Russell Banks - Trailerpark

Despite her life, Flora remained good-naturedly ambitious for her spirit. She believed in self-improvement, believed that it was possible, and that not to seek it, not to strive for it, was reprehensible, was in fact a sin. And sinners she viewed the way most people view the stupid or the poor — as if their stupidity or poverty were their own fault, the direct result of sheer laziness and a calculated desire to exploit the rest of humankind, who, of course, are intelligent or well-off as a direct result of their willingness to work and not ask for help from others. This might not seem a particularly enlightened way to view sinners, and it certainly was not a Christian way to view sinners, but it did preserve a kind of chastity for Flora. It also, of course, made it difficult for her to learn much, in moral terms, from the behavior of others. There was probably a wisdom in that, however, a trade-off that made it possible for her to survive into something like middle age without having fallen into madness and despair.

Within a week of having moved into the trailerpark, Flora had purchased her first pair of guinea pigs. She bought them for fifteen dollars at the pet counter of the five-and-dime in town. She had gone into the store looking for goldfish, but when she saw the pair of scrawny, matted animals in their tiny, filthy cages at the back of the store, she had forgotten the goldfish, which looked relatively healthy anyhow, despite the cloudiness of the water in their tank. She built her cages herself, mostly from castoff boards and chicken wire she found at the town dump and carried home. The skills required were not great, were, in fact, about the same as had been required of her father in the construction of cement forms. At the dump she also found the pieces of garden hose she needed to make her watering system and the old gutters she hooked up as grain troughs.

Day and night she worked for her guinea pigs, walking to town and hauling back fifty-pound bags of grain, dragging back from the dump more old boards, sheets of tin, gutters, and so on. As the guinea pigs multiplied and more cages became necessary, Flora soon found herself working long hours into the night alone in her trailer, feeding, watering and cleaning the animals, while out behind the trailer the pyramid of mixed straw, feces, urine and grain gradually rose to waist height, then to shoulder height, finally reaching to head height, when she had to start a second pyramid, and then, a few months later, a third. And as the space requirements of the guinea pigs increased, her own living space decreased, until finally she was sleeping on a cot in a corner of the back bedroom, eating standing up at the kitchen sink, stashing her clothing and personal belongings under her cot so that all the remaining space could be devoted to the care, housing and feeding of the guinea pigs.

By the start of her third summer at the trailerpark, she had begun to lose weight noticeably, and her usually pinkish skin had taken on a gray pallor. Never particularly fastidious anyhow, her personal hygiene now could be said not to exist at all, and the odor she bore with her was the same odor given off by the guinea pigs, so that, in time, to call Flora Pease the Guinea Pig Lady (as did the people in town, having learned at last of the secret — through several sources: it’s a small town, Catamount, and one sentence by one person can be placed alongside another sentence by another person, and before long you will have the entire story) was not to misrepresent her. Her eyes grew dull, as if the light behind them was slowly going out, and her hair was tangled and stiff with dirt, and her clothing seemed increasingly to be hidden behind stains, smears, spills, drips and dust.

“Here comes the Guinea Pig Lady!” You’d hear the call from outside where the loafers leaned against the glass front of Briggs’ News & Variety, and a tall, angular teen-ager with shoulder-length hair and acne, wearing torn jeans and a Mothers of Invention tee shirt, would stick his long head inside and call out your name, “C’mere, take a look at this, will ya!”

You’d be picking up your paper, maybe, or because Briggs’ was the only place that sold it, the racing form with yesterday’s Rockingham results and today’s odds. The kid might irritate you slightly — his gawky, dim-witted pleasure at staring at someone undeniably less sociable-looking than he, his slightly pornographic acne, the affectation of his tee shirt and long hair — but still, your curiosity up, you’d pay for your paper and stroll to the door to see what had got the kid so excited.

In a low, conspiratorial voice borne on bad breath, the kid would say, “Take a look at that, will ya? The Guinea Pig Lady.”

She would be on the other side of the street, shuffling rapidly along the sidewalk in the direction of Merrimack Farmers’ Exchange, wearing her blue, U.S. Air Force, wool, ankle-length coat, even though this would be in May and an unusually warm day even for May, and her boot lacings would be undone and trailing behind her, her arms chopping away at the air as if she were a boxer working out with the heavy bag, and she would be singing in a voice moderately loud, loud enough to be heard easily across the street, “My Boy Bill” from Carousel .

“Hey, honey!” the kid would wail, and the Guinea Pig Lady, though she ignored his call, would stop singing. “Hey, honey, how about a little nookie, sweets!” The Guinea Pig Lady would speed up a bit, her arms churning faster against the air. “Got something for ya, honey! Got me a licking-stick, sweet lips!” Then, in a wet whisper, to you: “A broad like that, man, you hafta fuck ’em in the mouth. You can get a disease, ya know.”

If you already knew who the woman was, Flora Pease of the Granite State Trailerpark out at Skitter Lake, and knew about the guinea pigs and, thereby, could reason why she was headed for the grain store, you would ease past the kid and away. But if you didn’t know who she was, you might ask the kid, and he would say, “The Guinea Pig Lady, man. She lives with these hundreds of guinea pigs in the trailerpark out at Skitter Lake. Just her and all these animals. Everybody in town knows about it, but she won’t let anyone inside her trailer to see ’em, man. She’s got these huge piles of shit out behind her trailer, and she comes into town all the time to buy feed for ’em. She’s a fuckin’ freak, man! A freak! And nobody in town can do anything about ’em, the guinea pigs, I mean, because so far nobody out at the trailerpark will make a formal complaint about ’em. Though you can bet your ass if I lived out there I’d sure as shit make a complaint. I’d burn the fucking trailer to the ground, man. I mean, that’s disgusting, all them animals. Somebody ought to go out there some night and pull her outa there and burn the place down, complaint or no complaint. It’s a health hazard, man! You can get a disease from them things!”

In September that year, after about a week of not having seen Flora leave her trailer once, even to empty the trays of feces out back, Marcelle Chagnon decided to make sure the woman was all right, so one morning she stepped across the roadway and knocked on Flora’s door. The lake, below a cloudless sky, was deep blue, and the leaves of the birches along the shore were yellowing. There had already been a hard frost, and the grass and weeds and low scrub shone dully gold in the sunlight.

There was no answer, so Marcelle knocked again, firmly this time, and called Flora’s name. Under her breath, she muttered, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Just what I need.”

Finally she heard a low, muffled voice from inside. “Go away.” Then silence, except for the breeze off the lake.

“Are you all right? It’s me, Marcelle!”

Silence.

Marcelle reached out and tried the door. It was locked. She called again, “Flora, let me in!” and stood with her hands in fists jammed against her hips. She breathed in and out rapidly, her large brow pulled down in alarm. A few seconds passed, and then she called out, “Flora, I’m coming inside!”