Trailerpark

The Burden

BECAUSE OF THE SHABBY CHARACTER of the boy’s mother and also that of the man she had married the very day she found herself legally divorced and able to marry again, and because the two had determined to live far away from New Hampshire without even bothering to send him their address until several years later, Tom had raised Buddy practically by himself. And he had seen his son through hard times, especially as the boy got older, such as when he was in the service that one year and later when he got himself beat up by the guy with the baseball bat and spent six months flat on his back in Tom’s trailer learning how to talk again. So of course when Tom walked into the Hawthorne House for a beer, even though, after the bright afternoon sunlight outside, he wasn’t used to the darkness inside, he recognized the boy right away. You can do that with your children, you can tell who they are even in darkness, when all you can see of them is their height and the position they happen to be standing in. You just glance over, and you say, Oh yeah, there’s my son.

Tom didn’t know the girl with him, though. Not even when he drew close to her and could see her face clearly in the dim light of the bar. She was sitting alone in the booth next to the juke box where Buddy stood studying the songs. Tom could tell she was with Buddy and not alone because of the way she watched him while he studied the names of the songs on the juke box. It was the way girls always watched Buddy, as if they couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to disappear from in front of them any second — just poof! and he’d be gone, a curling thread of smoke hanging in the air where a second ago he had been smiling and chattering in that circular way of his. Nobody knew where Buddy got it from, his good looks and that way he had of talking so interestingly that people hated to see him come to a stop or ask a question, even, because his mother Maggie, Tom’s ex-wife, had been pretty (back when she was Buddy’s age, that is) but she had never been as outstandingly good-looking as Buddy was, and Tom, even though he had a square and regular-featured face, was not the kind of man you’d compliment for his looks, and of course neither Tom nor his ex-wife owned what you’d call a gift for gab, especially not Tom, who usually seemed more interested in listening than in talking anyway.

Tom walked past the girl, who looked to be around twenty-five, which made her four years older than Buddy and which was also usual for him. The girl was dark haired and pretty, but actually more stylish than pretty when you got up close, with a round face and grim little mouth. Her short hair was all kinked up in a way that was fashionable just then, which made her somewhat resemble a dandelion, until you looked into her eyes and saw that she was awfully worried about something. You couldn’t tell what it was, exactly, but it was clear that she was not at peace with her circumstances.

Tom stopped behind his son and next to the bar, and as he moved up to the bar, he reached out and absently tapped his son on the shoulder, and the boy turned around and smiled nicely. Tom didn’t smile back, he didn’t even look at Buddy. He looked across at Gary the bartender who also owned the place and ordered a bottle of beer.

“You’re keeping your door locked now, Dad,” Buddy said, as if Tom didn’t realize it.

“I know.” Tom turned around and faced him.

Buddy reached out and shook his father’s hand. “This here’s Donna,” he said, nodding toward the girl. “Donna picked me up outside Portland on the Maine Pike, and we sorta got to be friends in a very short order, which is certainly nice for me because I’m nothing special and you can see that she is.”

Donna gave Tom a thin smile, and she did not look like a person who was glad to find herself where she was finding herself, stopped in a dingy, mill town New Hampshire barroom to have a chat with her new boyfriend’s father. Tom didn’t give a damn about her, though, one way or the other. If she wanted to drive all over the countryside in her Japanese car just because she thought Buddy looked good beside her, it didn’t matter to Tom, because women were always doing things like that, and so were men.

“How long you in town this time?” Tom asked his son. Gary the bartender delivered the bottle of beer, and Tom turned back to the bar and drank off half the bottle. He was feeling weighted and metallic inside, as if his stomach were filled with tangled stovepipe-wire, because even though Buddy was his son and he could recognize him in the darkness, he didn’t like it when he saw him. Not anymore.

“So, Dad, you’re keeping your door locked nowadays,” he said again.

Tom was silent for a few seconds and did not look at the boy. “That’s right. Ever since you left and took with you every damned thing of mine you could fit into that duffle of yours. My tape deck, tapes. You even took my cuff links. I must be stupid.” He finished off the bottle of beer and Gary automatically slid a second over. Gary was a tall, skinny, dark-haired man with a toothpick in his mouth that made him look wiser than he probably was. He was the fourth owner of the bar in the last ten years.

