Russell Banks - Trailerpark

In a short time, a fire was crackling inside the round belly of the stove, the kerosene lantern was lit, and the bobhouse was warmed sufficiently for Merle to pull off his mackinaw and gloves and hang them on pegs behind the bunk. Bruce laid in the wood carefully below the bunk, then looked up at Merle as if for approval, but Merle ignored him.

“Now,” the kid said, shaking off his blue parka and, following Merle’s example, placing it on a peg, “show me what you got there, those whachacallits from the fields.” He sat down next to Merle and started to roll a joint. “Smoke?” he said, holding out the cigarette.

“No, thanks, I got whiskey.”

“You oughta smoke grass instead,” the kid said, lighting up.

“That so. You oughta drink whiskey. ’Course, you got to be smarter to handle whiskey than you do that stuff.” He was silent and watched Bruce sucking on the joint.

The kid started to argue with the old man. Grass never did to you what whiskey surely did, made you depressed and angry, ruined your liver, destroyed your brain cells, and so on.

“What does grass do to you?” Merle asked.

“Gets you high, man.” He grinned.

Merle grunted and stood up. “If it can’t hurt you, I don’t see how it can get you high.” He opened the trap doors in the floor, exposing the white ice below, and with his chisel went to work cutting holes. With the lip of the steel, he flaked ice neatly away, making a circle eight or nine inches across, then dug deeper, until suddenly the hole filled with water. Moving efficiently and quickly, he soon had a half-dozen holes cut, their tops and bottoms carefully beveled so as not to cut the line, and then with a smaller strainer he scooped the floating ice chips away, until there was only clear, pale blue water in the holes.

On a lapboard he proceeded to chop hunks of flesh off several hand-sized minnows he’d plucked from a bait pail. This done, he placed the chum into a tin cone that had a line attached to the top through a lever that released the hinged bottom of the cone when the line was jerked. Then he let the cone slowly down the center hole, slightly larger than the others, and hand over hand let out about thirty feet of line, until he felt the cone touch bottom. He jerked the line once, then retrieved it and brought the cone back into the bobhouse, dripping and empty.

Bruce watched with obvious admiration as the old man moved about the confines of the bobhouse, adjusting the draft of the stove, taking out, using and then wiping dry and putting back his tools and equipment, drawing his bottle of Canadian Club from under the bunk, loosening his boots, when suddenly the old man leaned down and blew out the lantern, and the bobhouse went black.

“What? What’d you do that for?” His voice was high and thin.

“Don’t need it now.” From the darkness came the sound of Merle unscrewing the cap of the whiskey bottle. Then silence.

“How long you plan to stay out here tonight?” The kid sounded a little frightened.

“Till morning,” came the answer. “Then for as long as the fishing’s any good and the ice holds.”

“Days and nights both?”

“Sure. I only hafta come in when I run outa whiskey. There’s lotsa wood along the banks, I’ll hafta step out now and then for that, and of course you hafta piss and shit once in a while. Otherwise…”

They sat in darkness and silence a while longer, when finally the kid stood up and groped behind him for his coat. “I… I gotta go back in.”

“Suit yourself.”

He took a step toward the door, and Merle said to him, “Those goldenrod galls you was asking about?”

“Oh, yeah,” the kid said.

Merle struck a match, and suddenly his face was visible, red in the glow of the match as he sucked the flame into the barrel of his pipe, his bearded face seeming to lurch ominously in and out of the light when the flame brightened and then dimmed. When he had his pipe lit, he snuffed out the match, and all the kid could see was the red glow of the smoldering tobacco. “Bait. That’s all.”

“ Bait? ”

“Yep. Old Indian trick.”

The kid was silent for a few seconds. “Bait. You mean, that’s how you got me to push this thing way the hell out here tonight?”

“Old Indian trick.”

“Yeah,” Bruce said coldly. “And I fell for it. Jesus.” He drew open the door and stepped quickly out to the ice and wind, looked into the darkness for the lights of the trailerpark, found them way off and dimly in the west, and started the walk back.

No one brought Merle any Christmas gifts or invited him to any of the several small parties at the park. The reasons may have been complicated and may have had to do with the “loans” they all had received from him, but more likely the residents of the trailerpark, as usual, simply forgot about him. Once in a while someone mentioned having seen him walk through the park on his way to town and return later carrying a bag of groceries and a state liquor store bag, but otherwise it was almost as if the old man had moved away, had gone west to Albany like Buddy Smith or south to Florida like Captain Knox’s mother and father or into town to the Hawthorne House like Claudel Bing. Nobody thought to send them Christmas gifts or invite them back to the trailerpark for a Christmas party.

Then, the week before Christmas, there was a snowstorm that left a foot and a half of snow on the ground and on the lake, followed by a day and a night of high, cold winds that scraped the snow into shoulder-high drifts along the shore, and that further isolated Merle from the community. Now it was almost as if he had died, and when in the morning you happened to look out at the lake and saw way out there in the brilliant white plain a red cube with a string of woodsmoke unraveling from the stovepipe chimney on top, you studied it the way you would the distant gravestone of a stranger reddening in the light of the rising sun.

A week later, just after Christmas and before the turn of the year, Noni Hubner’s mother was reading the Manchester Union-Leader at breakfast, when she started up excitedly, grabbed the paper off the table and hurried back through the trailer to her daughter’s bedroom.

“Noni! Noni, wake up!” She shook the girl’s shoulder roughly.

Slowly Noni came to. She lay in the bed on her back, blinking like a seal on a rock. “What?”

“The Grand Prize Drawing! They’re going to have the Grand Prize Drawing, dear! Think of it! What if he won! Wouldn’t that be wonderful for him? The poor old man.”

“Who? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Don’t curse, dear. Merle Ring, the old fellow out on the lake. He won the lottery back in October, and now they’re going to hold the Grand Prize Drawing on January fifteenth. Apparently, they put all the winning numbers for the year into a basket or something, and the governor or somebody draws out one number, and whoever holds that number wins fifty thousand dollars! Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

“Yeah,” the girl said, and rolled over, yanking the covers over her head.

“No, you can’t go back to sleep. You’ve got to go out there and tell him. He hasn’t been out of that cabin of his for days, so he can’t know yet. You can ski out there with the news. Won’t that be fun , dear?”

“Let someone else do it,” Noni mumbled from under the covers. “It’s too cold.”

“You’re the only one who has skis, dear,” the mother said.

“Most of the snow is off the ice.”

“Then you can skate out!”

“Oh, God,” Noni groaned. “Can’t you leave people alone?”

“He’s such a sweet old man, and he’s been very generous. It’s the least we can do.”