Read Online Trailerpark by Russell Banks - Free Book Online

the plot intricacies of a situation comedy about two young women who worked on an assembly line in Milwaukee and made the kind of comically stupid errors of judgment and perception that Chester A. Riley used to make in The Life of Riley twenty-five years before. “It’s a correspondence school or something, in Vermont. He has to go there and see his teachers for a couple of weeks twice a year or something. It’s the new thing in education.”
    Well, Nancy didn’t know how it could be much of an education, and it certainly didn’t explain why Bruce lived where he did and not at his college or even at his parents’ home, as Noni did.
    â€œI don’t know,” Noni said.
    â€œDon’t you ever ask, for heaven’s sake?”
    â€œNo.”
    That was all their conversation for the night. At eleven, Nancy yawned and went to bed in her room at the far end of the trailer, the rooms of which were carpeted and furnished lavishly and resembled the rooms of a fine apartment. Around midnight, Noni rolled a joint and went to her room, next to her mother’s, and smoked it, and went to sleep. She bought her marijuana from Bruce. So did Terry buy his from Bruce. Also Leon LaRoche, who had never tried smoking grass before but certainly did not reveal that to Bruce, who knew it anyhow and charged him twice the going rate. Doreen Tiede bought grass from Bruce, too. Not often, however; about once every two or three months. She liked to smoke it in her trailer with men she went out with and came home with, so she called herself a “social smoker,” but Bruce knew what that meant. Over the years, Bruce had bought his grass from several people, most recently from a Jamaican named Keppie who lived in the West Roxbury area of Boston but who did business from a motel room in Revere. Next year, Bruce had decided, he would harvest the hemp crop Flora Pease had discovered, and he would sell the grass back, running it the other direction, to Keppie and his Boston friends. He figured there must be five hundred pounds of the stuff growing wild out there, just waiting for a smart guy like him to cut, dry, chop and pack. He might have to cut Terry Constant in, but that would be fine, because in this business you often needed a partner who happened to be black.
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    The next morning, on her way to town to have her hair cut and curled by Ginnie Bing (now Ginnie Leeke, after having married the plumber Howie Leeke), Nancy Hubner picked up Merle Ring. Merle was walking out from the trailerpark and had almost reached Old Road, when he heard the high-pitched whirr of Nancy’s powerful Japanese fastback coupe and without turning around stepped off the road into the light, leafless brush. There had been an early snow in late October that winter, and then no snow throughout November and well into December, which had made it an excellent year for ice fishing. After the first October snow, there was a brief melt and then a cold snap that had lasted for five weeks now, so that the ice had thickened daily, swiftly becoming iron-hard and black and smooth. Then all over the lake shanties had appeared, and all day and long into the night men and sometimes women sat inside the shanties, keeping warm from tiny kerosene or coal-burning heaters, sipping from bottles of whiskey, watching their lines and yakking slowly to friends or meditating alone and outside of time and space, until the flag went up and the line got yanked and the fisherman would come crashing back into that reality from the other. The ice had hardened sufficiently to bear even the weight of motor vehicles, and now and then you could look out from the shore and see a car or pickup truck creeping across the slick ice and stopping at one of the shanties, bringing society and a fresh six-pack or pint of rye. No one ever visited Merle’s shanty, though he certainly had plenty of friends of various ages and both sexes. He had made it known that, when he