Russell Banks - Trailerpark

A few miles north of Manchester, she left the Turnpike and continued on toward Catamount through Hooksett and Suncook on Route 28. The towns were smaller now, villages and old, decaying mill towns squatting alongside the rivers in the rain and cold darkness of October. North of Suncook, at the edge of a gray circle of fluorescent light cast by a filling station, she caught sight of a figure standing by the side of the road. It was a girl, she realized as she sped past, or a woman, and she was hitchhiking. On the ground next to her was a backpack, soaked through from the rain, and the girl was wearing an orange, stiff-looking, plastic poncho. Nancy slowed the car, feathering the brakes so as not to slide, and came almost to a stop several hundred yards beyond the girl. In the rearview mirror she saw the girl lift the backpack from the ground and start running in a clumsy, off-balance gait toward the car, which was still moving slowly ahead, a few miles an hour. The girl struggled along behind, splashing through deep puddles, until she had drawn to within a hundred yards of the car, and still Nancy kept the car moving forward. Finally, the girl stopped running. She dropped her pack onto the ground beside her and stood peering into the darkness at Nancy’s car. In the mirror, as the car moved back into the roadway and increased speed, Nancy saw the girl jab her hand at her in a gesture of disgust and contempt, and then the car went around a long, slow bend in the road, and the girl was gone.

Nancy did not understand what she had done, because she did not know why she had done it. She drove the last twenty-five miles to Catamount puzzling over the event, replaying it and rephrasing her description of it as she drove, thinking, as if saying it to Moses, I stopped to pick up a hitchhiker in the rain but I didn’t do it, but I don’t know why I didn’t do it. She tried several explanations — that she suddenly, inexplicably, had become frightened by the hitchhiker, since she might have made a mistake, the girl might actually have been a man; that she was still addled by the close call with the truck back on the Turnpike; that she had suddenly realized that the hitchhiker would break into her solitary thoughts, which at this time more than at any other she treasured and needed — but none of the explanations told her truly why she had tempted and then rejected the girl, why, by slowing almost to a stop, she had offered something she was not ready or willing actually to give.

She drove quickly along Main Street in Catamount, the tall elms and maples alongside the street shedding their last leaves in the rain, the stores and offices darkened and empty, except for the Copper Skillet, where, as she passed, she could see a few solitary diners at the counter. At the far side of town, she turned right toward home, uphill for a quarter mile, and there it suddenly was, the white Cape farmhouse and attached barn, the neatly trimmed lawn and flowerbeds, the bony, leafless oaks by the side of the road.

She turned into the drive and parked the car in front of the barn door. She would have to run no more than twenty feet to reach the breezeway and the kitchen door, but she knew she would be soaked through by the time she got there, so she sat for a few seconds, hesitating to leave the dry, smoky warmth of the car. She wished she had brought an umbrella. She decided that from now on she would bring an umbrella with her on Thursdays. Then she decided that she would not leave Ronald, and stepping from the car, she ran into the house.

THE BOY STEPPED OUT OF THE HOUSE to the porch and from the porch into the glare of sunlight off the snow. The boy was fourteen years old, exactly, for it was his birthday. Tall and somewhat awkward, his height was coming early and in bits and pieces. First his hands and feet, then his legs, followed a few months later by his arms, so that his body seemed to be made of parts from several different-sized bodies, which made him look fragile and graceless, a long-legged bird walking on rocky ground.

He moved down the straight, wide, freshly cleared path in the snow, gazing at the path from different angles, as if admiring his work, for it was he who had shoveled the path earlier and then the driveway, from the barn all the way to the road, where he had diligently chopped away the hardpacked snowbank made by the town plow, tossing the huge, heavy chunks of snow over his shoulder, deliberately constructing with them neat, conical gateposts on either side of the driveway. Now he stood in the middle of the driveway and studied the crisp, dry snow, studied the way it smoothed the world, softened the fields and yard almost into abstraction, abruptly to break off where, with the shovel, he had cut cleanly into it, had carved out blocks of snow that got deposited in a rumpled row a few feet back from the cut, as if the snowfield had risen slightly into a rough wave before pitching over a low fault in the earth’s crust.

The boy had his hands jammed into the pockets of his red plaid jacket and stood with feet apart, his wool hunter’s cap pulled down over his ears. It was a cold day, despite the bright sunshine, and a stiff wind blowing through the tall pine trees at the edge of the yard became, on noticing it, a grieving kind of noise that made it difficult but not impossible for the boy to hear his father, inside the house, call his name, first from the front of the house, where the parlor was, then from the kitchen, until at last the door to the porch was flung open, and the man stood there, looking at the boy with a mixture of puzzlement and irritation.

The man was large, a few inches taller than the boy, but heavy through the shoulders and arms, with a large, full face and straight, dark brown hair. He was in his shirtsleeves, wearing brown twill trousers and green braces. “Dewey,” the man said, as if making an announcement. He was silent for a moment, but the boy made no response. “What the hell you doing out here? I was calling all over.”

“I’m all ready. I was only waiting for you out here.”

“You ate breakfast.”

“Sure.”

The father turned and hollered to someone inside. “He’s outside! He already ate, he says.”

A woman, the boy’s mother, answered indistinctly.

“I don’t know when,” the man said. He was pulling on a wool mackinaw and cap, still by the open door. When the man spoke to the woman he looked at the boy.

“Will you bring the others with you?” the woman asked.

“I don’t know when I’ll be back, maybe not till this afternoon. They’ll get bored. It’s just errands. Besides, Dewey’s doing the driving.”

“Oh,” the woman said, as if the fact of the boy’s driving was somehow significant.

The man was plainly irritated. He turned back to her and said. “It’s his birthday, isn’t it? Besides, he drives here at the farm all the time.”

“Fine.”

The man closed the door and stepped into the white glare beyond the porch. Moving ahead of him, the boy went quickly to the barn and pulled the wide door open. While the man walked around him and climbed into the passenger’s seat of the Ford, the boy prepared to crank-start the sedan from the front.

“Set your spark?” the man asked.

“Oh, yeah,” the boy said, and he rushed around to the driver’s side and moved the spark lever. Then he hurried to the front again and commenced cranking, until the motor coughed and turned over, caught and was running.

“Let it warm up,” the man said. He sat with his thick arms crossed over his chest, his head pulled low to his shoulders, and stared straight out the open barn door at the brilliant white world beyond. His freshly shaved face was gray and taut, and his pale blue eyes glistened wetly behind a film, as if he were peering at the world through a window. He was a sad-looking man, the kind of man who has given up trying to stop the dying going on around and inside him.