Russell Banks - Trailerpark

Marcelle Chagnon said it again, this time almost pleading. “You can’t keep these animals in here anymore!”

Flora stopped fluttering. “It’s getting colder, winter’s coming. I must keep them inside, or they’ll freeze to death. Just like plants.”

Marcelle Chagnon crossed her arms over her chest and for the third time informed Flora that she would not be able to keep her guinea pigs inside her trailer.

This time the words seemed to have been understood. Flora stood still, hands extended as if for alms, and cried, “What will I do with them, then? I can’t put them outside, they’ll freeze to death, if they don’t starve first. They’re weak little animals, not made for this climate. You want me to kill them? Is that what you’re telling me? That I have to kill my babies?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re going to do with them!” Marcelle was angry now. Her head had cleared somewhat, and she knew again that this was Flora’s problem, not hers. “It’s your problem, not mine. I’m not God. What you do with the damned things is your business…”

“But I’m not God, either!” Flora cried. “All I can do is take care of them and try to keep them from dying unnaturally,” she explained. That was all anyone could do and, therefore, it was what one had to do. “You do what you can. When you can take care of things, you do it. Because when you take care of things, they thrive.” She said it as if it were a motto.

“Then I’ll just have to call the health board and have them come in here and take the guinea pigs out. I don’t want the scandal, it’ll make it hard to rent, and it’s hard enough already, but if I can’t get you to take care of these animals by getting rid of them, I’ll have someone else do it.”

“You wouldn’t do that,” Flora said, shocked.

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll have to get rid of me first,” she said. “You’ll have to toss me out into the cold first, let me freeze or starve to death first, before I’ll let you do that to my babies.” She pushed her square chin out defiantly and glared at Marcelle.

“Oh, Jesus, what did I do to deserve this?”

Quickly, as if she knew she had won, Flora started reassuring Marcelle, telling her not to worry, no one would be bothered by the animals, their shit was almost odorless and would make good fertilizer for the several vegetable and flower gardens in the park, and she, Flora, took good care of them and kept their cages clean, so there was no possible health hazard, and except for their relatively quiet chitchat, the animals made no noise that would bother anyone. “People just don’t like the idea of my having guinea pigs, that’s all,” she explained. “The reality of it don’t bother anyone, not even Captain Knox. If people were willing to change their ideas, then everyone could be happy together,” she said brightly.

In a final attempt to convince her to give up the guinea pigs, Marcelle tried using some of Leon LaRoche’s calculations. She couldn’t remember any of the specific numbers, but she understood the principle behind them. “You know you’ll have twice as many of these things by spring. And how many have you got now, seventy-five or a hundred, right?”

Flora told her not to worry herself over it, she already had plenty to worry about with the trailerpark and winter coming and all. She should forget all about the guinea pigs, Flora told her with sympathy, and look after the people in the trailerpark, just as she always had. “Life is hard enough, Mrs. Chagnon, without us going around worrying about things we can’t do anything about. You let me worry about taking care of the guinea pigs. That’s something I can do something about, and you can’t, so therefore it’s something I should do something about, and you shouldn’t even try.” Her voice had a consoling, almost motherly tone, and for a second Marcelle wanted to thank her.

“All right,” she said brusquely, gathering herself up to her full height. “Just make sure these bastards don’t cause any trouble around here, and make sure there ain’t any health hazard from … whatever, bugs, garbage, I don’t know, anything … and you can keep them here. Till the weather gets warm, though. Only till spring.”

Marcelle moved toward the door, and Flora smiled broadly. She modestly thanked Marcelle, who answered that if Flora was going to smoke pot here, she’d better do it alone and not with those two big-mouthed jerks, Terry and Bruce. “Let me warn you, those jerks, one or the other of ’em, will get you in trouble. Smoke it alone, if you have to smoke it.”

“But I don’t know how to make those little cigarettes. My fingers are too fat and I spill it all over.”

