Russell Banks - Trailerpark

BUDDY SMITH:You probably remember the tragic death of my father by his own hand. He was very fond of you, Mr. Ring, and often spoke highly of you to me, telling me himself what a kind and generous man you are. I will soon be returning to N.H. on business of a personal nature and was thinking of dropping by the trailerpark, where I have so many fond but also sad memories of my childhood. I thought, if you had the room, because my father was so very fond of you, I could perhaps visit with you a few days and we could talk about the old times. I’m a young man, alone in the cold world now, and without the kind of wise counsel that an older man like yourself can provide…

NANCY HUBNER:The man is obviously depressed. You people amaze me. He’s depressed. It happens often to elderly people who live alone and don’t feel needed anymore. We simply have to take better care of our senior citizens. The man needs company, he needs to feel wanted, and especially he needs to feel needed. We ought to make up an excuse to have a party, a Valentine’s Day party, say, and march out there and say to him, “Merle, if you won’t come to our party, then we’ll bring the party right out here on the ice, we’ll bring the party to you! ” We’ll all have a lovely time. We’ve got to bring him back into our circle, a man like that should not be allowed to be alone in life. The money has nothing to do with it.

DEWEY KNOX:The man’s obviously incapable of taking care of himself, so it shouldn’t be difficult to have him declared incompetent to handle his own affairs. The money can then go into a blind trust, which clever and aggressive management ought to be able to double in a matter of a few years. Imagine, if you’d bought gold five years ago, as I did, when it was going for $112 an ounce, you’d now have a nice little nest egg. I myself, if pressed to it, would certainly be willing to put together a management team to handle the trust. Other than taking for myself a nominal fee for services provided, the capital accrued would of course go directly into the trust and ultimately to Merle Ring’s heirs. It could be arranged so that Merle himself received a modest monthly stipend. People like Merle need looking after. Not vice versa, the way some of you would have it.

MARCELLE CHAGNON:Am I crazy, or is everybody trying to figure out how to get Merle’s money for themselves? It’s his money, and I don’t care what in hell he does with it. He can wipe his butt with it, for all I care, if you’ll excuse my English. So what if he’s got lots of money he don’t need and you don’t have enough. So what else is new? That’s life. Do I expect my sons all grown up and making good money to send me money just because they got lots of it now and I don’t have enough? No, I do not. That’s life, is all I got to say. All I care now is that Merle does something with that money, spends it or gives it away or loses it, something, anything, just so life can return to normal around here. I wish to hell he’d never got it in the first place. Thinking about it, all this talk and argument about it, gives me a goddamned headache. I hate thinking about money, and here I’ve been doing it all my life. I get the same damned headache every time one of my sons writes and tells me he just bought a new dishwasher for his wife or a color TV or just got back from Bermuda or someplace. What do I care what he just bought or where the hell he went on vacation? What the hell do I care about money? There’s lots more important things in life than money. I just want to forget it exists. I’m tired.

It’s hard to know more about a person’s life than what that person wants you to know, and few people know even that much. Beyond what you can see and are told (both of which are controlled pretty easily by the person seen and told about), what you come to believe is true of who a person is and was and will be comes straight from your imaginings. For instance, you know that a man like Merle Ring had a mother and a father, probably brothers and sisters, too, and that for most of his life he was a working man and that he was married and had children. He said as much himself, and besides, these things are true of almost any man you might choose to read about or speak of. That he was married numerous times (you might imagine four or five or even more, but “numerous” was all he ever said) and fathered numerous children explains only why in his old age he was as alone in the wide world as a man who had never married at all and had fathered no one. Whether he meant to or not, Merle had avoided the middle ground and in that way had located himself alone in the center of his life, sharing it with no one. In fact, you could say the same of everyone at the trailerpark. It’s true of trailerparks that the people who live there are generally alone at the center of their lives. They are widows and widowers, divorcées and bachelors and retired army officers, a black man in a white society, a black woman there too, a drug dealer, a solitary child of a broken home, a drunk, a homosexual in a heterosexual society — all of them, man and woman, adult and child, basically alone in the world. When you share the center of your life with someone else, you create a third person who is neither you nor the person you have cleaved to. No such third person resided at the Granite State Trailerpark.

In any event, to return to Merle Ring, though you knew all these things about Merle’s inner and outer lives, you could know little more about them than that, unless he himself were to provide you with more information than he had already provided, more actions and reactions, more words. And, unfortunately, as the winter wore on he seemed less and less inclined to say or do anything new. People’s imaginings, therefore, as to who he really was, came to dominate their impressions of him.

This, of course, was especially true after he won the money. By then most of the people at the park were frightened of him. The money gave him power, and the longer he neither acted on nor reacted to the presence of that money, the greater grew his power. For the most part, though they argued among themselves as to how Merle should exercise his immense power, no one dared approach him on the subject. They spoke of it, naturally, and made plans and commitments to send one or another of the group or several in a delegation out onto the plain of ice to ask Merle what he was going to do with the money, but by morning the plans and commitments got broken, ignored or forgotten altogether — until the next time a group of them got to bickering, accusing one another of selfishness and greed and downright stupidity, when a new agreement would be made as to who should make the trip. The trouble was, they no longer trusted anyone or any group from among their number to return with accurate information as to Merle’s behavior, and for that reason they could not be relieved of their imaginings. Finally someone, possibly Marcelle Chagnon and probably as a bitter joke, suggested they send a child, the only true child who lived at the trailerpark, Doreen Tiede’s five-year-old daughter Maureen.

Her mother dressed the child warmly in a dark blue hooded snowsuit, mittens and overshoes. It was an overcast Sunday afternoon, the low sky promising snow, when the residents of the trailerpark walked Maureen down to where the land ended and the ice began. Smiling and talking cheerfully together for the first time in weeks, they called advice to their tiny emissary:

“Don’t forget, ask him about his fishing first! Then ask him about the money.”

“Just say we all miss him here and wonder when he’s coming back in!”

“No, no, just ask if we can do anything for him! Can we bring him any supplies, wood for his fire, tools — anything!”