Trailer Park Tramp

The cops busted my neighbor in the trailer next door again last night. I could hear Larry calling them motherfuckers as they dragged him out, see the pulse of the cop car strobes through the ragged Venetians that barely covered my trailer bedroom window.

Larry was a tweaker who stayed up for days at a time, tinkering on his rusty yellow Ford Pinto or just watching TV spun out, and he'd told me over beers from the broken Styrofoam ice chest on his tiny deck that he had outstanding warrants. He'd pissed off the old bitch three trailers up one too many times, and she'd called the pigs on him. Finito. It was just a matter of time.

I could hear the baby crying in the trailer on the other side, frightened by the sudden noise and light, and the chopped staccato crackle and pop of the cop car radio as they called in to dispatch.

I find it interesting that people fight cops. It's like fighting the weather -- except the weather doesn't automatically beat the shit out of you in response and throw you face down on the hard plastic backseat of a police cruiser, arms handcuffed behind your back.

I've spent time in county, that's all. Nothing to write home about, especially when all they give you to write with is a four-inch golf pencil that goes dull in five minutes, and if you sharpen it yourself and they catch you, it's considered a shiv and they toss you into solitary.

Jail is so boring your soul comes to a grinding halt after a few days and you can feel your life running down the drain and all you can do is listen to the chatter -- nobody ever stops talking, day and night, they never turn the lights off, and none of it means a thing except the judge when they finally put you in front of him in shackles and striped pajamas that don't fit, and if you're lucky he's in a good mood and gives you time served and cuts you loose to go back out into the bleak daylight to find a job and another place to live, since most of the time you've lost both on the inside.

Guys like Larry seem to take it in stride -- I guess there's nothing else to do? For them it's a seasonal event, a reverse-holiday. Larry said he'd been in jail about thirteen times in ten years, best he could count.

I'd been in twice, once for fighting in a bar and once for -- well, never mind. I got off lucky that time. Never again. Never.

I was surprised the assholes had time to answer penny-ante disturbing the peace calls with all the hold-ups going on lately. The Budweiser Bandit, because he always stole a sixpack of Bud along with whatever was in the till.

That's small town cops for you. People could get murdered on the street and the cops'd be out making pot busts, or answering noise complaints.

The guy had hit about every liquor store in town, including my favorite one up the street, Big Daddy's Liquor. The little blonde who works mornings when I get off work told me he was more or less white or possibly Mexican and wore a ski mask and was real polite, except for the .45 in one hand and the stolen sixpack in the other.

I couldn't go back to sleep after that. It was 12:41 a.m. and my night off at the plant, but I was used to being awake for graveyard shift and it had been a stupid idea to try to go to bed in the first place. My brain was tired as hell but my body thought it should be punching the clock.

I got up finally and turned on the little lamp and rolled a cigarette.

The cops were gone with Larry and the baby had been shushed to sleep, apparently.

I smoked in the silence. Well, not silence-silence. Someone on the next row had their TV on and I could almost figure out what they were watching. The hum of traffic continued unabated as always in the distance.

Down by campus the college kids were whooping it up in the bars, angling to get laid, spending their parents' hard-earned cash on beer and music and the frivolities of youth.

I'd lived here a year in this run-down rented trailer and usually it didn't bother me, but all of a sudden I felt claustrophobic. I had $75 in my wallet that I need to stretch a few days, but the thought of drinking a cold beer in a frosted mug surrounded by spoiled, sleek sorority girls ... no, fuck that, but I needed a drink, and the few cans of beer in my rattling old fridge wouldn't cut it at all, so I'd have to go out.

It was warm outside even this late. I stood smoking under the street light in the gravel lane between the rows of trailers and watched clouds of insects swirling around it, and bats darting frantically down like kamikazes looking for dinner.

"What happened to Larry?"

She stood on the shabby wooden deck of her trailer, holding a sleeping baby in her arms. Her name was Kayla. She was small and sexy, with a little round bubble-butt cupped by her ragged daisy dukes and little tip-tilted teacup titties. It was all offset in a kinky way by the black eye she was sporting. Her hair was the color of a last-minute sunset, and her eyes were green.

I knew she had an old man. He drove a purple '72 Buick Skylark that smoked and had a black Elvis mullet and muttonchop whiskers. He was another Confederate sympathizer like Larry. Rebel yell!

