Trailerpark (7 page)

“I don't know.” Noni was sliding into the plot intricacies of a situation comedy about two young women who worked on an assembly line in Milwaukee and made the kind of comically stupid errors of judgment and perception that Chester A. Riley used to make in
The Life of Riley
twenty-five years before. “It's a correspondence school or something, in Vermont. He has to go there and see his teachers for a couple of weeks twice a year or something. It's the new thing in education.”

Well, Nancy didn't know how it could be much of an education, and it certainly didn't explain why Bruce lived where he did and not at his college or even at his parents' home, as Noni did.

“I don't know,” Noni said.

“Don't you ever ask, for heaven's sake?”

“No.”

That was all their conversation for the night. At eleven, Nancy yawned and went to bed in her room at the far end of the trailer, the rooms of which were carpeted and furnished lavishly and resembled the rooms of a fine apartment. Around midnight, Noni rolled a joint and went to her room, next to her mother's, and smoked it, and went to sleep. She bought her marijuana from Bruce. So did Terry buy his from Bruce. Also Leon LaRoche, who had never tried smoking grass before but certainly did not reveal that to Bruce, who knew it anyhow and charged him twice the going rate. Doreen Tiede bought grass from Bruce, too. Not often, however; about once every two or three months. She liked to smoke it in her trailer with men she went out with and came home with, so she called herself a “social smoker,” but Bruce knew what that meant. Over the years, Bruce had bought his grass from several people, most recently from a Jamaican named Keppie who lived in the West Roxbury area of Boston but who did business from a motel room in Revere. Next year, Bruce had decided, he would harvest the hemp crop Flora Pease had discovered, and he would sell the grass back, running it the other direction, to Keppie and his Boston friends. He figured there must be five hundred pounds of the stuff growing wild out there, just waiting for a smart guy like him to cut, dry, chop and pack. He might have to cut Terry Constant in, but that would be fine, because in this business you often needed a partner who happened to be black.

 

The next morning, on her way to town to have her hair cut and curled by Ginnie Bing (now Ginnie Leeke, after having married the plumber Howie Leeke), Nancy Hubner picked up Merle Ring. Merle was walking out from the trailerpark and had almost reached Old Road, when he heard the high-pitched whirr of Nancy's powerful Japanese fastback coupe and without turning around stepped off the road into the light, leafless brush. There had been an early snow in late October that winter, and then no snow throughout November and well into December, which had made it an excellent year for ice fishing. After the first October snow, there was a brief melt and then a cold snap that had lasted for five weeks now, so that the ice had thickened daily, swiftly becoming iron-hard and black and smooth. Then all over the lake shanties had appeared, and all day and long into the night men and sometimes women sat inside the shanties, keeping warm from tiny kerosene or coal-burning heaters, sipping from bottles of whiskey, watching their lines and yakking slowly to friends or meditating alone and outside of time and space, until the flag went up and the line got yanked and the fisherman would come crashing back into that reality from the other. The ice had hardened sufficiently to bear even the weight of motor vehicles, and now and then you could look out from the shore and see a car or pickup truck creeping across the slick ice and stopping at one of the shanties, bringing society and a fresh six-pack or pint of rye. No one ever visited Merle's shanty, though he certainly had plenty of friends of various ages and both sexes. He had made it known that, when he went ice fishing, it was as if he were going into religious withdrawal and meditation, a journey into the wilderness, as it were, and if you were foolish or ignorant enough to visit him out there on the ice in his tiny, windowless shack with the stovepipe chimney sticking up and puffing smoke, you would be greeted by a man who seemed determined to be left alone. He would be cold, detached, abstracted, unable or unwilling to connect to the person standing self-consciously before him, and after a few moments you would leave, your good-bye hanging unanswered in the air, and Merle would take a sip from his fifth of Canadian Club and drift back into his trance.

