Russell Banks - Trailerpark

Merle took his long-handled chisel in hand, and tapping lightly in front of him as he walked, moved like a blind man carefully onto the ice. He walked twenty or so feet from the shore and parallel to the shore toward the marshy area west of the park, where the hermit they called the Guinea Pig Lady would build her shack. Here, he knew, the water was late to freeze, because of the several trickling inlets and the marsh grass and bushes, and here, too, the water was not very deep, so that if indeed it was not safe and he fell through, he would not be in any danger. It was late in the day and the sky was peach-colored near the horizon and blue-gray where thin clouds scudded in from the northeast. Merle, in his dark green mackinaw and plaid trooper’s cap with the fur earflaps tied down, tapped his way away from the trailerpark toward the swamp, then past the swamp and out along the point, crossing the cove, and then beyond the point, until he was over deep water. Below him, the lake was a hundred feet deep, and the ice was black and smooth, like polished obsidian. This first solitary walk on the ice is almost like flying, for you have left the safe and solid earth and are moving over what you know and can see is an ether, supported by a membrane that you can feel but cannot quite see, as if the difference between the ice below and the air above were merely a difference in atmospheric pressures. Later, your mind will accept the information coming from your body, and then there will be no difference between ice with a hundred feet of water below it and the frozen ground itself, so that when you cut a hole in the ice and it fills with water, you will be surprised but no more frightened than if you had dug a hole in sand at the beach and watched it fill with seawater.

Confident now that he could safely put his bobhouse onto the ice, Merle spent the following day picking through the brushy overgrown fields out by Old Road, collecting galls from dried stalks of goldenrod. Inside each gall slept a small, white grub, excellent bait for bluegills, and it wasn’t long before Merle had collected in his mackinaw pockets half a hundred of the woody containers. Then, on returning to the trailerpark, he was hailed on the roadway just opposite Marcelle Chagnon’s trailer by Bruce Severance. Bruce had driven his black Chevy van with the Rocky Mountain sunsets on the sides up behind the old man — it was midafternoon but almost dark, and he probably hadn’t seen Merle until he was almost upon him. He stopped a few feet away, raced his motor until Merle turned, then waved him over to the driver’s side and cranked down the window.

“Hey, man, what’s happening?” The sweet smell of marijuana exhaled from the vehicle, and the kid took a last hit, knocked the lit end off the roach and popped it into his mouth.

“Temperature’s dropping,” Merle said with a slight smile. As he peered up at the boy his blue, crinkly-lidded eyes filled and glistened in the wind.

“Yeah. Wow. Temperature’s dropping. That’s what’s happening, all right.” He swallowed the roach.

“Yep.” Merle turned to walk on.

“Say, I’ve been meaning to ask you, I saw you this morning when I came in from Boston. You were in those old fields out by the road. Then later I came back out, and you were still there. And now here you are again, this time coming in from the fields. What’s going on out there?”

“Nothing. Temperature’s dropping there too. That’s all.”

“No, man. I’m curious. I know you know things, about herbs and things, I mean.”

Merle said, “You want to know what I was out there for? Is that what you’re wondering, boy?”

“Yeah.”

The old man reached into his mackinaw pocket and drew out one of the goldenrod galls. “These.”

“What’s that?”

“Goldenrod gall.”

“What’s it for?”

“I’ll show you. But you’ll have to spend awhile first helping me move my bobhouse out on the ice tonight.”

“Tonight? In the dark?”

“Yep. Got to bait the camp with chum tonight so’s I can start to fish tomorrow.”

With a slow and maybe reluctant nod, the kid agreed to help him. Merle walked around and climbed into the van, and the two drove through the park to Merle’s trailer.

When an old man and a young man work together, it can make an ugly sight or a pretty one, depending on who’s in charge. If the young man’s in charge or won’t let the old man take over, the young man’s brute strength becomes destructive and inefficient, and the old man’s intelligence, out of frustration, grows cruel, and inefficient also. Sometimes the old man forgets that he is old and tries to compete with the young man’s strength, and then it’s a sad sight. Or the young man forgets that he is young and argues with the old man about how to do the work, and that’s a sad sight too.

In this case, however, the young man and the old man worked well together. Merle told Bruce where to place his pole so he could lift the front of the bobhouse while Merle slid a second pole underneath. Then the same at the back, until practically on its own the bobhouse started to roll down the slope toward the ice. As each roller emerged from the back, Merle told Bruce to grab it and run around to the front and lay it down, which the young man did, quickly and without stumbling, until in a few moments, the structure was sliding onto the ice, and then it was free of the ground altogether. It slid a few feet from the bank, and the momentum left it, and then it stopped, silent, solid, dark in the wind off the lake.

“Incredible!” the kid said.

“Everything’s inside except firewood,” Merle said. “Put them poles in, we’ll cut them up out on the lake.”

The kid did as he was told.

Merle walked around to the front of the bobhouse, away from the land, and took up a length of rope attached to and looped around a quarter-inch-thick U-bolt. “I’ll steer, you push,” he called to the kid.

“Don’t you have a flashlight?” Bruce yelled nervously. The wind was building and shoved noisily against the bobhouse.

“Nothing out there but ice, and it’s flat all the way across.”

“How’ll I get back?”

“There’s lights on here at the park. You just aim for them. You don’t need a light to see light. You need dark. C’mon, stop gabbing and start pushing,” he said.

The kid leaned against the bobhouse, grunted, and the building started to move. It slid easily over the ice on its waxed runners, at times seeming to carry itself forward on its own, even though against the wind. As if he were leading a large, dumb animal, Merle steered the bobhouse straight out from the shore for about a quarter mile, then abruptly turned to the right and headed east, until he had come to about two hundred yards from the weirs, where the lake narrowed and where, Merle knew, there were in one place a gathering current, thirty to forty feet of water and a weedy, fertile bottom. It was a good spot, and he spun the bobhouse slowly on it until the side with the door faced away from the prevailing wind.

“Let it sit,” he said to the kid. “Its weight’ll burn the ice and keep it from moving.” He went inside and soon returned with a small bucksaw and his long chisel. “You cut the wood into stove lengths, and I’ll dig us in,” he said, handing the saw to the kid.

“This is really fucking incredible,” Bruce said.

Merle looked at him silently for a second, then went quickly to work chipping the ice around the runners and stamping the chips back with his feet, moving swiftly up one side and down the other, until the sills of the house were packed in ice. By then Bruce had cut two of the four poles into firewood. “Finish up, and I’ll get us a fire going,” Merle told him, and the kid went energetically back to work.