Trailer Park Noir

Eleven

The phone inside the trailer was chirping when Anna and Kendra got back from running errands. Anna hurriedly unlocked the door and went inside, a bag of groceries in one arm. She answered the phone while still holding the bag.

While Anna talked on the phone, Kendra stayed outside and played with her new pet – a tiny pale-tan Chihuahua she had named Dexter. The little dog had fallen in love with Kendra at once when she first held him in the animal shelter. Dexter had licked her face frantically and quivered and wiggled in her arms. The dog was not unlike Conan, the main difference being his lighter color.

Anna came to the door. “That was the temp agency,” she said. “I’ve got a job this afternoon, but I have to go right away. I’m going to get dressed, okay? You gather up whatever you want to take to Aunt Rose’s.”

Kendra stomped a foot. “But Maah-meee! You said the next time you had to go out, you’d leave me to take care of myself.”

“Not this time, honey, I’m in too big a hurry, okay?” She disappeared from the doorway.

Kendra bent down and scooped Dexter up in her arms. She went inside, where Mommy was unloading the groceries into the refrigerator.

“Mommy, you said you’d seriously consider it,” Kendra said. “And this is perfect! It’s daylight. You can go straight to work instead of taking me to Aunt Rose’s. And it’ll still be light when you get home, light for a long time. If you get off at five. Will you get off at five?”

“Actually, I get off at four-thirty,” Anna said. “You’ll miss Vacation Bible School.”

“It’s okay, I can miss a day.” Kendra put Dexter down on the floor and spread her arms dramatically. “And see? Four-thirty! It’s only a little after noon now. You wouldn’t be gone long at all! Just a few hours! I can take care of myself, Mommy. Really I can. I’ll prove it to you.”

Kendra chewed on her lower lip as she thought. She put a fist on her hip and shifted her weight from foot to foot. She could tell someone to keep an eye on Kendra for her that afternoon. But who? There was Debra Connor in the trailer across the way, but – no, that wouldn’t work, Debra visited her parents in a rest home most afternoons, she was probably already gone. She could ask Mrs. Snodgrass – if she hadn’t started drinking already. That was what she would do.

“You won’t go wandering off?” Kendra said.

“No!”

“No cooking. I don’t want you using the stove while I’m gone.”

Kendra shrugged. “Too hot to cook, anyway. I’ll have cereal, or a sandwich for lunch.”

“I put the cans of dog food under the sink. You might want to go ahead and feed Dexter, because we don’t know when he ate last.”

“Okay.”

Anna sighed as she stared at Kendra.

“Whatsa matter?” Kendra said.

“I don’t know. I guess… well, I’ll worry about you.”

“Don’t worry about me, Mommy,” Kendra said with a big smile. “Dexter will take care of me. And Jesus and my guardian angel will watch over me.”

For a moment, Anna thought she was going to cry. She swallowed hard a few times until the feeling passed. “Well,” she said, “I should get cleaned up.” She turned and left the kitchen, and went down the hall to her bedroom.

Kendra picked up Dexter again. “Y’hear that, Dexter? Me’n you’ll have the whole house to ourselves this afternoon.”

The little dog seemed thrilled.

Muriel Snodgrass came to the screen door about thirty or forty seconds after Anna rang the bell. She was a fat pasty-white woman with a big belly, but spindly legs that came like sticks out of the baggy blue shorts she wore. Her black-dyed hair – and a bad job, too – was a mess. She wore glasses with big square frames, a baggy sleeveless top speckled green and yellow and white. “Yeah?” she said. She held a glass of something on ice in her right hand. It was the kind of glass handed out at fast food chains to promote movies. This one had some kind of superhero on the side.

Anna hoped the glass did not contain liquor, not at this early hour. It looked like ice tea.

Somewhere in the house, a television played loudly.

“Hi, Mrs. Snodgrass,” she said, smiling.

“Hi. Keepin’ cool in this heat?”

“Barely. It’s miserably hot, isn’t it?”

“You got that right. What can I do for you?”

“Well,” Anna said, “you’ve met my daughter Kendra, haven’t you?”

“Sure. Real purty girl, too, she is.”

“Well, you know she’s a little slow.”

“Yeah. Shame, too.”

“I have to go to work, and I’m going to leave Kendra at home by herself for the first time this afternoon. Would you mind keeping an eye on her for me? I mean, just from a distance, you know? See if anybody shows up while I’m gone, or something.”

“You expectin’ someone?”

“No, no, I’m just… “ She chuckled a brief, breathy chuckle. “I guess I’m just a nervous, worried mother.”

“Yeah, I unnerstand. I was that way with my kids, too. I devoted my whole life to ‘em. I dropped my life for ‘em, y’know? Now, do I hear from ‘em? Do they come see me? Do they call? Or even write me a e-mail? Nope. Not them. Too busy. Or they live too far away.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Anna said, trying to conceal her need to get away from Mrs. Snodgrass as soon as possible and get to work. The workers in the office at Redding Tractor and Lawn Mower needed a hand right away, and she did not want to make them wait any longer. “I really have to run, Mrs. Snodgrass, or I’d stay and chat.”

