The Angel on the Roof

The Guinea Pig Lady

The story of Flora Pease, how she got to be the way she is now, isn’t all that uncommon a story, except maybe in the particulars. You often hear in these small towns of a woman no one will deal with anymore, except to sell her something she wants or needs — food, clothing, or shelter. In other words, you don’t have a social relationship with a woman like Flora, you have an economic one, and that’s it. But that’s important, because it’s what keeps women like Flora alive, and, after all, no matter what you might think of her, you don’t want to let her die, because, if you’re not related to her somehow, you’re likely to have a friend who is, or your friend will have a friend who is, which is almost the same thing in a small town. And not only in a small town, either — these things are true for any group of people that knows its limits and plans to keep them.

When Flora Pease first came to the trailerpark and rented number 11, which is the second trailer on your left as you come in from Old Road, no one in the park thought much about her one way or the other. She was about forty or forty-five, kind of flat-faced and plain, a red-colored person, with short red hair and a reddish tint to her skin. Even her eyes, which happened to be pale blue, looked red, as if she smoked too much and slept too little, which, as it later turned out, happened to be true. Her body was a little strange, however, and people remarked on that. It was blocky and square-shaped, not exactly feminine and not exactly masculine, so that while she could almost pass for either man or woman, she was generally regarded as neither. She wore mostly men’s work shirts and ankle-high work boots, which, except for the overcoat, was not all that unusual among certain women who work outside a lot and don’t do much socializing. But with Flora, because of the shape of her body, or rather, its shapelessness, her clothing only contributed to the vagueness of her sexual identity. Privately, there was probably no vagueness at all, but publicly there was. People elbowed one another and winked and made not quite kindly remarks about her when she passed by them on the streets of Catamount or when she passed along the trailerpark road on her way to or from town. The story, which came from Marcelle Chagnon, who rented her the trailer, was that Flora was retired military and lived off a small pension, and that made sense in one way, given people’s prejudices about women in the military, and in another way, too, because at that time Captain Dewey Knox (U.S. Army, ret.) was already living at number 6, and people at the park had got used to the idea of someone living off a military pension instead of working for a living.

What didn’t make sense was how someone who seemed slightly cracked, as Flora came quickly to seem, could have stayed in the military long enough to end up collecting a pension for it. Here’s how she first came to seem cracked. She sang out loud, in public. She supposedly was raised here in Catamount, and though she had moved away when she was a girl, she still knew a lot of the old-timers in town, and she would walk into town every day or two for groceries and beer, singing in a loud voice all the way, as if she were the only person who could hear her. But by the time she had got out to Old Road, she naturally would have passed someone in the park who knew her, so she had to be aware that she wasn’t the only person who could hear her. Regardless, she’d just go right on singing in a huge voice, singing songs from old Broadway musicals, mostly. She knew all the songs from Oklahoma and West Side Story and a few others as well, and she sang them, one after the other, all the way into town, then up and down the streets of town, as she stopped off at the A & P, Brown’s Drug Store, maybe Hayward’s Hardware, finally ending up at the Hawthorne House for a beer, before she headed back to the trailerpark. Everywhere she went, she sang those songs in a loud voice that was puffed up with feeling, if it was a happy song, or thick with melancholy, if it was sad. You don’t mind a person whistling or humming or maybe even singing to herself under her breath while she does something else, sort of singing absentmindedly. But you do have to wonder about someone who forces you to listen to her the way Flora Pease forced everyone within hearing range to listen to her Broadway songs. Her voice wasn’t half-bad, actually, and if she had been singing for the annual talent show at the high school, say, and you were sitting in the audience, you might have been pleased to listen, but at midday in June on Main Street, when you’re coming out of the bank and about to step into your car, it can be a slightly jarring experience to see and hear a person who looks like Flora Pease come striding down the sidewalk singing in full voice about how the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.

The second thing that made Flora seem cracked early on was the way she never greeted you the same way twice, or at least twice in a row, so you could never work out exactly how to act toward her. You’d see her stepping out of her trailer early on a summer day — it was summer when she first moved into the park, so everyone’s remembered first impressions naturally put her into summertime scenes — and you’d give a friendly nod, the kind of nod you offer people you live among but aren’t exactly friends with, just a quick, downward tip of the face, followed by a long, upsweeping lift of the whole head, with the eyes closed for a second as the head reaches its farthest point back. Afterwards, resuming your earlier expression and posture, you’d continue walking, wholly under the impression that, when your eyes were closed and your head tilted back, Flora had given you the appropriate answering nod. But no, or apparently no, because she’d call out, as you walked off, “Good morn-ing!” and she’d wave her hands at you as if brushing cobwebs away. “Wonderful morning for a walk!” she’d bellow (her voice was a loud one), and caught off guard like that, you’d agree and hurry away. The next time you saw her, however, the next morning, for instance, when once again you walked out to the row of mailboxes for your mail and passed her as, mail in hand, she headed back in from Old Road, you’d recall her greeting of the day before and how it had caught you off guard, and you’d say, “Morning,” to her and maybe smile a bit and give her a friendly and more or less direct gaze. But what you’d get back would be a glare, a harsh, silent stare, as if you’d just made an improper advance on her. So you’d naturally say to yourself, “The hell with it,” and that would be fine until the following morning, when you’d try to ignore her, and she wouldn’t let you. She’d holler the second she saw you, “Hey! A scorcher! Right? Goin’ to be a scorcher today, eh?” It was the sort of thing you had to answer, even if only with a word, “Yup,” which you did, wondering as you said it what the hell was going on with that woman.

Everyone in the park that summer was scratching his or her head and asking what the hell was going on with the woman in number 11. Doreen Tiede, who lived with her five-year-old daughter, Maureen, in number 4, which was diagonally across the park road from Flora Pease’s trailer, put Marcelle on the spot, so to speak, something Doreen could get away with more easily than most of the other residents of the park. Marcelle Chagnon intimidated most people. She was a large, hawk-faced woman, and that helped, and she was French Canadian, which also helped, because it meant that she could talk fast and loud without seeming to think about it first, and most people who were not French Canadians could not, so most people tended to remain silent and let Marcelle have her way. In a sense Marcelle was a little like Flora Pease — she was sudden and unpredictable and said what she wanted to, or so it seemed, regardless of what you might have said first. She didn’t exactly ignore you, but she made it clear that it didn’t matter to her what you thought of her or anything else. She always had business to take care of. She was the resident manager of the Granite State Trailerpark, which was owned by the Granite State Realty Development Corporation down in Nashua, and she had certain responsibilities toward the park and the people who lived there that no one else had. Beyond collecting everyone’s monthly rent on time, she had to be sure no one in the park caused any trouble that would hurt the reputation of the park; she had to keep people from infringing on other people’s rights, which wasn’t all that simple, since in a trailerpark people live within ten or fifteen feet of each other and yet still feel they have their own private dwelling place and thus have control over their own destiny; and she also had to assert the rights of the people in the park whenever those rights got stepped on by outsiders, by Catamount police without a warrant, say, or by strangers who wanted to put their boats into the lake from the trailerpark dock, or by ex-husbands who might want to hassle ex-wives and make their kids cry. These things happened, and Marcelle was always able to handle them efficiently, with force and intelligence, and with no sentimentality, which, in the end, is probably the real reason she intimidated most people. She seemed to be without sentimentality.

Except when dealing with Doreen Tiede, that is. Which is why Doreen was able to put Marcelle on the spot and say to her late one afternoon in Marcelle’s trailer at number 1, “What’s with that woman, Flora Pease? Is she a fruitcake, or what? And if she is, how come you let her move in? And if she isn’t a fruitcake, how come she looks the way she does and acts the way she does?” There were in the park, besides Doreen, Marcelle, and Flora, three additional women, but none of them could make Marcelle look at herself and give a straight answer to a direct question. None of them could make her forget her work and stop, even for a second. Only Doreen could get away with embarrassing Marcelle, or at least with demanding a straight answer from her, and getting it, too, probably because both Doreen and Marcelle looked tired in the same way, and each woman understood the nature of the fatigue and respected it in the other. They didn’t feel sorry for it in each other; they respected it. There were twenty or more years between them, and Marcelle’s children had long ago gone off and left her — one was a computer programmer in Billerica, Massachusetts, another was in the Navy and making a career of it, a third was running a McDonald’s in Seattle, Washington, and a fourth had died. Because she had raised them herself, while at the same time fending off the attacks of the man who had fathered them on her, she thought of her life as work and her work as feeding, housing, and clothing her three surviving children and teaching them to be kindly, strong people, despite the fact that their father happened to have been a cruel, weak person. A life like that, or rather, twenty-five years of it, can permanently mark your face and make it instantly recognizable to anyone who happens to be engaged in similar work. Magicians, wise men, and fools are supposed to be able to recognize each other instantly, but so, too, are poor women who raise children alone.

They were sitting in Marcelle’s trailer, having a beer. It was five-thirty, Doreen was on her way home from her job at the tannery, where she was a bookkeeper in the office. Her daughter, Maureen, was with her, having spent the afternoon with a baby-sitter in town next door to the kindergarten she attended in the mornings, and was whining for supper. Doreen had stopped in to pay her June rent, a week late, and Marcelle had accepted her apology for the lateness and had offered her a beer. Because of the lateness of the payment and Marcelle’s graciousness, Doreen felt obliged to accept it, even though she preferred to get home and start supper so Maureen would stop whining.

Flora’s name had come up when Maureen had stopped whining and had suddenly said, “Look, Momma, at the funny lady!” and had pointed out the window at Flora, wearing a heavy, ankle-length coat in the heat, sweeping her yard with a broom. She was working her way across the packed dirt yard toward the road that ran through the center of the park, raising a cloud of dust as she swept, singing in a loud voice something from Fiddler on the Roof—“If I were a rich man…”—and the two women and the child watched her, amazed. That’s when Doreen had demanded to know what Marcelle had been thinking when she agreed to rent a trailer to Flora Pease.

Marcelle sighed, sat heavily back down at the kitchen table, and said, “Naw, I knew she was a little crazy. But not like this.” She lit a cigarette and took a quick drag. “I guess I felt sorry for her. And I needed the money. We got two vacancies now out of twelve trailers, and I get paid by how many trailers have tenants, you know. When Flora came by that day, we got three vacancies, and I’m broke and need the money, so I look the other way a little and I say, sure, you can have number eleven, which is always the hardest to rent anyhow, because it’s on the backside away from the lake, and it’s got number twelve and number ten right next to it and the swamp behind. Number five I’ll rent easy, it’s on the lake, and nine should be easy too, soon’s people forget about Tom Smith’s suicide. It’s the end of the row and has a nice yard on one side, plus the toolshed in back. But eleven has always been a bitch to rent. So here’s this lady, if you want to call her that, and she’s got a regular income from the Air Force, and she seems friendly enough, lives alone, she says, has relations around here, she says, so what the hell, even though I can already see she’s a little off. I figure it was because of her being maybe not interested in men, one of those women. And I figure, what the hell, that’s her business, not mine, I don’t give a damn what she does or who she does it with, so long as she keeps to herself. So I say, sure, take number eleven, thinking maybe she won’t. But she did.”

Marcelle sipped at her can of beer, and Doreen went for hers. The radio was tuned quietly in the background to the country-and-western station from Dover. Doreen reached across the counter to the radio and turned up the volume, saying to no one in particular, “I like this song.”

“That’s ’cause you’re not thirty yet, honey. You’ll get to be thirty, and then you’ll like a different kind of song. Wait.”

Doreen smiled from somewhere behind the fatigue that covered her face. It was a veil she had taken several years ago, and she’d probably wear it until she died or lost her memory, whichever came first. She looked at her red-painted fingernails. “What happens when you’re forty, and then fifty? You like a different kind of song then too?”

“Can’t say for fifty yet, but, yes, for forty. Thirty, then forty, and probably fifty, too. Sixty, now, that’s the question. That’s when you decide you don’t like any of the songs they play, and so you go and sit in front of the TV and watch game shows,” she laughed.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Doreen said, finishing her beer off and standing to leave, “that Flora Pease over there, she’s going to be trouble, Marcelle. You made a big mistake letting her in the park. Mark my words.”

“Naw. She’s harmless. A little fruity, that’s all. We’re all a little fruity, if you want to think about it,” she said. “Some are just more able to cover it up than others, that’s all.”

Doreen shook her head and hurried her daughter out the screened door and along the road to number 4. When she had left, Marcelle stood up and from the window over the sink watched Flora, who swept and sang her way back from the road across her dirt yard to the door, then stepped daintily up the cinder blocks and entered her home.

Then, in August that summer, a quarrel between Terry Constant and his older sister, Carol, who lived in number 10 next door to Flora, caused young Terry to fly out the door one night around midnight and bang fiercely against the metal wall of their trailer. It was the outer wall of the bedroom where his sister slept, and he was doubtless pounding that particular wall to impress his sister with his anger. No one in the park knew what the quarrel was about, and at that hour no one much cared, but when Terry commenced his banging on the wall of the trailer, several people were obliged to involve themselves with the fight. Lights went on across the road at number 6, where Captain Knox lived alone, and 7, where Noni Hubner and her mother, Nancy, lived. It wasn’t unusual for Terry to be making a lot of noise at night, but it was unusual for him to be making it this late and outside the privacy of his own home.

