The Small Crimes of Tiffany Templeton

by Richard Fifield

  My family had lived in the trailer park for years, but we had the newest trailer. Although my mother liked to live cheap, she insisted on presenting well. They bought the brand-new double-wide after the house next door exploded. I was four years old, but it’s not something you forget. The flames left scorch marks on our skirting, and the smoke stained the vinyl. Instead of repairing the damage, she bought a new house, but had the floors reinforced before we moved in. The weight of her and my father combined caused soft spots, and this time, she was determined to not have the joists replaced every few years

  In addition to the new trailer, with the immaculate white vinyl siding, we also had a hot tub that my mother traded from somebody on the Bad Check List. In seven years, we only used it four times, because it was weird to be in the front yard, with all the neighbors watching. My brother drained it three years ago, because it was basically a mosquito incubator. Our yard was planted with Kentucky bluegrass, too, which went against my mother’s hatred of things from the South, but it was a variety that nobody else had, and it set our yard apart. Next month, it would chameleon from the yellow of winter into the blue green that made her so happy.

  Both trailer houses had the exact same layout. I always got the smallest of the three rooms, even though the Meatloaf had moved out long ago. His bedroom had its own bathroom, but I think my mother was punishing me for my lack of personal grooming. Since Ronnie left, it was supposedly a guest room, but we had never had guests.

  My room was dark, the way I preferred it. It had a picture window that looked out onto the island in the middle of the trailer court, but I did not find much solace in staring at a dumpster, especially since many residents had terrible aim, and the ground around it was littered with random trash and broken furniture. I didn’t want to ask for curtains, so I thumbtacked an army blanket to block out the view. David had talked me into painting the walls when we were in third grade, and they were still dark purple. This was before he had discovered painter’s tape and tarps, so the paint job was sloppy. My bedding had been pink, and I had ruined the guest room bathtub in an attempt to dye all of it black.

  After seeing the bathtub, my mother had been furious. “You are so inconsiderate, Tiffany Templeton. You should know better. Take your destruction elsewhere.”

  I kept my pages locked in my nightstand, and that was all I needed. One of David’s cheerleaders, a girl like Becky, Victoria, Kaitlynn, or Caitlyn, might have covered all the surfaces in her room with makeup and jewelry and diet pills, but I left them bare. The only decoration at all was an unframed canvas, a gift from David, a self-portrait, which was typical, the negative space dotted with rhinestones. They were the only thing that sparkled in the room.

  In brand-new trailers, every bedroom has a walk-in closet, and mine was no exception. For years, it was a pathetic thing, all of the clothing I owned hung on twenty hangers, leaving room enough for an entire family of Sweets. After my father died, I surrendered to a strange urge. I ripped the clothes from the hangers and jammed it all in the empty bureau drawers. I pulled the gray pillows and duvet inside the walk-in closet, and I slept inside. It was comforting. It was enclosed and dark and I could be alone with my thoughts, pretend that it was a cave in which there was no such thing as Gabardine, no such thing as parents. Inside that walk-in closet, there were no people to lose.

  The month before I was sent away, my mother was looking for me all over the house, most likely to yell about something. Eventually, she yanked open the door of the walk-in closet. Needless to say, I was startled. It was not a good way to be wakened.

  “What in the hell are you doing in here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s creepy, Tiffany. This is the kind of stuff devil worshippers do.”

  * * *

  * * *

  AFTER EATING, I STARED AT a DVD for twenty minutes. I had a collection of horror movies, all of them from the pawn shop, and I mostly kept them on for background noise. This is what happens when things become too familiar. You watch something so many times and you stop seeing it. You watch something so many times, and you count on it being home to cook you dinner, and wave at you from the front porch. You stop seeing it, because it is no longer there.

  Even though he was gone, the loss of my dad created an actual space. He was so large he left room, real room for me to grieve in.

  Chapter Three

  IT WAS STILL NOT DARK enough to check on my box. In March, the sun sets just after six o’clock, and I had an hour to kill before my mother got home from work. She would want to see my face, make sure I wasn’t out in the darkness, sneaking around. Even though my mother had not declared any rules, I knew I was on a short leash. I saw it in her face at the gas station, and in the extra bulk of her purse, the phone cord peeking out. Now there was an invisible cord inside the house, and I would not stray. She was prepared to yank me in any direction, a fish on a hook. I knew I could go to David’s house, because it was two hundred feet away, and because he was the only person in our town that she liked. And he would be the first to rat me out, anything to gain points with my mother.

  David was my best friend by default because he lived with his mother in the next lot over. We grew up together, closest in age, closest in trailers. That’s what I mean by default, I guess. David taught me how to shoplift in sixth grade, on a field trip to Fortune to tour the remains of the sawmill, and the stump of the largest cottonwood tree in America. On our lunch break, our unsupervised classmates sought out fistfights with the rich kids of Fortune. They had always been our rivals, and they may have had high-speed internet and computers in all their classrooms, but we had choke holds and upper body strength. David, however, had more nefarious plans and yanked me to the Ben Franklin. That day he only stole fabric glue, but over the next five years, his criminal enterprise expanded. I mostly stole slasher DVDs, but David stole presents for his cheerleaders. I swallowed our secrets, and all the ones that came after. Partners in crime, we had to be best friends. Neither one of us wanted to use the ammunition.

