Read Online Trailerpark by Russell Banks - Free Book Online Page B

animals crowded into a trailer, and remember, number eleven is not one of the larger trailers in the park, as you know.”
    â€œI guess you’re right, the S.P.C.A. could kill ’em for us, once we’d got Flora locked up someplace. The whole thing would probably drive her right over the edge anyhow, taking away her animals and killing ’em like that, tossing ’em into that incinerator they got. That’d push ol’ Flora right over the edge. She’d be booby-hatch material for sure then, whether she is now or not.”
    â€œYou’re making fun of me, Mr. Ring. Aren’t you?”
    â€œNo, no, no, I’m not making fun of you, Mrs. Hubner,” he said, opening the door and stepping out, not without difficulty, however, because of the shape of the car and his stiff back. “I’ll check into it for you, ma’am. Get the facts of the situation, so to speak. Because you’re probably right. I mean, something will have to be done, eventually, by someone. Because those kind of animals, rodents and such, they breed fast and before you know it a hundred is two hundred, two hundred is four, four is eight, and so on. So I’ll check into it for you.”
    â€œThank you so much, Mr. Ring,” she said with clear relief. He was such a nice man. She wondered if there was some way she could make his life a little easier. At his age, to be alone like that, it was simply awful.
    Merle closed the door, waved and walked into Hayward’s, and Nancy drove on to Ginnie’s Beauty Nook, on Green Street across from Knight’s Paint Store, where Ginnie and her ex-husband Claudel had lived in the upstairs apartment back when their trailer had burned down. That was over three years ago, maybe four. Nancy couldn’t remember, until it came back to her that it had happened in the summer, when Ginnie and Claudel had returned from a weekend on the Maine coast to discover that their fancy trailer had burned to the ground in their absence, and then she remembered that was the summer Noni turned fifteen and started having migraines and saying she hated her, and then she remembered that was the summer her husband had died. So it must be over four years now since Ginnie and Claudel moved into town and rented that apartment over Knight’s Paint Store. Isn’t it amazing, how time flies when you’re not paying attention, she reflected.
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    A week later, Merle woke late after having spent most of the night out on the lake in his ice-house, and because the sun was shining, casting a raw light that somehow pleased him, he decided to visit Flora Pease and determine if all this fuss over her guinea pigs was justified. Since talking with Nancy Hubner, he had spoken only to Marcelle Chagnon about the guinea pigs, and her response had been to look heavenward, as if for help or possibly mere solace, and to say, “Just don’t talk to me about that crazy woman, Merle, don’t start in about her. As long as she don’t cause any troubles for me, I won’t cause any troubles for her. But if you start in on this, there’ll be troubles. For me. And that means for her, too, remember that.”
    â€œMakes sense,” Merle said, and for several days after he had succeeded in going about his business—ice-fishing, eating, cleaning, reading the Manchester Union-Leader , puttering with his tools and equipment—slow, solitary activities that he seemed to savor. He was the kind of person who, by the slowness of his pace and the hard quality of his attention, appeared to take a sensual pleasure from the most ordinary activity. He was a small, lightly framed man and wore a short white beard which he kept neatly trimmed. His clothing was simple and functional, flannel shirts, khaki pants, steel-toed work shoes—doubtless the same style of clothing he had worn since his youth, when he first became a carpenter’s apprentice and determined what clothing was