Five

 

From the south you enter Belleville via Route 13. The monotony of fallow crop fields quickly gives way to the tedium of fast food joints, strip malls, auto repair shops, and decrepit 1940s cottages. Streets choked with pickups and the occasional muscle car. It’s a town of thirty thousand. Thirty thousand slugs with no imagination, no interests beyond televised sports and crappy beer.

That’s where I come in, with the sports and crappy beer. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Belleville. Mostly hate, but the fact is I fit right in here. I wouldn’t feel right being someplace else. Some place better.

When I was a teenager all we talked about was getting out. Moving to Florida or Texas. A few of us did. A few of us joined the military, saw some of the world’s real hellholes. Iraq. Libya. Pakistan. Afghanistan. Suddenly Belleville didn’t seem so bad. Don’t get me wrong, it was still bad, but now we knew it could be a lot worse. After our tours of duty most of us drifted back. Turns out you can drink bad beer and watch sports just as easy in Belleville as you can in Jasper, Florida or Denton, Texas. And the rent is cheaper.

To me, the best thing about Belleville has always been that it’s close to places that aren’t Belleville. Places you could drive to or take a bus to. Like St. Louis. St. Louis was the best thing about Belleville. And that ain’t saying much.

We grew up in the shadow of the Stag brewery, once the largest employer in town. When I was fifteen, the brewery was sold to some big, out-of-state operation. The new owners promised to keep the brewery open, but before the ink had dried on the contract the bastards had shut her down and tossed thousands of my neighbors out of work. And not just any work, but good-paying union jobs. As the seventies and eighties wore on the town’s other major businesses followed suit. The stove factory. The shoe factory. Closed or moved overseas. Eventually, even the coal mines outside of town shut down.

The knockout blow came when a massive shopping mall opened in a nearby town. Ripped the barely beating heart right out of our one-hundred-and-twenty-five-year-old downtown while the city fathers stood around with their dicks in their hands and their thumbs up their asses.

The few shops that survived went under when the Super Walmart came to town.

Today, Belleville is a town in name only. It’s more a collection of dilapidated houses ringed by fast food joints. The largest employer in town is the county jail.

We lose population every year. The middle class moves farther and farther out from town, sets up its own gated enclaves in pasture land and the poor drift in to take their place. Slumlords buy the homes for pennies on the dollar, rent them out to poor folks on housing assistance and illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, the houses, the neighborhoods, the schools deteriorate. It’s the same old song all over the Rust Belt. There you have it. That’s my town in a nutshell.

 

 

Vince’s trailer was parked out back of our grandparents’ house a half mile south of town. The little white farmhouse seemed to shrink in size every time I saw it. Soon it wouldn’t look any bigger than a cheap doll house. Both grandparents were long dead and a single mom rented the place. Amber McFall worked as a waitress at Denny’s and raised a two-year-old girl and tried her best to keep up a cheerful front, even though her world was pretty much shit. Amber was the kind of girl who never had a chance. She must have known that since she was twelve or thirteen. That’s the age when teachers and school counselors begin telling a few select students that they have promise, that they can go far—as in far away from this dust bowl of dreams. But to the Amber McFalls of the world, they don’t say a goddamn thing. Nor to the Denis Carrolls, the Vince Carrolls. They don’t even see you.

Before he was sent to the work camp, Vince used to mow the grass and mend things on the property in exchange for parking his trailer rent-free. I don’t think anybody mowed the grass or fixed anything since Vince went away. That was probably my job, considering it was my fault that Vince went away. At least partially.

Amber and some gal I didn’t recognize sat on the front porch steps smoking cigarettes as we pulled up to my grandparents’ house. Amber wore a long black coat with a gray fluffy hood over her beige Denny’s uniform and she hugged her knees to her chest. Her friend had on a man’s dark brown Carhartt jacket and a green stocking cap. Amber’s little girl was bundled up in a gray bubble coat and green scarf and swung upside down from an old snow tire hung from a sycamore branch. The ugliest dog I’d ever seen—looked part rat terrier and part opossum—ran circles around the little girl, yapping stupidly. The little girl stopped swinging when we pulled up and hurried over and stood between her mother’s knees and eyed us suspiciously.

But what really drew my attention was the trailer.

It was in far worse shape than I’d imagined. Besides the busted window, part of the roof had collapsed. So had the rest of the porch. Like I said, Chad and I had talked about fixing the place up before Vince came home—turning on the water and electricity and airing the rooms out a bit, but I guess we both expected the other one to handle it.

Vince eased out of the van and glanced at the trailer. “Man, the trailer has sure gone to hell the past four years.” He glanced at me. “Thanks for keeping the place up, bro.”

I didn’t say anything. He was right. It looked like a meth lab had blown up.

“Probably skunks and shit living in there,” he said. “Hell of a homecoming for a war hero.”

That war hero thing was wearing thin. He’d been out of the service six years.

“That’s your place?” Pritchard said, making a sour face.

Vince nodded halfheartedly.

“I don’t know, dude. I think skunks got too much class to live there.” Pritchard nodded toward the little white farmhouse. “What about that place? Can’t we bunk there?”

“Who said anything about you bunking anywhere?” Vince said. Then he turned to me. “Who are the old ladies?”

“The one of the left is Amber. She’s renting the house. And she ain’t old. I don’t know who the other one is.”

Vince studied her. “She looks familiar.”

She did, but damn if I could place her.

The rat-possum wandered over and sniffed Vince’s hand. “You’re an ugly little guy, aren’t you?” he said. “Yes you are! Yes you are!” He squatted down and let the dog slobber all over his face. “What happened to Leah?” he said.

“She moved out two years ago.”

“Really? Where’d she go?”