Once again, Buddy smiled in that easy way he had, like a summer sun coming up, and Tom felt his stomach clank and tangle. “C’mon, Dad, I only borrowed that stuff. I only planned to be gone for the weekend, me and Bilodeau, that kid from Concord. It was a weekend, the weather suddenly got warm, you probably don’t remember, but it did, and we were planning to chase some girls Bilodeau knew over on the coast near Kittery. But things just got screwed up, and before the weekend was over, we ended up going in different directions with different people. You know how it goes…” He showed Tom both his palms, as if to prove he wasn’t hiding anything.

“That was last April.” Tom knew his son was lying, and there was no damned sense trying to catch him out or somehow prove the boy was lying or get him to admit it, because he’d just go on lying, topping one lie with another, canceling one out with a new one, on and on, until you just gave up out of fatigue and boredom. He was one of those people who are always ready to go a step further than anyone else, and after a while you could see that about him, so you’d stop, and he’d be standing there just ahead of you, smiling back. It was almost as if he didn’t know the difference between right and wrong.

“April?” the girl said. She lit a cigarette and looked at Buddy through the smoke. “So what’s been happening since April? This is June,” she observed, as if she had got a glimpse, from the conversation between the father and son, of what might be in store for her if she went ahead with her plans and hooked up for a while with this good-looking, smooth-talking, slender young man. It had probably started out as a whim, picking up and spending the weekend with a guy she’d seen hitchhiking in Maine. It would make a funny story she could tell on herself to her friends in Boston or Hartford or wherever she had originally been headed. But now things were starting to look a little off-center to her, not quite lined up, which is how it always was with Buddy, how it always had been. He was so damned good-looking, all white teeth and high cheekbones and quick-sloping narrow nose and deep blue eyes, the all-American boy, and he talked sweetly and in a strangely elaborate way, all in circles and curls that kept you listening, so that pretty soon you forgot what it was you were planning on doing and instead you plugged into his plans, but then someplace down along the line, things started to look a little bit off-center, as if a couple of basic pieces hadn’t been cut right. And you couldn’t tell which pieces were off, because the whole damned thing was off.

Buddy peered down at her as if he couldn’t quite place her. “What’s been happening since April?” he asked. “You really want to know?”

“No. Not really. It just seemed a funny thing, that’s all…”

“Funny. What’s funny?” Buddy asked. Tom watched the two carefully from the bar.

“Nothing,” the girl said. “Forget it.” She closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them, her expression had changed, as if she had turned Buddy into a total stranger, as if she were seeing him for the first time all over again but this time with the knowledge of him that she had gained since morning, when she first saw him at the Portland exit with his thumb out and his duffle and suitcase on the road beside him.

“Forget funny?” Buddy said, smiling broadly. “Who can forget funny?” He turned away from the girl and faced his father and suddenly started talking to him. “Listen, Dad, that’s why I stopped down at the trailer before I came up here. To give your stuff back, I mean. Hey, I couldn’t do it way the hell up there in Maine among the trees and lakes, and then Donna here was nice enough to drive all this distance out of her way just to help me drop these things off at your place, before we resume our wanderings. Listen, Dad, since April I been way the hell out on a narrow neck of land in northern Maine, working on a lobster boat.” He had laid a hand on his father’s shoulder.