“Don’t worry, honey, I’ll keep an eye out for your little girl.”

“Thank you so much.” Anna turned and hurried back to the trailer.

She’d called Rose to ask her to drop in on Kendra while she was gone. But she’d gotten Rose’s answering machine. She’d called her cell phone, but it was turned off. Anna did not understand why Rose had a cell phone if she never turned it on.

Anna was dressed in a business-like blue-and-white suit and ready to go. She went inside and stood before Kendra, who was on the floor playing with Dexter with an old sock that had a knot tied in it.

“Sweetheart, I have to go,” Anna said. “Can you stand up for a second?”

Kendra got to her feet. “Don’t worry, Mommy. I’ll be fine.”

“I guess that’s my problem,” Anna whispered as she hugged Kendra. “I don’t like the idea that you don’t need me anymore.”

“Oh, Mommy,” Kendra said as she squeezed Anna. “I’ll always need you.”

They stood that way for a long moment, then Anna pulled away, pecked Kendra’s cheek, and said, “I’ve got to go.”

Out in the car, as she backed out of the carport, Anna noticed a man walking from the new trailer in unit five. He headed toward the Snodgrass house.

She stopped backing up for a moment, and watched him in the rearview mirror. There was something startlingly familiar about him. He had short dark hair, broad shoulders – he wasn’t that tall, but he was well built. And there was something about him… something. She frowned as she watched him in the mirror and tried to place him, tried to figure out where she’d seen him before. But she could not.

Anna drove out of the trailer park and headed for work at Redding Tractor and Lawn Mower.

Muriel Snodgrass heard another knock at her front door. It was really more of a rattle, because someone had knocked on the metal edge of the loose screen door. That made three so far today. What did all these people want all of a sudden?

The first had been Audrey Marsh from unit nineteen, wanting some sugar, because she was baking cookies and had run out of sugar and couldn’t run to the store because there were cookies in the oven. Muriel had invited her in and given her the sugar. Why she wanted to do any baking in such miserable heat was beyond Muriel.

Then it had been that woman with the beautiful retarded daughter.

So, who was it this time?

“Hank, get the door!” Muriel shouted. She was washing dishes. There stood on one side of the sink several piles of filthy dishes which had accumulated there over the last couple weeks. Muriel let all the dishes pile up awhile before she washed them. She didn’t wash them until they ran out of clean ones. That way she didn’t have to do it as often.

“Dammit to hell,” she said as she threw the sponge into the sink and dropped a plate with a clattering splash. She rinsed the suds off her hands, dried them on a hand towel, tossed the towel onto the counter, picked up her drink, and left the kitchen.

In the hall, cats scattered before Muriel.

As she passed the living room to the right, she looked in and saw her husband Hank slumped in his recliner, big belly sticking up out of the chair, a big, round, snowy mountain in a white sleeveless undershirt. A nature program played on TV.

“Useless,” she shuffled in her slippers to the front door. “Hi.”

“Hello, there, Mrs. Snodgrass.”

“Who’re you?”

“You don’t remember me? I’m Steven Regent, your newest tenant.” He turned and pointed. “Over there, in unit five.”

“Oh, yeah. Step back a bit.” When he did, she pushed the screen door open and invited him inside.

When he came in, Muriel gave him a good once over. He was good-looking, this one. Not too tall, but handsome and strong-looking.

“What can I do you for, Steve?” she said.

“I’d like to pay my rent for three months in advance.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. I hope that’s not a problem.”

“Oh, no. But I’m curious, Steve, whatcha payin’ rent in advance for? Or is that none of my business?”

“Not at all. It’s just that I like to get it out of the way so I don’t have to worry about it every month for a while.”

“Oh. Sure. Okay. You wanna pay your rent in advance, that’s just fine by me.”

He reached fingers into the breast pocket of the unbuttoned short-sleeve blue chambray shirt he was wearing. He wore nothing underneath it. From the pocket, he removed a check.

“That should be the right amount,” he said as he handed the check to Muriel.

She took it, tilted her head back, and looked through her bifocals. “Yep, right on the money.”

“Could I get a receipt for that?” Regent said.

“A receipt?”

“Yes, please.” He was still smiling.

He was a looker, all right, in his mid-thirties. A genial fellow. But there was something else. There was something about that constant smile. Muriel did not trust people who smiled all the time. It wasn’t natural – and usually, it was downright fake. If Mr. Regent didn’t lose that smile pretty quick, Muriel was going to get rid of him pretty quick.

“C’mon in here,” she said, leading him down the hall to the kitchen. Once again, cats scattered before her. The house smelled of them.

“How many cats do you have?” Regent said.

“Eleven.” She put her drink on the counter, then went to a desk against the kitchen wall on the right. The desk was cluttered with papers and big envelopes and books and magazines and even a shoe box. Muriel shuffled things around until she found her receipt pad. It didn’t take her long to find it – the desk was a mess, but she knew where everything was.

