Russell Banks - Trailerpark

The girl Donna was gone. She had got up as if going to the ladies’ room, and she hadn’t come back.

“Where’s Donna, Dad?” Buddy asked, looking hurt and slightly bewildered. He sat down in the booth where the girl had been sitting earlier.

“Gone, maybe.” Tom turned away from his son and faced the bar, standing between two barstools as if he were in too much of a hurry to sit down and relax.

Buddy sat in the booth looking half-dazed, but it was the wrong way to look, or so it seemed to Tom, so Tom said nothing, even though he thought about it, thought about how the boy should be acting at a time like this. After all, a new girlfriend had just got scared or spooked and had slipped out the door and had driven off in her car, and she might have taken all Buddy’s belongings with her, even including his father’s tape deck and tapes and cuff links. Why, then, wasn’t the boy racing outside to see if the girl at least had tossed his bags out of her car before driving off? And why wasn’t he cursing her? Or maybe even laughing, at himself, at the girl, at his fate? Instead, he sat in the booth, languid, head lolling back, eyes half-closed. Tom glanced down at the boy, then turned swiftly away again. The sight of his son sitting like that made him tighten inside and caused his shoulders and the small of his back to stiffen.

“You think she tossed your bags out before she took off?” he asked the boy in a low voice.

Gary looked across at Buddy and chuckled. He apparently didn’t see anything wrong with the way the boy was acting. He craned his neck so he could see out the window to where the girl’s car had been parked. “Nope, Buddy, you’re in luck this time, she left your gear. It’s sitting out there in the lot.” He looked at Tom and grinned and winked.

Tom didn’t respond. Instead he sighed and turned away from the bar and came and sat opposite his son in the booth, saying as he slid into the seat, “Well, Buddy, what are your plans now? Where you headed for this time?”

Buddy smiled warmly, as if noticing his father’s presence for the first time. “I was thinking about staying here for the summer, you know, maybe get some work locally, drilling wells or as a carpenter’s helper, and then in the fall see if I can’t work something out down at the university, maybe get the government to help me pay for a couple of engineering drawing courses or something, you know, with the GI Bill, so I could get a better job next year and gradually work my way to the top, become a captain of industry, maybe even run for governor or open up a car dealership or start a tree farm…”

“Buddy, I’m serious.”

“So’m I, Dad. I’m serious.” And suddenly he looked it, his mouth drawn tightly forward, his blue eyes cold and grim, his hands clenched in fists in front of him on the table.

In a soft voice, Tom reminded the boy that the government wouldn’t help him pay for anything, not with his kind of discharge from the army (he’d spent more than half his one year in the army locked up in the stockade, usually for trivial offenses, but offenses committed so compulsively and frequently that finally they had given up on him and sent him home to his father), and he told the boy, again, that he couldn’t take courses down at the university until he first finished high school, and he told him, again, that with his reputation for trouble it was almost impossible for him to get work around here anymore, unless he was willing to work the night shift down at the tannery stacking hides, and he informed his son that he didn’t want him to live with him in his trailer, not anymore, not ever.

Quickly, as if startled, Buddy looked directly into his father’s eyes, and his blue eyes filmed over with tears. “You mean you’re kicking me out?” His lip trembled. Tom saw that the boy was terrified and was about to cry, and he was shocked to see it.

He got up from the booth quickly. “C’mon, we’ll talk about this outside,” he said gruffly, and he hurried away from the booth, tossing Gary a pair of dollar bills as he passed the bar. Buddy followed silently along behind.

Outside, in the comparative brightness of the parking lot, they stood facing each other at the tailgate of Tom’s pickup truck. Nearby, Buddy’s duffle and battered brown canvas suitcase lay in a heap on the pavement.

“Dad, maybe I could just stay till I got on my feet, you know, saved a little money, enough to rent my own place…?”

Tom looked at the boy steadily. They were the same height and build, though Tom, twenty years older, was slightly heavier and thicker through the shoulders and arms. Behind them a lumber truck changed gears, braked and slowed, passed through the town on its way south. Tom cleared his throat. “You got to take care of yourself now,” he said slowly.

The boy walked to his bags and drew them toward the truck, lifted them and tossed them into the back of the pickup. He was smiling again. “C’mon, Dad, just a few days, I’ll get hold of Donna, I got her number down in Boston, she gave it to me, and I’ll call her and set something up with her… She just took off because she had to be in Boston by tonight and she could see I wanted to stay here awhile and visit alone with you, sort of to re-establish contact.”

Tom reached over the tailgate into the truck and pulled out the bags and dropped them onto the pavement behind Buddy. His face grew long and heavy with a deep sadness, and the boy stared down at the bags as if not understanding what they were doing there, and when his gaze came back Tom saw that the boy was about to weep again.

Another lumber truck approached the Hawthorne House, changed gears as it neared the curve and the slope from the bar to the tannery below. “You could pick up a ride on one of them trucks this afternoon and be in Boston tonight, if you wanted to,” Tom said, looking after the truck.

“Daddy…”

It had turned into a low, gray day, dark and heavy and cool, not sunny and warm as it had been an hour earlier. The streets of the town were nearly empty. No cars passed. Generally, in a mill town people don’t move about much except early in the day and late.

“Daddy… I’m broke,” Buddy said quietly, and his voice cracked and tears rolled down his cheeks, and he looked like a small boy standing there before his father, open-faced, weeping, his shoulders slanting toward the ground, his hands hanging uselessly down. “I need some money … before I can take off on my own. Please help me, Daddy. I won’t cause you any more trouble, I promise.”

Tom looked away from the sight of his son and up at the gray sky, and he could see that it would rain soon. Then he looked away from the sky and down the hill toward the dam and the red brick tannery and then finally down at the boy’s duffle and suitcase. “I’ve heard promises,” he said. “And I’ve had to make up my mind regardless.”

“I can’t go off alone…”

“You just did, from last April.”

“Yes,” the boy cried, “but I thought I could come back! I didn’t know you’d lock your door against me!”

Tom studied the boy’s face carefully, as if seeing something there he had never seen before. When you love someone for years and years, you lose sight of how that person looks to the rest of the world. Then one day, even though it’s painful, you push the person away and suddenly you can see him the way a stranger sees him. But because you know so much more about him than a stranger can ever know, you are frightened for him, as frightened as you would be for yourself if you could see in yourself, as you see in him, that you’re not quite right, that you don’t quite fit into the place the world has tried to make for you.

Tom stopped looking at his son and instead looked at the ground. Then he took a deliberate step past his son and picked up the two bags, turned and pitched them into the back of the truck. Slowly, as if exhausted, he walked around to the driver’s side and got in. “C’mon,” he said in a low voice and started the engine.