“Buy yourself a corncob pipe,” Marcelle advised. “Where do you buy the stuff from, anyway,” she suddenly asked, as she opened the door to leave and felt the raw chill from outside.

“Oh, I don’t buy it!” Flora exclaimed. “It grows wild all over the place, especially along the side of Old Road where there used to be a farm, between the river and the state forest.” There were, as part of the land owned by the Corporation, ten or fifteen acres of old, unused farmland now grown over with brush and weeds. “They used to grow hemp all over this area when I was a little girl,” Flora told her. “For rope during the war. But after the war, when they had to compete with the Filipinos and all, they couldn’t make any money at it anymore, so it just kind of went wild.”

“That sure is interesting,” Marcelle said, shaking her head. “And I don’t believe you. But that’s okay, I don’t need to know who you buy your pot from. I don’t want to know. I already know too much,” she said, and she stepped out and closed the door quickly behind her.

The trailerpark was located a mile and a half northwest of the center of the town of Catamount, a mill town of about 5000 people situated and more or less organized around a dam and mill pond first established on the Catamount River some two hundred years ago. The mill had originally been set up as a gristmill, then a lumber mill, then a shoe factory, and in modern times, a tannery that processed hides from New Zealand cattle and sent the leather to Colombia for the manufacture of shoes.

To get to the trailerpark from the town, you drove north out of town past the Hawthorne House (named after the author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who stopped there overnight in May of 1864 with the then ex-president Franklin Pierce on the way to the White Mountains for a holiday; though the author died the next night in a rooming house and tavern not unlike the present Hawthorne House but located in Plymouth, New Hampshire, the legend had grown up in the region that he had died in his bed in Catamount), then along Main Street, past the half-dozen or so blocks of local businesses and the large white Victorian houses that once were the residences of the gentry and the owners of the mill or shoe factory or tannery, whichever it happened to be at that time, and that were now the residences and offices of the local physician (for whom Carol Constant worked), dentist, lawyer, certified public accountant, and mortician. A ways beyond the town, you came to an intersection, or you might more properly say Main Street came to an end. To your right Mountain Road ran crookedly uphill toward the mountain, the hill, actually, that gave the town its name, Catamount Mountain, so named by the dark presence in colonial times of mountain lions at the rocky top of the hill. Turning left, however, you would drive along Old Road, called that only recently and for the purpose of distinguishing between it and New Road, or the Turnpike, that ran north and south between the White Mountains and Boston. When, a mile and a half from town, you had crossed the Catamount River, you would turn right at the tipped, flaking sign, GRANITE STATE TRAILERPARK, posted off the road behind a bank of mailboxes standing like sentries at the intersection. Passing through some old, brush-filled fields and then some pine woods that grew on both sides of the narrow, paved lane, you would emerge into a clearing, with a sedge-thickened swamp on your left, the Catamount River on your right, and beyond, a cluster of somewhat battered and aging housetrailers. Some were in better repair than others, and some, situated in obviously more attractive locations than others, were alongside the lake where they exhibited small lawns and flower gardens and other signs of domestic tidiness and care. The lake itself lay stretched out beyond the trailerpark, four and a half miles long and in the approximate shape of the silhouette of a turkey. For that reason, it was called Turkey Pond for over a hundred years, until Ephraim Skitter, who owned the shoe factory, left the town a large endowment for its library and a bandstand, and in gratitude the town fathers changed the name of the lake. That in turn gave the name Skitter to the large parcel of land that bordered the north and west sides of the lake, becoming by 1950, when the Turnpike was built, the Skitter Lake State Forest. All in all, it was a pretty piece of land and water. If you stood out on the point of land where the trailerpark was situated, with the swamp and pine woods behind you, you could see, way out beyond the deep blue water of the lake, spruce-covered hills that humped their way northward all the way to the mauve-colored wedges at the horizon that were the White Mountains.