Russell Banks - Trailerpark

For it wasn’t simply Buddy’s stealing his father’s belongings that had turned the man against him, though of course that helped. And it wasn’t that the boy seemed incapable of telling the truth about anything (he would lie when there was nothing to be gained by it, he lied for the sheer pleasure of lying, or so it seemed, and if you asked him was it raining outside, he’d look out the window, see that it was raining and say no, not yet, and when you stepped out the door into the rain, you’d turn around and look at Buddy, and he’d say with great delight that it must have started raining that very second). And it wasn’t that the boy was reckless and troublesome, that he seemed incapable of avoiding the kind of person who happened at that moment to want to hurt someone, especially someone young and pretty and mouthy. Buddy would find himself in a bar, the Hawthorne House, say, next to a crossed-up truck driver or some hide-stacker from the tannery, and he would do everything he could think of to make himself look even younger, prettier and mouthier than he was, and of course he’d end up getting himself thrashed for it. And then somehow he’d get himself back to the trailerpark, and he’d drag himself to the door, swing open the door and fall into the living room, where his father would be sitting in front of the TV with a can of beer in his hand and the open newspaper on his lap.

“Buddy! What in hell’s happened now?”

“Oh, Daddy, did I ever get myself into one this time! They got some mean and dirty-fighting rattle-snaking bad-ass cowboys hanging out nowadays at the Hawthorne House, and it’s just not your family restaurant anymore.”

No, it wasn’t any of those actions and attitudes and incapacities that had turned Tom against his son, had made him lock his door against his boy. In fact, if anyone had asked him why, Tom, have you suddenly gone and turned against your boy after all those years of standing by him, Tom would not have been able to answer. All he knew was that it had begun for him about a week after Buddy left this last time, back in April. Right off, Tom noticed that his son had taken with him his tape deck, tapes, a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey, his cuff links, two shirts, and probably a dozen more possessions that he wouldn’t find out about until he needed them and went looking for them. He merely observed that once again his son had made off with everything of his that he could lay his hands on, and he was, once again, glad that none of it was irreplaceable. Nothing Tom owned was irreplaceable, even though that was not by intention. In recent years he had worked off and on as an escort driver for a mobile home manufacturer in Suncook, hiring out with his own pickup truck and CB radio, usually as the lead man, the one with the sign WIDE LOAD FOLLOWING on the front of his truck, and before that he had driven an oil delivery truck, so while he had always made enough to house and feed and clothe himself and his one child, he hadn’t made much more than that. Certainly he had never made enough money to buy anything that was irreplaceable.

But about a week after Buddy left this time, Tom began to feel something he had never felt before — at least in regard to Buddy he had never felt it before. What he felt was relief, relief that the boy was gone from him, was not at home in front of the TV set or coming in late all drunk and bashed up or slamming cupboard doors in the morning in search of food. He was glad, for the first time he could remember, that he did not have to see the boy’s face across the table from him, and he discovered that he enjoyed eating alone. And then, once he had admitted to himself that he was relieved to have the boy gone from him, it was as if he had released a flood of bad feelings about the boy, so that his face darkened every time Buddy’s name was mentioned or every time he walked into some evidence of the boy’s ever having lived with him, his dirty clothes in that final week’s laundry, for example, or a letter that came to him three days after he’d left, a letter in a woman’s handwriting, Tom could tell, because of the careful, large, rounded letters. And then even his memories of the boy’s childhood began to turn sour and ugly, and he couldn’t start to remember something he had once done with the boy without feeling his stomach tighten and grow heavy, so that he would turn away from the memory and think about something more immediate. For instance, he had taught Buddy to iceskate when he was only four or five and had taught him to shoot a hockey puck into a makeshift goal he had set up on the lake behind the trailerpark not far from the shore and within sight of his own trailer. Buddy developed the basic skills quickly and soon was obsessed with practicing at the sport, especially the part that had him skating full-speed to a spot twelve or fifteen feet in front of the goal and firing the puck, a few inches off the ice, into the goal, then coasting forward, stick raised to celebrate the score, retrieving the puck and looping back out to make the run over again. For hours in the late afternoons that winter the boy would skate alone and shoot goals, and his father would look out the window of the trailer as it grew swiftly dark outside and he’d watch the tiny figure of his son move back and forth across the gray surface of the ice, until after a while it seemed the boy was floating in a dark haze, and the father would step outside to the frozen ground and holler for him to come in for supper. And the image of his son that he held in his mind as he called his name into the darkness was of his small, struggling figure afloat in a haze between the ice below and the sky above, as if sky and ice had merged and had become an ether, as if the firmament had been erased. Remembering this now, as he often did when, by accident, he happened to look out the window in the kitchen that showed him a wide expanse of the open lake, he winced and held on to the edge of the counter as if to regain lost balance, and he thought about getting some new asbestos tiles to replace the half-dozen that were lifting from the floor in front of the sink.

Tom didn’t understand this shift in his feelings, this great relief, as if a huge burden had been lifted from his back. He was ashamed of it, which of course replaced one burden with another. For it seemed wrong to him, wrong to feel glad that his son was gone away, wrong to hope that he would never come back, and it seemed shameful to him that memories of his son made him wince, that signs of his son’s life made him look away with irritation, that questions from friends about his son’s whereabouts and welfare made him grit his teeth and answer abruptly and vaguely. But he couldn’t help himself. It was out of his control. Buddy had even started entering his dreams in the same irritating way, turning a pleasant dream sour, a peaceful dream turbulent, a funny dream grim.

Of course he knew Buddy eventually would come back, would show up in town again, probably down at the trailer, and if not there, then up here at the Hawthorne House, where he knew his father could be found almost every afternoon drinking three or four beers and listening to Gary and the locals who stopped in after work. And when Tom thought about that, his son’s coming back, he had taken to locking his door whenever he left the trailer, something he had never done before, not in all the years he had lived at the trailerpark. In recent years most people in the park had taken to locking their doors, mainly because of rumors of theft (though no one actually knew firsthand of any thievery), and until now Tom had refused to go along with the trend, saying that he had nothing worth stealing anyhow so why try to protect it? Then one morning he had walked out the door to his truck, about to leave for a two-day job escorting a sixty-seven-foot Marlette from Suncook to just outside Syracuse, New York. He got into the truck, started the engine, then peered back at the powder-blue trailer and thought, The door. He got out, walked quickly across to the cinderblock steps, reached up and locked the door. That was that. And he had locked it, whenever he left the trailer, ever since.