Trailerpark (10 page)

 

Doctor Wickshaw, Carol told her, doesn't make house-calls. Marcelle sat at her kitchen table, looked out the window and talked on the telephone. She was watching Flora's trailer, number 11, as if watching a bomb that was about to explode.

“Yeah, I know that,” Marcelle said, holding the receiver between her shoulder and cheek so both hands could be free to light a cigarette. “Listen, Carol, this is Flora Pease we're talking about, and there's no way I'm going to be able to get her into that office. But she's real sick, and it could be just the flu, but it could be meningitis, for all I know. My boy died of that, you know, and you have to do tests and everything before you can tell if it's meningitis.” There was a silence for a few seconds. “Anyhow, I don't want some infectious disease breaking out here, and Doctor Wickshaw could save us a lot of trouble if he'd just drive out here for ten minutes and take a look at this crazy woman so we could know how to handle her. I mean, I maybe should call the ambulance and get her over to the Concord Hospital, for all I know right now! I need somebody who knows something to come here and look at her,” she said, her voice rising.

“Maybe on my lunch hour I'll be able to come by and take a look,” Carol said. “At least I should be capable of saying if she should be got to a hospital or not.”

Marcelle thanked her—not without first laying down a curse against doctors who set themselves up like bankers—and hung up the phone. Nervously tapping her fingers against the table, she thought to call in Merle Ring or maybe Captain Knox, to get their opinions of Flora's condition, and then decided against it. That damned Dewey Knox, he'd just take over, one way or the other, and after reducing the situation to a choice between two courses, probably between leaving her alone in the trailer and calling the ambulance, he'd insist that someone other than he do the choosing, probably Flora herself, who, of course, would choose to be left alone. Then he'd walk off believing he'd done the right thing, the
only
right thing, without it ever occurring to him that he'd missed the point of the whole dilemma. Merle would be just as bad, she figured, with all his smart-ass comments about illness and death and leaving things alone until they have something to say to you that's completely clear. Some illnesses lead to death, he'd say, and some lead to health, and we'll know before long which this is, and when we do, we'll know how to act. Men. Either they take responsibility for everything, or else they take responsibility for nothing.

Around one, Carol Constant arrived in her little blue Japanese sedan, dressed in a white nurse's uniform and looking, to Marcelle, very much like a medical authority. Marcelle led her into Flora's trailer, after warning her about the clutter and the smell—“It's like some kinda burrow in there,” she said as they stepped through the door—and Carol, placing a plastic tape against Flora's forehead, determined that Flora was indeed quite ill, for her temperature was 105 degrees. She turned to Marcelle and told her to call the ambulance.

Immediately Flora went wild, bellowing and moaning about her babies and how she couldn't leave them, they needed her. She thrashed against Carol's strong grip for a moment and then gave up and fell weakly back into the cot.

“Go ahead and call,” Carol told Marcelle, “and I'll hold on to things here until they come.” When Marcelle had gone, Carol commenced talking to the ill woman in a low, soothing voice, stroking her forehead with one hand and holding her by the shoulder with the other, until, after a few moments, Flora began to whimper and then to weep, and finally, as if her heart were broken, to sob. By now Marcelle had returned from calling the ambulance and was standing in the background almost out of sight, while Carol soothed the woman and crooned, “Poor thing, you poor thing.”

“My babies, who'll take care of my babies?” she wailed.

“I'll get my brother Terry to take care of them,” Carol promised, and for a second that seemed to placate the woman.

But then she began to wail again, because she knew it was a lie and when she came back her babies would be gone.

No, no, no, no, both Carol and Marcelle insisted. When she got back, the guinea pigs would be here, all of them, every last one. Terry would water and feed them, and he'd clean out the cages every day, just as she did.

“I'll make sure he does,” Marcelle promised, “or he'll have his ass in a sling.”

That calmed the woman, but just then two young men dressed in white, the ambulance attendants, stepped into the room, and when Flora saw them, their large, grim faces and, from her vantage point, their enormous, uniformed bodies, her eyes rolled back and she began to wail, “No, no, no! I'm not going! I'm not going!”

