Russell Banks - Trailerpark

Tom walked past the girl, who looked to be around twenty-five, which made her four years older than Buddy and which was also usual for him. The girl was dark haired and pretty, but actually more stylish than pretty when you got up close, with a round face and grim little mouth. Her short hair was all kinked up in a way that was fashionable just then, which made her somewhat resemble a dandelion, until you looked into her eyes and saw that she was awfully worried about something. You couldn’t tell what it was, exactly, but it was clear that she was not at peace with her circumstances.

Tom stopped behind his son and next to the bar, and as he moved up to the bar, he reached out and absently tapped his son on the shoulder, and the boy turned around and smiled nicely. Tom didn’t smile back, he didn’t even look at Buddy. He looked across at Gary the bartender who also owned the place and ordered a bottle of beer.

“You’re keeping your door locked now, Dad,” Buddy said, as if Tom didn’t realize it.

“I know.” Tom turned around and faced him.

Buddy reached out and shook his father’s hand. “This here’s Donna,” he said, nodding toward the girl. “Donna picked me up outside Portland on the Maine Pike, and we sorta got to be friends in a very short order, which is certainly nice for me because I’m nothing special and you can see that she is.”

Donna gave Tom a thin smile, and she did not look like a person who was glad to find herself where she was finding herself, stopped in a dingy, mill town New Hampshire barroom to have a chat with her new boyfriend’s father. Tom didn’t give a damn about her, though, one way or the other. If she wanted to drive all over the countryside in her Japanese car just because she thought Buddy looked good beside her, it didn’t matter to Tom, because women were always doing things like that, and so were men.

“How long you in town this time?” Tom asked his son. Gary the bartender delivered the bottle of beer, and Tom turned back to the bar and drank off half the bottle. He was feeling weighted and metallic inside, as if his stomach were filled with tangled stovepipe-wire, because even though Buddy was his son and he could recognize him in the darkness, he didn’t like it when he saw him. Not anymore.

“So, Dad, you’re keeping your door locked nowadays,” he said again.

Tom was silent for a few seconds and did not look at the boy. “That’s right. Ever since you left and took with you every damned thing of mine you could fit into that duffle of yours. My tape deck, tapes. You even took my cuff links. I must be stupid.” He finished off the bottle of beer and Gary automatically slid a second over. Gary was a tall, skinny, dark-haired man with a toothpick in his mouth that made him look wiser than he probably was. He was the fourth owner of the bar in the last ten years.

Once again, Buddy smiled in that easy way he had, like a summer sun coming up, and Tom felt his stomach clank and tangle. “C’mon, Dad, I only borrowed that stuff. I only planned to be gone for the weekend, me and Bilodeau, that kid from Concord. It was a weekend, the weather suddenly got warm, you probably don’t remember, but it did, and we were planning to chase some girls Bilodeau knew over on the coast near Kittery. But things just got screwed up, and before the weekend was over, we ended up going in different directions with different people. You know how it goes…” He showed Tom both his palms, as if to prove he wasn’t hiding anything.

“That was last April.” Tom knew his son was lying, and there was no damned sense trying to catch him out or somehow prove the boy was lying or get him to admit it, because he’d just go on lying, topping one lie with another, canceling one out with a new one, on and on, until you just gave up out of fatigue and boredom. He was one of those people who are always ready to go a step further than anyone else, and after a while you could see that about him, so you’d stop, and he’d be standing there just ahead of you, smiling back. It was almost as if he didn’t know the difference between right and wrong.