It was easy to be frightened of Terry if you didn’t know him — he was about twenty-five, tall and muscular and very dark, and he had an expressive face and a loud voice — but if you knew him, he was, at worst, irritating. To his sister Carol, though, he must often have been a pure burden, and that was why they quarreled. She had come up from Boston a few years ago to work as a nurse for a dying real estate man who had died shortly after, leaving her sort of stuck in this white world, insofar as she was immediately offered a good job in town as Doctor Wickshaw’s nurse and had no other job to go to anywhere else and no money to live on while she looked. So she took it. Then her mother down in Boston died, and Terry moved in with his sister for a spell and stayed on, working here and there and now and then for what he called monkey money as a carpenter’s helper or stacking hides in the tannery. Sometimes he and Carol would have an argument, caused, everyone was sure, by Terry, since he was so loud and insecure and she was so quiet and sure of herself, and then Terry would be gone for a month or so, only to return one night all smiles and compliments. He was skillful with tools and usually free to fix broken appliances or plumbing in the trailerpark, so Marcelle never objected to Carol’s taking him back in — not that Marcelle actually had a right to object, but if she had fussed about it, Carol would have sent Terry packing. People liked Carol Constant, and because she put up with Terry, they put up with him, too. Besides, he was good-humored and often full of compliments and, when he wasn’t angry, good to look at.

Captain Knox was the first to leave his trailer and try to quiet Terry. In his fatherly way, embellished somewhat by his white hair and plaid bathrobe and bedroom slippers, he informed Terry that he was waking up working people. He stood across the road in the light from his window, tall and straight, arms crossed over his chest, one bushy black eyebrow raised in disapproval, and said, “Not everybody in this place can sleep till noon, young man.”

Terry stopped banging for a second, peered over his shoulder at the man, and said, “Fuck you, Knox!” and went back to banging on the tin wall, as if he were hammering nails with his bare fists. Captain Knox turned and marched back inside his trailer, and, after a few seconds, his lights went out.

Then the girl, Noni Hubner, in her nightgown, appeared at the open door of number 7. Her long, silky blond hair hung loosely over her shoulders, circling her like a halo lit from behind. A woman’s voice, her mother’s, called from inside the trailer, “Noni, don’t! Don’t go out there!”

The girl waved the voice away and stepped out to the landing, barefoot, delicately exposing the silhouette of her body against the light of the living room behind her.

Now the mother shrieked, “Noni! Come back! He may be on drugs!”

Terry ceased hammering and turned to stare at the girl across the road. He was wearing a T-shirt and khaki work pants and blue tennis shoes, and his arms hung loosely at his sides, his chest heaving from the exertion of his noisemaking and his anger, and he smiled over at the girl and said, “Hey, honey, you want to come beat on my drum?”

“You’re waking everyone up,” she said politely.

“Please come back inside, Noni! Please!”

The black man took a step toward the girl, and she whirled and disappeared inside, slamming the door and locking it, switching off the lights and dumping the trailer back into darkness.

Terry stood by the side of the road looking after her. “Fuck,” he said. Then he noticed Flora Pease standing next to him, a blocky figure in a long overcoat, barefoot, and carrying in her arms, as if it were a baby, a small, furry animal.

“What you got there?” Terry demanded.

“Elbourne.” Flora smiled down at the chocolate-colored animal and made a quiet, clucking noise with her mouth.

“What the hell’s an Elbourne?”

“Guinea pig. Elbourne’s his name.”

“Why’d you name him Elbourne?”

“After my grandfather. How come you’re making such a racket out here?”

Terry took a step closer, trying to see the guinea pig more clearly, and Flora wrapped the animal in her coat sleeve, as if to protect it from his gaze.

“I won’t hurt ol’ Elbourne. I just want to see him. I never seen a guinea pig before.”

“He’s a lot quieter than you are, mister, I’ll tell you that much. Now, how come you’re making such a racket out here banging on the side of your house?”

“That ain’t my house. That’s my sister’s house!”

“Oh,” Flora said, as if she now understood everything, and she extended the animal toward Terry so he could see it entirely. It was long-haired, shaped like a football, with circular, dark eyes on the sides of its head and small ears and tiny legs tucked beneath its body. It seemed terrified and trembled in Flora’s outstretched hands.

Terry took the animal and held it up to examine its paws and involuted tail, then brought it close to his chest and, holding it in one large hand, tickled it under the chin with his forefinger. The animal made a tiny cluttering noise that gradually subsided to a light drr-r-r, and Terry chuckled. “Nice little thing,” he said. “How many you got, or is this the only one?”

“Lots.”

“Lots? You got a bunch of these guinea pigs in there?”

“I said so, didn’t I?”

“I suppose you did.”

“Give him back,” she said and brusquely reached out for the animal.

Terry placed Elbourne into Flora’s hands, and she turned and walked swiftly on her short legs around the front of her trailer. After a few seconds, her door slammed shut, and the lights went out, and Terry was once again standing alone in darkness in the middle of the trailerpark. Tiptoeing across the narrow belt of knee-high weeds and grass that ran between the trailers, he came up close to Flora’s bedroom window. “No pets allowed in the trailerpark, honey!” he called out, and he turned and strolled off to get some sleep, so he could leave this place behind him early in the morning.

Either Terry didn’t find the opportunity to tell anyone about Flora Pease having “lots” of guinea pigs in her trailer or he simply chose not to mention it, because it wasn’t until after he returned to the trailerpark, two months later, in early October, that anyone other than he had a clue to the fact that, indeed, there were living in number 11, besides Flora, a total of seventeen guinea pigs, five of which were male. Of the twelve females, eight were pregnant, and since guinea pigs produce an average of 2.5 piglets per litter, in a matter of days there would be an additional twenty guinea pigs in Flora’s trailer, making a total of thirty-seven. About two months after birth, these newcomers would be sexually mature, with a two-month gestation period, so that if half the newborns were females, and if the other mothers continued to be fertile, along with the four original females, then sometime late in December there would be approximately one hundred fifteen guinea pigs residing in Flora’s trailer, of which fifty-four would be male and sixty-one female. These calculations were made by Leon LaRoche, who lived at number 2, the second trailer on your right as you entered the park. Leon worked as a teller for the Catamount Savings and Loan, so calculations of this sort came more or less naturally to him.

“That’s a minimum!” he told Marcelle. “One hundred fifteen guinea pigs, fifty-four males and sixty-one females. Minimum. And you don’t have to be a genius to calculate how many of those filthy little animals will be living in her trailer with her by March. Want me to compute it for you?” he asked, drawing his calculator from his jacket pocket again.

“No, I get the picture.” Marcelle scowled. It was a bright, sunny Sunday morning in early October, and the two were standing in Marcelle’s kitchen, Marcelle, in flannel shirt and jeans, taller by half a hand than Leon, who, in sport coat, slacks, shirt and tie, was dressed for mass, which he regularly attended at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Catamount. It was a conversation last night with Captain Knox that had led young Leon to bring his figures to the attention of the manager, for it was he, the Captain, who had made the discovery that there were precisely seventeen guinea pigs in Flora’s trailer, rather than merely “lots,” as Terry had discovered, and the Captain was alarmed.

It hadn’t taken much imagination for the Captain to conclude that something funny was going on in number 11. When you are one of the three or four people who happen to be around the park all day because you are either retired or unemployed, and when you live across the road from a woman who announces her comings and goings with loud singing, which in turn draws your attention to her numerous expeditions to town for more food than one person can possibly consume, and when you notice her carting into her trailer an entire bale of hay and daily emptying buckets of what appears to be animal feces, tiny pellets rapidly becoming a conical heap behind the trailer, then before long you can conclude that the woman is doing something that requires an explanation. And when you are a retired captain of the United States Army, you feel entitled to require that explanation, which is precisely what Captain Dewey Knox did.

He waited by his window until he saw Flora one morning carrying out the daily bucket of droppings, and he strode out his door, crossed the road, and passed her trailer to the back, where he stood silently behind her, hands clasped behind his back, briar pipe stuck between healthy teeth, one dark, bushy eyebrow raised, so that when the woman turned with her empty bucket, she met him face to face.

Switching the bucket from her right hand to her left, she saluted smartly. “Captain,” she said. “Good morning, sir.”

The Captain casually returned the salute, as befitted his rank. “What was your rank at retirement, Pease?”

“Airman Third Class, sir.” She stood not exactly at attention, but not exactly at ease, either. It’s difficult when retired military personnel meet each other as civilians: their bodies have enormous resistance to accepting the new modes of acknowledging each other, with the result that they don’t quite operate as either military or civilian bodies, but as something uncomfortably neither.

“Airman Third, eh?” The Captain scratched his cleanly shaved chin. “I would have thought after twenty years you’d have risen a little higher.”

“No reason to, sir. I was a steward in the officers’ clubs, sir, mostly in Lackland, and for a while, because of my name, I guess,” she said, smiling broadly, “at Pease down in Portsmouth. Pease Air Force Base,” she added.

“I know that. You were happy being a steward, then?”

“Yes, sir. Very happy. That’s good duty, sir. People treat you right, especially officers. I once kept house for General Curtis LeMay, a very fine man who could have been vice president of the United States. Once I was watching a quiz show on TV and that question came up, ‘Who was George Wallace’s running mate?’ and I knew the answer. But that was after General LeMay had retired—”

“Yes, yes, I know,” the Captain interrupted. “I thought the Air Force used male stewards in the officers’ clubs.”

“Not always, sir. Some of us like that duty, and some don’t, so if you like it, you have an advantage, if you know what I mean, and most of the men don’t much like it, especially when it comes to the housekeeping, though the men don’t mind being waiters and so forth…”

The Captain turned aside to let Flora pass and walked along beside her toward the door of her trailer. At the door they paused, unsure of how to depart from one another, and the Captain glanced back at the pyramid of pellets and straw. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that, Pease,” he said, pointing with his pipe stem.

“Sir?”

“What is it?”

“Shit, sir.”

“I surmised that. I mean, what kind of shit?”

“Guinea pig shit, sir.”

“And that implies you are keeping guinea pigs.”

Flora smiled tolerantly. “Yes, sir, it does.”

“You know the rule about pets in the trailerpark, don’t you, Pease?”

“Oh, sure I do.”

“Well, then,” he said, “what do you call guinea pigs?”

“I don’t call them pets, sir. Dogs and cats I call pets. But not guinea pigs. I just call them guinea pigs. They’re sort of like plants, sir,” she explained patiently. “You don’t call plants pets, do you?”

“But guinea pigs are alive, for heaven’s sake!”

“There’s some would say plants are alive, too, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir.”

“That’s different! These are animals!” The Captain sucked on his cold pipe, drew ash and spit into his mouth, and coughed.

“Animals, vegetables, minerals, all that matters is that they’re not like dogs and cats, which are pets, because they can cause trouble for people. They’re more like babies. That’s why they have rules against pets in places like this, sir,” she explained. “But not babies.”

“How many guinea pigs have you?” the Captain coldly inquired.

“Seventeen.”

“Males and females alike, I suppose.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, smiling broadly. “Twelve females, and eight of them is pregnant at this very moment. If you take good care of them, they thrive,” she said with pride. “Like plants,” she added, suddenly serious.

“But they’re not plants! They’re animals, and they produce … waste materials,” he said, again pointing with the stem of his pipe at the pile behind the trailer. “And they’re dirty.”

Flora stepped onto her cinder-block stairs, bringing herself to the same height as the Captain. “Sir, guinea pigs are not dirty. They’re cleaner than most people I know, and I know how most people can be. Don’t forget, I was a steward for twenty years almost. And as for producing ‘waste materials,’ even plants produce waste materials. It’s called oxygen, sir, which we human people find pretty useful, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir. And, as a matter of fact, come next spring you might want me to let you take some of that pile of waste material I got going over to your place.” She shoved her chin in the direction of Captain Knox’s trailer, where there was a now-dormant ten-foot-by-ten-foot garden plot on the slope facing the lake. Then she turned and abruptly entered her home.

That same evening, the Captain, in number 6, telephoned Leon LaRoche, in number 2, to explain the situation. “I’d take it to her myself,” he said, meaning to Marcelle Chagnon, “but she’s got it into her head that I’m trying to take over her job of running this place, so every time I ask her to do something, she does the opposite.”

LaRoche understood. “I’ll put a little data together first,” he said. “Guinea pigs are like rats, aren’t they?”

“Very much.”

LaRoche was eager to please the older man, as he admired and even envied him a little. He had once confessed to Doreen, after her ex-husband had made one of his brutal, unexpected visits and had been hauled away by the Catamount Police Department, that he was open-minded about the idea of marriage, assuming he met the right person and all, but if it turned out that he remained a bachelor all his life, he hoped he would be able to achieve the dignity and force, by the time he reached sixty or sixty-five, of a Captain Dewey Knox, say.

That night LaRoche researched guinea pigs in volume 7 of his complete Cooper’s World Encyclopedia, which he had obtained, volume by volume, by shopping every week at the A & P, and learned that guinea pigs, or cavies (Rodentia caviidae), a descendant of the Peruvian Cavia aperea porcellus, which were kept by the Indians for food and even today are sold as a delicacy in many South American marketplaces, have a life expectancy of eight years maximum, an average litter size of 2.5, a gestation period of sixty-three days, and reach reproductive maturity in five to six weeks. He further learned that the female goes through estrus every sixteen days for fifty hours, during which time the female will accept the male continuously, but only between the hours of 5:00 P.M. and 5:00 A.M. He also discovered that 8 percent of all guinea pig pregnancies end in abortion, a variable that made his calculations somewhat complicated but also somewhat more interesting to perform. He learned many other things about guinea pigs that night, but it was the numbers that he decided to present to Marcelle. He thought of telling her that guinea pigs are coprophagists, eaters of feces, a habit necessitated by their innate difficulty in digesting cellulose tissue, creating thereby a need for bacteria as an aid to digestion, but thought better of it. The numbers, he decided, would be sufficient to make her aware of the gravity of the situation.

