Trailerpark (17 page)

They talked. She explained how she herself didn't like hunting or guns, but she didn't judge those who did, and he said he sure was glad of that. Sometimes he asked her questions about herself, her family, her ex-husband, her ambitions, and she answered his questions. Not in detail, however, but briefly and, as much as possible, in general terms, which she knew was how he wanted her to answer them.

Once a week, he drove out to the house and examined the patient. The examination usually took less than five minutes, but his visits took most of the afternoon, for the two of them talked, Sam doing most of the talking. Sometimes they walked down the road a ways or drove to a particularly scenic spot that Sam wanted to reveal to her. And inevitably, when they returned in his car to the house, Sam turned somber and tried for a moment to tell Carol how much and in what ways he liked her. Each time, Carol was able to ease out of the conversation without doing more than frustrating the man, so that, with a wave and a cheery remark, he could pretend to himself that he had never said anything that could be misconstrued as inappropriate.

There was a Sunday, however, when it did not go so smoothly. Carol had slipped out of the car, crossed in front of it and waved good-bye, and this time he had stepped out also.

“Wait a moment,” he said seriously.

She stopped and stood before him, the same height as he but a larger person with a larger face, so that next to her he seemed suddenly fragile.

“Carol, I want to suggest something to you.”

She smiled and reached out with one hand and patted his shoulder. “I know you like me as a person, Sam. I like you, too. Let's keep it that way,” she said.

“No, no, no, that's not what I meant. What I mean is, I … ah… I'd like for you to work for me. I'd like you to stay up here, after Harold … after Harold is gone, and work for me. I like you … oh, hell, I know how that sounds. But I want you to work for me.”

Carol said nothing. She studied the man's earnest, red face, as if searching for a lie.

“Well, you
think
about it,” he blurted. “You
think
about it.” He got back into the car and closed the door. Then he cranked down the window. “You
think
about it,” he said. He started the motor, dropped the car into gear and drove swiftly away, exhaust fumes trailing behind.

 

The night before Thanksgiving, Harold Dame the real estate man died. At ten-thirty, Carol walked from her room to the old man's room, and as soon as she crossed the threshold, she knew he was dead. She had learned to hear his breathing without having to listen for it, so that when his breathing ceased, she knew. In the darkness, she reached forward and felt at his neck for his pulse, then turned and went back to her own room. She was in her nightgown, ready for sleep, with her bed already turned down. The portable television Sam had brought her was still on, and blue-gray figures flickered incoherently in front of her, as she sat down on the bed and picked up the telephone. She held the receiver in her lap for a moment and stared at the television screen. Finally, she dialed, and when Sam answered, she told him. “Harold died, Sam.”

“Well. When, Carol?”

“In the last half-hour. I just went in to check him.” Her voice was flat and without expression.

“Well. Are you all right?”

“I'm all right.”

“What about Ed and Sue? Do they know?”

“No.”

“Okay, then. I'll be right out there. I'll handle everything, Carol, don't worry.”

“I'm not worried,” she said.

“Listen, Carol, why don't you come in here tonight, stay here with us. I'll bring you back in with me. We have plenty of extra room,” he said. “Maybe you'd like to have Thanksgiving dinner with us tomorrow,” he said in a thin voice, as if talking to someone whose mind were already made up.

“All right. Thank you, Sam.”

“You will? Wonderful! I'll be there in five minutes!”

She said good-bye and hung up. Then she rose from the bed and switched off the television, crossed the room and sat by the window, peering into the cold, familiar, New Hampshire darkness.

1

E
VERY MAN OUGHT TO HAVE A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
. That's what Claudel Bing believed, and you might think that was his philosophy of life, but it wasn't. It was only a principle. It was like his father's principles, which people used to joke about and say were his philosophy of life, but they weren't. He used to tell his kids and Claudel's mother and anyone else who got him to talk seriously about life, “There are three things a man should never do. Swear in front of women, throw stones, and spit.” But you won't find philosophy there. You won't find anything there that will get a man through a time of great suffering or moral confusion.

But when you're a kid you try to figure out your mother's and your father's philosophy, and you do it constantly, until either you've got it and can accept it for your own or cast it away, or else you never get it and you end up sharing it with your mother and father anyway without even knowing it—which to Claudel seemed a shame. Because a man ought to be able to choose his own philosophy of life. That was another one of his principles.

Anyhow, for years he had struggled to figure out his father's philosophy of life, but all he could come up with were principles. Like the rule against spitting. What Claudel was looking for was something like Chisholm's Law, the one that says if things can get worse they will. Then, he figured, he could work out his own principles. A man can't have principles, he reasoned, unless he's got himself a philosophy of life.