I gestured toward the sagging Airstream three trailers down. "Mrs. Chinaski called the cops. They were fighting before you got home. She said he was playing his stereo too loud. He told her to piss up a rope. He's lucky she didn't stomp his ass."

"I was at Walmart," Kayla said. "My boyfriend Johnny Ray is locked up too. For a few days anyway. They're friends."

"Him and Mrs. Chinaski?" I grinned.

"No," she said, rolling her eyes at my joke. "Larry. They're friends."

I shrugged. "You want a beer?"

She nodded a little and joggled the baby, which had stirred in her arms. It burrowed deeper and slept.

I stepped over to Larry's porch, where four cans of beer floated in the cold water of his fractured ice chest, grabbed them and went back.

Someone had a radio on. "Papa Was A Rodeo" drifted through the air.

She had put the baby away someplace inside and we sat on Walmart lawn chairs on her deck and watched the bats whir.

"When I was a kid," she said, "we all used to go camping down by the river in the summer -- me, my mom and dad, my two uncles and their families, my grandpa and grandma, even my Pappy -- my great-grandpa. He was old as hell but he could get around pretty good. He ran moonshine when he was young. Anyway we'd fish in the river and put our fish on a stringer and leave them in the river overnight, and then get up the next morning and clean them and have fried fish and potatoes for breakfast.

"But sometimes turtles would come in the middle of the night and eat the fish right off the stringer, and when you pulled them out the next morning all you'd have was a stringer full of fish heads."

I digested this briefly. "And this story has what to do with anything?"

"Beer me!" She crumpled her empty and gestured for another. "It reminds me of this whole fucking place up here, where I am now," she said. She must've started earlier; she was already getting a buzz. "Johnny Ray tells me we're gonna be all set, but where is he now? Shit. It's all just a stringer of fish heads."

"Where you from anyway?" I asked.

"New Orleans." She smiled broadly, popped open her beer can and raised a toast. "Here's to the Upper Ninth Ward! Everywhere else sucks ass!"

I drained half my beer. We were going to run out shortly. I had to do something but I didn't want to drive. Then I thought of Larry's trailer.

"Be right back," I said.

I jimmied Larry's door with the butter knife he kept on the porch rail for that purpose. He had most of a liter of Jim Beam under the sink, another sixpack in the fridge, and I rummaged around in his freezer till I found his bag of weed. He still owed me for running him all over town on a snipe hunt the week before, looking for whatever the hell he was looking for that night; this would make us square.

I awkwardly rolled a hooter and we smoked it on her porch and drank the rest of the beer. A train moaned a few blocks over where it passed through town on its way to Kansas City.

She got up and went in to check on the baby. I watched that ass as she wobbled out of sight. God damn. She came back in a minute and flopped down in the chair.

We spent the next hour ruminating and getting real fucked up. She was talking about her childhood and how she met Johnny Ray, which was the last fucking thing I wanted to hear about, but I just kept watching the way her mouth moved and her little pink-painted toenails when she swung her feet, and the way her titties pressed against that little shirt she wore.

"I gotta tinkle," she said after awhile. She rose and wove her way inside and down the hall out of sight to the right.

I sat there for a few moments, fumes swirling through my brains, until something snapped and I rose and followed her in.

She was sitting on the toilet in their grubby little bathroom, panties around her ankles, peeing. She was actually a blonde. She looked up at me and smiled crookedly. "Hi," she said.

I dropped to my knees in front of her and ran my hand between her thighs to her furry muff. I slid two fingers inside her, hot pee cascading around my hand. I kissed her while she pissed. She kissed me back, face hot, her little tongue working in my mouth, and I pulled a handful of her thick red hair while I finger-fucked her on the john. I bit her on the neck. After a minute she came with a shudder and a groan.

When she finished I rolled her onto the floor on her back, pulling the pink panties off with one hand and unzipping with the other.

She didn't fight back. She had fading bruises on her thighs, and I added some fresh ones as I pulled her closer and slid all the way inside her with one wet thrust.

After awhile she wrapped her skinny legs around my back, so I pinned her wrists to the floor and stabbed her in the guts over and over for a long, long time.

She came three or four more times, grunting and gasping each time and having these little seizures where she locked up all over stiff as a board, but I couldn't get a nut for the life of me.

