Russell Banks - Trailerpark

“Well. When, Carol?”

“In the last half-hour. I just went in to check him.” Her voice was flat and without expression.

“Well. Are you all right?”

“I’m all right.”

“What about Ed and Sue? Do they know?”

“No.”

“Okay, then. I’ll be right out there. I’ll handle everything, Carol, don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried,” she said.

“Listen, Carol, why don’t you come in here tonight, stay here with us. I’ll bring you back in with me. We have plenty of extra room,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to have Thanksgiving dinner with us tomorrow,” he said in a thin voice, as if talking to someone whose mind were already made up.

“All right. Thank you, Sam.”

“You will? Wonderful! I’ll be there in five minutes!”

She said good-bye and hung up. Then she rose from the bed and switched off the television, crossed the room and sat by the window, peering into the cold, familiar, New Hampshire darkness.

1

EVERY MAN OUGHT TO HAVE A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. That’s what Claudel Bing believed, and you might think that was his philosophy of life, but it wasn’t. It was only a principle. It was like his father’s principles, which people used to joke about and say were his philosophy of life, but they weren’t. He used to tell his kids and Claudel’s mother and anyone else who got him to talk seriously about life, “There are three things a man should never do. Swear in front of women, throw stones, and spit.” But you won’t find philosophy there. You won’t find anything there that will get a man through a time of great suffering or moral confusion.

But when you’re a kid you try to figure out your mother’s and your father’s philosophy, and you do it constantly, until either you’ve got it and can accept it for your own or cast it away, or else you never get it and you end up sharing it with your mother and father anyway without even knowing it — which to Claudel seemed a shame. Because a man ought to be able to choose his own philosophy of life. That was another one of his principles.

Anyhow, for years he had struggled to figure out his father’s philosophy of life, but all he could come up with were principles. Like the rule against spitting. What Claudel was looking for was something like Chisholm’s Law, the one that says if things can get worse they will. Then, he figured, he could work out his own principles. A man can’t have principles, he reasoned, unless he’s got himself a philosophy of life.

It wasn’t until he was nineteen and had finished basic training in the army and was shipping out for Vietnam — that was in 1965 or ’66, when things were just starting to heat up over there — that he finally figured out his father’s philosophy of life. It was his mother who gave him the information that tipped him off to it. He had taken a little kidding in basic training from the guys, especially the guys from the cities who had never heard of a man with the name of Claudel so they used to kid him about it, “Why not Claude?” and, “Claudelle, you sure that’s a man’s name?” He could never come back at them with a smart or truthful answer, so when he was home on furlough before shipping out, he asked his mother one day at breakfast how come she had named him Claudel.

His mother was fixing him some beans and eggs at the stove, and she turned around with a strange expression on her face, as if she was wondering herself why she had named him Claudel. After a few seconds she said, “It was your father named you. I wanted to call you Claude if you were a boy and Claudine if you turned out to be a girl. But he said no. Not that he didn’t like both names. He said, ‘Let’s call it Claudel, regardless of whether it’s a boy or a girl. No sense having two names ready when we’re only expecting one baby.’”

“I can remember him saying that,” Claudel’s mother said, “just like it was yesterday. ‘No sense having two names ready when we’re only expecting one baby.’ But that’s your father, you know. All over. He likes to be efficient. When he was young and talked more about what he believed, maybe because he wasn’t so sure of himself then and had to hear himself say things out loud before he could really believe they were true, he used to say, ‘Too much is as bad as too little. Worse.’”

Right then and there at the breakfast table, Claudel finally got to understand his father’s philosophy of life. If the old man believed that too much was as bad as, or worse than, too little, and if that belief had led him to give his son a name like Claudel, which he must have known would be an embarrassment to the boy for a long time, then the old man must have a pretty bleak view of life’s offerings. It wasn’t quite as bleak as Chisholm’s Law, say, but it wasn’t exactly optimistic either.

Your philosophy tells you what the world is like, gives you the long view, so to speak. And your principles tell you how to live in that world. And Claudel’s father was telling him that the world was a tough and miserly place, and that the best way to live in that place was to be careful and relentlessly efficient. Don’t waste a thing, don’t take anything for granted. Don’t put off for tomorrow what you can do today, because tomorrow might never come, and just in case it does, you better have something done today or else you’re going to get beat tomorrow.

A hard view, Claudel knew. But when he was nineteen it seemed right to him. He loved his father and admired him, even though of course he thought his father was a little cracked on a few subjects, like spitting and throwing stones. But basically he thought his father knew the world a lot better than he himself did. The old man had pulled a hitch in the Navy in World War Two out there in the South Pacific, and after the war he’d worked for a few years down in Boston in the shipyards as a welder. At nineteen the son figured he’d do better listening to the father and taking on the father’s philosophy of life than he would trying to work up one of his own. So he didn’t mind being called Claudel anymore. Now that he knew there was a good reason for it.

2

Then he went off to Vietnam, and over there he learned a lot about the world that made him start to question his father’s viewpoint, because what he saw over there made him start to believe in Luck. His father’s philosophy had no place in it for Luck. But the war was teaching Claudel that there were lucky people, like him and the other guys who didn’t get killed or blown half to bits, and there were unlucky people, like all those Vietnamese farmers, say, whose houses and land and children and whole families were getting wiped out for no reason they could name. Half the time they couldn’t even see the bombers that dropped the bombs on them. It was like God was bombing them, instead of some foreigner looking into a bombardier’s sight at 40,000 feet.

Claudel wasn’t stupid, and he could see that the only difference between these farmers and the farmers back home was that one group was unlucky and the other group was lucky. And since he could see that, so far, he was a member of the lucky group, he started to expect more out of life than his father’s philosophy had said he would get.

He could remember when it first came wholly clear to him that he was one of the lucky ones. His outfit used to sit around at night guarding the 105 howitzers with their M-14 automatic rifles, talking and smoking and looking out at the darkness for signs of life (signs of death for them, so they had to look very carefully). What they were looking for was flashlights. They never knew why, but those guys out there in the black pajamas were carrying flashlights. Every once in a while somebody would see a fleck of light way out there in the jungle, like a firefly, only half a mile away, and he’d start firing his M-14 full steam, and in a second everybody else would be blasting away at the jungle. They weren’t supposed to fire those things except at an enemy they could see, but the guns were fun to shoot, because they were recoiling automatics and the barrel slid back onto a gas cartridge that took the recoil, so they would fire these things and just sit there watching the barrels slamming back and forth practically in their laps while the bullets soared through the night like stars. Then, after the shooting had stopped, all the men would be grinning. There’d be a sudden silence, and Claudel would look around and all his buddies would be grinning at nothing, and he’d realize that he was grinning at nothing too.