It wasn't until he was nineteen and had finished basic training in the army and was shipping out for Vietnam—that was in 1965 or '66, when things were just starting to heat up over there—that he finally figured out his father's philosophy of life. It was his mother who gave him the information that tipped him off to it. He had taken a little kidding in basic training from the guys, especially the guys from the cities who had never heard of a man with the name of Claudel so they used to kid him about it, “Why not Claude?” and, “Claudelle, you sure that's a man's name?” He could never come back at them with a smart or truthful answer, so when he was home on furlough before shipping out, he asked his mother one day at breakfast how come she had named him Claudel.

His mother was fixing him some beans and eggs at the stove, and she turned around with a strange expression on her face, as if she was wondering herself why she had named him Claudel. After a few seconds she said, “It was your father named you. I wanted to call you Claude if you were a boy and Claudine if you turned out to be a girl. But he said no. Not that he didn't like both names. He said, ‘Let's call it Claudel, regardless of whether it's a boy or a girl. No sense having two names ready when we're only expecting one baby.'”

“I can remember him saying that,” Claudel's mother said, “just like it was yesterday. ‘No sense having two names ready when we're only expecting one baby.' But that's your father, you know. All over. He likes to be efficient. When he was young and talked more about what he believed, maybe because he wasn't so sure of himself then and had to hear himself say things out loud before he could really believe they were true, he used to say, ‘Too much is as bad as too little. Worse.'”

Right then and there at the breakfast table, Claudel finally got to understand his father's philosophy of life. If the old man believed that too much was as bad as, or worse than, too little, and if that belief had led him to give his son a name like Claudel, which he must have known would be an embarrassment to the boy for a long time, then the old man must have a pretty bleak view of life's offerings. It wasn't quite as bleak as Chisholm's Law, say, but it wasn't exactly optimistic either.

Your philosophy tells you what the world is like, gives you the long view, so to speak. And your principles tell you how to live in that world. And Claudel's father was telling him that the world was a tough and miserly place, and that the best way to live in that place was to be careful and relentlessly efficient. Don't waste a thing, don't take anything for granted. Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today, because tomorrow might never come, and just in case it does, you better have something done today or else you're going to get beat tomorrow.

A hard view, Claudel knew. But when he was nineteen it seemed right to him. He loved his father and admired him, even though of course he thought his father was a little cracked on a few subjects, like spitting and throwing stones. But basically he thought his father knew the world a lot better than he himself did. The old man had pulled a hitch in the Navy in World War Two out there in the South Pacific, and after the war he'd worked for a few years down in Boston in the shipyards as a welder. At nineteen the son figured he'd do better listening to the father and taking on the father's philosophy of life than he would trying to work up one of his own. So he didn't mind being called Claudel anymore. Now that he knew there was a good reason for it.

2

Then he went off to Vietnam, and over there he learned a lot about the world that made him start to question his father's viewpoint, because what he saw over there made him start to believe in Luck. His father's philosophy had no place in it for Luck. But the war was teaching Claudel that there were lucky people, like him and the other guys who didn't get killed or blown half to bits, and there were unlucky people, like all those Vietnamese farmers, say, whose houses and land and children and whole families were getting wiped out for no reason they could name. Half the time they couldn't even see the bombers that dropped the bombs on them. It was like God was bombing them, instead of some foreigner looking into a bombardier's sight at 40,000 feet.

Claudel wasn't stupid, and he could see that the only difference between these farmers and the farmers back home was that one group was unlucky and the other group was lucky. And since he could see that, so far, he was a member of the lucky group, he started to expect more out of life than his father's philosophy had said he would get.

He could remember when it first came wholly clear to him that he was one of the lucky ones. His outfit used to sit around at night guarding the 105 howitzers with their M-14 automatic rifles, talking and smoking and looking out at the darkness for signs of life (signs of death for them, so they had to look very carefully). What they were looking for was flashlights. They never knew why, but those guys out there in the black pajamas were carrying flashlights. Every once in a while somebody would see a fleck of light way out there in the jungle, like a firefly, only half a mile away, and he'd start firing his M-14 full steam, and in a second everybody else would be blasting away at the jungle. They weren't supposed to fire those things except at an enemy they could see, but the guns were fun to shoot, because they were recoiling automatics and the barrel slid back onto a gas cartridge that took the recoil, so they would fire these things and just sit there watching the barrels slamming back and forth practically in their laps while the bullets soared through the night like stars. Then, after the shooting had stopped, all the men would be grinning. There'd be a sudden silence, and Claudel would look around and all his buddies would be grinning at nothing, and he'd realize that he was grinning at nothing too.