Nancy braked her car to a quick stop next to Merle, and reaching over, cranked down the window and asked if he wanted a lift into town. She liked the old man, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the old man intrigued her, as if she believed he knew something about the world they all lived in together that she did not know and that would profit her greatly if she did know. So she courted him, fussed over him, seemed to be looking after his comfort and welfare, behaving the way, as she once said to Noni, his daughters ought to behave.

Merle apparently knew all this, and more, though you could never be sure with him. He got inside the low, sleek car, slammed the door shut and surrounded himself with the smell of leather and the pressure of fan-driven heat. “Morning, Mrs. Hubner. A fine, crispy morning, isn't it?” he said.

She agreed and asked him where she could drop him. A fast, urgent driver, she was already flying past the intersection of Old Road and Main Street and was approaching the center of town. She drove so as to endanger, but she didn't seem to know it. It was as if her relation to the physical act of driving a motor vehicle was the same as her relation to poverty—abstract, wholly theoretical, and sentimental—which made her as dangerous a driver as she was a citizen. She was the type of person that believes poor people lead more wholesome lives than rich people and what poor people lack, and rich people have, is education. It was almost impossible for her to understand that what poor people lack, and rich people have, is money. And as for the wholesomeness of the lives of the poor, her notions were not all that different from Bruce Severance's, since the basis for both sets of ideas was a fear and loathing of the middle class that they themselves so perfectly embodied.

Merle and Nancy exchanged brief remarks, mostly solicitous on her part as to the present condition of Merle's arthritis and mostly whining on his part as to the same thing. Merle probably knew that by whining he could put Nancy at her ease, and in encounters as brief as this one he, like most people, surely enjoyed being able to put people at their ease. It made things more interesting for him later on. Stopping in front of Hayward's Hardware and Sporting Goods Store, where Merle was headed for traps, she suddenly asked him a direct question (since she was now sufficiently at her ease to trust that he would answer directly and honestly and in that way might be brought to reveal more than he wished to): “Tell me, Mr. Ring, is it true that that woman Flora in number eleven, you know the one, is raising hundreds of guinea pigs in her trailer?”

“Yes,” he said, lying, for he had heard nothing of it. “Though I'm not sure of the numbers. It's hard to count 'em over a certain point, sixty, say.”

“Don't you think that's a little … disgusting? I mean, the
filth
. I think the woman ought to be put away, don't you?” she asked, still trying to get information.

“What would you do with all those guinea pigs then?”

“Why, let the S.P.C.A. take them, I suppose. They know how to handle these things, when things like this get out of hand. Imagine, all those tiny animals crowded into a trailer, and remember, number eleven is not one of the larger trailers in the park, as you know.”

“I guess you're right, the S.P.C.A. could kill 'em for us, once we'd got Flora locked up someplace. The whole thing would probably drive her right over the edge anyhow, taking away her animals and killing 'em like that, tossing 'em into that incinerator they got. That'd push ol' Flora right over the edge. She'd be booby-hatch material for sure then, whether she is now or not.”

“You're making fun of me, Mr. Ring. Aren't you?”

“No, no, no, I'm not making fun of you, Mrs. Hubner,” he said, opening the door and stepping out, not without difficulty, however, because of the shape of the car and his stiff back. “I'll check into it for you, ma'am. Get the facts of the situation, so to speak. Because you're probably right. I mean, something will have to be done, eventually, by someone. Because those kind of animals, rodents and such, they breed fast and before you know it a hundred is two hundred, two hundred is four, four is eight, and so on. So I'll check into it for you.”

“Thank you so much, Mr. Ring,” she said with clear relief. He was such a nice man. She wondered if there was some way she could make his life a little easier. At his age, to be alone like that, it was simply awful.

