Trailerpark (14 page)

“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.

S
HE 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 little 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.

 

Time passed, and winter did indeed turn eventually into spring, soggy and swollen and ravaged, which is almost always the case with New Hampshire springs. Renewal seems almost impossible, except as survival alone indicates a potential for it. Noni saw no more of Jesus during these months, but she thought of Him frequently, and she read her Bible, and along about the end of March she started attending services at a small white building located on one of the side streets in town. It was a single-story building that once had been a paint store, just a half-block off Main Street, and the two large windows facing the street had been painted over dark green and a sign in white, wobbly letters had been made in each of them. The one on the right said:
CHURCH OF THE NEW HAMPSHIRE MINISTRY OF JESUS CHRIST
; on the other side were the words,
FOR WHERE TWO OR THREE ARE GATHERED TOGETHER IN MY NAME, THERE AM I IN THE MIDST OF THEM.
The people who attended prayer meetings and listened to sermons here were all local people, about twenty in all, and except for Noni, working people. Noni didn't work because she was supported by her mother who, in turn, was supported by her dead husband who, in his turn, had been supported by the selling of life insurance. Nevertheless, she felt comfortable with these people, mostly because they had been unhappy once, too, and now they were not, and when they talked about their time of unhappiness she knew they had felt then just as she felt now, stupid and unimaginative, with no gifts for the world and no belief that her love was worth giving. It was Jesus, they said, who had changed their lives, for He had found their love to be of infinite worth and their gifts, no matter how slight, to be of great value, and their intelligence and imaginative powers to be apocalyptically superior to the intelligence and imagination of the rest of the people in town. They said to her, when she wept, “Did you never read in the Scriptures, ‘The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner. This is the Lord's doing; it is marvelous in our eyes'?” And then in mid-April, shortly after Easter, Noni saw Jesus a second time, this time in the form of a body of light. He appeared to her one night late while she lay in her bed and tried to sleep. Since joining the Church of the New Hampshire Ministry of Jesus Christ she had given up smoking marijuana, along with alcoholic beverages, sex, cigarette smoking, cursing and cosmetics. All her anxieties and grief fell immediately away, and she came to be filled with the light of Jesus, and when He had passed through her and had gone from her room, she remained filled—but filled now with love, her love of Jesus Himself, and the inescapable logic of that love. From then until now Noni Hubner was a different person. That much was obvious to anyone who knew her, and that much, of course, she told the police when they interrogated her.

 

She did not quote Him directly, and not just because they didn't happen to ask her what, exactly, Jesus had asked her to do for Him. It was at the Wednesday evening prayer services, while Brother Joel was preaching, that she had received her instructions, or what she regarded as instructions. Brother Joel was in the front of the room, holding the open Bible in one hand, pointing at the ceiling with the other, shouting and beseeching, berating and explicating, imploring and excoriating to the assembled group of about seventeen or eighteen persons, mostly women of middle age and a few men of various ages, and several of the women were shaking their bodies up and down and rolling their heads back and around, as Brother Joel, a young man from Maine who had settled here last year to commence his ministry, moved to the text of Matthew, chapter eighteen, and read the words of Jesus that begin, “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven,” and when he reached the place where Jesus says, “For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost,” Noni felt herself leave her body behind, watched it fall like an emptied husk to the floor next to her chair, as she ascended into a rosy cloud, where she saw the outstretched hand of Jesus, and into His hand she placed her own, while He pointed with His other hand beyond the cloud and down. She thought for a second to check for the wounds in His hands, as Thomas had done, and a cold wind blew against her and took the doubting thoughts with it. She let her gaze flow to where Jesus indicated, beyond the cloud and down, and in the far distance she saw her father's grave. It was a summer afternoon, just as it had been when they had buried him, and she knew it was her father's grave, all right, even though it was covered with grass now and the stone, a common gray granite stone, was too far away for her to read the inscription, for she knew the location, even though she had not been out to his grave in the cemetery on the hill above the river since the afternoon of his burial. Nor had her mother. His grave was at the top of the hill, near a grove of young maple trees, and when the service had been completed by Reverend Baum, her mother's Congregational minister, Noni and her mother had turned and had got quickly into her mother's Japanese fastback coupe, and they had driven away and had not come back. From that day till now, almost five years later, Noni's mother had spoken of her dead husband as if he were merely absent, as if he had driven downtown to get the paper, and Noni had screamed at her several times that first year, “He's
dead!
Face it, Mother, Daddy's
dead! Dead! Dead!
” And then, after the first year, Noni had ceased screaming, had ceased correcting her mother, had ceased even to reflect on it, and in the end had ceased to observe that, to her mother, the man was neither dead nor alive, for to Noni that's how it was also—her father was neither dead nor alive. But when she came back to her body lying there on the wood floor of the Church of the New Hampshire Ministry of Jesus Christ, she knew her father was waiting for her, his hand reaching out to her, so she rose to her feet, and she left the building.

 

At the cemetery, standing with the shovel in the circle of light cast by her mother's coupe, she waited and listened and heard Jesus moving in the darkness behind her, heard His bare feet press against the wet grass, while He watched over her, and when the policemen came forward and crossed into the circle of light, walking over her father's grave to her, one of them taking the shovel from her hands, the other holding her arms tightly, as if she might run away, she had no fear. The one holding her arm asked what she thought she was doing, and she told him that she had come to show her mother that her father was dead, so that her mother could be free, as she was free. When they asked where her mother was, Noni was silent for a second and heard Jesus shift His weight in the shadows, and then she told them. While the second policeman went to the coupe and released Noni's mother from her bonds, Noni silently thanked Jesus for His guidance.