The next morning, a crisp, early fall day, with the birches near the lake already gone to gold and shimmering in the clear air, LaRoche walked next door to Marcelle’s trailer fifteen minutes before his usual departure time for Sunday mass and presented her with the evidence and the mathematical implications of the evidence. Captain Dewey Knox’s testimony was unimpeachable, and Leon LaRoche’s logic and calculations were irrefutable. Marcelle’s course of action, therefore, was inescapable. The guinea pigs would have to go, or Flora Pease would have to go.

“I need this like I need a hole in the head,” Marcelle griped, when LaRoche had left her alone with her cup of coffee and cigarette. Winter was coming on fast, and she had to be sure all the trailers were winterized, storm windows repaired and in place, exposed water pipes insulated, heating units all cleaned and operating at maximum efficiency to avoid unnecessary breakdowns and expensive service calls, contracts for fuel oil and snowplowing made with local contractors and approved by the Granite State Realty Development Corporation, leaky roofs patched, picnic tables and waterfront equipment and docks stored away until spring, and on and on — a long list of things to do before the first snowfall in November. Not only that, she had to collect rents, not always a simple job, and sometime this month she had to testify in court in the case involving Doreen’s ex-husband, since Marcelle had been the one to control him with her shotgun when Doreen called the police, and Terry Constant had taken off again for parts unknown, so she had no one to help her, no one (since Terry had a deal with his sister whereby his work for Marcelle helped pay her rent) she could afford. And now in the middle of all this she had to cope with a fruit-cake who had a passion for raising guinea pigs and didn’t seem to realize that they were going to breed her out of her own home right into the street. No sense treating the woman like a child. Rules were rules, and it wasn’t up to Flora Pease to say whether her guinea pigs were pets, it was up to management, and Marcelle was management. The pigs would have to go, or else the woman would have to go.

Days went by, however, and, for one reason or another, Marcelle left Flora alone, let her come and go as usual without bothering to stop her and inform her that guinea pigs were pets and pets were not allowed in the trailerpark. Terry came back, evidently from New York City, where he’d gone to hear some music, he said, and she put him to work winterizing the trailers, which, for another week, as she laid out Terry’s work and checked after him to be sure he actually did it, allowed Marcelle to continue to ignore the problem. Leon LaRoche thought better of the idea of bringing up the topic again and generally avoided her, although he did get together several times with Captain Knox to discuss Marcelle’s obvious unwillingness to deal forthrightly with what would very soon turn into a sanitation problem. Something for the health department, Captain Knox pointed out.

Finally, one morning late in the month, Marcelle went looking for Terry. It was a Saturday, and ordinarily she didn’t hire him on Saturdays, because it brought forward speeches about exploitation of the minorities and complaints about not getting paid time and a half, which is what anyone else would have to pay a man to work on Saturdays, unless, of course, that man happens to be a black man in a white world. Marcelle more or less accepted the truth of Terry’s argument, but that didn’t make it any easier for her to hire him on Saturdays, since she couldn’t afford to pay him the six dollars an hour it would have required. On this day, however, she had no choice in the matter — the weather prediction was for a heavy freeze that night and Sunday, and half the trailers had water pipes that would surely burst if Terry didn’t spend the day nailing homosote skirting to the undersides.

He wasn’t home, and his sister, Carol, didn’t know where he’d gone, unless it was next door to visit that woman, Flora Pease, where he seemed to spend a considerable amount of his time lately, Carol observed cautiously. Yes, well, Marcelle didn’t know anything about that, nor did she much care where Terry spent his spare time, so long as he stayed out of her hair (Carol said she could certainly understand that), but right now she needed him to help her finish winterizing the trailerpark by nightfall or they would have to spend the next two weeks finding and fixing water pipe leaks. Carol excused herself, as she had to get dressed for work, and Marcelle left in a hurry for Flora’s trailer.

At first when she knocked on the door there was no answer. A single crow called from the sedgy swamp out back, a leafless and desolate-looking place, with a skin of ice over the reedy water. The skeletal, low trees and bushes clattered lightly in the breeze, and Marcelle pulled the collar of her denim jacket tightly against her face. The swamp, which was more of a muskeg than an actual swamp, lay at the southern end of about three thousand acres of state forest — most of the land between the northwest shore of Skitter Lake and the Turnpike, Route 28, which ran from the White Mountains, fifty miles to the north, to Boston, ninety miles to the south. The trailerpark had been placed there as a temporary measure (before local zoning restrictions could be voted into action) to hold and initiate development on the only large plot of land available between the town of Catamount and the Skitter Lake State Forest. That was right after the Korean War, when the Granite State Realty Development Corporation, anticipating a coming statewide need for low-income housing, had gone all over the state purchasing large tracts of land that also happened to lie close to cities and towns where low-income people were employed, usually mill towns like Catamount, whose tannery kept between seventy and eighty families marginally poor. As it turned out, the trailerpark was all the Granite State Realty Development Corporation could finance in Catamount, for it soon became apparent that no one in the area would be able to purchase houses, if the Corporation built single-family dwellings, or pay high enough rents to justify the expense of constructing a town house apartment complex. Soon it became clear that the best use the Corporation could make of the land and trailers was as collateral for financing projects elsewhere in the state, in the larger towns and cities where there were people who could afford to buy single-family dwellings or rent duplex apartments. In the meantime, the Corporation maintained the twelve trailers just adequately, paid the relatively low taxes, and came close to breaking even on its investment. Marcelle had been the first tenant in the trailerpark, moving out of a shabby, wood-frame tenement building in town because of her kids, who, she believed, needed more space, and she had immediately become the manager — when the company representative recognized her tough-mindedness, made evident, as soon as there were no more vacancies, by her ability to organize a rent strike to protest the open sewage and contaminated water. They had installed septic tanks and leach fields, and she had continued as resident manager ever since.

Flora’s door opened a dark inch, and Marcelle saw a bit of cheek, blond hair, and an eye looking through the inch. She shoved against the door with the flat of one hand, pushing it back against the face behind it, and stepped up the cinder blocks and in, where she discovered the owner of the cheek, blond hair, and eye — Bruce Severance, the college kid who lived in number 3, between LaRoche and Doreen.

“Hold it a minute, man,” he said uselessly, rubbing his nose from the blow it had received from the door and stepping back into the room to make space for the large, gray-haired woman. The room, though dark from the venetian blinds being drawn, was filled with at least two other people than Bruce and Marcelle, batches of oddly arranged furniture, and what looked like merchandise counters from a department store.

“Don’t you have any lights in here, for Christ’s sake?” Marcelle demanded. She stood inside the room in front of the open door, blinking as she tried to accustom herself to the gloom and see who else was there. “Why are all the blinds drawn? What the hell are you doing here, Severance?” Then she smelled it. “Grass! You smoking your goddamned hippie pot in here with Flora?”

“Hey, man, it’s cool.”

“Don’t ‘man’ me. And it isn’t cool. I don’t let nothing illegal go on here. Something illegal goes on, and I happen to find out about it, I call in the goddamned cops. Let them sort out the problems. I don’t need problems, I got enough of them already to keep me busy.”

“That’s right, baby, you don’t want no more problems,” came a soft voice from a particularly dark corner.

“Terry! What the hell are you doing here?” She could make out a lumpy shape next to him on what appeared to be a mattress on the floor. “Is that Flora over there?” Marcelle asked, her voice suddenly a bit shaky. Things were changing a little too fast for her to keep track of. You don’t mind the long-haired hippie kid smoking a little grass and maybe yakking stupidly, the way they do when they’re stoned, with probably the only person in the trailerpark who didn’t need to get stoned herself in order to understand him. You don’t really mind that. A kid like Bruce Severance, you knew he smoked marijuana, but it was harmless, because he did it for ideological reasons, the same reasons behind his vegetarian diet and his T’ai Chi exercises and his way of getting a little rest, Transcendental Meditation — he did all these things, not because they were fun, but because he believed they were good for him, and good for you, too, if only you were able to come up with the wisdom, self-discipline, and money so that you, too, could smoke marijuana instead of drink beer and rye whiskey, eat organic vegetables instead of supermarket junk, study and practice exotic, ancient Oriental forms of exercise instead of sitting around at night watching TV. You, too, could learn how to spend a half hour in the morning and a half hour in the evening meditating, instead of sleeping to the last minute before getting up and making breakfast for yourself and the kid and rushing off to work and in the evening dragging yourself home just in time to make supper for the kid. And if you could accomplish these things, you would be like Bruce Severance, a much improved person. That was one of Bruce’s favorite phrases, “much improved person,” and he believed that it ought to be a universal goal and that only ignorance (fostered by the military-industrial complex), sheer laziness, and/or purely malicious ideological opposition (that is to say, a “fascist mentality”) kept the people he lived among from participating with him in his several rites. So, unless you happened to share his ideology, you could easily view his several rites as harmless, mainly because you could also trust the good sense of the poor people he lived among, and also their self-discipline and the day-to-day realities they were forced to struggle against. A fool surrounded by sensible poor people remains a fool and is, therefore, seldom troublesome. But when it starts to occur to you that some of the poor people are not sensible — which is what occurred to Marcelle when she peered into the dingy, dim clutter of the trailer and saw Terry sprawled out on a mattress on the floor with Flora Pease clumped next to him, both with marijuana cigarettes dangling from their lips — that’s when you start to view the fool as troublesome.

“Listen, Bruce,” she said, wagging a finger at the boy, “I don’t give a good goddamn about you wearing all them signs about legalizing pot and plastering bumper stickers against nuclear energy and so on all over your trailer, just so long as you take ’em down and clean the place up the way you found it when you leave here. And I don’t mind you putting that kind of stuff on your clothes,” she said, pointing with her forefinger at the image of a cannabis plant on the chest of Bruce’s tie-dyed T-shirt. “Because what you do behind your own closed door and how you decorate your trailer or your van or your clothes is all your own private business. But when you start mixing all this stuff up together like this,” she said, waving a hand contemptuously in the direction of Terry and Flora, “well, that’s a little different.”

“Like what, man?” Bruce asked. “C’mon, will you? And hey, calm down a little, man. No big thing. We’re just having us a little morning toke, then I’m headin’ out of here. No big thing.”

“Yeah, it’s cool,” Terry said lightly from the corner.

Marcelle shot a scowl in his direction. “I don’t want no dope dens in this park. I got my job to look out for. You do anything to make my job risky, I’ll come down on you,” she said to Terry. “And you, too,” she said to Bruce. “And you, too, sister,” she said to Flora. “Like a goddamned ton of bricks!”

“No big thing, man,” Bruce said, closing the door behind her, wrapping them all in the gray light of the room. Now Marcelle noticed the sharp, acidic smell of animal life, not human animals, but small, furred animals — urine and fecal matter and straw and warm fur. It was the smell of a nest. It was both irritating and at the same time comforting, that smell, because she was both unused to the smell and immediately familiar with it. Then she heard it, a chattering, sometimes clucking noise that rose and ran off to a purr, then rose again like a shudder, diminishing after a few seconds to a quiet, sustained hum. She looked closely at what she had thought at first were counters and saw that they were cages, large waist-high cages, a half dozen of them, placed in no clear order around the shabby furniture of the room, a mattress on the floor, a rocker, a pole lamp, a Formica-topped kitchen table, and, without the easy chair, a hassock. Beyond the living room, she could make out the kitchen area, where she could see two more of the large cages.

“You want a hit, man?” Terry asked, holding his breath as he talked, so that his words came out in high-pitched, breathless clicks. He extended the joint toward her, a relaxed smile on his lips. Next to him, Flora, who lay slumped against his muscular frame like a sack of grain dropped from several feet above, seemed to be dozing.

“That’s what she looks like, like she got hit.”

“Ah, no, Flora’s happy. Ain’t you, Flora honey?” Terry asked, chucking her under the chin.

She rolled her head and came gradually to attention, saw Marcelle, and grinned. “Hi, Mrs. Chagnon!” she cried, just this side of panic. “Have you ever smoked marijuana?”

“No.”

“Well, I have. I love to smoke marijuana!”

“That right?”

“Yep. I can’t drink, it makes me crazy, and I start to cry and hit people and everything…”

“Right on,” Bruce said.

“…so I drink marijuana, I mean, I smoke marijuana, and then I feel real fine and everything’s a joke, just the way it’s s’posed to be. The trouble is, I can’t get the knack of rolling these little cigarettes, so I need to have someone roll them for me, which is why I asked these boys here to come in and help me out this morning. You want a seat? Why don’t you sit down, Mrs. Chagnon? I been meaning to ask you over to visit sometime, but I been so busy, you know?” She waved toward the hassock for Marcelle to sit down.

“You sure you don’t want a hit, Marcelle baby?” Terry offered again. “This’s some dynamite shit. Flora’s got herself some dynamite grass, right, man?” he said to Bruce.