Tom didn’t believe a word the boy said. He had decided long ago, as policy, not to believe anything his son told him. And that, he told himself, was one of the reasons he kept his trailer locked now, for the first time in his entire life. You’re supposed to love your son and trust him and protect him, and while that would have been easy for Tom, it always had been, this new way of treating him was a burden, and he hated it. For years Tom had loved his son and trusted him and protected him, behaving precisely the way he knew the boy’s mother, his ex-wife Maggie, would not have behaved. Maggie would have let the boy down. Maggie wouldn’t have been home that night the state troopers brought him home all drunk and raving, and the boy would have ended up in jail. Maggie wouldn’t have known how to handle it when he got his head bashed in by that guy with the baseball bat in Florida. She would have let him rot in that charity ward in the Florida hospital before she’d have brought him home, set him up on the living room couch in front of the TV, and then every night for six months taught the boy how to talk again, until finally he could make those looping, charming sentences of his again, and people would sit back in their chairs and listen with light smiles on their faces to see such a clever, good-looking young man perform for them. Maggie never would have borne up under the weight of Buddy, Tom knew. The proof of her weakness, if he’d ever needed proof, he’d obtained the summer Buddy turned twelve, when he had taken the boy by Greyhound all the way to Phoenix, Arizona, to visit his mother, at her request, while he, the father, took a two-week holiday alone farther west, visiting Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm and Universal Studios and watching the surfers at Huntington Beach, the only time he had ever seen real live surfers. When the two weeks were up and Tom had called back at Phoenix for his son, things had changed, and he left the boy in Phoenix, at the boy’s request, presumably for good (at least that was Maggie’s and her husband’s intention and Buddy’s as well). Tom returned to New Hampshire, and didn’t hear anything from his son until September, when the boy showed up at the trailer. She had put him alone on a Boston-bound bus in Phoenix connecting to another bus to Concord, New Hampshire, and the boy, more travel-wise by then than he’d been in June, had hitchhiked the twenty-five remaining miles home. No, for Maggie it was the love and the trust and the protection that made the burden. For Tom, the burden was in withholding that love, trust and protection. That’s what he believed.

For it wasn’t simply Buddy’s stealing his father’s belongings that had turned the man against him, though of course that helped. And it wasn’t that the boy seemed incapable of telling the truth about anything (he would lie when there was nothing to be gained by it, he lied for the sheer pleasure of lying, or so it seemed, and if you asked him was it raining outside, he’d look out the window, see that it was raining and say no, not yet, and when you stepped out the door into the rain, you’d turn around and look at Buddy, and he’d say with great delight that it must have started raining that very second). And it wasn’t that the boy was reckless and troublesome, that he seemed incapable of avoiding the kind of person who happened at that moment to want to hurt someone, especially someone young and pretty and mouthy. Buddy would find himself in a bar, the Hawthorne House, say, next to a crossed-up truck driver or some hide-stacker from the tannery, and he would do everything he could think of to make himself look even younger, prettier and mouthier than he was, and of course he’d end up getting himself thrashed for it. And then somehow he’d get himself back to the trailerpark, and he’d drag himself to the door, swing open the door and fall into the living room, where his father would be sitting in front of the TV with a can of beer in his hand and the open newspaper on his lap.

“Buddy! What in hell’s happened now?”

“Oh, Daddy, did I ever get myself into one this time! They got some mean and dirty-fighting rattle-snaking bad-ass cowboys hanging out nowadays at the Hawthorne House, and it’s just not your family restaurant anymore.”

No, it wasn’t any of those actions and attitudes and incapacities that had turned Tom against his son, had made him lock his door against his boy. In fact, if anyone had asked him why, Tom, have you suddenly gone and turned against your boy after all those years of standing by him, Tom would not have been able to answer. All he knew was that it had begun for him about a week after Buddy left this last time, back in April. Right off, Tom noticed that his son had taken with him his tape deck, tapes, a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey, his cuff links, two shirts, and probably a dozen more possessions that he wouldn’t find out about until he needed them and went looking for them. He merely observed that once again his son had made off with everything of his that he could lay his hands on, and he was, once again, glad that none of it was irreplaceable. Nothing Tom owned was irreplaceable, even though that was not by intention. In recent years he had worked off and on as an escort driver for a mobile home manufacturer in Suncook, hiring out with his own pickup truck and CB radio, usually as the lead man, the one with the sign WIDE LOAD FOLLOWING on the front of his truck, and before that he had driven an oil delivery truck, so while he had always made enough to house and feed and clothe himself and his one child, he hadn’t made much more than that. Certainly he had never made enough money to buy anything that was irreplaceable.