Merle closed the door, waved and walked into Hayward's, and Nancy drove on to Ginnie's Beauty Nook, on Green Street across from Knight's Paint Store, where Ginnie and her ex-husband Claudel had lived in the upstairs apartment back when their trailer had burned down. That was over three years ago, maybe four. Nancy couldn't remember, until it came back to her that it had happened in the summer, when Ginnie and Claudel had returned from a weekend on the Maine coast to discover that their fancy trailer had burned to the ground in their absence, and then she remembered that was the summer Noni turned fifteen and started having migraines and saying she hated her, and then she remembered that was the summer her husband had died. So it must be over four years now since Ginnie and Claudel moved into town and rented that apartment over Knight's Paint Store. Isn't it amazing, how time flies when you're not paying attention, she reflected.

 

A week later, Merle woke late after having spent most of the night out on the lake in his ice-house, and because the sun was shining, casting a raw light that somehow pleased him, he decided to visit Flora Pease and determine if all this fuss over her guinea pigs was justified. Since talking with Nancy Hubner, he had spoken only to Marcelle Chagnon about the guinea pigs, and her response had been to look heavenward, as if for help or possibly mere solace, and to say, “Just don't talk to me about that crazy woman, Merle, don't start in about her. As long as she don't cause any troubles for me, I won't cause any troubles for her. But if
you
start in on this, there'll be troubles. For me. And that means for her, too, remember that.”

“Makes sense,” Merle said, and for several days after he had succeeded in going about his business—ice-fishing, eating, cleaning, reading the
Manchester Union-Leader
, puttering with his tools and equipment—slow, solitary activities that he seemed to savor. He was the kind of person who, by the slowness of his pace and the hard quality of his attention, appeared to take a sensual pleasure from the most ordinary activity. He was a small, lightly framed man and wore a short white beard which he kept neatly trimmed. His clothing was simple and functional, flannel shirts, khaki pants, steel-toed work shoes—doubtless the same style of clothing he had worn since his youth, when he first became a carpenter's apprentice and determined what clothing was appropriate for that kind of life. His teeth were brown, stained from a lifetime of smoking a cob pipe, and his weathered skin was still taut, indicating that he had always been a small, trim man. There was something effeminate about him that, at least in old age, made him physically attractive, especially to women but to men as well. Generally, his manner with people was odd and somewhat disconcerting, for he was both involved with their lives and not involved, both serious and not serious, both present and absent. For example, a compliment from Merle somehow had the effect of reminding the recipient of his or her vanity, while an uninvited criticism came out sounding like praise for having possessed qualities that got you singled out in the first place.

Though seasonably cold (fifteen degrees below freezing), the day was pleasant and dry, the light falling on the bonehard ground directly, so that the edges of objects took on an unusual sharpness and clarity. Merle knocked briskly on Flora's door, and after a moment, she swung it open. She was wrapped in a wool bathrobe that must have been several decades old and belonged originally to a very large man, for it flowed around her blocky body like a carpet. Her short hair stuck out in a corolla of dark red spikes, and her eyes were red-rimmed and watery-looking, as, grumpily, she asked Merle what he wanted from her.

“A look,” he chirped, smiling.

“A look. At what?”

“At your animals. The guinea pigs I heard about.”

“You heard about them? What did you hear?” She stood before the door, obstructing his view into the darkened room beyond. An odor of fur and straw, however, seeped past and merged warmly with the cold, almost sterile air outdoors.

Merle sniffed with interest at the odor, apparently relishing it. “Heard you got a passel of 'em. I never seen one of these guinea pigs before and was wondering what in hell they look like. Pigs?”

“No. More like fat, furry chipmunks,” Flora said, easing away from the door. She still had not smiled, however, and clearly was not ready to invite Merle inside. “Mrs. Chagnon send you over here?” she suddenly demanded. “That woman is putting me on a spot. I can't have any friends anymore to visit or to talk to me here, or else I'll get into trouble with that woman.”

“No, Marcelle didn't send me, she didn't even want to talk about your guinea pigs with me. She just said as long as they don't cause her any trouble, she won't cause you any trouble.”