One night, though, after the shooting had stopped, he looked around him as usual and saw they were all grinning as usual, and all of a sudden they heard a baby crying. It was stone silent otherwise, so they could hear its bawling clearly even though it was coming from someplace way out there in the jungle. It went on and on, and there wasn't anything they could do about it. It started to make them edgy and nasty-tempered, and a few of the guys cursed the baby's mother for being out there in the night in the first place. A few other guys cursed the enemy for being out there with guns and booby traps, which were keeping them from going out and finding the baby and bringing it in to safety. And a few others cursed the enemy for setting the whole thing up. They said it was a trick to draw them away from the camp into an ambush in the jungle. That sounded plausible, but they weren't sure, so they just kept on being bothered by the baby's crying, which went on and on and seemed to grow louder and louder. Until finally one of the soldiers, a big square-faced guy from Chicago, jumped up and started firing his automatic into the bushes, as if he had seen a flash of light out there someplace. Then the others started firing with him, watching the barrels leap back and forth while the tracer bullets made icy arcs across the sky and dove into the darkness of the jungle a mile and a half away.

After a few minutes they stopped firing and sat down again. This time, when Claudel looked around, no one was grinning. Everyone wore a dark, somber expression on his face, and Claudel knew he looked the same as they did. That's when he started thinking he was lucky. He was young. It's how you explain things that are too complicated to explain. You call it Luck. Either you've got it or you haven't got it, but if you've got it, use it. That was the first principle of his new philosophy. If you've got it, use it.

3

So by the time he got home again, he was raring to go, hot to get started making big money, buy a fast and fancy car, get himself a pretty girl and maybe marry her and buy one of those sixty-five-foot mobile homes to live in. And he did precisely that. He got himself a job as a lineman for the Public Service Company and started pulling in a couple hundred bucks a week with overtime. Then he got himself a loan from the bank and bought one hell of an automobile, a white '68 GTO convertible that made everybody in town turn around and think a minute. He moved for a while with several different girls from town, one of them the daughter of a doctor, and after about a year he married Ginnie Branche, who ran Ginnie's Beauty Nook out on Route 28. They had a big wedding, lots of presents, electric blankets, electric corn popper, waffle iron, all the usual things you need, and moved right into a baby-blue sixty-eight-foot-long mobile home out on Skitter Lake. It was a fancy new Longwoods, one of the first mobile homes to come out with a cathedral ceiling and teak-wood paneling in the living room. And after that, every morning when Claudel woke up in the master bedroom with that pretty young woman lying next to him, he'd slowly look across the room at his Danish modern bedroom suite, on to the framed pictures of mountains and streams, to the wall-to-wall green shag carpeting, the fancy fiber glass draperies shimmering in the morning breeze, and out the window to his GTO parked in the driveway, its top down, a huge white bird with its wings folded, and he'd say to himself, “Claudel Bing, you are one lucky son of a bitch!”

Now here's where you start to get to the point of his story. Because Claudel was wrong. He wasn't lucky. Not lucky at all. He only thought he was lucky. He thought the world was giving him a ride, and it was beginning to look like a good ride, so he figured all he had to do was just lie back and enjoy the passing scenery. And up to now, he'd been right. But then all of a sudden the scenery changed, and the road got bumpy, and then he knew he wasn't lucky.

But that didn't mean his father had been right, that the world was a chiseler and you had to be a miser to live in it. No, because Claudel wasn't
unlucky
either. He simply hadn't learned enough yet to have a view of the world that explained to him what happened to him, what he at first had called being lucky and what later he called being unlucky. Because for a while he did call it that, being unlucky, and if you had known him at that time or had just met him in a bar, you'd have heard him naming his life that way day and night, holding his glass up to let a bit of light from the Budweiser sign float through while he told his sad tale of bad luck to anyone who'd listen.

He'd tell you how the trailer had caught fire and burned to the ground because Ginnie had left the stove on, and how his insurance couldn't cover the loss so he was still paying off the damned mortgage to the bank. He and Ginnie had come home after a weekend down at York Beach, all sunburned and sandy from the beach and hungover from the good times they'd had the night before with some Canadians they'd run into at the motel bar, and when they pulled into the driveway, all there was next to it, where the trailer had been, was a sixty-eight-foot-long barbecue pit. The two of them just sat there in the car in their bathing suits and broke down and wept.

And after that Claudel would tell you how Ginnie had started running around with Howie Leeke, until everyone in town knew about it, except Claudel himself, of course, until one night he came into the Hawthorne House right after Howie had been there, and everybody started giving him a funny kind of grin, so he asked, “What the hell's wrong, my fly unzipped or something?”

Freddie Hubbard, a buddy of his from the Public Service Company, said, “No, nothing's wrong… It's just that Howie Leeke's been here and left … and he was telling stories again…”

“What kind of stories?” Claudel asked, thinking maybe one might be funny enough to repeat. He liked a good laugh as well as the next man, especially since his trailer burned down.

“Aw, you know,” Freddie said. “Stories about him … and Ginnie.”

Then all the people in the place sort of wiped their grins off and shifted in their seats and turned away, so Claudel knew what was happening, and what had been happening for a long time, probably ever since the trailer burned and he and Ginnie had moved into town and had taken the apartment over Knight's Paint Store, which happened to be across the street from Howie's pipefitting shop.