But about a week after Buddy left this time, Tom began to feel something he had never felt before — at least in regard to Buddy he had never felt it before. What he felt was relief, relief that the boy was gone from him, was not at home in front of the TV set or coming in late all drunk and bashed up or slamming cupboard doors in the morning in search of food. He was glad, for the first time he could remember, that he did not have to see the boy’s face across the table from him, and he discovered that he enjoyed eating alone. And then, once he had admitted to himself that he was relieved to have the boy gone from him, it was as if he had released a flood of bad feelings about the boy, so that his face darkened every time Buddy’s name was mentioned or every time he walked into some evidence of the boy’s ever having lived with him, his dirty clothes in that final week’s laundry, for example, or a letter that came to him three days after he’d left, a letter in a woman’s handwriting, Tom could tell, because of the careful, large, rounded letters. And then even his memories of the boy’s childhood began to turn sour and ugly, and he couldn’t start to remember something he had once done with the boy without feeling his stomach tighten and grow heavy, so that he would turn away from the memory and think about something more immediate. For instance, he had taught Buddy to iceskate when he was only four or five and had taught him to shoot a hockey puck into a makeshift goal he had set up on the lake behind the trailerpark not far from the shore and within sight of his own trailer. Buddy developed the basic skills quickly and soon was obsessed with practicing at the sport, especially the part that had him skating full-speed to a spot twelve or fifteen feet in front of the goal and firing the puck, a few inches off the ice, into the goal, then coasting forward, stick raised to celebrate the score, retrieving the puck and looping back out to make the run over again. For hours in the late afternoons that winter the boy would skate alone and shoot goals, and his father would look out the window of the trailer as it grew swiftly dark outside and he’d watch the tiny figure of his son move back and forth across the gray surface of the ice, until after a while it seemed the boy was floating in a dark haze, and the father would step outside to the frozen ground and holler for him to come in for supper. And the image of his son that he held in his mind as he called his name into the darkness was of his small, struggling figure afloat in a haze between the ice below and the sky above, as if sky and ice had merged and had become an ether, as if the firmament had been erased. Remembering this now, as he often did when, by accident, he happened to look out the window in the kitchen that showed him a wide expanse of the open lake, he winced and held on to the edge of the counter as if to regain lost balance, and he thought about getting some new asbestos tiles to replace the half-dozen that were lifting from the floor in front of the sink.

Tom didn’t understand this shift in his feelings, this great relief, as if a huge burden had been lifted from his back. He was ashamed of it, which of course replaced one burden with another. For it seemed wrong to him, wrong to feel glad that his son was gone away, wrong to hope that he would never come back, and it seemed shameful to him that memories of his son made him wince, that signs of his son’s life made him look away with irritation, that questions from friends about his son’s whereabouts and welfare made him grit his teeth and answer abruptly and vaguely. But he couldn’t help himself. It was out of his control. Buddy had even started entering his dreams in the same irritating way, turning a pleasant dream sour, a peaceful dream turbulent, a funny dream grim.

Of course he knew Buddy eventually would come back, would show up in town again, probably down at the trailer, and if not there, then up here at the Hawthorne House, where he knew his father could be found almost every afternoon drinking three or four beers and listening to Gary and the locals who stopped in after work. And when Tom thought about that, his son’s coming back, he had taken to locking his door whenever he left the trailer, something he had never done before, not in all the years he had lived at the trailerpark. In recent years most people in the park had taken to locking their doors, mainly because of rumors of theft (though no one actually knew firsthand of any thievery), and until now Tom had refused to go along with the trend, saying that he had nothing worth stealing anyhow so why try to protect it? Then one morning he had walked out the door to his truck, about to leave for a two-day job escorting a sixty-seven-foot Marlette from Suncook to just outside Syracuse, New York. He got into the truck, started the engine, then peered back at the powder-blue trailer and thought, The door. He got out, walked quickly across to the cinderblock steps, reached up and locked the door. That was that. And he had locked it, whenever he left the trailer, ever since.

The girl Donna was gone. She had got up as if going to the ladies’ room, and she hadn’t come back.

“Where’s Donna, Dad?” Buddy asked, looking hurt and slightly bewildered. He sat down in the booth where the girl had been sitting earlier.

“Gone, maybe.” Tom turned away from his son and faced the bar, standing between two barstools as if he were in too much of a hurry to sit down and relax.

