Trailerpark (18 page)

That's when Claudel started drinking every night after work at the Hawthorne House, hanging out there right up to closing time, stumbling home drunk and cursing his bad luck. Which of course only seemed to get worse. A man can't control his fate, but he does make his own luck. By calling it luck. But if he's a smart man, he won't call it luck at all. Of course Claudel didn't know that then. He called it luck, bad luck. So every night of the week he'd sit there on a stool at the bar of the Hawthorne House, punching all the sad songs on the juke box, ordering beers and shots of Canadian Club over and over, until finally Gary the bartender would come over and say, “Hey, Claudel, it's midnight. I gotta lock up the joint.”

Then he'd slide off the stool and head for the door, stumble down Main Street to Green Street, past the dark windows of the stores and restaurants and the few offices, till he came to Knight's Paint Store. Up the stairs he'd go, unlock the door, lurch in darkness to the bed, where Ginnie lay sleeping or pretending to sleep. Then, yanking off his clothes, smelling of beer and whiskey and cigarette smoke, he'd pull on her shoulder and paw at her body, even though he'd be too drunk to be much of a man, until finally she would jump out of bed, mad and afraid and disgusted.

In a month Ginnie had left him and had moved in with Howie Leeke, who had left his second wife the previous spring. In six weeks Claudel had got himself fired from the Public Service Company for coming in late so many times, late and hungover. And mad. All the time mad. He had got to be irritating to people. When he wasn't complaining about his bad luck, he was growling at people who looked, to him, to be having a run of good luck, like Freddie Hubbard, who had been his best friend since grade school. Freddie came into work one morning and told Claudel how he'd been promoted to foreman, and Claudel just sneered at him and said it was probably because they were afraid he'd fall off a pole if they didn't get him back down on the ground. “Keep lousing things up,” he told his old friend as he walked off, “and they'll stick you in the front office.”

People would say to him, “Hey, Claudel, how're you doing?” and he'd grump something like, “Depends on who I'm doing it to,” or some other remark that was designed mainly to stop the conversation dead. It was like falling into a well that didn't seem to have a bottom. There is an end to a person's self, though, and you can reach it, but only if you're stupid enough or smart enough to try hard for a long, long time. And that's precisely what Claudel did, for over a year, and eventually he hit the bottom of that well.

4

It happened one night at the Hawthorne House. He was living upstairs in a rented room by then, because after he'd got fired from the Public Service Company, he'd started collecting unemployment, and the bank had repossessed most of the furniture Ginnie had left him, the color TV and the bedroom suite and the couch. Besides, he wasn't able to pay the rent for the place over Knight's Paint Store anymore, so it seemed a reasonable thing to do. Maybe the only thing he could do. He'd go for days without shaving, letting his clothes get dirty and rumpled, eating Twinkies and potato chips for breakfast and cold canned beans for supper, getting himself drunk on boilermakers usually by three in the afternoon, and then sitting around in the Hawthorne House till closing time. He used to sit in one of the booths, and whenever someone would join him, because of having been a friend from the old days when, as Claudel still thought, his luck had been running good, he'd tell him over again how it all started with the fire and then his troubles with Ginnie and Howie Leeke, and how the Public Service Company had screwed him, probably because of Freddie Hubbard, who hated him, he was sure, and on and on into the night, until finally the friend would yawn and say he had to get home or someplace, and he'd leave, and Claudel wouldn't see him again for months, because the man would have been able to avoid him.

One night, a Friday, so there were a lot of drinkers in town that night, he was sitting in his usual booth, where he'd been sitting since three that afternoon, and he had nothing to think about, and no one to say it to, so he started listening to the conversation coming from behind him, where three young guys were sitting over beers and talking about state troopers and cars. A three-piece band had been playing for a while, country and western songs that had been popular about ten years ago. They had quit playing a few minutes earlier, had unplugged their instruments, two amplified guitars and a set of drums, and had headed for the bar. The Hawthorne House was laid out in a common way, a small bandstand in front that could accommodate no more than three musicians and their equipment, a dance floor the size of a kitchen, then along the walls a dozen plastic-covered booths and four long Formica-topped tables between them. At the back there was a bar with ten or twelve stools alongside it. On a Friday or Saturday night all the booths were usually taken and half the Formica tables were filled with drinkers, local men and women as well, and when the band played a danceable tune, eight or ten couples walked onto the dance floor and shoved each other around in approximate time to the music. But when the band took its break, there was a few minutes' silence, or relative silence, between the band's ceasing to play and someone's digging into his pocket for change for the juke box, and in that silence you could overhear conversations in the booths adjacent to yours. The rest of the time you couldn't hear anything said by anyone other than yourself unless it came from six inches away and was practically shouted into your face.