“April?” the girl said. She lit a cigarette and looked at Buddy through the smoke. “So what’s been happening since April? This is June,” she observed, as if she had got a glimpse, from the conversation between the father and son, of what might be in store for her if she went ahead with her plans and hooked up for a while with this good-looking, smooth-talking, slender young man. It had probably started out as a whim, picking up and spending the weekend with a guy she’d seen hitchhiking in Maine. It would make a funny story she could tell on herself to her friends in Boston or Hartford or wherever she had originally been headed. But now things were starting to look a little off-center to her, not quite lined up, which is how it always was with Buddy, how it always had been. He was so damned good-looking, all white teeth and high cheekbones and quick-sloping narrow nose and deep blue eyes, the all-American boy, and he talked sweetly and in a strangely elaborate way, all in circles and curls that kept you listening, so that pretty soon you forgot what it was you were planning on doing and instead you plugged into his plans, but then someplace down along the line, things started to look a little bit off-center, as if a couple of basic pieces hadn’t been cut right. And you couldn’t tell which pieces were off, because the whole damned thing was off.

Buddy peered down at her as if he couldn’t quite place her. “What’s been happening since April?” he asked. “You really want to know?”

“No. Not really. It just seemed a funny thing, that’s all…”

“Funny. What’s funny?” Buddy asked. Tom watched the two carefully from the bar.

“Nothing,” the girl said. “Forget it.” She closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them, her expression had changed, as if she had turned Buddy into a total stranger, as if she were seeing him for the first time all over again but this time with the knowledge of him that she had gained since morning, when she first saw him at the Portland exit with his thumb out and his duffle and suitcase on the road beside him.

“Forget funny?” Buddy said, smiling broadly. “Who can forget funny?” He turned away from the girl and faced his father and suddenly started talking to him. “Listen, Dad, that’s why I stopped down at the trailer before I came up here. To give your stuff back, I mean. Hey, I couldn’t do it way the hell up there in Maine among the trees and lakes, and then Donna here was nice enough to drive all this distance out of her way just to help me drop these things off at your place, before we resume our wanderings. Listen, Dad, since April I been way the hell out on a narrow neck of land in northern Maine, working on a lobster boat.” He had laid a hand on his father’s shoulder.

Tom didn’t believe a word the boy said. He had decided long ago, as policy, not to believe anything his son told him. And that, he told himself, was one of the reasons he kept his trailer locked now, for the first time in his entire life. You’re supposed to love your son and trust him and protect him, and while that would have been easy for Tom, it always had been, this new way of treating him was a burden, and he hated it. For years Tom had loved his son and trusted him and protected him, behaving precisely the way he knew the boy’s mother, his ex-wife Maggie, would not have behaved. Maggie would have let the boy down. Maggie wouldn’t have been home that night the state troopers brought him home all drunk and raving, and the boy would have ended up in jail. Maggie wouldn’t have known how to handle it when he got his head bashed in by that guy with the baseball bat in Florida. She would have let him rot in that charity ward in the Florida hospital before she’d have brought him home, set him up on the living room couch in front of the TV, and then every night for six months taught the boy how to talk again, until finally he could make those looping, charming sentences of his again, and people would sit back in their chairs and listen with light smiles on their faces to see such a clever, good-looking young man perform for them. Maggie never would have borne up under the weight of Buddy, Tom knew. The proof of her weakness, if he’d ever needed proof, he’d obtained the summer Buddy turned twelve, when he had taken the boy by Greyhound all the way to Phoenix, Arizona, to visit his mother, at her request, while he, the father, took a two-week holiday alone farther west, visiting Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm and Universal Studios and watching the surfers at Huntington Beach, the only time he had ever seen real live surfers. When the two weeks were up and Tom had called back at Phoenix for his son, things had changed, and he left the boy in Phoenix, at the boy’s request, presumably for good (at least that was Maggie’s and her husband’s intention and Buddy’s as well). Tom returned to New Hampshire, and didn’t hear anything from his son until September, when the boy showed up at the trailer. She had put him alone on a Boston-bound bus in Phoenix connecting to another bus to Concord, New Hampshire, and the boy, more travel-wise by then than he’d been in June, had hitchhiked the twenty-five remaining miles home. No, for Maggie it was the love and the trust and the protection that made the burden. For Tom, the burden was in withholding that love, trust and protection. That’s what he believed.