Buddy sat in the booth looking half-dazed, but it was the wrong way to look, or so it seemed to Tom, so Tom said nothing, even though he thought about it, thought about how the boy should be acting at a time like this. After all, a new girlfriend had just got scared or spooked and had slipped out the door and had driven off in her car, and she might have taken all Buddy’s belongings with her, even including his father’s tape deck and tapes and cuff links. Why, then, wasn’t the boy racing outside to see if the girl at least had tossed his bags out of her car before driving off? And why wasn’t he cursing her? Or maybe even laughing, at himself, at the girl, at his fate? Instead, he sat in the booth, languid, head lolling back, eyes half-closed. Tom glanced down at the boy, then turned swiftly away again. The sight of his son sitting like that made him tighten inside and caused his shoulders and the small of his back to stiffen.

“You think she tossed your bags out before she took off?” he asked the boy in a low voice.

Gary looked across at Buddy and chuckled. He apparently didn’t see anything wrong with the way the boy was acting. He craned his neck so he could see out the window to where the girl’s car had been parked. “Nope, Buddy, you’re in luck this time, she left your gear. It’s sitting out there in the lot.” He looked at Tom and grinned and winked.

Tom didn’t respond. Instead he sighed and turned away from the bar and came and sat opposite his son in the booth, saying as he slid into the seat, “Well, Buddy, what are your plans now? Where you headed for this time?”

Buddy smiled warmly, as if noticing his father’s presence for the first time. “I was thinking about staying here for the summer, you know, maybe get some work locally, drilling wells or as a carpenter’s helper, and then in the fall see if I can’t work something out down at the university, maybe get the government to help me pay for a couple of engineering drawing courses or something, you know, with the GI Bill, so I could get a better job next year and gradually work my way to the top, become a captain of industry, maybe even run for governor or open up a car dealership or start a tree farm…”

“Buddy, I’m serious.”

“So’m I, Dad. I’m serious.” And suddenly he looked it, his mouth drawn tightly forward, his blue eyes cold and grim, his hands clenched in fists in front of him on the table.

In a soft voice, Tom reminded the boy that the government wouldn’t help him pay for anything, not with his kind of discharge from the army (he’d spent more than half his one year in the army locked up in the stockade, usually for trivial offenses, but offenses committed so compulsively and frequently that finally they had given up on him and sent him home to his father), and he told the boy, again, that he couldn’t take courses down at the university until he first finished high school, and he told him, again, that with his reputation for trouble it was almost impossible for him to get work around here anymore, unless he was willing to work the night shift down at the tannery stacking hides, and he informed his son that he didn’t want him to live with him in his trailer, not anymore, not ever.

Quickly, as if startled, Buddy looked directly into his father’s eyes, and his blue eyes filmed over with tears. “You mean you’re kicking me out?” His lip trembled. Tom saw that the boy was terrified and was about to cry, and he was shocked to see it.

He got up from the booth quickly. “C’mon, we’ll talk about this outside,” he said gruffly, and he hurried away from the booth, tossing Gary a pair of dollar bills as he passed the bar. Buddy followed silently along behind.

Outside, in the comparative brightness of the parking lot, they stood facing each other at the tailgate of Tom’s pickup truck. Nearby, Buddy’s duffle and battered brown canvas suitcase lay in a heap on the pavement.

“Dad, maybe I could just stay till I got on my feet, you know, saved a little money, enough to rent my own place…?”

Tom looked at the boy steadily. They were the same height and build, though Tom, twenty years older, was slightly heavier and thicker through the shoulders and arms. Behind them a lumber truck changed gears, braked and slowed, passed through the town on its way south. Tom cleared his throat. “You got to take care of yourself now,” he said slowly.

The boy walked to his bags and drew them toward the truck, lifted them and tossed them into the back of the pickup. He was smiling again. “C’mon, Dad, just a few days, I’ll get hold of Donna, I got her number down in Boston, she gave it to me, and I’ll call her and set something up with her… She just took off because she had to be in Boston by tonight and she could see I wanted to stay here awhile and visit alone with you, sort of to re-establish contact.”

