Trailer Park Noir (3 page)

“Fish sticks are always good.”

* * * *

They ate in silence, as the radio on the counter played soft rock. Kendra liked the music – it was soothing, relaxing. It made her feel good. But she also liked rap – because it was naughty.

Kendra Marie Dunfy was a girl with a desperate hunger to be naughty.

There was a little girl who lived in unit sixteen. She was seven years old and her name was Valerie, but everyone called her Val. Val was spoiled rotten and allowed to run rampant. No one in the park liked her. Kendra was the only one in the park who would talk to her. Val had said something once that had struck Kendra. She’d said, “It’s
fun
to be naughty.”

Kendra’s life was an endless bland existence filled with unicorn stationary and puppy posters. One time when she and her mother had gone shopping in the Mt. Shasta Mall in Redding, Kendra had wandered into Hot Topic and had found some stationary she
really
wanted. It was all black, with silver and white cobwebs in the margins, and it came with a pen that wrote in silver ink. But Mommy said no. “I don’t think that’s a very good look for you, honey,” she’d said. “But we couldn’t afford it, anyway. I just can’t afford to get you fancy stationary. We don’t have the money.”

But Kendra thought it
was
a good look for her – she was drawn to those dark things. For example, she had a stack of old R.L. Stine horror stories she was making her way through, and she’d even read some horror novels meant for adults. They’d been scary, and they’d bothered Kendra, but she’d enjoyed that, thought it was fun. Mommy did not approve of such literature, although she let some of it slide, saying, “I’m just glad you’re reading.”

There’d been a girl last school year who was always getting into trouble. Monica Hartwell – she always dressed in black and her long, full hair was dyed black, and she was
always
getting detention for one thing or another. Kendra had sat down with her at lunch one day – Monica had always sat alone at a corner table in the cafeteria. Kendra had introduced herself and said she liked the way Monica’s hair looked, and the way she was dressed. They became friends, sort of. Monica did not seem to be the type of person to cultivate a real friendship. But they had lunch almost every day for the rest of the time that Monica was there. Monica had told Kendra about herself – just a tiny bit at a time – and Kendra realized she wasn’t weird at all. She was just like everybody else, who simply dealt with things in a way that was slightly different from most. Monica had given her a lot of great books to read – horror novels, dark fantasies. Some of them had been hard for Kendra to read, but she’d diligently made her way through all of them. There were a couple she didn’t quite understand, but most of them had been so scary, so disturbing – and so much fun! Monica had let her keep the books, but she had to hide them from Mommy, who wouldn’t have liked them. She’d read them in bed, under the covers, by the light of a flashlight in her dark bedroom, which had made them even scarier.

Monica wasn’t there the whole year. Her family moved away in March. Kendra missed her. There’d been no one else around like Monica, no one she could talk to with such ease, no one with whom she could truly relax and be herself. But something very useful had come from their friendship – Kendra now knew she was capable of
starting
a friendship. That was important to her.

She’d learned from Monica the same thing little Val had shouted:
It’s
fun
to be naughty
. She’d done things with her friend that were
definitely
naughty, things she’d never thought about doing with a girl before, things she’d never thought of girls doing together. Fun things, things that felt awfully good.

“You ever done any of these things with a boy?” Monica had asked.

“No.”

“You will. Someday.”

Someday
, Kendra thought.

She thought of her new next-door neighbor, Mr. Reznick – Marc. He was so handsome, so rugged-looking, like maybe he belonged on a horse. Kendra wondered what it would be like to do some of those things with him.

Yes, she wanted to do something
naughty
. The only problem was, she was never left alone. If only she could talk Mommy into leaving her alone for a change instead of taking her over to Aunt Rose’s.

Kendra knew there was liquor in the cupboard over the kitchen counter. Maybe she could have a drink. She thought about that a while. What if Mommy found out? What if she smelled it on her breath later? Or what if Kendra got drunk and Mommy came home and found her that way? Mommy would never let her stay by herself again, that was for sure.

Kendra could not allow that to happen.

She considered finding a pack of Mommy’s cigarettes and having a smoke.

Kendra sighed. Her life was so bland, there weren’t even any proper
opportunities
for her to be naughty.

It was like an itch – a naughty itch that she couldn’t scratch. On one hand, she got frustrated with Mommy, but on the other, she did not want to disappoint her or make her angry. Kendra loved her, and she knew Mommy loved her, too.

But there it was, anyway, that smirking, leering need inside her, that needling itch to do something naughty, anything at all, something with some risk to it, something exciting. That was what she enjoyed the most – the excitement. She liked video games because they were exciting, and some of them were even naughty – you could get points for killing police officers, or even innocent bystanders! Kendra enjoyed adrenaline, and the satisfying feeling of getting away with something.

Last year, Kendra and Monica had gone on a lot of shoplifting trips. They’d left school at the end of the day in Monica’s car and gone to a string of convenience stores around Redding. At each stop, one would talk to the cashier while the other lifted something. They took turns. They got a lot of magazines, paperback books, candy, and beer, or other malt beverages. There was always the chance of being caught at any moment, and Kendra had felt swollen and giddy with simultaneous fear and delight. It was an intoxicating concoction of excitement that made Kendra feel like she was really
doing
something, like she was
living
.

She missed those days, and she wanted to do something like that again – or something completely new that would excite her just as much, something she hadn’t thought of yet. But she had no one with whom to do it. That made her sad for a while. She wondered where Monica was now and if she had managed to keep out of jail. She wondered if Monica ever thought of her, as Kendra sometimes thought of Monica.

