went on. “So, hey, here I am coming barrel-ass down Twenty-eight past Webster’s Mill Road, and something tells me to check my mirror as I pass the intersection, and sure enough, I see Marcoux pulling out onto Twenty-eight with his blue light flashing and his siren wailing like an alley cat. Anyhow, nobody screws over me. So I jump on the LTD and I’m hitting a hundred and five when I pass Huckins Chevrolet, and just as I’m starting to put some real space between me and Marcoux, I see a goddamn semi, an eighteen-wheeler, for Christ’s sake, slowing to turn off for town, and he’s taking the whole damned road to make his cut, so I start hitting the brakes, right?”

  “Right,” Art said.

  “Right,” said Ron.

  “Right. And pretty soon my ass end is letting go and I start to think maybe I’m going to roll, and I think, Jesus, I start to roll at a hundred and five and they’ll be scraping me off Route Twenty-eight for a week. So I flip the wheel the same direction my ass is heading, bring her under control, at least I stop the slide, except that now I’m heading off the road into that big cornfield about a half-mile beyond Huckins, you know the one?”

  Art, Ron, and Claudel, too, knew the one. It was a tenacre, flat cornfield leased by a local dairy farmer, and at this time of year the corn was chest high. There was a shallow ditch between the field and the road, and then the ground was fairly flat and, except for the cornstalks, smooth.

  “So I barrel-ass into that goddamn field and I don’t touch the brake or the gas, just let the goddamn car plow through the corn for a couple hundred yards, until it comes to a stop. I had enough sense to flick off my lights just as I left the road, so I was hoping Marcoux had been distracted by that semi jackknifing off the road, like I had been, and that he’d just keep on running down the road after me, while I cool it out in the middle of the cornfield. That’s my plan, anyhow.”

  They all waited for him to tell them what had happened, Art, Ron, and Claudel. Show us how nobody screws over you, Deke.

  “So I’m sitting there, waiting for Marcoux to flash by with his siren screaming and his blue light flashing, only all of a sudden I hear something that isn’t a siren, it’s a car engine, idling, and it’s right behind me. And there isn’t any blue light flashing, it’s a set of headlights bouncing light off the corn that surrounds me, and I say, ‘Shit, it’s Marcoux.’ And it is, it is that damned strutting sonofabitching horse’s ass, and he’s got me, because the only direction I can move is backward, and he’s sitting there blocking me with his cruiser. He gets out, comes strolling up to my window, says, ‘Hello, Deke,’ real cool, you know, like he’s seen it on TV. ‘Out for your evening spin?’ he asks me. Real funny. ‘Ever think of trying the road, Deke? It’s kinda hard to get much speed up, even in this LTD, when you’re driving through a cornfield.’ ‘Ha ha ha,’ I says to him. I mean, hey, nobody screws over me. You know what I mean?”

  They knew.

  “Did he run you in?” Art asked.

  “Bet your ass!” Deke said defiantly. “Took me up to Laconia, made me take the breath test for drinking, but I passed the damned thing all right, so all he could do was hit me for speeding. I got my LTD out the next morning, but I was picking cornstalks out of the grill for days. Jesus, that car looked funny when I got it out, all those green stalks sticking out of the grill like that. I wanted to drive around town that way, you know, just to let people know.”

  “But you didn’t,” Ron said.

  “Naw. No reason to. Besides, the only one I had to prove anything to was Marcoux, and I’d already done that, if you know what I mean.”

  They knew what he meant, all three of them. They were satisfied that nobody had screwed over him. They knew that even though he was barely twenty years old, Deke understood the world and knew how to live in it.

  The band returned to the low stage in front, two middle-aged guitarists with their bellies hanging heavily over gaudy belt buckles and a skinny, balding drummer in his early sixties, all of them wearing matching purple cowboy shirts with pink fringes across their chests and along the backs of their arms.

  They started the music again, and Claudel drifted back into his troubles, when all at once, as if entering a room he hadn’t known existed, he realized that while he had been listening to Deke’s story and thinking about it and while he had been watching the youth and attempting to understand him, he hadn’t thought about himself once. Claudel had let young Deke become the center of his thoughts for a few minutes, and his mind and his heart now felt strangely refreshed for it. It was a feeling he couldn’t remember having experienced before. Certainly not since Vietnam. A coherence had momentarily come over his life, and he understood it, knew where it had come from, which gave him a feeling of wholeness he hadn’t even imagined possible before.

  All those years of thinking he had held a philosophy of life, when in reality he had held nothing of the sort. And now, here in the bar at the Hawthorne House, after listening to a local kid tell a story of how he got arrested for speeding, Claudel suddenly felt he knew enough about the world to devise ways for getting along in the world. It’s all in the way you pay attention to things! he said to himself. Oh, he knew nothing was going to change much. He wasn’t going to get back his job at the Public Service Company, he knew that, and besides, the other day he’d agreed to go to work stacking hides down at the tannery. And he knew he’d never get Ginnie back, not now, because she was pregnant now and would probably marry Howie Leeke as soon as the divorce came through. And he knew he wasn’t going to win the lottery or have some crazy kind of luck like that, which is what he’d need to pay off what he still owed the bank. No, he’d just go on—renting a room at the Hawthorne House, working days down at the tannery and spending his nights down here in the bar. Getting his life over with. But he also knew that it wouldn’t bother him anymore. That made him very thankful. And that was the end of his story.

