Russell Banks - Trailerpark

“I love to sweat,” she said, lying back and showing herself once again to the full sun. “I love to just lie back and sweat.”

The man fished, and the girl sunbathed. The water was as slick as oil, the air thick and still. After a while, the man reeled in his line and removed the silvery spinner and went back to poking through his tackle box. “Where the hell is the damn plug?” he mumbled.

The girl sat up and watched him, his long, dark back twisted toward her, the vanilla bottoms of his feet, the fluttering muscles of his shoulders and arms, when suddenly he yelped and yanked his hand free of the box and put the meat of his hand directly into his mouth. He looked at the girl in rage.

“What? Are you all right?” She slid back in her seat and drew her legs up close to her and wrapped her arms around her knees.

In silence, still sucking on his hand, he reached with the other hand into the tackle box and came back with a pale green and scarlet plug with six double hooks attached to its sides and tail. He held it as if by the head delicately with thumb and forefinger and showed it to her.

The girl grimaced. “Ow! You poor thing.”

He took his hand from his mouth and clipped the plug to his line and cast it toward the island, dropping it about twenty feet from the rocky shore, a ways to the right of a pair of dog-sized boulders. The girl picked up her magazine and began to leaf through the pages, stopping every now and then to examine an advertisement or photograph. Again and again, the man cast the flashing plug into the water and drew it back to the boat, twitching its path from side to side to imitate the motions of an injured, fleeing, pale-colored animal.

Finally, lifting the plug from the water next to the boat, the man said, “Let’s go. Old Merle was right, no sense fishing when the fish ain’t feeding. The whole point is catching fish, right?” he said, and he removed the plug from the line and tossed it into his open tackle box.

“I suppose so. I don’t like fishing anyhow.” Then after a few seconds, as if she were pondering the subject, “But I guess it’s relaxing, even if you don’t catch anything.”

The man was drawing up the anchor, pulling in the wet rope hand over hand, and finally with a splash he pulled the cinderblock free of the water and set it dripping behind him in the bow of the boat. They had drifted closer to the island now and were in the cooling shade of the thicket of oaks and birches that crowded together over the island. The water was suddenly shallow here, only a few feet deep, and they could see the rocky bottom clearly.

“Be careful,” the girl said. “We’ll run aground in a minute.” She watched the bottom nervously.

The man looked over her head and beyond, all the way to the shore and the trailerpark. The shapes of the trailers were blurred together in the distance so that you could not tell where one trailer left off and another began. “I wish I could just leave you here,” the man said, still not looking at her.

“What?”

The boat drifted silently in the smooth water between a pair of large rocks, barely disturbing the surface. The man’s dark face was somber and ancient beneath the turban that covered his head and the back of his neck. He had leaned forward on his seat, his forearms resting wearily on his thighs, his large hands hanging limply between his knees. “I wish I could just leave you here,” he said in a soft voice, and he looked down at his hands.

She looked nervously around her, as if for an ally or a witness.

Finally, the man slipped the oars into the oarlocks and started rowing, turning the boat and shoving it quickly away from the island. Facing the trailerpark, he rowed along the side of the island, then around behind it, out of sight of the trailerpark and the people who lived there, emerging again in a few moments on the far side of the island, rowing steadily, smoothly, powerfully. Now his back was to the trailerpark, and the girl was facing it, looking grimly past the man toward the shore.

He rowed, and they said nothing more, and in a while they had returned to shore and life among the people who lived there. A few of them were in the water and on the beach when the dark green rowboat touched land and the black man stepped out and drew the boat onto the sand. The old man in the white bathing cap was standing in waist-deep water, and the woman who was the manager of the trailerpark stood near the edge of the water, cooling her feet and ankles. The old man with the cob pipe was still chipping at the bottom of his rowboat, and next to him, watching and idly chatting, stood the kid with the long blond hair. They all watched silently as the black man turned away from the dark green rowboat and carried his fishing rod and tackle box away, and then they watched the girl, carrying her yellow towel, magazine and bottle of tanning lotion, step carefully out of the boat and walk to where she lived with her mother. It was very hot, and no one said anything.

IT WAS MID-OCTOBER. The leaves were already off the trees and were leathery brown on the frozen ground, and in the gray skies and early darkness you could feel winter coming on, when one afternoon around four-thirty a blue, late model Oldsmobile sedan with Massachusetts plates slowly entered the trailerpark. It was dark enough so that you couldn’t see who was inside the car, but strange cars, especially out-of-state cars, were sufficiently unusual an event at the trailerpark that you wanted to see who was inside. Terry Constant had just left the manager’s trailer with his week’s pay for helping winterize the trailers, as he did every year at this time, when the car pulled alongside him on the lane, halfway to the trailer he shared with his sister, and Terry, who was tall, wearing an orange parka and Navy watch cap, leaned over and down to see who was inside and saw the face of a black man, which naturally surprised him, since Terry and his sister were the only black people for miles around.

The car stopped, and the man inside rolled down the window, and Terry saw that there was a second man inside, a white man. Both looked to be in their late thirties and wore expensive wool sweaters and smoked cigarettes. The black man was very dark, darker than Terry, and not so much fat as thick, as if his flesh were packed in wads around him. The white man was gray-faced and unshaven and wore a sour expression, as if he had just picked a foul-tasting substance from behind a tooth.

“Hey, brudder,” the black man said, and Terry knew the man was West Indian.

“What’s happening,” Terry said. He kept his hands in his jacket pockets and looked down from his full height.

“Me wan fine a particular youth-mon, him cyall himself Seberonce, mon. You know dis a-mon, me brudder?” The man smiled and showed Terry his gold.

“Bruce Severance?”

“Dat de mon.”

“He ain’t here.”

The man smiled steadily up at Terry for a few seconds and finally said, “But him lib here.”

“Yeah.”

“Where him lib, tell me dat.”

“That trailer there,” Terry said, pointing at a pale yellow Kenwood with a mansard roof. The trailer sat on cinderblocks next to a dirt driveway, and the yard was unkempt and bare, without shrubbery or lawn.

“Okay, mon, many tanks,” the black man said, still smiling broadly, and he rolled the window up, stopped smiling, backed the car into the driveway of the trailer opposite, and headed slowly back out to the main road.

Terry stood and watched the car leave, then walked on, turning in at his sister’s trailer, which was dark, for she wasn’t home from work yet, and made to unlock the door, when he heard his name coming at him from the darkness.

“Terry!” A blond, long-haired kid in a faded Levi jacket stepped around from the back end of the trailer and came up to him.