Russell Banks - Trailerpark

“Birthday present!” his father hollered.

The other men looked at the boy with interest. “Birthday?” Al said, smiling. “How old are you, kid?”

“Fourteen.”

“I’ll be damned! Fourteen! Happy birthday, kid,” Al said and turned back to his drink.

“You oughta give him a birthday drink, Fred,” Emerson said and, grinning, he reached for the bottle and a fresh glass.

“No,” the father said.

“No? Hell, how old were you when you got started? I wasn’t no older’n him, that’s for sure.”

“Go ahead, let the kid have a birthday drink,” Al said.

“It won’t hurt him none,” the man with the beard added.

“No,” said the father. “You got tonic, he can have some of that. But none of this stuff. This is too strong, you got to work up to it. You know that,” he said to Emerson.

Emerson reached into the cupboard next to the sink, pulled out a bottle of orange liquid and poured a glassful for the boy.

“What’s the proof of this stuff,” the bearded one, Jimmy, asked.

“A hunnert, easy,” Al said.

“Apple jack’s got a kick like this, it’s more than a hundred,” Fred Knox said. “What d’you think?” he asked Emerson.

“Hunnert an’ fifty, maybe,” Emerson said.

“Hunnert an’ fifty! Wow!” Al said, and he took another swallow from his glass. “Goes down like mother’s milk!” He laughed with a wide-open mouth.

The others laughed with him and drank. At the suggestion of the boy’s father, Emerson cut two thick slices of bread and made a cheese sandwich for the boy, then brought out a large jar of pickled pig’s knuckles for the men at the table, and while the boy ate his sandwich and the men gnawed away at the knuckles and talked politics, the old man busied himself at the sink washing glasses and a few greasy plates. He asked the boy to go out in the shed by the barn and bring in an armload of stove wood and told the boy’s father that the cheese sandwich was free. Quickly, the boy pulled on his coat and hat and went out.

When a few minutes later he returned with the wood, the men’s voices were loud, and Al was shouting at Emerson, “You was crazy, man! It don’t matter he was a Roman Catholic, he was gonna make it so we could sit in town and buy a damned drink of whiskey when we want!”

“Mattered to me he was Catholic,” Jimmy said in a loud, sullen voice. “You want the Pope runnin’ the country? You want all them New York and Boston Irishers and Eye-talians takin’ over everything we fought the damned war for? That what you want?” he shouted at Al. “Fish-eaters!” he sneered.

Emerson said to Al, “I never vote for a man who’s gonna put me outa business. That’s my politics. Period.”

“Al Smith wouldn’t put you outa business,” Fred Knox said. “Matter a fact, if it ever gets to be legal to drink, they’s a hell of a lot of people will turn out to be drinkers. You’d be sellin’ more of this stuff than you can make by now if Smith had won,” he pronounced.

“The hell you say.”

“The hell I do say. Smith wouldn’a put you outa business. But tell me this, Emerson, if Hoover was the Democrat an’ Smith the Republican, instead of the other way around, which one would you have voted for then?” Fred lifted his glass woozily and snickered into it.

The other men looked steadily over at Emerson, and even the boy looked at him.

“What’s it matter anyhow. People oughtn’t to talk politics and religion when they’re drinking,” Emerson said, and he went back to wiping off the glasses in the sink.

“Religion an’ politics is gettin’ to be the same thing, you ask me,” Jimmy said grumpily.

Fred signaled for more drinks, and Emerson refilled the glasses. For a while longer the men drifted in and out of several conversations concerning the subject of religion-and-politics, and then Al reached out and laid a long paw on Fred’s wrist.

“ You can do it!” he exclaimed, his face brightening.

“Do what?”

“You can take Jimmy here. Arm-wrestling. I tol’ him this morning that they’s all kinda farmers around town could beat his butt. You can do it!”

“He does it all the time,” Fred said. “I don’t know the tricks.”

“There ain’t any tricks,” Jimmy said. He had sat up straight in his chair and was already poised, ready, his gaze fixed steadily on the boy’s father.

“I don’t know,” Fred said.

“Sure you can. I got a dollar bill here says you can. You willin’ to bet, Jimmy?”

“Sure.” The bearded man reached into his pocket and drew out a wrinkled bill and tossed it casually onto the table.

“It ain’t my money,” Fred said, and he rolled up his right sleeve and hitched his chair closer to the table.

Jimmy squared off against him, and the men locked hands. The boy stood up, and he and Emerson came toward the pair and stood at the end of the table, facing them.

“All right,” Al said, grinning broadly.

“Fine, fine. Call it,” Fred said, his face taut and somber.

Jimmy was relaxed, his beefy shoulders loose, his left hand lying flat in his lap. He watched the other man’s eyes.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

“Okay … wrestle!”

Fred strained, the veins and cords in his neck leaping forward as if he were lifting a great weight, but the other man’s arm did not move. He tried to twist the man’s wrist toward him, so he could pull his arm instead of push it, but the man’s arm was like stone and would not be twisted or pulled. Then slowly, steadily, the man with the beard pushed Fred’s hand back, inch by inch, in a slow, precise arc, all the way to the table. He let go of Fred’s hand, smiled through his beard and extended his right hand, palm up, to Al. “You owe me.”

Al shook his head and dug out a dollar bill. “I thought sure you could take him, Fred. You gotta lotta size on you.”

“I guess it’s in the wrong places,” he said. “And I told you, I don’t know the tricks.” He stood up, wobbled a bit, and reached for his wallet. He handed two dollars over to Emerson, nodded toward his son, who put his hat and coat on, and headed toward the door.

As the boy passed his father’s empty chair, he removed the man’s mackinaw from the chairback and carried it out with him. “Here, Pa, you forgot your coat,” he said in the hallway, but his father was already beyond the hallway and outside.

The man and the boy rode home in silence, until they reached the driveway, where the man instructed his son to swing the car around so it could be backed into the barn. “I won’t be going out again today,” he explained. His voice was low and his words came slowly and thickly as if he were speaking through a cloth curtain.

The boy turned the car around at the road and proceeded to back into the driveway skillfully and without hesitation, as if he had been driving to town for years. At the barn, he stopped, drew the brake up and stepped down from the car to open the barn door. His father sat heavily in his seat, ignoring him, lost in thought or lost in feeling. When the boy returned to the car, the father turned to him and said, “You tell your mother we ate in town. You understand?”

The boy didn’t look at him. He peered out the windshield across the square hood to the crisply shoveled driveway, along the path to the porch and house. There was a right way to do everything, even something as simple and unimportant as shoveling a path through snow to the kitchen. The boy’s father believed that, he had said it, too, and now the boy believed it. The pleasure you got from looking at a job done the right way proved that there was such a thing as the right way. Not just the best way, not the easiest way, not even the logical way. You did things in life the right way, and then, afterward, you got to admire what you had done. You didn’t have to avert your eyes from what you had done.