  The Burden

  BECAUSE OF THE SHABBY CHARACTER of the boy’s mother and also that of the man she had married the very day she found herself legally divorced and able to marry again, and because the two had determined to live far away from New Hampshire without even bothering to send him their address until several years later, Tom had raised Buddy practically by himself. And he had seen his son through hard times, especially as the boy got older, such as when he was in the service that one year and later when he got himself beat up by the guy with the baseball bat and spent six months flat on his back in Tom’s trailer learning how to talk again. So of course when Tom walked into the Hawthorne House for a beer, even though, after the bright afternoon sunlight outside, he wasn’t used to the darkness inside, he recognized the boy right away. You can do that with your children, you can tell who they are even in darkness, when all you can see of them is their height and the position they happen to be standing in. You ju
st glance over, and you say, Oh yeah, there’s my son.

  Tom didn’t know the girl with him, though. Not even when he drew close to her and could see her face clearly in the dim light of the bar. She was sitting alone in the booth next to the juke box where Buddy stood studying the songs. Tom could tell she was with Buddy and not alone because of the way she watched him while he studied the names of the songs on the juke box. It was the way girls always watched Buddy, as if they couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to disappear from in front of them any second—just poof! and he’d be gone, a curling thread of smoke hanging in the air where a second ago he had been smiling and chattering in that circular way of his. Nobody knew where Buddy got it from, his good looks and that way he had of talking so interestingly that people hated to see him come to a stop or ask a question, even, because his mother Maggie, Tom’s ex-wife, had been pretty (back when she was Buddy’s age, that is) but she had never been as outstandingly good-looking as Buddy was, and Tom, even though he had a square and regular-featured face, was not the kind of man you’d compliment for his looks, and of course neither Tom nor his ex-wife owned what you’d call a gift for gab, especially not Tom, who usually seemed more interested in listening than in talking anyway.

  Tom walked past the girl, who looked to be around twenty-five, which made her four years older than Buddy and which was also usual for him. The girl was dark haired and pretty, but actually more stylish than pretty when you got up close, with a round face and grim little mouth. Her short hair was all kinked up in a way that was fashionable just then, which made her somewhat resemble a dandelion, until you looked into her eyes and saw that she was awfully worried about something. You couldn’t tell what it was, exactly, but it was clear that she was not at peace with her circumstances.

  Tom stopped behind his son and next to the bar, and as he moved up to the bar, he reached out and absently tapped his son on the shoulder, and the boy turned around and smiled nicely. Tom didn’t smile back, he didn’t even look at Buddy. He looked across at Gary the bartender who also owned the place and ordered a bottle of beer.

  “You’re keeping your door locked now, Dad,” Buddy said, as if Tom didn’t realize it.

  “I know.” Tom turned around and faced him.

  Buddy reached out and shook his father’s hand. “This here’s Donna,” he said, nodding toward the girl. “Donna picked me up outside Portland on the Maine Pike, and we sorta got to be friends in a very short order, which is certainly nice for me because I’m nothing special and you can see that she is.”

  Donna gave Tom a thin smile, and she did not look like a person who was glad to find herself where she was finding herself, stopped in a dingy, mill town New Hampshire barroom to have a chat with her new boyfriend’s father. Tom didn’t give a damn about her, though, one way or the other. If she wanted to drive all over the countryside in her Japanese car just because she thought Buddy looked good beside her, it didn’t matter to Tom, because women were always doing things like that, and so were men.

  “How long you in town this time?” Tom asked his son. Gary the bartender delivered the bottle of beer, and Tom turned back to the bar and drank off half the bottle. He was feeling weighted and metallic inside, as if his stomach were filled with tangled stovepipe-wire, because even though Buddy was his son and he could recognize him in the darkness, he didn’t like it when he saw him. Not anymore.

  “So, Dad, you’re keeping your door locked nowadays,” he said again.

  Tom was silent for a few seconds and did not look at the boy. “That’s right. Ever since you left and took with you every damned thing of mine you could fit into that duffle of yours. My tape deck, tapes. You even took my cuff links. I must be stupid.” He finished off the bottle of beer and Gary automatically slid a second over. Gary was a tall, skinny, dark-haired man with a toothpick in his mouth that made him look wiser than he probably was. He was the fourth owner of the bar in the last ten years.

  Once again, Buddy smiled in that easy way he had, like a summer sun coming up, and Tom felt his stomach clank and tangle. “C’mon, Dad, I only borrowed that stuff. I only planned to be gone for the weekend, me and Bilodeau, that kid from Concord. It was a weekend, the weather suddenly got warm, you probably don’t remember, but it did, and we were planning to chase some girls Bilodeau knew over on the coast near Kittery. But things just got screwed up, and before the weekend was over, we ended up going in different directions with different people. You know how it goes…” He showed Tom both his palms, as if to prove he wasn’t hiding anything.

