Russell Banks - Trailerpark

“Hey, man, some dudes was just looking for you.”

“I know, get inside,” the kid said urgently, and he pushed at Terry’s shoulder.

“Take it easy, man.” He unlocked the door and stepped inside, and the skinny kid followed him like a shadow.

“Don’t turn on the lights. No, go back to your room and turn on one light, then come here. If they know you were coming here and then no lights go on, they’ll figure something’s up.”

“What the hell you talking about? You high?”

“Do it. I’ll explain.”

Terry did as he was told and came back to the darkened kitchen, where the kid, Bruce Severance, was standing at the window peeking out at the entrance to the trailerpark. Terry opened the refrigerator, throwing a wedge of yellow light into the room.

“Shut that fucking thing!” the kid cried.

“Take it easy. Want a beer?”

“No. Yeah, okay, just shut the door, will you?”

“Sure.” He took out two cans of Miller’s and shut the refrigerator door, dropping the room into darkness again. Handing the kid one of the cans, he slid onto a tall stool at the kitchen counter and snapped open his beer and took a long swallow. Across the room by the window the kid opened his beer and started slurping it down.

“I thought you was down in Boston,” Terry said.

“I was, but I came back up this morning.”

“Where’s your van?”

“I put it someplace.”

“You put it someplace.”

“Yeah. Listen, man, there’s some heavy shit going down. When’s your sister come home?”

“Around five-thirty,” Terry said.

They sat in silence for a few seconds, and then Terry said in a low voice, “Your deal came apart, huh? That’s your Jamaican out there, and his friend, right?”

“Right.”

“They didn’t want to buy your New Hampshire homegrown? Good old Granite State hemp grown wild in the bushes ain’t smoke enough for the big boys. Funny.” He paused and sipped his beer. “I’m not surprised.”

“You’re not.”

“No. When those kinda guys set something up and it’s running smoothly along like it’s been doing, with you doing the dealing and them doing the supplying for as long as this setup’s been working, they get mad if you try to change the rules. But you, I guess you know that now.”

The kid said nothing. A minute passed, and then he said almost in a whisper, “If you’re not surprised, how come you never said anything?”

“You wouldn’t have heard me.”

“They just said they didn’t want to buy, they wanted to sell.”

“You let ’em try some smoke?”

“Yeah, sure. We met, just like usual. In the motel in Revere. And I gave them both a joint without telling them what it was, you know?”

“And first whack, they knew you had something they didn’t sell you, right?”

“Yeah. But they didn’t believe it was hemp. They thought I was dealing for somebody else. They knew it wasn’t red or gold or ganja or anything they’d smoked before, but they wouldn’t believe this shit is growing wild all over the place up here. I told them all about the war, and the stuff about the Philippines and the government paying the farmers to grow hemp for rope back then and how the stuff went wild after the war, all of it! But they thought I was shitting them, man.”

“I wouldn’t have believed you, either.”

“But you know it’s true! You’ve seen it, you even helped me dry the damned stuff and brick and bale it! You even smoke it yourself!”

“No more, man. The shit makes me irritable.”

“It makes you high, too,” the kid said quickly.

“So how come those dudes are up here now?”

“I told them I have five one-hundred pound bales of the stuff,” the kid said in a low voice.

Terry sat in silence, took a sip of his beer and said, “You’re stupid. Stupid. You oughta be selling insurance, not dope.”

“I thought it would let them know I was in business for myself and not dealing for some other supplier, if they knew I had five bales of my own. The Jamaican, Keppie, he just looked at me like I wasn’t there anymore and said I should go to California, and I knew the whole thing had come apart. So I left them at the motel and drove back up. My van’s parked on one of the lumber roads in the state park west of the lake. I walked in through the woods, and then I saw them. I was coming to get you,” the kid added.

“Me! What do you want me for? I wouldn’t touch this with a stick, man!”

“I need to get rid of the stuff.”

“No shit. What are you going to do with it, throw it in the lake?”

“We can lug it into the woods, man. Just leave it. Nobody’ll find it for months, and by then it’ll be rotted out and nobody’ll know what the hell it is anyhow.” After a pause, the kid said, “I need you to help me.”

“You’re strong enough to carry one of those bales five times. You don’t need me.” Terry’s voice was cold and angry. “You’re an asshole. You know that?”

“Please. You can take your sister’s car and we can do it in one trip. It’ll take me all night alone on foot, maybe longer, and someone may see me.” He was talking rapidly, like a beggar explaining his poverty. He whined, and his voice almost broke with the fear and the shame. He was a nice enough kid, and most people liked him right away, because he enjoyed talking and usually talked about things that at first were interesting, organic gardening, solar energy, transcendental meditation, but he tended to lecture people on these subjects, which made him and the subjects soon boring. Terry hung out with him anyhow, smoked grass and drank in town with him at the Hawthorne House, mainly because the kid, Bruce, admired Terry for being black. Terry knew what that meant, but he was lonely and everyone else in town either feared or disliked him for being black. The kid usually had plenty of money, and he spent it generously on Terry, who usually had none, since, except for the occasional chores and repair work tossed his way by Marcelle Chagnon, the manager of the trailerpark, it was impossible for him to find a job here. Outside of his sister, who was his entire family and who, through happenstance, had located herself here in this small mill town in New Hampshire working as a nurse for the only doctor in town, Terry had no one he could talk to, no one he could gossip or grumble with, no one he could think of as his friend. When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike. In that way Terry had attached himself to Bruce Severance, the kid who sold grass to the local high school students and the dozen or so adults in town who smoked marijuana, the kid who drove around in the posh, black and purple van with a painting of a Rocky Mountain sunset on the sides and the bumper stickers attacking nuclear energy and urging people to heat their homes with wood, the kid who had furnished his trailer with a huge waterbed and Day-Glo posters of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, the kid who, to the amusement of his neighbors, practiced the one hundred twenty-eight postures of T’ai Chi outside his trailer every morning of the year, the kid who was now sitting across the darkened kitchen of the trailer owned by Terry’s sister, his voice trembling as he begged Terry, four years older than he, a grown man despite his being penniless and dependent and alone, to please, please, please, help him.

Terry sighed. “All right,” he said. “But not now.”

“When?” The kid peered out the window again. “They probably went back to town, to drink or for something to eat. We should do it now. As soon as your sister gets home with the car.”

“No. That’s what I mean, I don’t want my sister to know anything about this. This ain’t her kind of scene. We can go over to your place and wait awhile, and then I’ll come home and ask her for the car for a few hours, and then we’ll load that shit into the car and get it the hell out of here, and you can tell those dudes you were only kidding or some damned thing. I don’t care what you tell them. Just don’t tell them I helped you. Don’t even tell them I know you.” Terry got off the stool and headed for the door. “C’mon. I don’t want to be here when my sister gets home.”