The force of her thrashing movements tossed Carol off the cot onto the floor, and moving swiftly, the two young men reached down and pinned Flora against her cot. One of them, the larger one, told the other to bring his bag, and the smaller man rushed out of the trailer to the ambulance parked outside.

“I'm just going to give you something to calm yourself, ma'am,” the big man said in a mechanical way. The other man was back now, and Carol and Marcelle, looking at each other with slight regret and apprehension, stepped out of his way as he pushed through with the black satchel.

In seconds, Flora had been injected with a tranquilizer, and while the two hard-faced, large men in white strapped her body into a four-wheeled, chromium and canvas stretcher, she descended swiftly into slumber. They wheeled her efficiently out of the trailer, as if she were a piece of furniture, and slid her into the back of the ambulance, and then, with Marcelle following in her car, they were gone.

Alone by the roadway outside. Flora's trailer, Carol watched the ambulance and Marcelle's battered old Ford head out toward Old Road and away. After a moment or two, drifting from their trailers one by one, came Nancy Hubner, her face stricken with concern, and Captain Dewey Knox, his face firmed to hear grim news, and Merle Ring, his face smiling benignly.

“Where's my brother Terry?” Carol asked the three as they drew near.

 

It was near midnight that same night. Most of the trailers were dark, except for Bruce Severance's, where Terry, after having fed, watered and cleaned the ravenous, thirsty and dirty guinea pigs, was considering a business proposition from Bruce that would not demand humiliating labor for mere monkey-money, and Doreen Tiede's trailer, where Claudel Bing's naked, muscular arm was reaching over Doreen's head to snap off the lamp next to the bed—when out by Old Road the woman Flora Pease, the Guinea Pig Lady, came shuffling along the lane between the pine woods. She moved quickly and purposefully, just as she always moved, but silently now. She wore the clothes she was wearing in the morning, when the men had taken her from her cot and strapped her onto the stretcher—old bib overalls and a faded, stained, plaid flannel shirt. Her face was ablaze with fever. Her red hair ringed her head in a stiff, wet halo that made her look like an especially blessed peasant figure in a medieval fresco, a shepherd or carpenter rushing to see the Divine Child.

When she neared the trailerpark sufficiently to glimpse the few remaining lights and the dully shining, geometric shapes of the trailers through the trees and, here and there, a dark strip of the lake beyond, she cut to her left and departed from the roadway toward the swamp. Without hesitation, she darted into the swamp, locating even in darkness the pathways and patches of dry ground, moving slowly through the mushy, brush-covered muskeg, emerging from the deep shadows of the swamp after a while at the edge of the clearing directly behind her own trailer. Soundlessly, she crossed her back yard, passed the head-high pyramids standing like dolmens in the dim light, and stepped through the broken door into the trailer.

The trailer was in pitch darkness, and the only sound was that of the animals as they chirped, bred and scuffled in their cages through the nighttime. With the same familiarity she had shown cutting across the swamp, Flora moved in darkness to the kitchen area, where she opened a cupboard and drew from a clutter of cans and bottles a red one-gallon can of kerosene. Then, starting at the farthest corner of the trailer, she dribbled the kerosene through every room, looping through and around every one of the cages, until she arrived at the door. She placed the can on the floor next to the broken door, then stepped nimbly outside, where she took a single step toward the ground, lit a wooden match against her thumbnail, tossed it into the trailer and ran.

Instantly the trailer was a box of flame, roaring and snapping in rage, sending a dark cloud and poisonous fumes into the night sky as the paneling and walls ignited and burst into flame. Next door, wakened by the first explosion and terrified by the sight of the flames and the roar of the fire, Carol Constant rushed from her bed to the road, where everyone else in the park was gathering, wide-eyed, confused, struck with wonder and fear.

