Russell Banks - Trailerpark

The old man said that it was too hot for fishing, they wouldn’t feed in this weather, but the young man said he didn’t care, it had to be cooler out on the lake than here on shore. The old man agreed with that, but why bother carrying your fishing rod and tackle box with you when you don’t expect to catch any fish? Right, the young man said, smiling. Good question. Placing his box and the rod into the rowboat, he turned to wait for the young woman who was stepping away from the trailer where, earlier, the middle-aged woman in shorts, halter and floppy hat had come out and sat in the lawn chair to read. The young woman was a girl, actually, twenty or maybe twenty-one. She wore a lime-green terry cloth bikini and carried a large yellow towel in one hand and a fashion magazine and small brown bottle of tanning lotion in the other. Her long, honey-blond hair swung from side to side across her tanned shoulders and back as she walked down the lane to the beach, and both the young man and the old man watched her as she approached them. She made a brief remark about the heat to the old man, said good morning to the young man, placed her towel, magazine and tanning lotion into the dark green rowboat and helped the young man shove the boat off the hot sand into the water. Then she jumped into the boat and sat herself in the stern, and the man, barefoot, with the bottoms of his jeans rolled to his knees, waded out, got into the boat and began to row.

For a while, as the man rowed and the girl rubbed tanning lotion slowly over her arms and legs and across her shoulders and belly, they said nothing. While he pulled smoothly on the oars, the man watched the girl, and she examined her light brown skin and stroked it and rubbed the oily, sweet-smelling fluid onto it. Then, holding to the gunwales with her hands so that her entire body got exposed to the powerful sun, she leaned back, closed her eyes and stretched her legs toward the man, placing her small, white feet over his large, dark feet. The man studied the wedge of her crotch, then her navel, where a puddle of sweat was collecting, then the rise of her small breasts and her long throat glistening in the sunlight. The man was sweating from the effort of rowing now and he said he should have brought a hat. He stopped rowing, let the blades of the oars float in the water, and removed his shirt and wrapped it around his head like a turban. The girl, realizing that he had ceased rowing, looked up and smiled at him. “You look like an Arab. A sheik.”

“A galley slave, more likely.”

“No, really. Honestly.” She lay her head back again and closed her eyes, and the man took up the oars and resumed rowing. They were a long way out now, perhaps a half-mile from the trailerpark. The trailers looked like pastel-colored shoeboxes from here, six of them lined up on one side of the lane, six on the other, with a cleared bit of low ground and marsh off to one side and the outlet of the lake, the Catamount River it was called, on the other. The water was deep there, and below the surface and buried in the mud were blocks of stone and wooden lattices, the remains of fishing weirs the Indians had constructed here and used for centuries until the arrival of the Europeans. In the fall when the lake was low you could see the tops of the huge boulders the Indians had placed into the stream to make channels for their nets and traps. There were weirs like this all over northern New England, most of them considerably more elaborate than this, so no one here paid much attention to them, except perhaps to mention the fact of their existence to a visitor from Massachusetts or New York. It gave the place a history and a certain significance, when outsiders were present, that it did not otherwise seem to have.

The girl had lifted her feet away from the man’s feet, drawing them back so that her knees pointed straight at his. She had turned slightly to one side and was stroking one cheekbone and her lower jaw with the fingertips and thumb of one hand, leaning her weight on the other forearm and hand. “I’m already putting on weight,” she said.

“It doesn’t work that way. You’re just eating too much.”

“I told Mother.”

The man stopped rowing and looked at her.

“I told Mother,” she repeated. Her eyes were closed and her face was directed toward the sun and she continued to stroke her cheekbone and lower jaw.

“When?”

“Last night.”

“And?”

“And nothing. I told her that I love you very much.”

“That’s all?”

“No. I told her everything.”

“Okay. How’d she take it? As if I didn’t already know.” He started rowing again, faster this time and not as smoothly as before. They were nearing a small, tree-covered island. Large, rounded rocks lay around the island, half-submerged in the shallow water, like the backs of huge, coal-colored pigs. The man peered over his shoulder and observed the distance to the island, then drew in the oars and lifted a broken chunk of cinderblock tied to a length of clothesline rope and slid it into the water. The rope went out swiftly and cleanly as the anchor sank, then suddenly stopped. The man opened his tackle box and started poking through it, searching for a deep-water spinner.

The girl was sitting up now, studying the island with her head canted to one side, as if planning a photograph. “Actually, Mother was a lot better than I’d expected her to be. If Daddy were alive, it would be different,” she said. “Daddy…”

“Hated niggers.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“And Mother loves ’em.” He located the spinner and attached it to the line.

“My mother likes you. She’s a decent woman, and she’s tired and lonely. And she’s not your enemy, any more than I am.”

“You’re sure of that.” He made a long cast and dropped the spinner between two large rocks and started winding it back in. “No, I know your mamma’s okay. I’m sorry. No kidding, I’m sorry. Tell me what she said about you and me.”

“She thought it was great. She likes you. I’m happy, and that’s what is really important to her, and she likes you. She worries about me a lot, you know. She’s afraid for me, she thinks I’m fragile . Especially now, because I’ve had some close calls. At least that’s how she sees them.”

“Sees what?”

“Oh, you know. Depression.”

“Yeah.” He cast again, slightly to the left of where he’d put the spinner the first time.

“Listen, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I might as well come right out and say it. I’m going in to do it this afternoon. Mother’s coming with me. She called and set it up this morning.”

He kept reeling in the spinner, slowly, steadily, as if he hadn’t heard her, until the spinner clunked against the side of the boat and he lifted it dripping from the water, and he said, “I hate this whole thing. Hate. Just know that much, will you?”

She reached out and placed a hand on his arm. “I know you do. So do I. But it’ll be all right again afterward. I promise.”

“You can’t promise that. No one can. It won’t be all right again afterward. It’ll be lousy.”

“I suppose you’d rather I just did nothing.”

“That’s right.”

“Well. We’ve been through all this before. A hundred times.” She sat up straight and peered back at the trailerpark in the distance. “How long do you plan to fish?”

“An hour or so. Why? If you want to swim, I’ll row you around to the other side of the island and drop you and come back and get you later.”

“No. No, that’s all right, there are too many rocks anyhow. I’ll go in when we get back to the beach. I have to be ready to go by three-thirty.”

“Yeah. I’ll make sure you get there on time,” he said, and he made a long cast off to his right in deeper water.