“Oh, wow, man. Dynamite shit. Really dynamite shit.”

“No, thanks.” Marcelle sat gingerly on the hassock in the middle of the room. Bruce strolled loosely over and dropped himself on the mattress, plucked the joint from Terry’s hand, and sucked noisily on it. “So you’re the one who smokes the marijuana,” Marcelle said to Flora. “I mean, these boys didn’t…”

“Corrupt her?” Bruce interrupted. “Oh, wow, man, no way! She corrupted us!” he said, laughing and rolling back on the mattress. “Dynamite shit, man! What fucking dynamite grass!”

“He’s just being silly,” Flora explained. “It makes you a little silly sometimes, Mrs. Chagnon. Nothing to worry about.”

“But it’s illegal.”

“These days, Mrs. Chagnon, what isn’t? I mean, honestly.”

“Yeah, well, I suppose it’s okay, so long as you do it in the privacy of your own home, I mean.”

“Really, Mrs. Chagnon! I would never be so foolish as to risk being arrested by the police!” Flora was now sitting pertly, her legs crossed at the ankles, gesturing limp-wristedly as she talked.

Marcelle sighed heavily. “I came over here looking for Terry to help me finish winterizing, because we got a cold snap coming. But I can see he won’t be any good today, all doped up like he is…”

“Hey, man!” Terry said and sat up straight, his feelings hurt. “You paying time and a half, you got yourself a man. In fact, you pay time and a half, you might getcha self two men,” he said, waving toward Bruce. “You need a few bucks, man?”

“No, no, not today. I gotta study for a quiz on Monday, and I haven’t even looked at the stuff…”

“Right, right,” Terry said. “College boys gotta study for quizzes and stuff. But that’s okay. More for me, as I always say.” His voice was crisp and loud again, which to Marcelle was cheering, for she had been made anxious by his slurred, quiet, speech as if his voice had an edge she couldn’t see — if he was going to say things that cut, she wanted to be able to see them coming, and usually, with Terry, she could do that, so she was relieved to hear him yammering away again, snapping and slashing with his sarcasm and bravado.

“Hey, Flora,” Terry suddenly said, “now that you got the boss lady here, whyn’t you show her all your little furry friends! C’mon, baby, show the boss lady all your furry little friends!” He jumped up and urged Marcelle to follow. “C’mere and take a peek at these beasties. She’s got a whole heap of ’em.”

“Not so many,” Flora said shyly from the mattress.

“I gotta go,” Bruce said. “I gotta study,” he added and quickly let himself out the door.

Marcelle said not now and told Terry that he could start work by putting the winter skirting around Merle Ring’s trailer, which was the most exposed in the park, located as it was out there on the point facing the lake. She reminded him where the sheets of homosote were stored, and he took off, not before, as usual, synchronizing watches with her, so that, as he put it, she wouldn’t be able later on to say he didn’t work as long as he did. “I’ve been screwed that way too many times,” he reminded her.

Then he was gone, and Marcelle was alone in the trailer with Flora — alone with Flora and her animals, which to Marcelle seemed to number in the hundreds. Their scurrying and rustling in the cages and the chittering noises they made filled the silence, and the smell of the animals thickened the air. Flora moved about the room with a grace and lightness that Marcelle had never seen in her before. She seemed almost to be dancing, and Marcelle wondered if it was the effect of the marijuana, an effect caused by inhaling the smoke-filled air, because, after all, Flora was a heavy, awkward woman who moved slowly and deliberately, not in this floating, delicate, improvisational way, as if she were underwater.

“Flora! You can’t keep these animals in here anymore!”

Flora ignored the words and waved for Marcelle to follow her into the kitchen area, where the babies were. “The babies and the new mommies, actually,” she went on with obvious pride. As soon as they were weaned, she would place the mommies back with the daddies in the living room. Soon, she pointed out, she was going to have to build some more cages, because these babies would need to be moved to make room for more. She repeated what she had told Captain Knox: “When you take care of them, they thrive. Just like plants.”

Marcelle Chagnon said it again, this time almost pleading. “You can’t keep these animals in here anymore!”

Flora stopped fluttering. “It’s getting colder, winter’s coming in. I must keep them inside, or they’ll freeze to death. Just like plants.”

Marcelle Chagnon crossed her arms over her chest and for the third time informed Flora that she would not be able to keep her guinea pigs insider the trailer.

Finally, the words seemed to have been understood. Flora stood still, hands extended as if for alms, and cried, “What will I do with them, then? I can’t put them outside. They’re weak little animals, not made for this climate. You want me to kill them? Is that what you’re telling me? That I have to kill my babies?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re going to do with them!” Marcelle was angry now. Her head had cleared somewhat, and she knew again that this was Flora’s problem, not hers. “It’s your problem, not mine. I’m not God. What you do with the damned things is your business…”

“But I’m not God, either!” Flora cried. “All I can do is take care of them and try to keep them from dying unnaturally,” she explained. That was all anyone could do and, therefore, it was what one had to do. “You do what you can. When you can take care of things, you do it. Because when you take care of things, they thrive.” She said it as if were a motto.

“Then I’ll have to call the health board and have them take the guinea pigs out. I don’t want the scandal, it’ll make it hard to rent, and it’s hard enough already, but if I can’t get you to take care of these animals by getting rid of them, I’ll have someone else do it.”

“You wouldn’t do that!” Flora said, shocked.

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll have to get rid of me first,” she said. “You’ll have to toss me into the cold first, let me freeze or starve to death first, before I’ll let you do that to my babies.” She pushed her square chin defiantly out and glared at Marcelle.

“Oh, Jesus, what did I do to deserve this?”

Quickly, as if she knew she had won, Flora started reassuring Marcelle, telling her not to worry, no one would be bothered by the animals, their shit was almost odorless and would make fertilizer for the several vegetable and flower gardens in the park, and she, Flora, took good care of them and kept their cages clean, so there was no possible health hazard, and except for their relatively quiet chitchat, the animals made no noise that would bother anyone. “People just don’t like the idea of my having guinea pigs, that’s all,” she explained. “The reality of it don’t bother anyone, not even Captain Knox. If people were willing to change their ideas, then everyone could be happy together,” she said brightly.

In a final attempt to convince her to give up the guinea pigs, Marcelle tried using some of Leon LaRoche’s calculations. She couldn’t remember the specific numbers, but she understood the principle behind them. “You realize you’re going to have twice as many of these things by spring. And how many have you got now, seventy-five or a hundred, right?”

Flora told her not to worry herself over it, she already had plenty to worry about with the trailerpark and winter coming and all. She should forget all about the guinea pigs, Flora told her with sympathy, and look after the people in the trailerpark, just as she always had. “Life is hard enough, Mrs. Chagnon, without us going around worrying about things we can’t do anything about. You let me worry about taking care of the guinea pigs. That’s something I can do something about, and you can’t, so therefore it’s something I should do something about, and you shouldn’t even try.” Her voice had a consoling, almost motherly tone, and for a second Marcelle wanted to thank her.

“All right,” Marcelle said brusquely, gathering herself up to her full height. “Just make sure these bastards don’t cause any trouble around here, and make sure there isn’t any health hazard from … whatever, bugs, garbage, I don’t know, anything … and you can keep them here. Till the weather gets warm, though. Only till spring.”

Marcelle moved toward the door, and Flora smiled broadly. She modestly thanked Marcelle, who answered that, if Flora was going to smoke pot here, she’d better do it alone and not with those two big-mouthed jerks, Terry and Bruce. “Those jerks, one or the other of ’em, will get you in trouble. Smoke it alone, if you have to smoke it.”

“But I don’t know how to make those little cigarettes. My fingers are too fat, and I spill it all over.”

“Buy yourself a corncob pipe,” Marcelle advised. “Where do you buy the stuff from, anyway?” she suddenly asked, as she opened the door to leave and felt the raw chill from outside.

“Oh, I don’t buy it!” Flora exclaimed. “It grows wild all over the place, especially along the Old Road where there used to be a farm, between the river and the state forest.” There were, as part of the land owned by the Corporation, ten or fifteen acres of old, unused farmland now grown over with brush and weeds. “They used to grow hemp all over this area when I was a little girl,” Flora told her. “During the War, for rope. But after the War, when they had to compete with the Filipinos and all, they couldn’t make any money at it anymore, so it just kind of went wild.”

“That sure is interesting,” Marcelle said, shaking her head. “And I don’t believe you. But it’s okay, I don’t need to know who you buy your pot from. I don’t want to know. I already know too much,” she said, and she stepped out and closed the door behind her.

The trailerpark was located three and a half miles northwest of the center of the town of Catamount, a mill town of about five thousand people situated and more or less organized around a dam and millpond first established on the Catamount River some two hundred years ago. The mill had originally been set up as a gristmill, then a lumber mill, then a shoe factory, and, in modern times, a tannery that processed hides from New Zealand cattle and sent the leather to Colombia for the manufacture of shoes.

To get to the trailerpark from the town, you drove north out of town past the Hawthorne House (named for the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who stopped there overnight in May of 1864 with the then ex-president Franklin Pierce on the way to the White Mountains for a holiday; the author died the following night in a rooming house and tavern not unlike the present Hawthorne House, located in Plymouth, New Hampshire, but the legend had grown up in the region that he had died in his bed in Catamount), then along Main Street, past the half dozen or so blocks of local businesses and the large white Victorian houses that once were the residences of the gentry and the owners of the mill or shoe factory or tannery, whichever it happened to be at the time, and that were now the residences and offices of the local physician (for whom Terry’s sister, Carol Constant, worked), dentist, lawyer, certified public accountant, and mortician. A ways beyond the town, you came to an intersection. To your right, Mountain Road sloped crookedly toward the hill that gave the town its name, Catamount Mountain, so named by the dark presence in colonial times of mountain lions and the rocky top of the hill. Turning left, however, you drove along Old Road, called that only recently and for the purpose of distinguishing between it and New Road, or the Turnpike, that ran north and south between the White Mountains and Boston. When, three and a half miles from town, you crossed the Catamount River, you turned right at the tipped, flaking sign, GRANITE STATE TRAILERPARK, posted off the road behind a bank of mailboxes standing like sentries at the intersection. Passing through some old, brush-filled fields and a pinewoods that grew on both sides of the narrow, paved lane, you emerged into a clearing, with a sedge-thickened swamp on your left, the Catamount River on your right, and, beyond, a cluster of somewhat battered and aging house trailers. Some were in better repair than others, and some, situated in obviously more attractive locations than others, were alongside the lake, where they exhibited small lawns and flower gardens and other signs of domestic tidiness and care. The lake itself stretched beyond the trailerpark, four and a half miles long and in the approximate shape of a turkey. For that reason, for over a hundred years it had been called Turkey Pond until Ephraim Skitter, who owned the shoe factory, left the town a large endowment for its library and bandstand, and in gratitude the town fathers changed the name of the lake. That, in turn, gave the name Skitter to the large parcel of land that bordered the north and west sides of the lake, becoming by 1950, when the Turnpike was built, the Skitter Lake State Forest. All in all, it was a pretty piece of land and water. If you stood out on the point of land where the trailerpark was situated, with the swamp and pinewoods behind you, you could see, out beyond the deep blue water of the lake, spruce-covered hills that lumped their way northward all the way to the mauve-colored wedges at the horizon, the world-famous White Mountains.

In the trailerpark itself were an even dozen trailers, pastel-colored blocks, some with slightly canted roofs, some with low eaves, but most of them simply rectangular cubes sitting on cinder blocks, with dirt or gravel driveways beside them, usually an old car or pickup truck parked there, with some pathetic, feeble attempt at a lawn or garden evident, but evident mainly in a failure to succeed as such. Some of the trailers, Leon LaRoche’s, for example, looked to be in better repair than others, and a few even indicated that the tenants were practically affluent and could afford embellishments such as glassed-in porches, wrought-iron railings at the doorstep, toolsheds, picnic tables and lawn furniture by the shore, and a new or nearly new car in the driveway. The trailer rented to Noni Hubner’s mother, Nancy, was one of these— Nancy Hubner was a widow whose late husband had owned the Catamount Insurance Company and was rumored to have had a small interest in the tannery — and Captain Dewey Knox’s was another. Captain Knox, like Nancy Hubner, was from an old and relatively well off family in town, as suggested by the name of Knox Island, located out at the northern end of Skitter Lake, where the turkey’s eye was. Captain Knox enjoyed recalling childhood summer picnics on “the family island” with his mother and his father, a man who had been one of the successful hemp growers before and during the war, or “War Two,” as Captain Knox called it. Prior to that, his father had been a dairy farmer, but after the War decided to sell his land and moved to Maryland, where he died within six months and where Captain Knox’s mother, a woman in her eighties, still lived. Captain Knox’s return to Catamount after his retirement, he said, had been an act of love. “For this region, this climate, this people, and the principles and values that have prospered here.” He talked that way sometimes.