  “That was last April.” Tom knew his son was lying, and there was no damned sense trying to catch him out or somehow prove the boy was lying or get him to admit it, because he’d just go on lying, topping one lie with another, canceling one out with a new one, on and on, until you just gave up out of fatigue and boredom. He was one of those people who are always ready to go a step further than anyone else, and after a while you could see that about him, so you’d stop, and he’d be standing there just ahead of you, smiling back. It was almost as if he didn’t know the difference between right and wrong.

  “April?” the girl said. She lit a cigarette and looked at Buddy through the smoke. “So what’s been happening since April? This is June,” she observed, as if she had got a glimpse, from the conversation between the father and son, of what might be in store for her if she went ahead with her plans and hooked up for a while with this good-looking, smooth-talking, slender young man. It had probably started out as a whim, picking up and spending the weekend with a guy she’d seen hitchhiking in Maine. It would make a funny story she could tell on herself to her friends in Boston or Hartford or wherever she had originally been headed. But now things were starting to look a little off-center to her, not quite lined up, which is how it always was with Buddy, how it always had been. He was so damned good-looking, all white teeth and high cheekbones and quick-sloping narrow nose and deep blue eyes, the all-American boy, and he talked sweetly and in a strangely elaborate way, all in circles and curls that kept you listening, so that pretty soon you forgot what it was you were planning on doing and instead you plugged into his plans, but then someplace down along the line, things started to look a little bit off-center, as if a couple of basic pieces hadn’t been cut right. And you couldn’t tell which pieces were off, because the whole damned thing was off.

  Buddy peered down at her as if he couldn’t quite place her. “What’s been happening since April?” he asked. “You really want to know?”

  “No. Not really. It just seemed a funny thing, that’s all…”

  “Funny. What’s funny?” Buddy asked. Tom watched the two carefully from the bar.

  “Nothing,” the girl said. “Forget it.” She closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them, her expression had changed, as if she had turned Buddy into a total stranger, as if she were seeing him for the first time all over again but this time with the knowledge of him that she had gained since morning, when she first saw him at the Portland exit with his thumb out and his duffle and suitcase on the road beside him.

  “Forget funny?” Buddy said, smiling broadly. “Who can forget funny?” He turned away from the girl and faced his father and suddenly started talking to him. “Listen, Dad, that’s why I stopped down at the trailer before I came up here. To give your stuff back, I mean. Hey, I couldn’t do it way the hell up there in Maine among the trees and lakes, and then Donna here was nice enough to drive all this distance out of her way just to help me drop these things off at your place, before we resume our wanderings. Listen, Dad, since April I been way the hell out on a narrow neck of land in northern Maine, working on a lobster boat.” He had laid a hand on his father’s shoulder.

  Tom didn’t believe a word the boy said. He had decided long ago, as policy, not to believe anything his son told him. And that, he told himself, was one of the reasons he kept his trailer locked now, for the first time in his entire life. You’re supposed to love your son and trust him and protect hi
m, and while that would have been easy for Tom, it always had been, this new way of treating him was a burden, and he hated it. For years Tom had loved his son and trusted him and protected him, behaving precisely the way he knew the boy’s mother, his ex-wife Maggie, would not have behaved. Maggie would have let the boy down. Maggie wouldn’t have been home that night the state troopers brought him home all drunk and raving, and the boy would have ended up in jail. Maggie wouldn’t have known how to handle it when he got his head bashed in by that guy with the baseball bat in Florida. She would have let him rot in that charity ward in the Florida hospital before she’d have brought him home, set him up on the living room couch in front of the TV, and then every night for six months taught the boy how to talk again, until finally he could make those looping, charming sentences of his again, and people would sit back in their chairs and listen with light smiles on their faces to see such a clever, good-looking young man perform for them. Maggie never would have borne up under the weight of Buddy, Tom knew. The proof of her weakness, if he’d ever needed proof, he’d obtained the summer Buddy turned twelve, when he had taken the boy by Greyhound all the way to Phoenix, Arizona, to visit his mother, at her request, while he, the father, took a two-week holiday alone farther west, visiting Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm and Universal Studios and watching the surfers at Huntington Beach, the only time he had ever seen real live surfers. When the two weeks were up and Tom had called back at Phoenix for his son, things had changed, and he left the boy in Phoenix, at the boy’s request, presumably for good (at least that was Maggie’s and her husband’s intention and Buddy’s as well). Tom returned to New Hampshire, and didn’t hear anything from his son until September, when the boy showed up at the trailer. She had put him alone on a Boston-bound bus in Phoenix connecting to another bus to Concord, New Hampshire, and the boy, more travel-wise by then than he’d been in June, had hitchhiked the twenty-five remaining miles home. No, for Maggie it was the love and the trust and the protection that made the burden. For Tom, the burden was in withholding that love, trust and protection. That’s what he believed.