“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 cinderblocks and entered her home.
Then, in August that summer, a quarrel between Terry Constant and his older sister Carol, who were black and 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 doubtlessly 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 late 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. A few years ago she had come up from Boston 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. Then her mother down in Boston had died, and Terry had come with his sister for a spell and had 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 tousled 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, honkey!” 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 had ceased hammering and had turned to stare at the girl across the road. He was wearing a tee 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 noise-making 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 suddenly 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, and 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.”
“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.
“Listen, I won’t hurt ol’ Elbourne. I just want to see him. I ain’t ever seen a guinea pig before,” the man said.
“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!” he said, sneering.
“Oh,” Flora said, as if she now understood everything, and she extended the animal toward Terry so he could see it entirely. It was a long-haired animal shaped like a football with circular, dark eyes on the sides of its head and small ears and almost invisibly 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?”
Flora looked at him suspiciously, the way you’d look at someone accusing you of deliberately withholding information. “I said so, didn’t I?”
“Suppose you did.”
“Here,” she said brusquely, “give him back,” and she reached out for the animal.
Terry placed Elbourne into Flora’s hands, and she turned and walked swiftly on her short legs back around the front of her trailer. After a few seconds, her door slammed shut, and then 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 then he turned and strolled off to get some sleep so he could leave this place behind him again early in the morning.