Tom reached over the tailgate into the truck and pulled out the bags and dropped them onto the pavement behind Buddy. His face grew long and heavy with a deep sadness, and the boy stared down at the bags as if not understanding what they were doing there, and when his gaze came back Tom saw that the boy was about to weep again.

Another lumber truck approached the Hawthorne House, changed gears as it neared the curve and the slope from the bar to the tannery below. “You could pick up a ride on one of them trucks this afternoon and be in Boston tonight, if you wanted to,” Tom said, looking after the truck.

“Daddy…”

It had turned into a low, gray day, dark and heavy and cool, not sunny and warm as it had been an hour earlier. The streets of the town were nearly empty. No cars passed. Generally, in a mill town people don’t move about much except early in the day and late.

“Daddy… I’m broke,” Buddy said quietly, and his voice cracked and tears rolled down his cheeks, and he looked like a small boy standing there before his father, open-faced, weeping, his shoulders slanting toward the ground, his hands hanging uselessly down. “I need some money … before I can take off on my own. Please help me, Daddy. I won’t cause you any more trouble, I promise.”

Tom looked away from the sight of his son and up at the gray sky, and he could see that it would rain soon. Then he looked away from the sky and down the hill toward the dam and the red brick tannery and then finally down at the boy’s duffle and suitcase. “I’ve heard promises,” he said. “And I’ve had to make up my mind regardless.”

“I can’t go off alone…”

“You just did, from last April.”

“Yes,” the boy cried, “but I thought I could come back! I didn’t know you’d lock your door against me!”

Tom studied the boy’s face carefully, as if seeing something there he had never seen before. When you love someone for years and years, you lose sight of how that person looks to the rest of the world. Then one day, even though it’s painful, you push the person away and suddenly you can see him the way a stranger sees him. But because you know so much more about him than a stranger can ever know, you are frightened for him, as frightened as you would be for yourself if you could see in yourself, as you see in him, that you’re not quite right, that you don’t quite fit into the place the world has tried to make for you.

Tom stopped looking at his son and instead looked at the ground. Then he took a deliberate step past his son and picked up the two bags, turned and pitched them into the back of the truck. Slowly, as if exhausted, he walked around to the driver’s side and got in. “C’mon,” he said in a low voice and started the engine.

The boy suddenly brightened and, instantly transformed, ran around to the other side and slid in next to his father. “Oh, hey, listen, Dad,” he said, “I promise I won’t cause you any more trouble! I’ll even pay you room and board, I’ll get a job tomorrow down at the tannery, stacking hides, just like you said!” He stuck his right arm out the open window and slapped the side of the truck, making a loud noise, and repeated it with sudden, erratic exuberance. “I’ll get a car, a good used car, and then I’ll be able to rent my own place, Dad, maybe rent a trailer at the park near you, there’s always a couple of vacancies…” He went on banging the side of the truck.

Tom didn’t answer. He dropped the truck into reverse, waited as another lumber truck passed, then backed into the street and turned left and headed downhill toward the tannery, following the lumber truck.

Buddy had ceased banging the door and was peering out the open window at the stores and houses and then the dam and old mill pond, with the tannery buildings on the left. “Where we going, Dad? The trailerpark’s the other way.”

Tom said nothing. He shifted down a gear as they came up close behind the lumber truck, which was laboriously making its way up the hill on the far side of the dam. At the top of the hill, the road straightened and widened, and Tom pulled out and passed the lumber truck, giving a toot and a wave to the driver as he passed. Driving rapidly, he soon was ahead of the truck by a quarter mile or more, and two miles down the road from the dam, with rolling green fields of new corn spreading away from the road, he came to the Turnpike, and he pulled over and stopped the pickup. The lumber truck was drawing slowly up behind him.

Buddy, suddenly understanding, looked at his father with terror, then anger. “You sonofabitch.”

“You get out and stick your thumb out and that driver’ll pick you up,” Tom said in a low voice.

Buddy wrenched open the door and stepped out of the pickup and slammed the door shut behind him. Slinging his bags quickly to the ground, he waved up at the driver of the lumber truck hissing to a stop and showed him his thumb. The driver waved him up, and Buddy climbed aboard. Tom let the truck pass, then turned slowly around in the road and headed back to town.