Of course, all of this depended on whether or not Mommy would let her stay in the trailer by herself the next time Mommy got a temp assignment, or when she went out dancing at night. And sometimes it felt as if that would never happen.

Kendra was always defeated by the dread words, “We’ll see” ...

Three

Reznick had been in the trailer park for five weeks. During that time, he’d kept to himself. Before that, he’d lived for a while in a smaller, more run-down park on River Valley Drive on the other side of the river, but the place had become
so
run-down that he couldn’t stand it anymore. He wished he could afford to live in one of the better parks with mostly senior citizens who lived in expensive double-wides. Of course, what he
really
wanted was to live in a house again. But that was down the line. Way down the line. He had to build up his business again first. He still had some of the money his father had left him, but not much. The rental of his office took big chunks out of it. What he needed more than anything was not a new trailer park or a house, but more business.

After his nap, he got up and dumped the chicken bones in the garbage, then tied the bag off and pulled it out of the can. It was Tuesday night, and the garbage man came early Wednesday morning. He took the bag outside and put it in the big green can, then wheeled the can out to the edge of the narrow paved road that ran through the park.

He heard voices. He slowed down as he returned to his trailer, then stopped and listened. The voices were nearby, but he could see no one, and he could not pinpoint their source, but they were close. Then he looked up.

“Hello, neighbor,” a woman said. She peered down at him from the roof of the trailer next door. She was lying face-down on the roof, leaning on her elbows.

“Hello,” he said.

He’d seen her around, but he’d paid her no attention. They hadn’t spoken. He thought she had a daughter, if he wasn’t mistaken.

She seemed to be smiling down at him, but it was difficult to tell because her face was in shadow. “Have you ever watched the sunset from your roof?”

“No, can’t say that I have,” he said.

“You should try it, it’s really beautiful. We’ve got a great view from up here. You want to come up and join us?”

He almost said, without even thinking about it, no. Then it occurred to him that if he went back inside, he would stare at the television and brood.

“We have ice tea if you’ll bring a glass,” the woman said.

“Are you serious?” Reznick said.

“Yes. There’s a ladder on the other side of the trailer, in front. We have room for one more. I’m Anna, by the way. Anna Dunfy.”

“Marcus Reznick.”

“Well, come on up, Mr. Reznick. The sun’s about to set.”

Reznick scratched the back of his head, then thought,
What the hell.
He went inside, got a glass. Conan followed him out of the trailer.

“Can I bring my dog up?” he said. “He’s small.”

“Sure,” Anna Dunfy said.

Reznick picked up Conan, then went around to the other side of his neighbor’s trailer to the ladder, which he climbed awkwardly. Once his head and shoulders had risen above the top edge of the trailer, he set Conan on the roof.

“Oh, look at
you
!”

Reznick was faced by a second woman on the roof, not the one who had spoken to him. Not a woman, really – a girl. And suddenly, he could not move. He stopped climbing, stopped breathing for a little while.

The girl had been lying face-down on a blanket, which was spread over a large foam-rubber egg-carton pad, but when she saw Conan, she quickly got up and turned toward Reznick, sat up and crossed her legs. She sat between Reznick and Anna Dunfy.

Reznick was frozen in place by her. Had she reached out and plunged her hand into his chest and clutched his heart and ripped it out of him, she could not have stunned him more than she did simply by sitting there petting Conan. His heart had completely lost control of itself. It wasn’t simply beating, it was thundering. His insides were tense. He was overwhelmed by a bone-deep hunger, a need so great that he set the glass on the roof before he shattered it with his squeezing, white-knuckled hand.

Never in his forty-two years of life – not even in his hormone-addled youth – had he ever wanted a woman so deeply, so desperately, so instantly.

“Oh, he’s so cute!” the girl said.

Her mane of golden hair hung down on both sides of her face as she bent forward to pet the wiggling little dog. Even in the dim light, he could see her face – a beautiful face that glowed the way a pregnant woman’s face glowed. She lifted her head and looked at him and he stopped breathing. Her smiling eyes were so big, he was afraid for a moment that he might fall into them if he climbed any higher on the ladder. Her lips – had there ever been lips more custom-made for kissing? They were plump and her mouth was perhaps just a fraction too long, but it made her kind, sympathetic smile all the bigger and more pleasant. Her mouth was open as she looked at him, and she ran her tongue slowly around her lips. Creamy cleavage rose up out of the red halter top from between her round, heavy breasts. The halter top revealed an expanse of flat, pale belly. Between her legs, small golden hairs curled out around the narrow, raggedy crotch of the very-short cutoffs she wore. Her toenails were painted a delicate red on her bare feet. Her legs were long and slender and shapely.

For a moment, he felt light-headed. He clutched the sides of the ladder with both hands for fear of toppling over backwards.

“You okay, Mr. Reznick?” Anna Dunfy said as she peered around her daughter.

“Yeah, yeah, just ... a little, uh ... a little dizzy. I’m not, uh, you know, crazy about heights.”

“Oh, well, you’re almost here, just a little bit more.”

Reznick was surprised by how much effort it took to pull his eyes from the girl. It almost hurt to look away from her. He climbed up onto the roof as the girl stretched out on her belly again on the blanket between Reznick and Anna.

“Just lie down on the blanket, Mr. Reznick,” Anna said.

“Call me Marc,” he said.

“And you call me Anna.”

“And you can call me Kendra,” the girl said as she smiled at him.

He tried to speak, to say hi to the girl, but nothing but breath came out the first couple times. “Hi, Kendra.”

“I’m her daughter,” she said. She was chewing gum. He could smell it – it smelled of grape flavoring.