“No idea. Just moved out one night. Owed us four months’ back rent.” I paused. “Well, owed Sara.”

We walked past Amber’s Ford Escort and a dusty silver Camry and wandered over to the house. It occurred to me I should have warned Amber about Vince coming home.

Too late now.

“Hey Amber,” I said.

Amber’s face darkened and she pressed her little girl close. “Denis,” she said coolly.

“This here’s my brother Vince.”

Vince grinned. “How do?”

I nodded toward the trailer. “Um, that’s his place over there.”

The three females continued to stare blankly at us. I nodded toward Pritchard. “And this here is…uh…” I shrugged. “Never mind about him.”

A blackbird hopped on a satellite dish on the roof of the trailer and Pritchard picked up a stone and flung it at the bird. He missed by a mile, but the stone shattered some more of the broken window glass.

“Fuck you, man.”

Amber flared. “My little girl don’t need to be hearing that kind of talk!”

Pritchard rolled his eyes and chuckled softly to himself.

After a moment, Amber lifted her eyes toward me. “This is my friend Erica.” Erica looked away and blew cigarette smoke out her nose like she was bored beyond words. Amber whispered something to Erica, and her friend took the little girl’s hand and led her inside. The mutt trailed behind them.

Amber stood up and cut her eyes toward me. “Denis, can I talk to you a minute?”

“Sure, hold on a second,” I said. I went for my wallet and pulled out a cashier’s check, which contained Vince’s cut of the bar profits for the past four years. I turned to Vince and stuffed the check in his jacket pocket. “Your cut,” I said.

He took the check out of his pocket and stared at it for a moment. “Really? That’s it? That’s four years’ profit?”

“Uh huh.”

He shoved the check back into his pocket. “I don’t know how that place stays open.”

“Tell me about it. Anyway, that ought to help you get on your feet.”

“One foot, anyway.”

“I’m going to take off in a minute. I got to pick up the twins. Let me know if you need anything, okay?”

“You’re leaving?” he said, a look of concern etched across his face.

Pritchard had wandered over to Vince’s pickup. He kicked one of the truck’s four flat tires. “This is the truck you were talking about?” he said to Vince.

“Denis?” Amber called.

“Yeah,” I said. “Coming.”

I gave Vince a hug. “Good to have you home.”

We moved around the side of the house. An empty concrete slab sat where my grandparents’ air conditioning unit should have been. The slab was covered in colored chalk drawings. A house, a mommy, a little girl, a dog, and a cat. I looked around for a cat, but didn’t see one. Amber drew on her cigarette and leaned in, her voice tight. “He isn’t living here, is he?”

I shrugged. “That’s his home.”

“I know, but he isn’t living here?”

“Well—”

“Denis, in case you forgot, I’ve got a little girl. You expect us to live out here alone with a pedophile?”

The wind picked up a little and made a raspy breath through the bare branches. Amber folded her arms against the cold and dipped her head. I studied the frozen crop fields beyond the treeline and thought how I just wanted to go home and sleep till this day was over. “He’s not a pedophile,” I said.

“No? What is he then? What was he in prison for?”

“He’s harmless,” I said.

She glared at me, waiting.

“He’s a nonviolent offender, okay? It was a victimless crime.”

“I read the papers, Denis. He killed someone.”

“If you read the paper you’d know it was self-defense.”

“Bullshit. He did five years.”

“Four years. And that was for drugs,” I said, before I realized how that sounded.

She shook her head disgustedly. “What about that other one?”

“Pritchard?”

She waited, tapped her foot.

“Armed robbery, I think.”

“Goddammit, Denis!” she cried. “What are you thinking?”

I looked away. I’ll tell you what I was thinking. I was thinking about that nap and maybe a hot shower. I wasn’t asking for much. I studied the ground where dozens, maybe hundreds of cigarette butts littered the dirt. Among the weeds lay an empty pint of cut-rate vodka.

“You know that trailer isn’t fit for fleas to live in,” she said. “The roof’s falling in. There’s no water or electricity.”

I shrugged. “I’m working on that. Meantime, you think you could run an extension cord out to the trailer? We’ll deduct it from your rent.”

Her eyes flashed angrily and she stamped her foot.

“Come on, Amber, where else is he going to go?”

“He could stay with you.”

I shook my head. “You don’t know my wife.”

She lowered her eyes. Actually she did know my wife. My wife had babysat Amber when they were younger.

“Then he could stay with your brother,” she said. “Or he could get an apartment. I don’t care what he does as long as he doesn’t stay here.”

I looked over at Vince’s old pickup parked behind the house, the tires cracked and deflated. I wondered if it would start. Probably not. Probably the battery was shot. That wasn’t on me, though. Chad was in charge of Vince’s truck.

I made a show of looking at my watch. “I need to pick up my kids,” I said and turned to leave.

“Denis, where are you going?” she cried. “Denis!”

I turned the corner, leaving her on the side of the house with the butts and vodka bottles, and hurried back to the van. None of this was my problem. Sara owned the house. Let her deal with Amber. I had my own problems to worry about.

 

 

Vince and Pritchard stood on the porch of the trailer, gazing through the front door.

“It ain’t so bad,” I heard Vince say.

“Oh man, somebody took a shit on the floor,” Pritchard said. “Is that human?”

I eased into the van and cranked the engine.

“Denis!” Amber said. She came around the corner of the house, looking pitiful and angry in the frozen mud of the front yard.

Vince turned and called after me, too. “Hey, bro! Wait up a second!”

I waved to them and slammed the door. I shifted the van into drive and made one-hundred-eighty-degree turn bouncing over the hard, rutted terrain. I turned up the radio so I didn’t have to hear them shouting after me as I rolled down the gravel road toward home.