Muriel put the pad on a stack of books, then felt around for a pen. She filled the receipt out, referring to the check for the right total. She tore his copy of the receipt from the book and handed it to Regent.

“Howzat?” she said.

He looked at it. “Perfect. Thank you.”

“You all settled in now?” Muriel said.

“Yes, I am. Everything’s unpacked and in its place. I didn’t procrastinate at all this time, I got all the unpacking done the first day.”

“Well-well, good for you. What kinda work you do, Steve?”

“I’ve got a few very successful – what am I saying, wildly successful websites.”

“Websites, huh? Pornography?”

“I prefer adult entertainment.”

“Yeah, that’s what they’re callin’ it these days, huh?” Muriel went over to the kitchen counter where a half-full whiskey bottle stood next to two glasses, Muriel’s almost full. By her glass was a pack of cigarettes, a red Bic lighter, and an ashtray full of butts. “Can I get you a drink?” she said as she shook out a cigarette, then lit up.

His smile fell away then. “Nothing for me, thank you.”

“I been spikin’ my ice tea this afternoon,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper. “So you got websites with lotsa neckid women on ‘em?”

“Yes, something like that.”

“You’n my husband Frank’ll get along just fine. He looks at them titty sights all the time. He don’t know how lucky he is to have a wife don’t mind him lookin’ at them titty sites. You ain’t gonna have a big parade of neckid women comin’ in and out of your trailer, are ya?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that at all. We do most of our work at my partner’s house, anyway. We’re very discreet, I promise.”

“Okay. That’s good. This is a family park. I can’t have no pornography goin’ on all over the place for the kids to see.”

“Don’t worry, you won’t even know I’m there.”

“Sounds good to me,” Muriel said. “A quiet park is a happy park.”

She walked him back to the front door, said goodbye, then stepped outside and watched him walk to his trailer from the porch, smoking her cigarette. She looked at his trailer a long time, and the back end of his SUV – a very expensive SUV, she knew, because it was a Porsche.

Muriel went back into the house and turned into the living room, went to Frank’s recliner. “Wake up, Frank.”

He did not move. He was snoring quietly. For a change. When he snored in bed he sounded like an ill zoo animal. He snored in his recliner and he sounded like a purring cat.

“Frank!” she shouted.

Frank jerked in his chair. “Huh?”

“Wake up.”

“Dammit,” he said as he shuffled around in the recliner. He reached down and clutched a wooden lever on the side of the chair, pulled it, and straightened it up into a sitting position. “What the hell’s a matter now?” he said. Frank Snodgrass had a long, hound dog face, bald on top with a U of greying brown hair from ear to ear. He slowly stood as he said, “What’s so damned important that I couldn’t sleep a little while longer, huh?”

“There’s something wrong about him,” Muriel said.

“Wrong about who?”

“That man who was just here.”

“Who the hell you talking about? I was asleep, ‘member?”

“The man who just – Steven Regent, who just moved into unit five.”

“What about him?” Frank shuffled out of the living room and into the kitchen.

Muriel followed him, talking the whole way.

“What’s he doin’ here, in this trailer park?”

“What kinda question is that?” Frank said. He went to the refrigerator and opened the door below the top freezer. He bent down and looked in at what was on the metal shelves.

“Well, think about it,” Muriel said. She went to the counter and snubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray. “He’s got that beautiful trailer – that thing looks new, and it didn’t come cheap. And how about that Porsche SUV, huh? How much you think he paid for that? And he just now paid three months in rent. Three months.”

“So what?”

“Well, if he’s – what the hell are you looking for?”

“Nothin’.” He stood and closed the refrigerator door. He did that all the time, and it drove Muriel crazy.

“The so-what is that he’s here in this dump,” Muriel said.

“Maybe he just likes trailer park living, ever thought a that?”

“Then why this trailer park? This place is an old dump. Why would he come here? He’s got a lotta money, and he smiles a lot. Too much. Says he runs a few titty sites on the Internet.” She went back to washing dishes.

Frank was pouring some whiskey into the empty glass, and he stopped and turned to her. “Really? Titty sites?”

She turned to him. “Yeah, I thought you’d like that. You an’ your titty sites. I got a bad feelin’ about him.”

“Maybe the guy just wants to live in some outta the way dumpy trailer park, who the hell knows anything about anybody? You’re always tryin’ to figure out what’s goin’ on in other people’s heads.” He took a couple big gulps of whiskey, put the glass down, then came up behind Muriel and wrapped his arms around her from behind. He rubbed his hands over her belly, then slid them up and cupped her sagging breasts. “You gotta stop tryin’ to get into other people’s heads, my melon princess.” He kissed her neck.

Muriel laughed and put her hands over his. “I can’t help it. I see things other people don’t. And I’m seein’ somethin’ in that young man. There’s somethin’ wrong about him.”

“Don’t worry about him. He’s prob’ly innocent as pie. Hell, he runs titty sites, he can’t be all bad.”

“You know how lucky you are you gotta wife lets you look at them titty sites on the Internet?”

“Oh, yeah, I know how lucky I am. And you know the only titties I really want are yours.”