Ah, alcohol, the two-faced friend.

Finally she was gasping, "Stop! Stop! I'm dying! You're murdering me with that thing!" She pushed me off, and I rolled over on my back on the tile floor and lay breathing hard like a beached porpoise.

"It's okay, baby." She curled up against me and slid her hand down and fondled me.

"It happens to Johnny Ray sometimes," she said. "I mean -- wait -- ..."

I didn't want to hear about Johnny Ray's limp dick so I went to the couch in the front room and she retrieved the rest of Larry's beer and put it in the fridge. I took one.

"Don't be upset," she said.

"Relax," I said. As I rolled another joint I looked the room over. It wasn't too different from mine -- tiny kitchen with microwave and dirty stove and fridge, shitty little bar, card table with two chairs and a baby seat, and in the "living room" section, the couch I was on, with its springs sprung, a broken recliner, and a rusty folding metal office chair.

There were pictures taped to the wall by the recliner, several of them, all Xeroxes of old-timey photos of guys I didn't recognize. Some of them were obviously mugshots.

I lit the joint and gestured. "Who are those guys?"

She smiled. "That one is Morgan Earp, and that one is Frank James, and that one is Alvin something, and that one is Fred Dillinger."

"I've heard of Wyatt Earp and Jesse James," I said. "Those were their brothers. But I never heard of Fred Dillinger."

"Oh yeah, Johnny Ray is up on all those guys," she said. "The brothers. He says nobody pays enough attention to them, they're thrown out of the limelight, but they were just as good as the famous ones."

"So Johnny Ray's in jail," I said.

She nodded, hitting the joint, lungs full of smoke. I took it back.

"Yeah," she said, her voice low. "He keeps doing so good, then he fucks up. We're saving up to go back to New Orleans, but he keeps getting public intoxes and shit like that and we have to start over. He says he has a job lined up as soon as they cut him loose from jail, though."

"What's he do?" I asked. "For a job?"

She hesitated. "This and that. He's a handyman. He works on cars. Stuff." She looked blearily over at me. "What do you do?"

I told her. Nothing glamorous about the wheel factory -- constant loud noise and heat and chemical stench, conveyor belts far above carrying the aluminum rims from casting deck to chemical tanks to de-burring stations, spray booths, testing lab -- an orgy of hell basically. All the new girls they put in the paint booths and they came out at the end of their first shift covered in silver glitter paint like the alien chicks on Star Trek, crying their eyes out. Most didn't come back.

After awhile she stirred. "I gotta check the baby," she said. "What are you doing tomorrow?"

"Off all day. Work tomorrow night at eleven."

"I take the baby to my sitter and work till four," she said. "Stockroom at Walmart. But I'll be home after. Come on back over if you wanna."

"Will do," I said. Time to go. I handed her the rest of the joint and stood up. "What's that baby's name anyway," I asked.

"Jolene," she smiled. "Jolene Clementine Fontenot. She's a Cajun girl."

I went home. I took the weed and the last of the whiskey with me.

I sat in the dark by my window with the little fan on, sipping whiskey and thinking. After awhile I heard her door open and shut and then, unexpectedly, music.

I peered through the screen and could just barely make her out in the dim cast off glow of the street light. She was playing a fiddle. It sounded like funeral music or something -- long and slow and lonesome. She sat erect in her ratty lawn chair, chin tucked, drawing forlorn notes out of that piece of wood, filling the night with beautiful misery.

This I had not expected. I finally drained the liter and stretched out on the couch, exhausted at everything. I drifted off to sleep with her music in my ears.

I called in sick to work that night. It had been a long day. The gal at the other end of the line sounded bored and unconvinced, but neither one of us cared.

I wasn't sick, just restless. I sat smoking cigarettes and nipping a pint of Fighting Cock, watching the lights in Kayla's trailer as dusk set in. I couldn't get her off my mind.

I knew goddamned well I shouldn't go over thee. But I couldn't get her off my mind.. She was contagious. When her lights went off at ten-thirty, I sat there in my own darkened trailer, kicking myself for skipping work and kicking myself for just sitting there.

At midnight I couldn't sit still any longer. I'd finished the whiskey and it hadn't done a thing to change my mind.

I popped the lock on her trailer door with Larry's butter knife and stepped inside. No lights. I crossed to her bedroom door and looked in.

