Russell Banks - Trailerpark

Marcelle hung up the phone and continued to watch Flora, who stood as if before a grave. The others in the park also, as they rose from their beds, looked out at the wreckage, and seeing her there, stayed inside and left her alone. Eventually, around midday, she slowly turned and started back toward the swamp.

Marcelle saw her leaving and ran out to stop her. “Flora!” she cried, and the woman turned back and waited in the middle of the clearing. Marcelle trotted heavily across the open space, and when she came up to her, said to Flora, “I’m sorry.”

Flora stared at her blankly, as if she didn’t understand.

“Flora, I’m sorry … about your babies.” Marcelle put one arm around the woman’s shoulders, and they stood side by side, facing away from the trailerpark.

Flora said nothing for a few moments. “They wasn’t my babies. Babies make me nervous,” she said, shrugging the arm away. Then, when she looked up into Marcelle’s big face, she must have seen that she had hurt her, for her tone softened. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Chagnon. But they wasn’t my babies. I know the difference, and babies make me nervous.”

That was in September. The fire was determined to have been “of suspicious origin,” and everyone concluded that some drunken kids from town had set it. The several young men suspected of the crime, however, came up with alibis, and no further investigation seemed reasonable.

By the middle of October, Flora Pease had built a tiny, awkwardly pitched shanty on the land where the swamp behind the trailerpark rose slightly and met the pine woods, land that might have belonged to the Corporation and might just as well have belonged to the state of New Hampshire, but it was going to take a couple of lawyers and a pair of surveyors before anyone could say for sure, so as long as neither the Corporation nor the state of New Hampshire fussed about it, neither the Corporation nor the state of New Hampshire was willing to make Flora tear down her shanty and move.

She built the shack herself, from stuff she dragged down the road and into the woods from the town dump — old boards, galvanized sheet metal, strips of tarpaper, cast-off shingles — and furnished it the same way, with a discolored, torn mattress, a three-legged card table, an easy chair with the stuffing blossoming at the seams, and a moldly rug that had been in a children’s playhouse. It was a single room, with a tin woodstove for cooking and heat, a privy out back, and for light a single kerosene lantern.

For a while there were a few people from the trailerpark who went out there to the edge of the swamp and visited her. You could see her shack easily from the park, as she had situated it right where she had the clearest view of the charred wreckage of old number 11. Bruce Severance, the college kid, went fairly often to visit her, especially in early summer, when he was busily locating the feral hemp plants in the area and needed her expert help, and Terry Constant went out there, “just for laughs,” he said, but even so, he used to sit peacefully with her in the sun and get stoned on hemp and rap with her about his childhood and dead mother. Whether or not Flora talked about her childhood and her dead mother Terry never said, but then, no one asked him, either. It quickly got hard to talk about Flora. She was just there, exactly the way she was, the Guinea Pig Lady, even though she didn’t have any guinea pigs, and there wasn’t much anyone could say about it anymore, since everyone more or less knew how she had got to be who she was and everyone more or less knew who she was going to be from here on out. Merle used to walk out there in warm weather, and he continued to visit Flora long after everyone else had left off and had gone about his and her business quite as if Flora no longer even existed. The reason he went out, he said, was because you got a different perspective on the trailerpark from out there, practically the same perspective he said he got in winter from the lake when he was in his ice-house out on the lake. And though Marcelle never went out to Flora’s shack, every time she passed it with her gaze, she stopped her gaze and for a long time looked at the place and Flora sitting outside on an old metal folding chair, smoking her cob pipe and staring back at the trailerpark. She gazed at Flora mournfully and with an anger longing for a shape, for Marcelle believed that she alone knew the woman’s secret.

WHEN DOREEN TIEDE MARRIED BUCK TIEDE she did not have to change her name. Her grandfather Sam Tiede, a well driller from Northwood, and Buck’s father Norman Tiede, a house painter from Catamount, were brothers. They had been born and raised in Catamount, along with a half-dozen more Tiedes of the same generation, and when Sam had moved to Northwood ten miles away and had become a well driller and after a few years had managed to borrow enough money from the bank in Concord to set him and his son up with their own drilling rig, he was regarded from then till now as the successful son of old Warren Tiede, for none of the remaining children had moved that far from Catamount and made money. Doreen, then, was descended directly from the Tiedes who had risen in the world, whereas her second cousin Buck was from the Tiedes who, generation after generation, had plowed the same old row. This is important to know, because it helps explain why Doreen didn’t have to change her last name when, a seventeen-year-old virgin, she married, and it also helps explain why they acted the way they did after they were married and divorced. It doesn’t much help explain Buck’s alcoholism, of course, and it doesn’t tell you why Doreen had such a craving for sexual love that Buck, who wasn’t much interested in sex in the beginning, got to be obsessed with it, but it does tell you why Doreen thought Buck was a better man than he perhaps thought he was, and it tells you a little something about his anger.

In the first year of their marriage, Doreen made love with three men other than her husband, who knew about only one of the men, Howie Leeke, and when it came right down to it, didn’t know about Howie for sure and was made to think that he was imagining the worst parts, the parts, that is, where Howie rides wildly atop Doreen on the waterbed he’s supposed to have out there in his trailer on Cush Meadow Road, rides her bouncing, arching, tautly sprung, eighteen-year-old body as if it were a horse he were breaking, rubbing and drifting through her while she works against him the other way in perfectly thrilling counterline, until she can’t control her movements any longer and… Well, you know the rest.

Buck knew the rest, too, but only from what he had read about sex in Playboy and other such magazines, not from what he had experienced with women himself, for he had very little experience when he married Doreen — teen-age sex in the back seat of his Chevy Nomad with girls he had gone to high school with, which meant mainly kissing and biting and then plucking and pulling and poking at each other’s private parts and sometimes sucking on each other’s private parts, which, even though such activities usually brought him and sometimes his girlfriend a deep shudder and a wet spot, nevertheless left him feeling dazed with guilt and overall feelings of inferiority; and then, later, in the service, sex with prostitutes in towns near the bases where he was stationed, in Texas and South Carolina, sex that left him feeling like a man who has just walked out to the neon-lit street from a pornographic movie; and after he had come back to New Hampshire and had gone to work for Doreen’s father and grandfather, his cousin and uncle, drilling wells in Northwood and living at his parents’ home in Catamount, sex with Doreen, who was then a senior in high school, five years younger than he. Because Buck was afraid he would get Doreen pregnant before she graduated from high school, and probably also because he wanted Doreen’s father and grandfather to think well of him, Buck Tiede of the Catamount Tiedes who never amount to a tinker’s dam anyway, sex with Doreen remained more or less of the back-seat kind, enlivened of course with a lot of talk, for they were, after all, in love.