  Janelle, his mother, told me to stop knocking on the door a very long time ago, wanted me to consider their trailer my second home. Of course, I did not tell my mother this.

  I didn’t knock, even though I’d been gone three months, a notorious three months. Maybe Janelle had changed her opinion of me, but I walked into the living room, nonetheless. It was usually cluttered with Janelle’s New Age things and David’s finds from thrift stores—midcentury modern. You could say it was an interesting juxtaposition of tastes, but today, none of that was visible. The entire living room was piled with the furniture from David’s room. He was redecorating again. Stacks of stuff everywhere, but his bare mattress lay in the very center of the room, pristine, and Janelle reclined there, arms folded across her chest like a vampire at rest in a coffin. I knew there was nothing evil here, though. She was meditating. And she was deep inside it; her eyelids didn’t even flutter when I walked past and knocked into a set of chimes. The bells rang out, but Janelle didn’t stir.

  Down the hall, I could see David posed in his doorway, paintbrush in hand. The house smelled like latex paint instead of the usual scent of Janelle’s incense, but she loved her son deeply and was used to the smell of redecoration because it happened at least twice a year.

  He rolled his eyes when he saw me approach.

  “We have sharp objects in this house. I hope you learned your lesson.”

  The end of his paintbrush was drenched in bright white. A new color, and I had seen them all, had seen all of his redecoration projects.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t learn my lesson. But I can probably melt a toothbrush with a lighter and stab you to death before you even know it.” This was a lie. The only useful thing I learned at Dogwood was how to shape my eyebrows.

  “You haven’t changed at all,” he said. He pointed to the cheap carpet beside him. An iron sunburst clock, the face chipped enoug
h for me to know it was really vintage, the wavy arms that radiated around it pristine. The entire object was bright white, had not faded yellow like most white things that were sixty years old, even the hands that kept time. The second hand was bright red, but he would probably paint it.

  “I learned some things while you were gone. Things that changed my life.”

  “I was only gone for three months.”

  “It seemed longer. You’re my best friend,” he said. “If you tell anyone that, I will kill you.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I learned that you should build a room around one object,” he said. “I found this clock, and it was like fate, I think. It called out to me. I know what you’re going to ask, so don’t bother. No, it doesn’t work. If you go away for another three months, maybe I can learn how to be an electrician.”

  I was used to speeches like this. I was one of the few people that understood David, the other being my mother, and I knew that cruel things came out of his mouth, for good reason. I learned a long time ago that he said terrible things to me because he was practicing for adulthood. David believed that when he finally left this town, he would become rich and imperious. It didn’t matter how he got there—he’d never chosen a vocation, or followed through on any of his interests. He had faith, I guess, and around Gabardine, faith was in short supply. Sure, Janelle’s chimes and incense were based in some sort of belief, but it sprung from things she had highlighted in yellow from an ever-growing stack of hippie self-help books.

  “I’m going to do white on white,” he said. “Like a beach house in Miami.” I did not question his choice, even though Miami was the absolute antithesis of Gabardine. I knew better.

  “White on white,” I said. “Like the worst part of winter.”

  “The snow here is dirty,” he said. “All that creeping around, and you don’t even pay attention.”

  “I’m reformed,” I said. “No more creeping. No more silverware, either. And my mom took the phone, too. She carries it around in her purse.”

  “You don’t need a phone,” he said. “You don’t have anybody to call.” This was true. “I know about the silverware,” said David. “She gave it to us.”

  “Of course she did,” I said. Janelle already had two mobiles on the front porch made of silverware cantilevered on wooden dowels and piano wire. I hoped she had the common sense not to do the same with our family’s cutlery. My mom drove slowly through the trailer court, and she would notice something like that.

  David took a step back from the doorway to admire his work, and his frame filled the entire space. He was the best-built boy in our class. It wasn’t surprising that Coach Bitzche had begged David to join the football team. Our entire freshman year, Coach did everything he could to cajole him, even got on his knees and pleaded. David refused.

  “I don’t do team sports,” said David. He already had a team, and it was all of us, and he was a vindictive and cruel leader. He’d been leading my class since the second grade. When Coach Bitzche wrote David a check for $1,000, about which of course I was sworn to secrecy, David refused the money. In his version of events, he brought the check back to Coach Bitzche, wrote VOID across it in huge letters. “There is no amount of money worth risking this face.”

  Freshman year, David was focused on modeling, and my mother paid for headshots, but it never went anywhere.

  I craned around the doorjamb, and my eyes watered—it was so bright, and the paint so fresh. He had used high gloss on the walls, even though he had sworn off high gloss from past redecorating disasters. It reminded me of a laboratory in a spaceship. He waited for my reaction.

  “It’s a big change,” I said. His former bedroom was dark gray, and he had spray-painted the furniture to look like chrome, even sprayed a glass coffee table to make it look smoky. Amidst all the gray and metal and glass, he had chosen citron as an accent color, but the only fabric he could find at the Ben Franklin was closer to a neon green, and he never stopped complaining about it. “I like the white,” I said. “When I stab you with my toothbrush shiv, the blood splatter will be fantastic.”