Marcelle hollered at Terry and Bruce, ordering them to hook up garden hoses and wash down the trailers next to Flora's. Then she yelled to Doreen. Dressed in a filmy nightgown, with the naked Claudel Bing standing in darkness behind her, the woman peered through her half-open door at the long, flame-filled coffin across the lane. “Call the fire department, for Christ's sake! And tell Bing to get his clothes on and get out here and help us!” Captain Knox gave orders to people who were already doing what he ordered them to do, and Nancy Hubner, in nightgown, dressing gown and slippers, hauled her garden hose from under the trailer and dragged it toward the front, screeching as she passed each window along the way for Noni to wake up and get out here and help, while inside, Noni slid along a stoned slope of sleep, dreamless and genuinely happy. Leon LaRoche appeared fully dressed in clean and pressed khaki workclothes with gloves and silver-colored hardhat, looking like a cigarette ad's version of a construction worker. He asked the Captain what he should do, and the Captain pointed him toward Bruce and Terry, who were already hosing down the steaming sides of the trailers next to the fire. At the far end of the row of trailers, in darkness at the edge of the glow cast by the flames, stood Merle Ring, uniquely somber, his arms limply at his sides, in one hand a fishing rod, in the other a string of hornpout.

In a few moments, the fire engines arrived, but it was already too late to save Flora's trailer or anything that had been inside it. All they could accomplish, they realized immediately, was to attempt to save the rest of the trailers, which they instantly set about doing, washing down the metal sides and sending huge, billowing columns of steam into the air. Gradually, as the flames subsided, the firemen turned their hoses and doused the dying fire completely. An hour before daylight, they had left, and behind them, where Flora's trailer had been, was a cold, charred, shapeless mass of indistinguishable materials—melted plastic, crumbled wood and ash, blackened, bent sheet metal, and flesh and fur.

 

By the pink light of dawn, Flora emerged from the swamp and came to stand before the remains of the pyre. She was alone, for the others, as soon as the fire engines had left, had trudged heavily and exhausted to bed. Around nine, Marcelle Chagnon was stirred from her sleep by her telephone—it was the Concord Hospital, informing her that the woman she had signed in the day before, Flora Pease, had left sometime during the night without permission and they did not know her whereabouts.

Marcelle wearily peered out the window next to her bed and saw Flora standing before the long, black heap across the lane, and she told the woman from the hospital that Flora was here. She must have heard last night that her trailer burned down, over the radio, maybe, and hitchhiked back to Catamount. She assured the woman that she would look after her, but the woman said not to bother, she only had the flu and probably would be fine in a few days, unless, of course, she had caught pneumonia hitchhiking last night without a hat or coat on.

Marcelle hung up the phone and continued to watch Flora, who stood as if before a grave. The others in the park also, as they rose from their beds, looked out at the wreckage, and seeing her there, stayed inside and left her alone. Eventually, around midday, she slowly turned and started back toward the swamp.

Marcelle saw her leaving and ran out to stop her. “Flora!” she cried, and the woman turned back and waited in the middle of the clearing. Marcelle trotted heavily across the open space, and when she came up to her, said to Flora, “I'm sorry.”

Flora stared at her blankly, as if she didn't understand.

“Flora, I'm sorry … about your babies.” Marcelle put one arm around the woman's shoulders, and they stood side by side, facing away from the trailerpark.

Flora said nothing for a few moments. “They wasn't my babies. Babies make me nervous,” she said, shrugging the arm away. Then, when she looked up into Marcelle's big face, she must have seen that she had hurt her, for her tone softened. “I'm sorry, Mrs. Chagnon. But they wasn't my babies. I know the difference, and babies make me nervous.”

 

That was in September. The fire was determined to have been “of suspicious origin,” and everyone concluded that some drunken kids from town had set it. The several young men suspected of the crime, however, came up with alibis, and no further investigation seemed reasonable.

By the middle of October, Flora Pease had built a tiny, awkwardly pitched shanty on the land where the swamp behind the trailerpark rose slightly and met the pine woods, land that might have belonged to the Corporation and might just as well have belonged to the state of New Hampshire, but it was going to take a couple of lawyers and a pair of surveyors before anyone could say for sure, so as long as neither the Corporation nor the state of New Hampshire fussed about it, neither the Corporation nor the state of New Hampshire was willing to make Flora tear down her shanty and move.