Russell Banks - Trailerpark

“The rice is burning,” she said, and she pushed his head off her lap and got up. In a few seconds she came back from the stove and sat down again, and he put his head back on her lap, and she told him that she hadn’t slept with Howie, she had only let him kiss her, once, and then she had felt awful and she had sent him away.

“Kissed you? That’s all?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t believe her, of course, and his despair turned suddenly to anger, for she was lying to him, lying so she could go out tomorrow as soon as he had gone to work and do all kinds of disgusting things with her and Howie Leeke’s bodies. He saw them sweating against each other, naked and twined around each other, heads where genitals are supposed to be, genitals where heads are supposed to be, arms and hands where legs and feet should be, stomachs against backs, backs against stomachs, everything backward and upside-down, and the two of them laughing deliriously as they swallowed each other whole. “You whore, I’m going to shoot you dead,” he declared, and he got to his feet and stomped down the narrow hallway to their bedroom, returning a minute later, just as she lit a cigarette, with his.20 gauge shotgun. “You lying bitch, you deserve to die! You first, and then I’m going to shoot that sonofabitch Howie Leeke, and then I’m going to shoot myself!” He drew the gun up and aimed at her chest, which had begun to heave.

“Good,” she said. “I want you to shoot me. But don’t shoot Howie, and please, Buck, don’t shoot yourself. You’re a good man, and it’s not Howie’s fault that he kissed me, it’s mine. I’m everything you say I am, I deserve to be shot by a jealous husband, even if all I did was let another man kiss me, but you don’t deserve to die. You’re a good man, Buck, and someday you’ll make something of yourself, someday you’ll be running your own well-drilling business and you’ll be just like Daddy and Grandpa, happy and with children and a good wife and all that a good man can wish for. But I’m a rotten wife, I haven’t been good to you, I’ve let another man kiss me…” She got up from the chair and crossed the room slowly, evenly, until she drew near the barrel of the shotgun. “I let another man’s lips touch mine.” She placed her chest lightly against the mouth of the gun barrel. “A strange man’s lips were placed and pressed against mine, and I permitted it. I invited it.” Buck pulled the trigger.

They say that time stops, or goes away, and your body and the world’s body cross into one another. You have no thoughts, for once, no memories and no plans for the future, they say it’s like being born, though of course you have no memory of that and cannot know if the comparison is apt, and they say that it’s like dying, but you have not quite done that either and so cannot know if they are right, and people who have died cannot come back and tell you what it was like to die, so you will just have to imagine what Doreen felt for that instant when Buck pulled the trigger and the hammer fell, and the only noise was a gasp from Doreen as she clamped her hands onto the barrel of the gun and pressed it as tightly as she could against the exact center of her chest and then collapsed into a pile on the floor, the shotgun clattering to the floor beside her, as Buck came forward toward her, his trousers already to his knees, his hands yanking at her clothing, drawing it away from her body, until he had her naked from the waist down, her legs spread wide on either side of him, and he was moving swiftly, sweetly, smoothly into her, the two of them crooning sly obscenities and gross compliments into each other’s ears.

Doreen got pregnant that night, and both she and Buck knew it the instant it happened, or at least they claimed to know it afterward. But they did not live happily ever after. Their second year of marriage was worse than the first, and when the baby was born, a girl they named Maureen, Doreen stopped sleeping with Buck altogether, and he took to staying out late almost every night, usually at the Hawthorne House, where he would drink himself into a sullen stupor that often led him to beat his wife when he arrived home and found her sleeping peacefully alone. Doreen had three or four lengthy affairs over the next few years, none of them satisfactory to her, all of them resulting in an increased distance from her husband Buck. They were divorced in the fifth year of their marriage, when their little girl was four and right after Buck had been fired by Doreen’s father and grandfather because she had been forced to call the police one night to stop him from beating her. Doreen and Buck never forgot that snowy night and the shotgun, however, and in later years, alone, they would wish they could speak of it to each other, but they never did speak of it to each other, not even the night that it happened.

IT WAS THE THIRD DAY OF AN AUGUST HEAT WAVE. Within an hour of the sun’s rising above the spruce and pine trees that grew along the eastern hills, a blue-gray haze had settled over the lake and trailerpark, so that, from the short, sandy spit that served as a swimming place for the residents of the trailerpark, you couldn’t see the far shore of the lake. Around seven, a man in plaid bathing trunks and white bathing cap, in his sixties but still straight and apparently in good physical condition, left one of the trailers and walked along the paved lane to the beach. He draped his white towel over the bow of a flaking, bottle-green rowboat that had been dragged onto the sand and walked directly into the water, and when the water was up to his waist, he began to swim, smoothly, slowly, straight out in the still water for two hundred yards or so, where he turned, treaded water for a few moments, and then started swimming back toward shore. When he reached the shore, he dried himself and walked back to his trailer and went inside. By the time he closed his door, the water was smooth again, a dark green plain beneath the thick, gray-blue sky. No birds moved or sang; even the insects were silent.

In the next few hours, people left their trailers to go to their jobs in town, those who had jobs — the nurse, the bank teller, the carpenter, the woman who worked in the office at the tannery and her little girl who would spend the day with a babysitter in town. They moved slowly, heavily, as if with regret, even the child.

Time passed, and the trailerpark was silent again, while the sun baked the metal roofs and sides of the trailers, heating them up inside, so that by midmorning it would be cooler outside than in, and the people would come out and try to find a shady place to sit. First to appear was a middle-aged woman in large sunglasses, white shorts and halter, her head hidden by a floppy, wide-brimmed, cloth hat. She carried a book and sat on the shaded side of her trailer in an aluminum and plastic-webbing lawn chair and began to read her book. Then from his trailer came the man in the plaid bathing trunks, bare-headed now and shirtless and tanned to a chestnut color, his skin the texture of old leather. He wore rubber sandals and proceeded to hook up a garden hose and water the small, meticulously weeded vegetable garden on the slope behind his trailer. Every now and then he aimed the hose down and sprayed his boney feet. From the first trailer in from the road, where a sign that said MANAGER had been attached over the door, a tall, thick-bodied woman in her forties with cropped, graying hair, wearing faded jeans cut off at midthigh and a floppy tee shirt that had turned pink in the wash, walked slowly out to the main road, a half-mile, to get her mail. When she returned, she sat on her steps and read the letters and advertisements and the newspaper. About that time a blond boy in his late teens with shoulder-length hair, skinny, tanned, shirtless and barefoot in jeans, emerged from his trailer, sighed and sat down on the stoop and smoked a joint. At the last trailer in the park, the one next to the beach, an old man smoking a cob pipe and wearing a sleeveless undershirt and beltless khaki trousers slowly scraped paint from the bottom of an overturned rowboat. He ceased working and watched carefully as, walking slowly past him toward the dark green rowboat on the sand, there came a young black man with a fishing rod in one hand and a tackle box in the other. The man was tall and, though slender, muscular. He wore jeans and a pale blue, unbuttoned, shortsleeved shirt.