  “Three months in rehabilitation, and you have nothing to show for it.”

  “It wasn’t rehabilitation,” I said. “None of us had drug problems.” I stopped myself. “Okay, some of them had drug problems, but that wasn’t the point. And I got a lot of stuff done, believe it or not.”

  “Your eyebrows, obviously. Thank god.”

  “I wrote a play,” I said. “A whole entire play. Stage directions and everything.” I slid it from my backpack, but he seemed unimpressed.

  “I prefer musicals,” he said.

  “I know that. Everybody knows that. But I think you’d like this one. It’s got death and prostitutes.” He snatched it from my hands.

  “The Soiled Doves of Gabardine? We don’t have doves here, Tiffany. We have turkey vultures.”

  “It’s not about birds,” I said. I watched as he thumbed through the first pages.

  “Interesting,” he said.

  “I’d like your feedback,” I said.

  “Everybody does,” he said. He pushed past me and returned to the paint tray in the corner, his feet crunching on the tarp, perfectly laid out, corner to corner. I knew this was unnecessary. David never spilled a drop.

  Chapter Four

  AT SIX THIRTY, I HEARD the crash, as my mother’s purse took flight and landed somewhere in the kitchen. In my bedroom, I waited. An hour later, I heard her bedroom door close, and I could unclip myself from that short leash. The box called me, and I swear the voice was distant and full of echoes, just like my mother on speakerphone. I climbed out of my bedroom window.

  When my father was alive, I would never have dared to do such a thing. Before my father died, I had no reason to find relief in all that darkness.

  At night, the loop of our trailer park seemed to be one whole creature, multiple eyes of windows casting light onto snowy yards. During the day, it was depressing to see. In trailer houses, there are no attics or basements, no places to hide. In the bright light of day, it was a horror movie, all the fear contained in one box, no escape.

  Since I’d been back, I’d only entered the trailer park through the entrance closest to town, past the McGurty family, Waterbed Fred (his real name was Fred Hakes, but he was forever known by the name of his long-defunct business), the horrible cheerleader Victoria and her former cheerleader mother, the cursed Bitzches, the sloppy brothers McMackin, and Ronnie, who tried so hard to get away from our family but only ended up next door. We lived in the middle. To the left of us was the burned-out lot, and then David and his mother, but if you kept going left, the loop extended farther to another entrance off the highway. Everything that occupied my mind followed that curve, but it was only safe in the dark.

  The tire tracks and ruts had frozen when the sun went down, and I stumbled and slid in my sneakers. I used to be good at this. I used to be stealthy. Tonight, the noise of my shoes was as good as a bell around my neck, jewelry for a girl who didn’t even have her ears pierced.

  I zipped my jacket up all the way and pulled the drawstrings of my hood tight against the cold. As I passed David’s house, the lights blazed in his bedroom window, and Guns N’ Roses blasted from the living room, which meant Janelle was doing her sun salutations, always at the wrong end of the day. Next door, the city clerk of Gabardine lived in an immaculate double-wide, a lot of space for a tiny man. Mr. Francine’s house was dark, but I could see the glow of a television set from his window that faced the woods behind his home, another shade of blue, always blue, casting against the white barks of the quaking aspens.

  I planned to stop at the next house. Betty Gabrian was the only person who wrote to me at Dogwood, and I wanted to give her the script. Instead, David had it, and all I had to show were the blue stains on my fingers from the ancient mimeograph machine, ink still embedded in m
y cuticles.

  I stopped at her front yard, walk unshoveled, a For Sale sign stuck into the snowbank. The windows were dark black squares, and ice clumped in a ring around her house, had slid from her sloping roof. It must have been a stormy winter, and she must have been gone for quite a while. She had spent thousands of dollars improving the trailer, jacking it up and installing a concrete foundation. Real wood siding had been painted to look like stone, until it seemed like a Victorian mansion. She even had a cupola. This had made my mother seethe.

  In her letters, she didn’t mention moving. The real estate market in Gabardine was nonexistent, so her castle would probably be abandoned for years, and our trailer court could finally have a haunted house, not just haunted people.

  In the night, the bluffs of snow glowed, and a wind picked up out of nowhere. The For Sale sign wobbled as it was buffeted by a gust, and my heart was broken.

  I had to keep moving. It was too cold to ruminate. In the center of our trailer park, the ponderosa pine that had survived the hits of many drunk drivers swayed in the wind, the lowest branches slapped against the dumpsters. Garbage day was tomorrow, and the wind blew so hard that it whipped the overflowing garbage bags in the dumpsters and sounded like whips cracking.

  That was what I heard as I continued on, the night disrupted by trash. Only appropriate, because the next house belonged to Lou Ann Holland, who was my number two archenemy, second only to the Mail Lady. As I ducked my head against the gale, I glanced to my left, at the burning windows. I caught a glimpse of her, and as usual, she stood in the middle of her living room, a gooseneck lamp on the floor firing light across her easel, onto the painting she was working on. Tonight, no blue, and for that I was thankful.