Russell Banks - Trailerpark

Then, according to Marcelle, who had come up behind him in the darkness with her shotgun, Merle said to the man, “Once you kill her, it’s done. Dead is dead. If I was you, Buck, and wanted that woman dead as you seem to, I’d just get me some dynamite and blow the place all to hell. Or better yet, just catch her some day coming out of work down to the tannery, snipe her with a high-powered rifle from a window on the third floor of the Hawthorne House. Then she’d be dead, and you could stop all this hollering and banging on doors and stuff.”

Buck stared at him in amazement. “What the hell are you saying?”

“I’m saying you ought to get yourself a window up in the Hawthorne House that looks down the hill to the tannery, and when she comes out the door after work, plug her. Get her in the head, to be sure. Just bang, and that’d be that. You could do your daughter the same way. Dead is dead, and you wouldn’t have to go around like this all the time. If you was cute about it, you’d get away with it all right. I could help you arrange it. Give you an alibi, even.” He held up the string of whiskery fish. “I’d tell ’em you was out hornpouting with me.”

“What are you telling me to do?” Buck took a step away from the door toward Merle. “You’re crazy.”

“Step aside, Merle, I’ll take care of this,” Marcelle ordered, shouldering the tiny man out of the way and bringing her shotgun to bear on Buck Tiede. “Doreen!” she called out. “You hear me?”

Buck made a move toward Marcelle.

“Stay right where you are, mister, or I’ll splash you all over the wall. You know what a mess a twelve-gauge can make?”

Buck stood still.

A thin, frightened voice came from inside. “Marcelle, I’m all right! Oh God, I’m sorry for all this! I’m so sorry!” Then there was weeping, both a woman’s and a child’s.

“Forget sorry. Just call the cops. I’ll hold Mister Bigshot here until they come.”

And she did hold him, frozen and silent at the top of the steps, while Doreen called the police, who came in less than five minutes and hauled Buck off to spend the night in jail. Merle, once Marcelle and her shotgun had taken charge of the situation, had strolled on with his fish, gutting them and skinning them quickly in Marcelle’s kitchen, then neatly wrapping and depositing them in her deep-freeze. The cops came and went, blue lights flashing, and later Marcelle returned home, her shotgun slung over her thick arm, and when she entered her kitchen, she found Merle sitting over a can of Budweiser reading her copy of People magazine.

“You’re crazy, dealing with Buck Tiede that way,” she said angrily.

“What way?”

“Telling him to shoot Doreen from a room in the Hawthorne House! He’s just liable to do that, he’s a madman when he’s drinking!” She cracked open a can of beer and sat down across from the old man.

He closed the magazine. “I never told him to kill her. I just said how he might do it, if he wanted to kill her. The way he was going about it seemed all wrong to me.” He smiled and showed his brown teeth through his beard.

“What if he actually went and did it, shot her from the Hawthorne House some afternoon as she came out of work? How would you feel then?”

“Good.”

“Good! Why, in the name of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, would you feel good?”

“Because we’d know who did it.”

“But you said you’d give him an alibi!”

“That was just a trick. I wouldn’t, and that way he’d be trapped. He’d say he was with me all afternoon fishing, and then I’d come out and say no, he wasn’t. I’d fix it so there’d be no way he could prove he was with me, because I’d make sure someone else saw me fishing alone, and that way he’d be trapped and they’d take him over to Concord and hang him by the neck until dead.”

“Why do you fool around like that with people?” she asked, genuinely curious. “I don’t understand you, old man.”

He got up, smiled and flipped the copy of People magazine across the table. “It’s more interesting than reading this kind of stuff,” he said and started for the door. “I put an even dozen hornpouts in your freezer.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot,” she said absently, and he went out.

Merle heard about Flora’s guinea pigs from Nancy Hubner, the widow in number 7, who heard about them from her daughter, Noni, who was having a love affair with the college boy, Bruce Severance. He told her one night in his trailer after they had made love and were lying in darkness on the huge waterbed he’d built, smoking a joint while the stereo played the songs of the humpback whale quietly around them. Noni had been a college girl in northern California before her nervous breakdown, so she understood and appreciated Bruce more than anyone else in the park could. Most everyone tolerated Bruce good-humoredly — he believed in knowledge and seemed to be earnest in his quest for it, and what little knowledge he had already acquired, or believed he had acquired, he dispensed liberally to anyone who would listen. He was somberly trying to explain to Noni how yogic birth control worked, how “basically feminist” it was, because the responsibility was the man’s, not the woman’s.

“I wondered how come you never asked me if I was protected,” she said.

“Yeah, well, no need to, man. It’s all in the breathing and certain motions with the belly, so the sperm gets separated from the ejaculatory fluid prior to emission. It’s really quite simple.”

“Amazing.”

“Yeah.”

“Overpopulation is an incredible problem.”

“Yeah. It is.”

“I believe that if we could just solve the overpopulation problem, all the rest of the world’s problems would be solved, too. Like wars.”

“Ecological balance, man. The destruction of the earth.”

“The energy crisis. Everything.”

“Yeah, man. It’s like those guinea pigs of Flora Pease’s. Flora, she’s got these guinea pigs, hundreds of them by now. And they just keep on making new guinea pigs, doubling their numbers every couple of months. It’s incredible, man.”

Noni rolled over on her belly and stretched out her legs and wiggled her toes. “Do you have that record of Dylan’s, the one where he sings all those country and western songs, way before anyone even heard of country and western? What’s it called?”

“ Nashville Skyline? ”

“Yeah, that’s it. Isn’t it incredible, how he was singing country and western way before anyone even heard of it?”

“Yeah, he’s really incredible, Dylan. Anyhow…”

“Do you have it, the record?” she interrupted.

“No, man. Listen, I was telling you something.”

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay, man. Anyhow, Flora’s guinea pigs, it’s like they’re a metaphor . You know? I mean, it’s like Flora is some kind of god and the first two guinea pigs, the ones she bought from the five-and-dime in town, were Adam and Eve, and that trailer of hers is the world. Be fruitful and multiply, Flora told them, and fine, they go out and do what they’re programmed to do, and pretty soon they’re taking over the world, the trailer, so that Flora can’t take care of them anymore. No matter how hard she works, they eat too much, they shit too much, they take up too much room. So what happens?”

Silence.

“What happens?” Bruce repeated.

“Oh. I don’t know. A flood, maybe?”

“No, man, it’s not that literal, it’s a metaphor. What happens is Flora moves out, leaves the trailer to the guinea pigs. Twilight of the gods, man. God is dead. You know.”

“Yeah. That’s really incredible.”

“Yeah,” Bruce said, drifting into still deeper pools of thought.