Trailerpark by Russell Banks Page A

fish, gutting them and skinning them quickly in Marcelle’s kitchen, then neatly wrapping and depositing them in her deep-freeze. The cops came and went, blue lights flashing, and later Marcelle returned home, her shotgun slung over her thick arm, and when she entered her kitchen, she found Merle sitting over a can of Budweiser reading her copy of People magazine.
    â€œYou’re crazy, dealing with Buck Tiede that way,” she said angrily.
    â€œWhat way?”
    â€œTelling him to shoot Doreen from a room in the Hawthorne House! He’s just liable to do that, he’s a madman when he’s drinking!” She cracked open a can of beer and sat down across from the old man.
    He closed the magazine. “I never told him to kill her. I just said how he might do it, if he wanted to kill her. The way he was going about it seemed all wrong to me.” He smiled and showed his brown teeth through his beard.
    â€œWhat if he actually went and did it, shot her from the Hawthorne House some afternoon as she came out of work? How would you feel then?”
    â€œGood.”
    â€œGood! Why, in the name of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, would you feel good?”
    â€œBecause we’d know who did it.”
    â€œBut you said you’d give him an alibi!”
    â€œThat was just a trick. I wouldn’t, and that way he’d be trapped. He’d say he was with me all afternoon fishing, and then I’d come out and say no, he wasn’t. I’d fix it so there’d be no way he could prove he was with me, because I’d make sure someone else saw me fishing alone, and that way he’d be trapped and they’d take him over to Concord and hang him by the neck until dead.”
    â€œWhy do you fool around like that with people?” she asked, genuinely curious. “I don’t understand you, old man.”
    He got up, smiled and flipped the copy of People magazine across the table. “It’s more interesting than reading this kind of stuff,” he said and started for the door. “I put an even dozen hornpouts in your freezer.”
    â€œThanks. Thanks a lot,” she said absently, and he went out.
    Â 
    Merle heard about Flora’s guinea pigs from Nancy Hubner, the widow in number 7, who heard about them from her daughter, Noni, who was having a love affair with the college boy, Bruce Severance. He told her one night in his trailer after they had made love and were lying in darkness on the huge waterbed he’d built, smoking a joint while the stereo played the songs of the humpback whale quietly around them. Noni had been a college girl in northern California before her nervous breakdown, so she understood and appreciated Bruce more than anyone else in the park could. Most everyone tolerated Bruce good-humoredly—he believed in knowledge and seemed to be earnest in his quest for it, and what little knowledge he had already acquired, or believed he had acquired, he dispensed liberally to anyone who would listen. He was somberly trying to explain to Noni how yogic birth control worked, how “basically feminist” it was, because the responsibility was the man’s, not the woman’s.
    â€œI wondered how come you never asked me if I was protected,” she said.
    â€œYeah, well, no need to, man. It’s all in the breathing and certain motions with the belly, so the sperm gets separated from the ejaculatory fluid prior to emission. It’s really quite simple.”
    â€œAmazing.”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œOverpopulation is an incredible problem.”
    â€œYeah. It is.”
    â€œI believe that if we could just solve the overpopulation problem, all the rest of the world’s problems would be solved, too. Like wars.”
    â€œEcological balance, man. The destruction of the earth.”
    â€œThe energy crisis. Everything.”
    â€œYeah, man. It’s like those guinea pigs of Flora Pease’s. Flora, she’s got these