Russell Banks - Trailerpark

One night, though, after the shooting had stopped, he looked around him as usual and saw they were all grinning as usual, and all of a sudden they heard a baby crying. It was stone silent otherwise, so they could hear its bawling clearly even though it was coming from someplace way out there in the jungle. It went on and on, and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. It started to make them edgy and nasty-tempered, and a few of the guys cursed the baby’s mother for being out there in the night in the first place. A few other guys cursed the enemy for being out there with guns and booby traps, which were keeping them from going out and finding the baby and bringing it in to safety. And a few others cursed the enemy for setting the whole thing up. They said it was a trick to draw them away from the camp into an ambush in the jungle. That sounded plausible, but they weren’t sure, so they just kept on being bothered by the baby’s crying, which went on and on and seemed to grow louder and louder. Until finally one of the soldiers, a big square-faced guy from Chicago, jumped up and started firing his automatic into the bushes, as if he had seen a flash of light out there someplace. Then the others started firing with him, watching the barrels leap back and forth while the tracer bullets made icy arcs across the sky and dove into the darkness of the jungle a mile and a half away.

After a few minutes they stopped firing and sat down again. This time, when Claudel looked around, no one was grinning. Everyone wore a dark, somber expression on his face, and Claudel knew he looked the same as they did. That’s when he started thinking he was lucky. He was young. It’s how you explain things that are too complicated to explain. You call it Luck. Either you’ve got it or you haven’t got it, but if you’ve got it, use it. That was the first principle of his new philosophy. If you’ve got it, use it.

3

So by the time he got home again, he was raring to go, hot to get started making big money, buy a fast and fancy car, get himself a pretty girl and maybe marry her and buy one of those sixty-five-foot mobile homes to live in. And he did precisely that. He got himself a job as a lineman for the Public Service Company and started pulling in a couple hundred bucks a week with overtime. Then he got himself a loan from the bank and bought one hell of an automobile, a white ’68 GTO convertible that made everybody in town turn around and think a minute. He moved for a while with several different girls from town, one of them the daughter of a doctor, and after about a year he married Ginnie Branche, who ran Ginnie’s Beauty Nook out on Route 28. They had a big wedding, lots of presents, electric blankets, electric corn popper, waffle iron, all the usual things you need, and moved right into a baby-blue sixty-eight-foot-long mobile home out on Skitter Lake. It was a fancy new Longwoods, one of the first mobile homes to come out with a cathedral ceiling and teak-wood paneling in the living room. And after that, every morning when Claudel woke up in the master bedroom with that pretty young woman lying next to him, he’d slowly look across the room at his Danish modern bedroom suite, on to the framed pictures of mountains and streams, to the wall-to-wall green shag carpeting, the fancy fiber glass draperies shimmering in the morning breeze, and out the window to his GTO parked in the driveway, its top down, a huge white bird with its wings folded, and he’d say to himself, “Claudel Bing, you are one lucky son of a bitch!”

Now here’s where you start to get to the point of his story. Because Claudel was wrong. He wasn’t lucky. Not lucky at all. He only thought he was lucky. He thought the world was giving him a ride, and it was beginning to look like a good ride, so he figured all he had to do was just lie back and enjoy the passing scenery. And up to now, he’d been right. But then all of a sudden the scenery changed, and the road got bumpy, and then he knew he wasn’t lucky.

But that didn’t mean his father had been right, that the world was a chiseler and you had to be a miser to live in it. No, because Claudel wasn’t unlucky either. He simply hadn’t learned enough yet to have a view of the world that explained to him what happened to him, what he at first had called being lucky and what later he called being unlucky. Because for a while he did call it that, being unlucky, and if you had known him at that time or had just met him in a bar, you’d have heard him naming his life that way day and night, holding his glass up to let a bit of light from the Budweiser sign float through while he told his sad tale of bad luck to anyone who’d listen.

He’d tell you how the trailer had caught fire and burned to the ground because Ginnie had left the stove on, and how his insurance couldn’t cover the loss so he was still paying off the damned mortgage to the bank. He and Ginnie had come home after a weekend down at York Beach, all sunburned and sandy from the beach and hungover from the good times they’d had the night before with some Canadians they’d run into at the motel bar, and when they pulled into the driveway, all there was next to it, where the trailer had been, was a sixty-eight-foot-long barbecue pit. The two of them just sat there in the car in their bathing suits and broke down and wept.

And after that Claudel would tell you how Ginnie had started running around with Howie Leeke, until everyone in town knew about it, except Claudel himself, of course, until one night he came into the Hawthorne House right after Howie had been there, and everybody started giving him a funny kind of grin, so he asked, “What the hell’s wrong, my fly unzipped or something?”

Freddie Hubbard, a buddy of his from the Public Service Company, said, “No, nothing’s wrong… It’s just that Howie Leeke’s been here and left … and he was telling stories again…”

“What kind of stories?” Claudel asked, thinking maybe one might be funny enough to repeat. He liked a good laugh as well as the next man, especially since his trailer burned down.

“Aw, you know,” Freddie said. “Stories about him … and Ginnie.”

Then all the people in the place sort of wiped their grins off and shifted in their seats and turned away, so Claudel knew what was happening, and what had been happening for a long time, probably ever since the trailer burned and he and Ginnie had moved into town and had taken the apartment over Knight’s Paint Store, which happened to be across the street from Howie’s pipefitting shop.

That’s when Claudel started drinking every night after work at the Hawthorne House, hanging out there right up to closing time, stumbling home drunk and cursing his bad luck. Which of course only seemed to get worse. A man can’t control his fate, but he does make his own luck. By calling it luck. But if he’s a smart man, he won’t call it luck at all. Of course Claudel didn’t know that then. He called it luck, bad luck. So every night of the week he’d sit there on a stool at the bar of the Hawthorne House, punching all the sad songs on the juke box, ordering beers and shots of Canadian Club over and over, until finally Gary the bartender would come over and say, “Hey, Claudel, it’s midnight. I gotta lock up the joint.”

Then he’d slide off the stool and head for the door, stumble down Main Street to Green Street, past the dark windows of the stores and restaurants and the few offices, till he came to Knight’s Paint Store. Up the stairs he’d go, unlock the door, lurch in darkness to the bed, where Ginnie lay sleeping or pretending to sleep. Then, yanking off his clothes, smelling of beer and whiskey and cigarette smoke, he’d pull on her shoulder and paw at her body, even though he’d be too drunk to be much of a man, until finally she would jump out of bed, mad and afraid and disgusted.