Russell Banks - Trailerpark

After a few moments, Noni got up from the bed and drew on her clothes. “I better get home, my mother’ll kill me. She thinks I’m at the movies with you.”

“Naw, man, she knows where you are. All she’s got to do is walk three doors down and see my van’s still here. C’mon, she knows . She knows we’re making it together. She’s not that out of it.”

Noni shrugged. “I don’t know. She believes what she wants to believe. Sometimes I think she still doesn’t believe Daddy’s dead, and it’s been over four years now. There’s no point in forcing things on people. You know what I mean?”

Bruce understood, but he didn’t agree. People needed to face reality, it was good for them and good for humanity as a whole, he felt. He was about to tell her why it was good for them, but Noni was already dressed and heading for the door, so he said good night instead and waved from the bed as she slipped out the door.

When later that same evening she told her mother that Flora Pease was raising hundreds of guinea pigs in her trailer, it was not so much because Noni herself was interested in Flora or the guinea pigs as it was because her mother Nancy was quizzing her about the movie she was supposed to have seen with Bruce.

“That’s not true,” the woman said.

“What’s not?” Noni switched on the TV set and sat down cross-legged on the floor.

“About the guinea pigs. Where’d you hear such a thing?”

“Bruce. Do you think I could study yoga somewhere around here?”

“Of course not. Don’t be silly.” Nancy lit a cigarette and sat down on the sofa, where she’d been reading this month’s Book-of-the-Month Club selection, a novel that gently satirized the morals and mores of Westchester County’s smart set. “Bruce. I don’t know about that boy. How can he be a college student when the nearest college is the state university in Durham, which is over forty miles from here?”

“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.