Two of the twelve trailers, numbers 5 and 9, were vacant at this time, number 9 having been vacated only last February as the result of the suicide of a man who had lived in the park as long as Marcelle Chagnon and who had been extremely popular among his neighbors. Tom Smith was his name, and he had raised his son alone in the park, and when his son, at the age of twenty-one or so, had gone away, Tom had withdrawn into himself, and one gray afternoon in February he shot himself in the mouth. He had been a nice man, everyone insisted, though no one had known him very well. In fact, people seemed to think he was a nice man mainly because his son Buddy was so troublesome, always drunk and fighting at the Hawthorne House and, according to the people in the park, guilty of stealing and selling in Boston their TV sets, stereos, radios, jewelry, and so forth. Tom Smith’s trailer, number 9, wasn’t a particularly fancy one, but it was well located at the end of the land side of the park, right next to Terry and Carol Constant and with a view of the lake. But even so, Marcelle hadn’t yet been able to rent it, possibly because of the association with Tom’s suicide, but also possibly because of there being black people living next door, which irritated Marcelle whenever it came up, bringing her to announce right to the prospective tenant’s face, “Good, I’m glad you don’t want to rent that trailer, because we don’t want people like you living around here.” That would be the end of the tour, and even though Marcelle felt just fine about losing that particular kind of tenant, her attitude certainly did not help her fill number 9, which cost her money. But you had to admire Marcelle Chagnon — she was like an old Indian chief, the way she came forward to protect her people, even if with nothing but her pride, and even at her own expense.

Number 5, the other vacancy, was located between Doreen Tiede, the divorcée who lived with her little girl, and Captain Knox, and was on the lake side of the park, facing the stones and sticks where the lake flowed into the Catamount River and where the Abenaki Indians, back before the whites came north from Massachusetts and drove the Indians away to Canada, had built their fishing weirs. Number 5 was a sleek, sixty-eight-foot-long Marlette with a mansard roof, very fancy, a replacement for the one that burned to the ground a few years ago. A young, newly married couple, Ginnie and Claudel Bing, had moved in, and only three months later, returning home from a weekend down on the Maine coast, found it leveled and still smoldering in the ground, the result of Ginnie’s having left the kitchen stove on. They had bought the trailer, financed through the Granite State Realty Development Corporation, and were renting only the lot and services, and their insurance on the place hadn’t covered half of what they owed (as newlyweds, they were counting on a long and increasingly rewarding future, so they had purchased a new car and five rooms of new furniture, all on time). Afterwards, they broke up, Claudel lost his job, became something of a drunk, and ended up living alone in a room at the Hawthorne House and working down at the tannery. It was a sad story, and most people in the park knew it and remembered it whenever they passed the shining new trailer that the Corporation moved in to replace the one the Bings had burned down. Because the new trailer was expensive, the rent was high, which made it difficult for Marcelle to find a tenant for it, but the Corporation didn’t mind, since it was being paid for anyhow by Claudel Bing’s monthly checks. Corporations have a way of making things come out even in the end.

There was in the park one trailer, an old Skyline, that was situated more favorably than any other in the park, number 8, and it was out at the end of the shoreline side, where the road became a cul-de-sac and the shore curved back around toward the swamp and state forest. It was a plain, dark gray trailer, with the grass untended, uncut, growing naturally all around, as if no one lived there. A rowboat lay tilted on one side where someone had drawn it up from the lake behind the trailer, and there was an ice-fishing shanty on a sledge waiting by the shore for winter, but there were no other signs of life around the yard, no automobile, none of the usual junk and tools lying around, no piles of gravel, crushed stone, or loam to indicate projects under way and forsaken for lack of funds, no old and broken toys or tricycles or wagons, nothing out back but a single clothesline stretching from one corner of the trailer back to a pole that looked like a small chokecherry tree cut from the swamp. This was where Merle Ring lived.

Merle Ring was a retired carpenter, retired by virtue of his arthritis, though he could still do a bit of finish work in warm weather, cabinet-making and such, to supplement his monthly social security check. He lived alone and modestly and in that way managed to get by all right. He had outlived and divorced numerous wives, the number varied from three to seven, depending on who Merle happened to be talking to, and he had fathered on these three to seven women at least a dozen children, most of whom lived within twenty miles of him, but none of them wanted Merle to live with him or her because Merle would only live with him or her if, as he put it, he could be the boss of the house. No grown child would accept a condition like that, naturally, and so Merle lived alone, where he was in fact and indisputably the boss of the house.

Merle, in certain respects, was controversial in the park, though he did have the respect of Marcelle Chagnon, which helped keep the controversy from coming to a head. He was mouthy, much given to offering his opinions on subjects that involved him not at all, which would not have been so bad, however irritating it might have been, had he not been so perverse and contradictory with his opinions. He never seemed to mean what he said, but he said it so cleverly that you felt compelled to take him seriously. Then, later, when you brought his opinion back to him and tried to make him own up to it and take responsibility for its consequences, he would laugh at you for ever having taken him seriously in the first place. He caused no little friction in the lives of many of the people in the park. When one night Doreen Tiede’s ex-husband arrived at the park drunk and threatening violence, Merle, just coming in from a long night of hornpout fishing on the lake, stopped and watched with obvious amusement, as if he were watching a movie and not a real man cockeyed drunk and shouting through a locked door at a terrorized woman and child that he was going to kill them both. Buck Tiede caught sight of old Merle standing there at the edge of the road, where the light just reached him, his string of hornpout dangling next to the ground.

“You old fart!” Buck, a large and disheveled man, roared at Merle. “What the hell you lookin’ at! G’wan, get the hell outa here!” He made a swiping gesture at Merle, as if chasing a dog.

Then, according to Marcelle, who had come up in the darkness carrying her shotgun, Merle said to the man, “Once you kill her, Buck, it’s done. Dead is dead. If I was you and wanted that woman dead as you seem to, I’d just get me some dynamite and blow the place all to hell. Or better yet, just catch her someday coming out of work down to the tannery, and snipe her with a high-powered rifle from a window on the third floor of the Hawthorne House. Then she’d be dead, and you could stop all this hollering and banging on doors and stuff.”

Buck stared at him in amazement. “What the hell are you saying?”

“I’m saying you ought to get yourself a window up in the Hawthorne House that looks down the hill to the tannery, and when she comes out the door after work, plug her. Get her in the head, to be sure. Just bang, and that’d be that. You could do your daughter the same way. Dead is dead, and you wouldn’t have to go around like this all the time. If you was cute about it, you’d get away with it all right. I could help you arrange it. Give you an alibi, even.” He held up the string of whiskered fish. “I’d tell ’em you was out hornpouting with me.”

“What are you telling me to do?” Buck took a step away from the door toward Merle. “You’re crazy.”

“Step aside, Merle, I’ll take care of this,” Marcelle ordered, shouldering the tiny man out of the way and bringing her shotgun to bear on Buck Tiede. “Doreen!” she called out. “You hear me?”

Buck made a move toward Marcelle.

“Stay right where you are, mister, or I’ll splash you all over the wall. You know what a mess a twelve-gauge can make?”

Buck stood still.

A thin, frightened voice came from inside. “Marcelle, I’m all right! Oh God, I’m sorry for all this! I’m so sorry!” Then there was weeping, a woman’s and a child’s.

“Forget sorry. Just call the cops. I’ll hold Mister Bigshot here until they come.”

And she did hold him, frozen and silent at the top of the steps, while Doreen called the police, who came in less than five minutes and hauled Buck off to spend the night in jail. Merle, once Marcelle and her shotgun had taken charge of the situation, had strolled on with his fish. 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 at the kitchen table over a can of Budweiser, reading her copy of People magazine.

“You’re crazy, dealing with Buck Tiede that way,” she said angrily.

“What way?”

“Telling 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.

“What 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?”

“Good.”

“Good! Why, in the name of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, would you feel good?”

“Because we’d know who did it.”

“But you said you’d give him an alibi!”

“That 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.”

“Why 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.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot,” she said absently, and he went out.

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 water bed 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, and how “basically feminist” it was, because the responsibility was the man’s, not the woman’s.

“I wondered how come you never asked me if I was protected,” she said.

“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.”

“Amazing.”

“Yeah.”

“Overpopulation is an incredible problem.”

“Yeah. It is.”

“I believe that if we could just solve the overpopulation problem, all the rest of the world’s problems would be solved, too. Like wars.”

“Ecological balance, man. The destruction of the earth.”

“The energy crisis. Everything.”

“Yeah, man. It’s like those guinea pigs of Flora Pease’s. Flora, she’s got these guinea pigs, hundreds of them by now. And they just keep on making new guinea pigs, doubling their numbers every couple of months. It’s incredible, man.”

Noni rolled over on her belly and stretched out her legs and wiggled her toes. “Do you have the record of Dylan’s, the one where he sings all those country-and-western songs, way before anyone even heard of country and western? What’s it called?”

“Nashville Skyline?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Isn’t it incredible, how he was singing country and western way before anyone even heard of it?”

“Yeah, he’s really incredible, Dylan. Anyhow…”

“Do you have it, the record?” she interrupted.

“No, man. Listen, I was telling you something.”

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay, man. Anyhow, Flora’s guinea pigs, it’s like they’re a metaphor. I mean, it’s like Flora is some kind of god, and the first two guinea pigs, the ones she bought from the five-and-dime in town, were Adam and Eve, and that trailer of hers is the world. Be fruitful and multiply, Flora told them, and, fine, they go out and do what they’re programmed to do, and pretty soon they’re like taking over the world, which is the trailer, so that Flora, who’s like God, can’t take care of them anymore. No matter how hard she works, they eat too much, they shit too much, they take up too much room. So what happens?”

Silence.

“What happens?” Bruce repeated.

“A flood, maybe?”

“No, man, it’s not that literal, it’s a metaphor. What happens is, Flora moves out. She leaves the trailer to the guinea pigs. Twilight of the gods, man. God is dead!”

“That’s really incredible.”

“Yeah,” Bruce said, drifting into still deeper pools of thought.

After a few moments, Noni got up from the bed and drew on her clothes. “I better get home, my mother’ll kill me. She thinks I’m at the movies with you.”

“Naw, man, she knows where you are. All she’s got to do is walk three doors down and see my van’s still here. C’mon, she knows we’re making it together. She’s not that out of it.”

Noni shrugged. “She believes what she wants to believe. Sometimes I think she still doesn’t believe Daddy’s dead, and it’s been over four years now. There’s no point in forcing things on people. You know what I mean?”

Bruce understood, but he didn’t agree. People needed to face reality, it was good for them and good for humanity as a whole, he felt. He was about to tell her why it was good for them, but Noni was already dressed and heading for the door, so he said good night instead and waved from the bed as she slipped out the door.

When later that same evening she told her mother that Flora Pease was raising hundreds of guinea pigs in her trailer, it was not so much because Noni was interested in Flora or the guinea pigs, as because her mother, Nancy, was quizzing her about the movie she was supposed to have seen with Bruce.

“That’s not true,” the woman said.

“What’s not?” Noni switched on the TV set and sat down cross-legged on the floor.

“About the guinea pigs. Where’d you hear such a thing?”

“Bruce. Do you think I could study yoga somewhere around here?”

“Of course not. Don’t be silly.” Nancy lit a cigarette and sat down on the sofa, where she’d been reading this month’s Book-of-the-Month Club selection, a novel that gently satirized the morals and mores of Westchester County’s smart set. “Bruce. I don’t know about that boy. How can he be a college student when the nearest college is the state university in Durham, which is over forty miles from here?”

“I don’t know.” Noni was sliding into the plot intricacies of a situation comedy about two young women who worked on an assembly line in Milwaukee and made comically stupid errors of judgment and perception. “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.”

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.

“I don’t know,” Noni said.

“Don’t you ever ask, for heaven’s sake?”

“No.”

That was 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 fell asleep with her light on. She bought her marijuana from Bruce. So did Terry. 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 could 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.

The next morning, on her way to town to have her hair cut and curled, 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 sedan 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 lasted for five weeks now, so that the ice had thickened daily, swiftly becoming iron-hard and black and smooth. All over the lake, fishing 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 visited Merle’s shanty, though he certainly had plenty of friends of various ages and sexes. He had made it known that, when he went ice fishing, it was as if he were going into religious withdrawal and meditation, a journey into the wilderness, as it were, and if you were foolish or ignorant enough to visit him out there on the ice in his tiny, windowless shack with the stovepipe chimney sticking up and puffing smoke, you would be greeted by a man who seemed determined to be left alone. He would be cold, detached, abstracted, unable or unwilling to connect to the person standing self-consciously before him, and after a few moments you would leave, your good-bye hanging unanswered in the air, and Merle would take a sip from his fifth of Canadian Club and drift back into his trance.

Nancy braked her car to a quick stop next to Merle, lowered the window and asked if he wanted a lift into town. She liked the old man, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the old man intrigued her, as if she believed he knew something about the world they lived in together that she did not know and that would profit her greatly if she did know. So she courted him, fussed over him, seemed to be looking after his comfort and welfare, behaving the way, as she once said to Noni, his daughters ought to behave.

Merle apparently knew all this, and more, though you could never be sure with him. He got inside the low, sleek car, slammed the door shut, and surrounded himself with the smell of leather and the pressure of fan-driven heat. “Morning, Mrs. Hubner. A fine, crispy morning, isn’t it?”

She agreed and asked him where she could drop him. A fast, urgent driver, she was already flying past the intersection of Old Road and Main Street and was approaching the center of town. She drove so as to endanger, but didn’t seem to know it. It was as if her relation to the physical act of driving was the same as her relation to poverty — abstract, wholly theoretical, and sentimental — which, from Merle’s perspective, made her as dangerous a driver as she was a citizen.