The music had stopped and the kid behind Claudel had gone on shouting into the faces of the two men sitting with him, men a few years older than he, all three of them wearing mechanic's uniforms from Steele's, the local Ford dealer, with their first names on the left breast pocket and Henry Ford's last on the other. The one talking, or rather shouting, was Deke, and the two he was shouting to were Art and Ron. “Nobody screws over me!” Deke told them. He had long, slack, blond hair that hung in greasy strands thick as twine over his collar, and his forearms wore tattoos, one a heart with a knife plunged into it and the words
Born to Love
emblazoned above the heart, the other a Confederate flag with the inscription
The South Will Rise Again!
“Nobody, but nobody, screws over me! I mean it, man, I don't give a shit how big he is, no goddamn state trooper puts me down!”

The kid's friends nodded, patiently waiting for the story of how nobody screwed over Deke once, because that's the way most stories get told when they're told in person. First the teller sets out his principles, and then he shows you how those principles get enacted in the world, usually by describing some incident or event in his recent past, so that what you end up with is the storyteller's philosophy of life. If you'd asked him straight out in the beginning to tell you what his philosophy of life was, he probably wouldn't have been able to tell you, any more than Deke could have. Sure he'd have one, at least he'd believe he had one, but unless he happened to be a professional philosopher, the chances are good he wouldn't be able to tell you what it was in so many words. And if he was a professional philosopher, the chances are just as good you wouldn't be able to understand what the hell he was talking about anyhow.

The same thing was happening with Deke. That's how Claudel looked at it. Deke started telling how the other night he was coming back to town from Concord in his LTD, hitting ninety-two as he left the traffic circle in Epsom, ninety-seven by the time he passed Webster's Mill Road where Frankie Marcoux was sitting in the dark, just waiting. Deke was a little bit drunk, but not much. He'd been drinking beer at the El Rancho in Concord since seven, and he was feeling ugly because he'd had a little run-in outside the El Rancho when he was leaving with a girl he'd picked up there. The girl turned out to be married and her husband turned out to be waiting for her in the parking lot, and the husband had given the girl hell and had taken her home with him. “Hey, I don't want some other guy's wife. Not like that, I mean. To me she was just some broad I picked up at the bar. To him she was his wife and the mother of his kids. So I just says to the guy, ‘Sure,' I says, ‘take her home where she belongs. Only next time,' I tell the guy, ‘next time make sure she stays there,' I says, ‘or maybe the next guy she walks out with won't be so agreeable.' You know what I mean?” he asked his friends.

They knew what he meant. Everybody took a pull on his beer, and Deke went on. “So, hey, here I am coming barrel-ass down Twenty-eight past Webster's Mill Road, and something tells me to check my mirror as I pass the intersection, and sure enough, I see Marcoux pulling out onto Twenty-eight with his blue light flashing and his siren wailing like an alley cat. Anyhow,
nobody
screws over me. So I jump on the LTD and I'm hitting a hundred and five when I pass Huckins Chevrolet, and just as I'm starting to put some real space between me and Marcoux, I see a goddamn semi, an eighteen-wheeler, for Christ's sake, slowing to turn off for town, and he's taking the whole damned road to make his cut, so I start hitting the brakes, right?”

“Right,” Art said.

“Right,” said Ron.

“Right. And pretty soon my ass end is letting go and I start to think maybe I'm going to roll, and I think, Jesus, I start to roll at a hundred and five and they'll be scraping me off Route Twenty-eight for a week. So I flip the wheel the same direction my ass is heading, bring her under control, at least I stop the slide, except that now I'm heading off the road into that big cornfield about a half-mile beyond Huckins, you know the one?”

