Russell Banks - Trailerpark

“Right,” Art said.

“Right,” said Ron.

“Right. And pretty soon my ass end is letting go and I start to think maybe I’m going to roll, and I think, Jesus, I start to roll at a hundred and five and they’ll be scraping me off Route Twenty-eight for a week. So I flip the wheel the same direction my ass is heading, bring her under control, at least I stop the slide, except that now I’m heading off the road into that big cornfield about a half-mile beyond Huckins, you know the one?”

Art, Ron, and Claudel, too, knew the one. It was a tenacre, flat cornfield leased by a local dairy farmer, and at this time of year the corn was chest high. There was a shallow ditch between the field and the road, and then the ground was fairly flat and, except for the cornstalks, smooth.

“So I barrel-ass into that goddamn field and I don’t touch the brake or the gas, just let the goddamn car plow through the corn for a couple hundred yards, until it comes to a stop. I had enough sense to flick off my lights just as I left the road, so I was hoping Marcoux had been distracted by that semi jackknifing off the road, like I had been, and that he’d just keep on running down the road after me, while I cool it out in the middle of the cornfield. That’s my plan, anyhow.”

They all waited for him to tell them what had happened, Art, Ron, and Claudel. Show us how nobody screws over you, Deke.

“So I’m sitting there, waiting for Marcoux to flash by with his siren screaming and his blue light flashing, only all of a sudden I hear something that isn’t a siren, it’s a car engine, idling, and it’s right behind me. And there isn’t any blue light flashing, it’s a set of headlights bouncing light off the corn that surrounds me, and I say, ‘Shit, it’s Marcoux.’ And it is, it is that damned strutting sonofabitching horse’s ass, and he’s got me, because the only direction I can move is backward, and he’s sitting there blocking me with his cruiser. He gets out, comes strolling up to my window, says, ‘Hello, Deke,’ real cool, you know, like he’s seen it on TV. ‘Out for your evening spin?’ he asks me. Real funny. ‘Ever think of trying the road, Deke? It’s kinda hard to get much speed up, even in this LTD, when you’re driving through a cornfield.’ ‘Ha ha ha,’ I says to him. I mean, hey, nobody screws over me. You know what I mean?”

They knew.

“Did he run you in?” Art asked.

“Bet your ass!” Deke said defiantly. “Took me up to Laconia, made me take the breath test for drinking, but I passed the damned thing all right, so all he could do was hit me for speeding. I got my LTD out the next morning, but I was picking cornstalks out of the grill for days. Jesus, that car looked funny when I got it out, all those green stalks sticking out of the grill like that. I wanted to drive around town that way, you know, just to let people know.”

“But you didn’t,” Ron said.

“Naw. No reason to. Besides, the only one I had to prove anything to was Marcoux, and I’d already done that, if you know what I mean.”

They knew what he meant, all three of them. They were satisfied that nobody had screwed over him. They knew that even though he was barely twenty years old, Deke understood the world and knew how to live in it.

The band returned to the low stage in front, two middle-aged guitarists with their bellies hanging heavily over gaudy belt buckles and a skinny, balding drummer in his early sixties, all of them wearing matching purple cowboy shirts with pink fringes across their chests and along the backs of their arms.

They started the music again, and Claudel drifted back into his troubles, when all at once, as if entering a room he hadn’t known existed, he realized that while he had been listening to Deke’s story and thinking about it and while he had been watching the youth and attempting to understand him, he hadn’t thought about himself once. Claudel had let young Deke become the center of his thoughts for a few minutes, and his mind and his heart now felt strangely refreshed for it. It was a feeling he couldn’t remember having experienced before. Certainly not since Vietnam. A coherence had momentarily come over his life, and he understood it, knew where it had come from, which gave him a feeling of wholeness he hadn’t even imagined possible before.

All those years of thinking he had held a philosophy of life, when in reality he had held nothing of the sort. And now, here in the bar at the Hawthorne House, after listening to a local kid tell a story of how he got arrested for speeding, Claudel suddenly felt he knew enough about the world to devise ways for getting along in the world. It’s all in the way you pay attention to things! he said to himself. Oh, he knew nothing was going to change much. He wasn’t going to get back his job at the Public Service Company, he knew that, and besides, the other day he’d agreed to go to work stacking hides down at the tannery. And he knew he’d never get Ginnie back, not now, because she was pregnant now and would probably marry Howie Leeke as soon as the divorce came through. And he knew he wasn’t going to win the lottery or have some crazy kind of luck like that, which is what he’d need to pay off what he still owed the bank. No, he’d just go on — renting a room at the Hawthorne House, working days down at the tannery and spending his nights down here in the bar. Getting his life over with. But he also knew that it wouldn’t bother him anymore. That made him very thankful. And that was the end of his story.

BECAUSE OF THE SHABBY CHARACTER of the boy’s mother and also that of the man she had married the very day she found herself legally divorced and able to marry again, and because the two had determined to live far away from New Hampshire without even bothering to send him their address until several years later, Tom had raised Buddy practically by himself. And he had seen his son through hard times, especially as the boy got older, such as when he was in the service that one year and later when he got himself beat up by the guy with the baseball bat and spent six months flat on his back in Tom’s trailer learning how to talk again. So of course when Tom walked into the Hawthorne House for a beer, even though, after the bright afternoon sunlight outside, he wasn’t used to the darkness inside, he recognized the boy right away. You can do that with your children, you can tell who they are even in darkness, when all you can see of them is their height and the position they happen to be standing in. You just glance over, and you say, Oh yeah, there’s my son.

Tom didn’t know the girl with him, though. Not even when he drew close to her and could see her face clearly in the dim light of the bar. She was sitting alone in the booth next to the juke box where Buddy stood studying the songs. Tom could tell she was with Buddy and not alone because of the way she watched him while he studied the names of the songs on the juke box. It was the way girls always watched Buddy, as if they couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to disappear from in front of them any second — just poof! and he’d be gone, a curling thread of smoke hanging in the air where a second ago he had been smiling and chattering in that circular way of his. Nobody knew where Buddy got it from, his good looks and that way he had of talking so interestingly that people hated to see him come to a stop or ask a question, even, because his mother Maggie, Tom’s ex-wife, had been pretty (back when she was Buddy’s age, that is) but she had never been as outstandingly good-looking as Buddy was, and Tom, even though he had a square and regular-featured face, was not the kind of man you’d compliment for his looks, and of course neither Tom nor his ex-wife owned what you’d call a gift for gab, especially not Tom, who usually seemed more interested in listening than in talking anyway.