Merle and Nancy exchanged brief remarks, mostly solicitous on her part as to the present condition of Merle’s arthritis and mostly whining on his part as to the same thing. Merle knew that by whining he could put Nancy at her ease, and in encounters as brief as this he, like most people, enjoyed being able to put people at their ease. It made things more interesting for him later on. Stopping in front of Hayward’s Hardware and Sporting Goods Store, where Merle was headed for traps, she suddenly asked him a direct question (since she was now sufficiently at her ease to trust that he would answer directly and honestly and in that way might be brought to reveal more than he wished to): “Tell me, Mr. Ring, is it true that that woman, Flora in number eleven, you know the one, is raising hundreds of guinea pigs in her trailer?”

“Yes,” he said, lying, for he had heard nothing of it. “Though I’m not sure of the numbers. It’s hard to count ’em after a certain point, sixty, say.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little … disgusting? I mean, the filth! I think the woman ought to be put away, don’t you?” she asked, still trying to get information.

“What would you do with all those guinea pigs then?”

“Let the SPCA take them, I suppose. They know how to handle these things, when things like this get out of hand. Imagine, all those tiny animals crowded into a trailer, and remember, number eleven is not one of the larger trailers in the park, you know.”

“I guess you’re right, the SPCA 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.”

“You’re making fun of me, Mr. Ring. Aren’t you?”

“No, no, no, I’m not making fun of you, Mrs. Hubner,” he said, opening the door and stepping out, not without difficulty, 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 kinds of animals, rodents and such, they breed fast, and before you know it, one hundred is two hundred, two hundred is four, four is eight, and so on.”

“Thank 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 husband, Claudel, had rented the upstairs apartment after their trailer burned down. That was over three years ago, or maybe four. Nancy couldn’t remember, until it came back to her that it had happened the summer Noni turned fifteen and started having migraines and saying she hated her, and then Nancy remembered that was the summer her husband 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.

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 doesn’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.”

“Makes sense,” Merle said, and for several days he went strictly 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 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 — the same style of clothing he had worn since his youth, when he first became a carpenter’s apprentice and determined what sort of clothing was appropriate for that kind of life. His teeth were brown, stained from a lifetime of smoking a cob pipe, and his weathered skin was still taut, indicating that he had always been a small, trim man. There was something effeminate about him that, at least in old age, made him physically attractive, especially to women, but to men as well. Generally, his manner with people was odd and somewhat disconcerting, for he was both involved with their lives and not involved, both serious and not serious, both present and absent. For example, a compliment from Merle somehow had the effect of reminding the recipient of his or her vanity, while an uninvited criticism came out sounding like praise for having possessed qualities that got you singled out in the first place.

Though seasonably cold (fifteen degrees below freezing), the day was pleasant and dry, the light falling on the rock ground directly, so that the edges of objects took on an unusual sharpness and clarity. Merle knocked briskly on Flora’s door, and after a moment, she swung it open. She was wrapped in a wool bathrobe that must have been several decades old and belonged originally to a very large man, for it flowed around her blocky body like a carpet. Her short hair stuck out in a corolla of dark red spikes, and her eyes were red-rimmed and watery-looking, as, grumpily, she asked Merle what he wanted from her.

“A look,” he chirped, smiling.

“A look. At what?”

“At your animals. The guinea pigs I been hearing about.”

“You heard about them? What did you hear?” She stood before the door, obstructing his view into the darkened room beyond. An odor of fur and straw, however, seeped past and merged warmly with the cold, almost sterile air outdoors.

Merle sniffed with interest at the odor, apparently relishing it. “Heard you got a passel of ’em. I never seen one of these guinea pigs before and was wondering what in hell they look like. Pigs?”

“No. More like fat, furry chipmunks,” Flora said, easing away from the door. She still had not smiled, however, and was not ready to invite Merle inside. “Mrs. Chagnon send you over here?” she demanded. “That woman is putting me on the spot. I can’t have any friends anymore to visit or to talk to me here, or else I’ll get into trouble with that woman.”

“No, Marcelle didn’t send me, she didn’t even want to talk about your guinea pigs with me. She just said as long as they don’t cause her any trouble, she won’t cause you any trouble.”

“That’s what I mean,” Flora said, defiantly crossing her short, thick arms over her chest. “People come around here and see my guinea pigs, and then I get into trouble. If they don’t come around here and don’t see nothing, then it’s like the guinea pigs, for them, don’t exist. That kid, Terry, the black one, he started it, when all I was doing was trying to be friendly, and then he went and dragged the other kid, the white one, in here, and they got to smoking my hemp, and then pretty soon here comes Mrs. Chagnon, and I get in trouble. All I want is to be left alone,” she said with great clarity, as if she said it to herself many times a day.

Merle nodded sympathetically. “I understand how you feel. It’s like when I won the lottery, that was back a ways before you come here, and everybody thought I had a whole heap more money than I had, so everyone was after me for some.”

That interested Flora. She had never met anyone who had won the lottery. In fact, she was starting to believe that it was all faked, that no one ever won, that those people jumping up and down hysterically in the TV ads were just actors. Now, because of Merle’s having won, her faith in the basic goodness of the world was magically restored. “This means they probably went to the moon, too!” she said with clear relief.

“Who?”

“The astronauts.”

“You didn’t believe that, the rocket to the moon? I thought you used to be in the Air Force.”

“That’s why I had so much trouble believing it,” she said and stood aside and waved him in.

Inside, when his eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light of the room, this is what Merle saw: large, waist-high, wood-framed, chicken-wire pens that were divided into cubicles about two feet square. The pens were placed throughout the room in no apparent order or pattern, which gave the room, despite the absence of furniture, the effect of being incredibly cluttered, as if someone were either just moving in or all packed to move out. As far as Merle could see, the rooms adjacent to this one were similarly jammed with pens, and he surmised that the rooms he couldn’t see, the bedroom at the back and the bathroom, were also filled with pens like these. In each cubicle there was a pair of grown or nearly grown guinea pigs or else one grown (presumably female) pig and a litter of two or three piglets. Merle could see and hear the animals in the nearby cubicles scurrying nervously in their cages, but the animals closest to him were crouched and still, their large round eyes rolling frantically and their noses twitching as, somehow, Merle’s own odor penetrated the heavy odor of the room.

Flora reached down and plucked a black and white spotted pig from the cage it shared with a tan, long-haired mate. Cradling it in her arm and stroking its nose with her free hand, she walked cooing and clucking over to Merle and showed him the animal. “This here’s Ferdinand,” she said. “After the bull.”

“Ah. May I?” he said, reaching out to take Ferdinand.

Merle held the animal as Flora had and studied its trembling, limp body. It seemed to offer no defense and showed no response except stark terror. When Merle placed it back into its cubicle, it remained exactly where he had placed it, as if waiting for a sudden, wholly deserved execution.

“How come you like these animals, Flora?”

“Don’t you like them?” she bristled.

“I don’t feel one way or the other about them. I was wondering about you.”

She was silent for a moment and moved nervously around the cages, checking into the cubicles as she moved. “Well, somebody’s got to take care of them. Especially in this climate. They’re really not built for the ice and snow.”

“So you don’t do it because you like them?”

“No. I mean, I like looking at them and all, the colors are pretty, and their little faces are cute and all. But I’m just taking care of them so they won’t die, that’s all.”

There was a silence, and Merle said, “I hate to ask it, but how come you let them breed together? You know where that’ll lead?”

“Do you know where it’ll lead if I don’t let them breed together?” she asked, facing him with her hands fisted on her hips.

“Yup.”

“Where?”

“They’ll die out.”

“Right. That answer your question?”

“Yup.”

Merle stayed with her for the next half hour, as she showed him her elaborate watering system — a series of interconnected hoses that ran from the cold water spigot in the kitchen sink around and through all the cages, ending back in the bathroom sink — and her cleverly designed system of trays beneath the cages for removing from the cages the feces and spilled food, and her gravity-fed system of grain troughs, so that all she had to do was dump a quart a day into each cage and the small trough in each individual cubicle would be automatically filled. She designed and built the cages herself, she explained, and, because she was no carpenter, they weren’t very fancy or pretty to look at. But the basic idea was a good one, she insisted, so that, despite her lack of skill, the system worked, and consequently every one of her animals was clean, well-fed, and watered at all times. “You can’t ask for much more in this life, can you?” she said proudly as she led Merle to the door.

He guessed no, you couldn’t. “But I still think you’re headed for troubles,” he told her, and he opened the door to leave.

“What do you mean? What’s going on?” Suddenly she was suspicious of him and frightened of Marcelle Chagnon again, with her suspicion of the one and fear of the other swiftly merging and becoming anger at everyone.

“No, no, no. Not troubles with Marcelle or any of the rest of the folks in the park. Just with the breeding and all. In time, there will be too many of them. They breed new ones faster than the old ones die off. It’s simple. There will come a day when you won’t have any more room left in there. What will you do then?”

“Move out.”

“What about the animals?”

“I’ll take care of them. They can have the whole trailer. They’ll have lots of room if I move out.”

“But you don’t understand,” Merle said calmly. “It goes on forever. It’s numbers, and it doesn’t change or level off or get better. It gets worse and worse, faster and faster.”

“You don’t understand,” she said to him. “Everything depends on how you look at it. And what looks worse and worse to you might look better and better to me.”

Merle smiled, and his blue eyes gleamed. He stepped down to the ground and waved pleasantly at the grim woman. “You are right, Flora Pease. Absolutely right. And I thank you for straightening me out this fine morning!” he exclaimed, and, whistling softly, he walked off for Marcelle’s trailer, where he would sit down at her table and drink a cup of coffee with her and recommend to her that, in the matter of Flora and her guinea pigs, the best policy was no policy, because Flora was more than capable of handling any problem that the proliferation of the guinea pigs might create.

Marcelle was not happy with Merle’s advice. She was a woman of action and it pained her to sit still and let things happen. But, she told Merle, she had no choice in this matter of the guinea pigs. If she tried to evict Flora and the animals, there would be a ruckus and possibly a scandal; if she brought in the health department, there was bound to be a scandal; if she evicted Flora and not the guinea pigs, then she’d have the problem of disposing of the damn things herself. “It’s just gone too far,” she said, scowling.

“But everything’s fine right now, at this very moment, isn’t it?” Merle asked, stirring his coffee.

“I suppose you could say that.”

“Then it hasn’t gone too far. It’s gone just far enough.”

At this stage, just before Christmas, everyone had an opinion as to what ought to be done with regard to the question of the guinea pigs.

FLORA PEASE: Keep the animals warm, well-fed, clean, and breeding. Naturally, as their numbers increase, their universe will expand. (Flora didn’t express herself that way, for she would have been speaking to people who would have been confused by language like that coming from her. She said it this way: “When you take care of things, they thrive. Animals, vegetables, minerals, same with all of them. And that makes you a better person, since it’s the taking care that makes people thrive. Feeling good is good, and feeling better is better. No two ways about it. All people ever argue about anyhow is how to go about feeling good and then better.”)

DOREEN TIEDE: Evict Flora (she could always rent a room at the Hawthorne House, Claudel Bing had and, God knows, he was barely able to tie his own shoes for a while, he was so drunk, though of course he’s much better now and may actually move out of the Hawthorne House one of these days, and in fact the man was starting to look like his old self again, which was not half bad), and then call in the SPCA to find homes for the animals (the ones that couldn’t be placed in foster homes would have to be destroyed— but, really, all they are is animals, rodents, rats, almost).

TERRY CONSTANT: Sneak into her trailer one day when she’s in town buying grain, and, one by one, liberate the animals. Maybe you ought to wait till spring and then just set them free to live in the swamp and the piney woods and fields between Old Road and the trailerpark. By the time winter came rolling around again, they’d have figured out how to tunnel into the ground and hibernate like the rest of the warm-blooded animals. The ones that didn’t learn how to survive, well, too bad for them. Survival of the fittest.

BRUCE SEVERANCE: The profit motive, man. That’s what needs to be invoked here. Explain to Flora that laboratories pay well for clean, well-fed guinea pigs, especially those bred and housed under such controlled conditions as Flora has established. Explain this, pointing out how it’ll enable her to breed guinea pigs for both fun and profit for an indefinite period of time, for as long as she wants, when you get right down to it. Show her that this is not only socially useful but it’ll provide her with enough money to take even better care of her animals than now.

NONI HUBNER: Bruce’s idea is a good one, and so is Leon LaRoche’s, and Captain Knox has a good idea too. Maybe we ought to try one first, Captain Knox’s, say, since he’s the oldest and has the most experience of the world, and if that doesn’t work, we could try Leon LaRoche’s, and then if that fails, we can try Bruce’s. That would be the democratic way.

LEON LAROCHE: Captain Knox’s idea, of course, is the logical one, but it runs certain risks and depends on his being able to keep Flora, by the sheer force of his will, from reacting hysterically or somehow “causing a scene” that would embarrass the trailerpark and we who live in it. If the Suncook Valley Sun learned that we had this sort of thing going on here, that we had a village eccentric living here among us at the trailerpark, we would all suffer deep embarrassment. I agree, therefore, with Doreen Tiede’s plan. But my admiration, of course, is for Captain Knox’s plan.