She lay on her side, half covered by a sheet. The light from the streetlamp outside pooled on her bare shoulder and rounded thighs. I stepped alongside the bed. In the corner was a crib, and in the crib a small mound breathed silently. Jolene.

I reached down and ran my fingertips along the smooth skin of Kayla's bare arm. It made me hard, just touching her like that.

She opened her eyes and looked straight up at me. I pulled off my t-shirt and threw it on the floor. She slid up and tugged at my belt buckle. I helped her get my pants open, and she reached inside and pulled out my half-erect hardness.

She looked me in the eye as she slid my cock into her mouth. She sucked on it earnestly, gripping my hips as her head bobbed in and out. She moaned down in her throat.

I ran my fingers through her hair and traced the delicate shell of her ear. Then I pulled her face hard into my crotch, bumping the back of her throat with my cock.

She didn't choke. She paused, then began circling my cockhead inside her warm wet mouth with her tongue. Around and around and around. And her head began to slide back and forth again.

I came suddenly, hard. She paused only a moment before continuing her wonderful blowjob, working my cock with her tongue as she swallowed my load.

She lay back on the sheets and looked up at me. "What took you so long?" she asked. She patted the mattress beside her. "Come down here. It's my turn now."

I joined her on the bed and stayed there till morning.

Larry got out of jail sometime the next morning. About noon, right after I got up bleary eyed, his yellow Pinto pulled into the drive, and he walked into my trailer without knocking, like Kramer on "Seinfeld," if Kramer was a crackhead with white power tattoos and bad teeth. He seemed a little edgy.

"Do you mind if I use your bathroom to shoot up?" he asked. He had the works in one hand.

"Be my guest," I said, gesturing broadly.

"Some asshole's been in my trailer," he said.

"That was me. I drank all your whiskey. And your beer. And smoked all your pot, with Kayla. Now we're even for that road trip you took me on last week. I'll run you down to the liquor store directly and we can stock up again."

When he came back from the bathroom a few minutes later, thumb pressed inside his elbow, he was his old self, which is to say, jazzed up but relaxed, looking around, his eyes spinning like centrifuges.

"You gotta watch out about Kayla," he said. "That's Johnny Ray's old lady, he would go nuts if he knew you was hanging with her."

"He's in jail," I said.

"His brother was a badass," Larry said.

"Who?"

"His brother, Bobby Joe McCaskill. You remember all those big bank robberies in Seattle, millions of dollars? Like twenty years ago. He had a couple guys. They went the whole nine yards -- disguises, everything. He lived in this giant million dollar treehouse out in the woods, had a secret arsenal under the barn floor, it was amazing. The only way they caught him was they figured out how when he'd hit the next bank depending on how long it took him to spend money, how long between robberies, how much money he stole, shit like that."

"So what happened?" I think I read a book about this guy in jail.

"What you think happened?" said Larry. "They were waiting for him. They blew the shit out of all of 'em. The other two guys are doing life in the pen. His brother tried to go on the lam. They found him hiding in a camper in some old lady's back yard. When they surrounded the place he blew his brains out."

I thought about all the pictures on Johnny Ray's living room wall. "So what," I said, "if his brother was a badass? He's dead."

"Yeah," Larry said, "but Johnny Ray will be home in about two days."

Larry wandered on later to run some errands, he said, and left me sitting in my living room trying to put all the pieces together.

I walked around awhile that afternoon. Up and down, thinking. All I could think about though was Kayla, and the way she looked staring up at me and the way she tasted and the way her little ass felt in my hands.

Her old man -- Johnny Ray -- was the Budweiser Bandit, that was almost for sure. It had been staring me in the face the whole time. Maybe it would be very convenient if it turned out he was the Bud Bandit, but shit, all the facts fit. She'd said he was pulling another job as soon as he got out of the pokey, and then they were leaving town for good.

I couldn't let her leave. I tried to think. There was just something about her that drove me nuts. Those skinny legs, those eyes, the way she moaned when I was on top of her. That fiddle music. It was too much. If I didn't have her with me there wasn't any point in anything.

I ended up on the main drag off campus, where all the bars were. Ended up at Swifty's Pool Hall. Most of the places along the street were sports bars, crap like that, fancy joints with 101 beers on tap, $7 a throw, bright and peppy and full of horny college kids with too much moola and too little goddamn sense.