Art, Ron, and Claudel, too, knew the one. It was a tenacre, flat cornfield leased by a local dairy farmer, and at this time of year the corn was chest high. There was a shallow ditch between the field and the road, and then the ground was fairly flat and, except for the cornstalks, smooth.

“So I barrel-ass into that goddamn field and I don't touch the brake or the gas, just let the goddamn car plow through the corn for a couple hundred yards, until it comes to a stop. I had enough sense to flick off my lights just as I left the road, so I was hoping Marcoux had been distracted by that semi jackknifing off the road, like I had been, and that he'd just keep on running down the road after me, while I cool it out in the middle of the cornfield. That's my plan, anyhow.”

They all waited for him to tell them what had happened, Art, Ron, and Claudel. Show us how nobody screws over you, Deke.

“So I'm sitting there, waiting for Marcoux to flash by with his siren screaming and his blue light flashing, only all of a sudden I hear something that isn't a siren, it's a car engine, idling, and it's right behind me. And there isn't any blue light flashing, it's a set of headlights bouncing light off the corn that surrounds me, and I say, ‘Shit, it's Marcoux.' And it is, it is that damned strutting sonofabitching horse's ass, and he's got me, because the only direction I can move is backward, and he's sitting there blocking me with his cruiser. He gets out, comes strolling up to my window, says, ‘Hello, Deke,' real cool, you know, like he's seen it on TV. ‘Out for your evening spin?' he asks me. Real funny. ‘Ever think of trying the road, Deke? It's kinda hard to get much speed up, even in this LTD, when you're driving through a cornfield.' ‘Ha ha ha,' I says to him. I mean, hey,
nobody
screws over me. You know what I mean?”

They knew.

“Did he run you in?” Art asked.

“Bet your ass!” Deke said defiantly. “Took me up to Laconia, made me take the breath test for drinking, but I passed the damned thing all right, so all he could do was hit me for speeding. I got my LTD out the next morning, but I was picking cornstalks out of the grill for days. Jesus, that car looked funny when I got it out, all those green stalks sticking out of the grill like that. I wanted to drive around town that way, you know, just to let people know.”

“But you didn't,” Ron said.

“Naw. No reason to. Besides, the only one I had to prove anything to was Marcoux, and I'd already done that, if you know what I mean.”

They knew what he meant, all three of them. They were satisfied that nobody had screwed over him. They knew that even though he was barely twenty years old, Deke understood the world and knew how to live in it.

The band returned to the low stage in front, two middle-aged guitarists with their bellies hanging heavily over gaudy belt buckles and a skinny, balding drummer in his early sixties, all of them wearing matching purple cowboy shirts with pink fringes across their chests and along the backs of their arms.

They started the music again, and Claudel drifted back into his troubles, when all at once, as if entering a room he hadn't known existed, he realized that while he had been listening to Deke's story and thinking about it and while he had been watching the youth and attempting to understand him, he hadn't thought about himself once. Claudel had let young Deke become the center of his thoughts for a few minutes, and his mind and his heart now felt strangely refreshed for it. It was a feeling he couldn't remember having experienced before. Certainly not since Vietnam. A coherence had momentarily come over his life, and he understood it, knew where it had come from, which gave him a feeling of wholeness he hadn't even imagined possible before.

All those years of thinking he had held a philosophy of life, when in reality he had held nothing of the sort. And now, here in the bar at the Hawthorne House, after listening to a local kid tell a story of how he got arrested for speeding, Claudel suddenly felt he knew enough about the world to devise ways for getting along in the world. It's all in the way you pay attention to things! he said to himself. Oh, he knew nothing was going to change much. He wasn't going to get back his job at the Public Service Company, he knew that, and besides, the other day he'd agreed to go to work stacking hides down at the tannery. And he knew he'd never get Ginnie back, not now, because she was pregnant now and would probably marry Howie Leeke as soon as the divorce came through. And he knew he wasn't going to win the lottery or have some crazy kind of luck like that, which is what he'd need to pay off what he still owed the bank. No, he'd just go on—renting a room at the Hawthorne House, working days down at the tannery and spending his nights down here in the bar. Getting his life over with. But he also knew that it wouldn't bother him anymore. That made him very thankful. And that was the end of his story.