CAROL CONSTANT: I don’t care what you do with the damned things, just do something. The world’s got enough problems, real problems, without people going out and inventing new ones. The main thing is to keep the poor woman happy, and if having a lot of little rodents around is what makes her happy, and they aren’t bothering anyone else yet, then, for God’s sake, leave her alone. She’ll end up taking care of them herself, getting rid of them or whatever, if and when they start to bother her — and they’ll bother her a lot sooner than they bother us, once we stop thinking about them all the time. Her ideas will change as soon as the guinea pigs get to the point where they’re causing more trouble than they’re giving pleasure. Everybody’s that way, and Flora Pease is no different. You have to trust the fact that we’re all human beings.

NANCY HUBNER: Obviously, the guinea pigs are Flora’s substitutes for a family and friends. She’s trying to tell us something, and we’re not listening. If we, and I mean all of us, associated more with Flora on a social level, if we befriended her, then her need for these filthy animals would diminish and probably disappear. It would be something that in the future we could all laugh about, Flora laughing right along with us. We should drop by for coffee, invite her over for drinks, offer to help redecorate her trailer, and so on. We should be more charitable. It’s as simple as that. Christian charity. I know it won’t be easy — Flora’s not exactly socially “flexible,” if you know what I mean, but we are, at least most of us are, and therefore it’s our responsibility to initiate contact, not hers, poor thing.

CAPTAIN DEWEY KNOX: It’s her choice, no one else’s. Either she goes, or the animals go. She decides which it’s to be, we don’t. If she decides to go, fine, she can take the animals with her or leave them behind, in which case I’m sure some more or less humane way can be found to dispose of them. If she stays, also fine, but she stays without the animals. Those are the rules — no pets. They’re the same rules for all of us, no exceptions. All one has to do is apply the rules, and that forces onto the woman a decision that, however painful it may be for her, she must make. No one can make that decision for her.

MARCELLE CHAGNON: If she’d stop the damned things from breeding, the whole problem would be solved. At least it would not bother me anymore, which is important. The only way to get her to stop breeding them, without bringing the Corporation or the health board or the SPCA or any other outsiders into it, is to go in there and separate the males from the females ourselves, and when she comes back from town, say to her, Okay, Flora, this is a compromise. Sometimes people don’t understand what a compromise is until you force it on them. It’s either that or we sit around waiting for this thing to explode, and then it’ll be too late to compromise, because the outsiders will be in charge.

MERLE RING: Let Flora continue to keep the animals warm, well-fed, clean, and breeding. Naturally, as their numbers increase, their universe will expand. And as a result, all the people in the trailerpark, insofar as they observe this phenomenon, will find their universe expanding also. (It’s understood that Merle did not express himself this way, for he would have been expressing himself to people who would have been offended by language like that. Here’s how he put it: “It’ll be interesting to see what the woman does with her problem — if it ever actually becomes a problem. And if it never becomes a problem, that should be interesting, too.”)

Flora’s life up to now ought to have prepared her for what eventually happened with the guinea pigs. It had been a hard life, beginning with the death of her mother when Flora was barely a year old. Flora’s father was what in these parts is often called a rough carpenter, meaning that he could use a hammer and saw well enough to work as a helper to a bona fide carpenter. Usually he was the one who nailed together the plywood forms for making cellar walls and then, when the cement had set, tore the forms apart. During the fall and winter months, when it was too cold for cement to pour, the bona fide carpenters moved to interior work, which required a certain skill and a basic fluency with numbers, and Flora’s father was always among the first in the fall unemployment line.

There were three older children, older by one, two, and three years, and after the mother died, the children more or less took care of themselves. They lived out beyond Shackford Corners in a dilapidated house that appeared to be falling into its own cellar hole, an unpainted, leaky, abandoned house heated in winter by a kerosene stove, with no running water and only rudimentary wiring. The father’s way of raising his children was to stay drunk when he was not working, to beat them if they cried or intruded on his particular misery, and, when he was working, to leave them to their own devices, which were not especially healthful devices. When Flora’s older brother was six, he set off one of the blasting caps that he found near the lumber camp a half mile behind the house in the woods and blew one of his arms off and almost died. When Flora’s only sister was eleven, she was raped by an uncle visiting from Saskatchewan and after that could only gaze blankly past your head when you tried to talk to her or get her to talk to you. Flora’s older brother, when he was fourteen and she thirteen, sickened and died of what was determined by the local health authorities to have been malnutrition, at which point the remaining three children were taken away from the father and placed into the care of the state, which meant, at that time, the New Hampshire State Hospital over in Concord, where they had a wing for juveniles who could not be placed in foster homes or who were drug addicts or had committed crimes of violence but were too young to be tried as adults. Four years later, Flora was allowed to leave the mental hospital (for that is what it was) on the condition that she join the United States Air Force, where she spent the next twenty years working in the main as a maid, or steward, in officers’ clubs and quarters at various bases around the country. She was not badly treated by the Air Force itself, but numerous individual servicemen, enlisted men as well as officers, treated her unspeakably.

Despite her life, Flora remained good-naturedly ambitious for her spirit. She believed in self-improvement, believed that it was possible, and that not to seek it was reprehensible, was, in fact, a sin. And sinners she viewed the way most people view the stupid or the poor — as if their stupidity or poverty were their own fault, the direct result of sheer laziness and a calculated desire to exploit the rest of humankind, who, of course, are intelligent or well-off as a direct result of their willingness to work and not ask for help from others. This might not seem a particularly enlightened way to view sinners, and it certainly was not a Christian way to view sinners, but it did preserve a kind of chastity for Flora. It also, of course, made it difficult for her to learn much, in moral terms, from the behavior of others. There was probably a wisdom in that, however, a trade-off that made it possible for her to survive into something like middle age without falling into madness and despair.

Within a week of having moved into the trailerpark, Flora had purchased her first pair of guinea pigs. She went into the Catamount five-and-dime looking for goldfish, but when she saw the pair of scrawny, matted animals in their tiny, filthy cages at the back of the store, she forgot the goldfish, which by comparison looked relatively healthy, despite the cloudiness of the water in their tank. She built her cages herself, mostly from cast-off boards and chicken wire she found at the town dump and carried home. The skills required were not great, were, in fact, about the same as had been required of her father in the construction of cement forms. At the dump she also found pieces of garden hose she needed to make her watering system and the old gutters she hooked up as grain troughs.

Day and night, she worked for her guinea pigs, walking to town and hauling back fifty-pound bags of grain, dragging back from the dump more old boards, sheets of tin, gutters, and so on. As the guinea pigs multiplied and more cages became necessary, Flora soon found herself working long hours into the night alone in her trailer, feeding, watering, and cleaning the animals, while out behind the trailer the pyramid of mixed straw, feces, urine, and grain gradually rose to waist height, then to shoulder height, finally reaching to head height, when she had to start a second pyramid, and then, a few months later, a third. And as the space requirements of the guinea pigs increased, her own living space decreased, until finally she was sleeping on a cot in a corner of the back bedroom, eating standing up at the kitchen sink, stashing her clothing and personal belongings under her cot, so that all the remaining space could be devoted to the care, housing, and feeding of the guinea pigs.

By the start of her third summer at the trailerpark, she had begun to lose weight noticeably, and her usually pinkish skin had taken on a gray pallor. Never particularly fastidious anyhow, her personal hygiene now could be said not to exist at all, and the odor she bore with her was the same odor given off by the guinea pigs, so that, in time, to call Flora Pease the Guinea Pig Lady was not to misrepresent her. Her eyes grew dull, as if the light behind them were slowly going out, and her hair was tangled and stiff with dirt, and her clothing seemed increasingly to be hidden behind stains, smears, spills, drips, and dust.

“Here comes the Guinea Pig Lady!” You’d hear the call from the loafers outside McCallister’s News & Variety leaning against the glass front, and a tall, angular teenager with shoulder-length hair and acne, wearing torn jeans and a Mothers of Invention T-shirt, would stick his long head inside and call your name, “C’mere, take a look at this, man!”

You’d be picking up your paper, maybe, or because McCallister’s was the only place that sold it, the racing form with yesterday’s Rockingham results and today’s odds. The kid might irritate you slightly — his gawky, witless pleasure, his slightly pornographic acne, the affectation of his T-shirt and long hair — but still, your curiosity up, you’d pay for your paper and stroll to the door to see what had got the kid so excited.

In a low, conspiratorial voice, the kid would say, “The Guinea Pig Lady.”

She’d be on the other side of the street, shuffling rapidly along the sidewalk in the direction of Merrimack Farmers’ Exchange, wearing her blue, U.S. Air Force, wool, ankle-length coat, even though this was May and an unusually warm day even for May, and her boot lacings were undone and trailing behind her, her arms chopping away at the air as if she were a boxer working out with the heavy bag, and she was singing in a voice moderately loud, loud enough to be heard easily across the street, “My Boy Bill” from Carousel.

“Hey, honey!” the kid wailed, and the Guinea Pig Lady, though she ignored his call, stopped singing at once. “Hey, honey, how about a little nookie, sweets!” The Guinea Pig Lady sped up a bit, her arms churning faster against the air. “Got something for ya, honey! Got me a licking stick, sweet lips!”

If you already knew who the woman was, Flora Pease, of the Granite State Trailerpark out at Skitter Lake, and knew about the guinea pigs and, thereby, could guess why she was headed for the grain store, you’d ease past the kid and away. But if you didn’t know who she was, you might ask the kid, and he’d say, “The Guinea Pig Lady, man. She lives with these hundreds of guinea pigs in the trailerpark out at Skitter Lake. Just her and all these animals. Everybody in town knows about it, but she won’t let anyone inside her trailer to see ’em, man. She’s got these huge piles of shit out behind her trailer, and she comes into town all the time to buy feed for ’em. She’s a fuckin’ freak, man! A freak! And nobody in town can do anything about ’em, the guinea pigs, I mean, because so far nobody out at the trailerpark will make a formal complaint about ’em. You can bet your ass if I lived out there I’d sure as shit make a complaint. I’d burn the fucking trailer to the ground, man. I mean, that’s disgusting, all them animals. Somebody ought to go out there some night and pull her outa there and burn the place down. It’s a health hazard, man! You can get a disease from them things!”

One September morning, after about a week of not having seen Flora leave her trailer once, even to empty the trays of feces out back, Marcelle decided to make sure the woman was all right, so she stepped across the roadway and knocked on Flora’s door. The lake, below a cloudless sky, was deep blue, and the leaves of the birches along the shore were yellowing. There had already been a hard frost, and the grass and weeds and low scrub shone dully gold in the sunlight.

There was no answer. Marcelle knocked again, firmly this time, and called Flora’s name.

A moment later she heard a low, muffled voice from inside. “Go away.” Then silence, except for the breeze off the lake.

“Are you all right? It’s me, Marcelle!”

Silence.

Marcelle tried the door. Locked. She called again, “Flora, let me in!” and stood with her fists jammed against her hips. She breathed in and out rapidly, her large brow pulled down in alarm. A few seconds passed, and she called out, “Flora, I’m coming inside!”

Moving quickly to the top step, she pitched her shoulder against the door just above the latch, which immediately gave way and let the door blow open, causing Marcelle to stagger inside, off-balance, blinking in the darkness and floundering in the odor of the animals as if she’d fallen in a huge tub of warm water. “Flora!” she yelled. “Flora, where are you?” Bumping against the cages, she made her way around them and into the kitchen area, shouting Flora’s name and peering in vain into the darkness. In several minutes, she had made her way to the bedroom in back, and there in a corner she found Flora on her cot, wrapped in a blanket, looking almost unconscious, limp, bulky, gray. Her hands were near her throat, clutching the top of the blanket like the hands of a frightened, beaten child, and she had her head turned toward the wall, with her eyes closed. She looked like a sick child to Marcelle, like her own child, Joel, who had died when he was twelve— the fever had risen, and the hallucinations had come until he was out of his head with them, and then, suddenly, while she was mopping his body with damp washcloths, the wildness had gone out of him, and he had turned on his side, drawn his skinny legs up to his belly, and died.

Flora was feverish, though not with as high a fever as the boy, Joel, had endured, and she had drawn her legs up to her, bulking her body into a lumpy heap beneath the filthy blanket. “You’re sick,” Marcelle announced to the woman, who seemed not to hear her. Marcelle straightened the blanket, brushed the woman’s matted hair away from her face, and looked around the room to see if there wasn’t some way she could make her more comfortable. The room was jammed with the large, odd-shaped cages, and Marcelle could hear the animals rustling back and forth on the wire flooring, now and then chittering in what she supposed was protest against hunger and thirst.

Taking a backward step, Marcelle yanked the cord and opened the venetian blind, and sunlight tumbled into the room. Suddenly Flora was shouting, “Shut it! Shut it! Don’t let them see! No one can see me!”

Marcelle closed the blind, and the room once again filled with the gloom and shadow that Flora believed hid the shape of the life being lived here. “I got to get you to a doctor,” Marcelle said quietly. “Doctor Wickshaw’s got office hours today. You know Carol Constant, his nurse, that nice colored lady who lives next door? You got to see a doctor, missy.”

“No. I’ll be all right soon,” she said in a weak voice. “Just the flu, that’s all.” She pulled the blanket up higher, covering most of her face, but exposing her dirty bare feet.

Marcelle persisted, and soon Flora began to curse the woman, her voice rising in fear and anger, the force of it pushing Marcelle away from the cot, “You leave me alone, you bitch! I know your tricks, I know what you’re trying to do! You just want to get me out of here so you can take my babies away from me! I’m fine, I can take care of my babies fine, just fine! Now you get out of my house! Go on, get!”

Marcelle backed slowly away, then turned and walked to the open door and outside to the sunshine and the clean fall air.

Doctor Wickshaw, Carol told her, doesn’t make house calls. Marcelle sat at her kitchen table, looked out the window, and talked on the telephone. She was watching Flora’s trailer, number 11, as if watching a bomb about to explode.

“I know that,” Marcelle said, holding the receiver between her shoulder and cheek so both hands could be free to light a cigarette. “Listen, Carol, this is Flora Pease we’re talking about, and there’s no way I’m going to be able to get her into that office. But she’s real sick, and it could be just the flu, but it could be meningitis, for all I know. My boy died of that, you know, and you have to do tests and everything before you can tell if it’s meningitis.” There was silence for a few seconds. “Maybe I should call the ambulance and get her over to the Concord Hospital. I need somebody who knows something to come here and look at her,” she said, her voice rising.

“Maybe on my lunch hour I’ll be able to come by and take a look,” Carol said. “At least I should be capable of saying if she should be got to a hospital or not.”

Marcelle thanked her and hung up the phone. Nervously tapping her fingers against the table, she thought to call in Merle Ring or maybe Captain Knox, to get their opinions of Flora’s condition, and then decided against it. That damned Dewey Knox, he’d just take over, one way or the other, and after reducing the situation to a choice between two courses, probably between leaving her alone in the trailer and calling the ambulance, he’d insist that someone other than he do the choosing, probably Flora herself, who, of course, would choose to be left alone. Then he’d walk off believing he’d done the right thing, the only right thing. Merle would be just as bad, she figured, with all his smart-ass comments about illness and death and leaving things alone until they have something to say to you that’s completely clear. Some illnesses lead to death, he’d say, and some lead to health, and we’ll know before long which it is, and when we do, we’ll know how to act. Men. Either they take responsibility for everything, or they take responsibility for nothing.

Around one, Carol Constant arrived in her little blue sedan, dressed in a white nurse’s uniform and looking, to Marcelle, very much like a medical authority. Marcelle led her into Flora’s trailer, after warning her about the clutter and the smell—“It’s like some kinda burrow in there,” she said as they stepped through the door — and Carol, placing a plastic tape against Flora’s forehead, determined that Flora was indeed quite ill, her temperature was 105 degrees. She turned to Marcelle and told her to call the ambulance.

Immediately, Flora went wild, bellowing and moaning about her babies and how she couldn’t leave them, they needed her. She thrashed against Carol’s strong grip for a moment and then gave up and fell weakly back into the cot.

“Go ahead and call,” Carol told Marcelle. “I’ll hold on to things here until they come.” When Marcelle had gone, Carol commenced talking to the ill woman in a low, soothing voice, stroking her forehead with one hand and holding her by the shoulder with the other, until, after a few moments, Flora began to whimper and then to weep, and finally, as if her heart were broken, to sob. Marcelle had returned from calling the ambulance and stood in the background almost out of sight, while Carol soothed the woman and crooned, “Poor thing, you poor thing.”

“My babies, who’ll take care of my babies?” she wailed.

“I’ll get my brother Terry to take care of them,” Carol promised, and for a second that seemed to placate the woman.

Then she began to wail again, because she knew it was a lie and when she came back her babies would be gone.

No, no, no, no, both Carol and Marcelle insisted. When she got back, the guinea pigs would be here, all of them, every last one. Terry would water and feed them, and he’d clean out the cages every day, just as she did.

“I’ll make sure he does,” Marcelle promised, “or he’ll have his ass in a sling.”

That calmed the woman, but just then two young men dressed in white, the ambulance attendants, stepped into the room, and when Flora saw them, their large, grim faces and, from her vantage point, their enormous, uniformed bodies, her eyes rolled back, and she began to wail, “No, no, no! I’m not going! I’m not going!”

The force of her thrashing movements tossed Carol off the cot onto the floor. Moving swiftly, the two young men reached down and pinned Flora against her cot. One of them, the larger one, told the other to bring his bag, and the smaller man rushed out of the trailer to the ambulance parked outside.

“I’m just going to give you something to calm yourself, ma’am,” the big man said in a mechanical way. The other man was back, and Carol and Marcelle, regarding one another with slight regret and apprehension, stepped out of his way.

In seconds, Flora had been injected with a tranquilizer, and while the two hard-faced men in white strapped her body into a four-wheeled, chromium and canvas stretcher, she descended swiftly into slumber. They wheeled her efficiently out of the trailer as if she were a piece of furniture and slid her into the back of the ambulance and were gone, with Marcelle following in her car.

Alone by the roadway outside Flora’s trailer, Carol watched the ambulance and Marcelle’s battered old Ford head out toward Old Road and away. After a moment or two, drifting from their trailers one by one, came Nancy Hubner, her face stricken with concern, and Captain Dewey Knox, his face firmed to hear the grim news, and Merle Ring, his face smiling benignly.

“Where’s my brother Terry?” Carol asked the three as they drew near.

It was near midnight that same night. Most of the trailers were dark, except for Bruce Severance’s, where Terry, after having fed, watered, and cleaned the ravenous, thirsty, and dirty guinea pigs, was considering a business proposition from Bruce that would not demand humiliating labor for mere monkey-money, and Doreen Tiede’s trailer, where Claudel Bing’s naked, muscular arm was reaching over Doreen’s head to snap off the lamp next to the bed — when, out by Old Road, the Guinea Pig Lady came shuffling along the lane between the pinewoods. She moved quickly and purposefully, just as she always moved, but silently now. She wore the clothes she’d worn in the morning when the men had taken her from her cot and strapped her onto the stretcher — old bib overalls and a faded, stained, plaid flannel shirt. Her face was ablaze with fever. Her red hair ringed her head in a stiff, wet halo that made her look like an especially blessed peasant figure in a medieval fresco, a shepherd or stonemason rushing to see the Divine Child.

When she neared the trailerpark, sufficiently close to glimpse the few remaining lights and the dully shining, geometric shapes of the trailers through the trees and, here and there, a dark strip of the lake beyond, she cut to her left and departed from the road and made for the swamp. Without hesitation, she darted into the swamp, locating even in darkness the pathways and patches of dry ground, moving slowly through the mushy, brush-covered muskeg, emerging from the deep shadows of the swamp after a while at the edge of the clearing directly behind her own trailer. Soundlessly, she crossed her backyard, passed the head-high pyramids standing like dolmens in the dim light, and stepped through the broken door of the trailer.

The trailer was in pitch darkness, and the only sound was that of the animals as they chirped, bred, and scuffled in their cages through the nighttime. With the same familiarity she had shown cutting across the swamp, Flora moved in darkness to the kitchen area, where she opened a cupboard and drew from a clutter of cans and bottles a red one-gallon can of kerosene. Then, starting at the farthest corner of the trailer, she dribbled the kerosene through every room, looping through and around every one of the cages, until she arrived at the door. She placed the can on the floor next to the broken door, then stepped nimbly outside, where she took a single step toward the ground, lit a wooden match against her thumbnail, tossed it into the trailer, and ran.

Instantly, the trailer was a box of flame, roaring and snapping and sending a dark cloud and poisonous fumes into the night sky as the paneling and walls ignited and burst into flame. Next door, wakened by the first explosion and terrified by the sight of the flames and the roar of the fire, Carol Constant rushed from her bed to the road, where everyone else in the park was gathering, wide-eyed, confused, struck with wonder and fear.

Marcelle hollered at Terry and Bruce, ordering them to hook up garden hoses and wash down the trailers next to Flora’s. Then she yelled to Doreen. Dressed in a filmy nightgown, with the naked Claudel Bing standing in darkness behind her, the woman peered through her half-open door at the long, flame-filled coffin across the lane. “Call the fire department, for Christ’s sake! And tell Bing to get his clothes on and get out here and help us!” Captain Knox gave orders to people who were already doing what he ordered them to do, and Nancy Hubner, in nightgown, dressing gown, and slippers, hauled her garden hose from under the trailer and dragged it toward the front, screeching as she passed each window along the way for Noni to wake up, wake up and get out here and help, while inside, Noni slid along a stoned slope of sleep — dreamless, and genuinely happy. Leon LaRoche appeared fully dressed in clean and pressed khaki work clothes with gloves and silver-colored hard hat, looking like an ad agency’s version of a construction worker. He asked the Captain what he should do, and the Captain pointed him toward Bruce and Terry, who were hosing down the steaming sides of the trailers next to the fire. At the far end of the row of trailers, in darkness at the edge of the glow cast by the flames, stood Merle Ring, uniquely somber, his arms limply at his sides, in one hand a fishing rod, in the other a string of hornpout.

A few moments later, the fire engines arrived, but it was already too late to save Flora’s trailer or anything that had been inside it. All they could accomplish, they realized immediately, was to attempt to save the rest of the trailers, which they instantly set about doing, washing down the metal sides and sending huge, billowing columns of steam into the air. Gradually, as the flames subsided, the firemen turned their hoses and doused the dying fire completely. An hour before daylight, they left, and behind them, where Flora’s trailer had been, was a cold, charred, shapeless mass of indistinguishable materials — melted plastic, crumbled wood and ash, blackened, bent sheet metal, and charred flesh and fur.

By the pink light of dawn, Flora emerged from the swamp and came to stand before the remains of the pyre. She was alone, for the others, as soon as the fire engines left, had trudged heavily and exhausted to bed. Around nine, Marcelle Chagnon was stirred from her sleep by the telephone — it was the Concord Hospital, informing her that the woman she had signed in the day before, Flora Pease, had left sometime during the night without permission, and they did not know her whereabouts.

Marcelle wearily peered out the window next to the bed and saw Flora standing before the long, black heap across the lane. She told the woman from the hospital that Flora was here. She must have heard last night that her trailer burned down, over the radio, maybe, and hitchhiked back to Catamount. She assured the woman that she would look after her, but the woman said not to bother, she only had the flu and probably would be fine in a few days, unless, of course, she caught pneumonia hitchhiking last night without a hat or coat on.

Marcelle hung up the phone and continued to watch Flora, who stood as if before a grave. The others in the park, as they rose from their beds, looked out at the wreckage, and, seeing Flora there, stayed inside, and left her alone. Eventually, around midday, she slowly turned and walked back to the swamp.

Marcelle saw her leaving and ran out to stop her. “Flora!” she cried, and the woman turned back and waited in the middle of the clearing. Marcelle trotted heavily across the open space, and when she came up to her, said to Flora, “I’m sorry.”

Flora stared at her blankly, as if she didn’t understand.

“Flora, I’m sorry … about your babies.” Marcelle put one arm around the woman’s shoulders, and they stood side by side, facing away from the trailerpark.

Flora said nothing for a few moments. “They wasn’t my babies. Babies make me nervous,” she said, shrugging the arm away. Then, when she looked up into Marcelle’s big face, she must have seen that she had hurt her, for her tone softened. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Chagnon. But they wasn’t my babies. I know the difference, and babies make me nervous.”

That was in September. The fire was determined to have been “of suspicious origin,” and everyone concluded that some drunken kids from town had set it. The several young men suspected of the crime, however, came up with alibis, and no further investigation seemed reasonable.

By the middle of October, Flora Pease had built an awkwardly pitched shanty on the land where the swamp behind the trailerpark rose slightly and met the pinewoods, land that might have belonged to the Corporation and might have been New Hampshire state property. But it was going to take a judge, a battery of lawyers, and a pair of surveyors before anyone could say for sure. As long as neither the Corporation nor the state fussed about it, no one was willing to make Flora tear down her shanty and move.

She built it herself from stuff she dragged from the town dump down the road and into the woods to the swamp — old boards, galvanized sheet metal, strips of tar paper, cast-off shingles — and furnished it the same way, with a discolored, torn mattress, a three-legged card table, an easy chair with the stuffing blossoming at the seams, and a moldy rug that had been in a children’s playhouse. It was a single room, with a tin woodstove for cooking and heat, a privy out back, and a kerosene lantern for light.

For a while, a few people from the trailerpark went on occasion to the edge of the swamp and visited with her. You could see her shack easily from the park, as she had situated it on a low rise where she had the clearest view of the charred wreckage of old number 11. Bruce Severance, the college kid, dropped by fairly often, especially in early summer, when he was busily locating the feral hemp plants in the area and needed her expert help, and Terry Constant went out there, “just for laughs,” he said. He used to sit peacefully on a stump in the sun and get stoned on hemp and rap with her about his childhood and dead mother. Whether Flora talked about her childhood and her dead mother Terry never said. It got hard to talk about Flora. She was just there, the Guinea Pig Lady, even though she didn’t have any guinea pigs, and there wasn’t much anyone could say about it anymore, since everyone more or less knew how she had got to be who she was, and everyone more or less knew who she was going to be from here on out.

Merle used to walk out there in warm weather, and he continued to visit Flora long after everyone else had ceased doing it. The reason he went out, he said, was because you got a different perspective on the trailerpark from out there, practically the same perspective he said he got in winter from the lake when he was in his ice house. And though Marcelle never visited Flora’s shack herself, every time she passed it with her gaze, she stopped her gaze and for a long time looked at the place and Flora sitting outside on an old metal folding chair, smoking her cob pipe and staring back at the trailerpark. She gazed at Flora mournfully and with an anger longing for a shape, for Marcelle believed that she alone knew the woman’s secret.