Trailer #846

Trailer #846

“So,” Marlow said. He handed over the key with a tight, strangled swallow. “That’s pretty much all you need to know, Joan.” The brass was old and dark scratches marred the shiny metal. Carved into it shallowly were the crude, scratched numbers, ‘8-4-6.’ It was cold and damp in my palm.

Marlow stuffed his hands in his ragged jean pockets. His forehead was coated with sweat and his short, unwashed dark brown hair stuck up in greasy chunks. He blinked for a second too long. He swayed as he looked at me, his pupils cloaked in heavy eyelashes. Mud clung to his tennis shoes.

His seventy-four-year-old mother, Betsy, fell four weeks ago while preparing a Thanksgiving turkey. She smacked her head on the counter and impaled herself with a kitchen knife. She’d be in the hospital for a while. Maybe another month.

I glanced at the disintegrated pop bottles and crumpled candy wrappers littered on the counter. Old cigarette smoke lingered in the air, even four weeks later. Betsy smoked like a chimney—she’d colored the walls with tar. “So, Poopsie needs to go out every two hours?” He nods. “And she’ll still pee on the floor, right?”

“Yes,” he said, as his eyes glazed over, tracing crumbled blankets and crumb-filled plastic containers that once held Safeway coffeecake. “There’s fresh towels in the washing machine. Poopsie probably has a condition, but I don’t know what. I didn’t realize she was this bad.” I didn’t know if Marlow meant the old woman or the dog. “After my mother’s out of the woods, I’ll take Poopsie to the vet. First thing.”

Marlow exhaled, like a release valve. He handed me nine hundred-dollar bills from his back pocket, crumbled and stained.

“An advance,” Marlow said. “Three hundred a night, two weeks.”

I nodded. “I’ll take good care of Poopsie.”

This rattled something in Marlow. “…Yeah. Poopsie’s kind of a tough one. She doesn’t like anyone except the neighbor girl—and well, you know.”

I did know. Mariah Banks disappeared from her yard on a Tuesday afternoon, four weeks ago. Around two AM, I stumbled awake as a bald cop pounded on my door. He held up a photo of a nine-year-old girl in a school uniform, a gummy gap where her two front teeth should be. I shook my head, then signed the information to my deaf roommate, Rocko, who did the same. Mariah wandered around the trailer park often, so I’d technically seen her. But I lived in a shithouse apartment a few blocks away. I didn’t know of her.

The school portrait hung on Betsy’s dirty fridge, its corners trapped between commercial plumbing magnets, along with her missing poster. The middle creased against the fridge.

Marlow grabbed his dark leather wallet. “I’m off to the hospital. Thanks,” he said, bland, soul elsewhere.

Somewhere, a Dollar Store solar clock dinged.

...

The odor of urine, cigarettes and moldy food permeated the trailer. It reeked—worse than eye-watering. On my way to Betsy’s room, a particularly heavy cloud hit me in the doorway. “Oh, Jesus,” I cursed and dry gagged. I threw open the faux wooden door, stained with liquids of an unreputable past. “Poopsie?” The stench of rotten chicken hit me like a train.

A poodle sat on the bed. Like the rest of the mobile home, it hadn’t seen a bath in months, nor a groomer in years. Its brown fur clung in matts; wide eyes barely visible under the sticky layers that threatened to eclipse its view completely. “Poopsie?” I said and stepped forward. My stomach churned. This wasn’t just a dirty house—this was animal abuse.

As I navigated the piles that looked suspiciously like discarded adult diapers, a low growl emitted from the poodle. Sweat jumped out of my pores. It snapped its yellow, rotten teeth. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just Joan,” I murmured. The growling grew more insistent, and so did the smell. It was so thick and ossiferous that I could taste it.

I eyed a cluttered escape route. Water damaged cookbooks, moldy fallen picture frames and all kinds of garbage littered the foul-smelling bedroom. Betsy did not favor any single fast-food joint. A variety of wrappers lay scattered on the damp carpet.

The dog paused to pant, open mouthed. Thick, foamy saliva dripped onto the dirty blankets. Its eyes dilated, expanding into giant black holes. “Poopsie,” I said, “it’s okay.”

It growled again, a low, angry sound. A pit formed in my stomach.

I busied myself with the trash in the doorway. Maybe Poopsie would get used to me. To survive the two weeks, I would have to sleep in the room. The only other option was the living room, but Mount Laundry—filled with moldy underwear and old socks—blocked my path. I picked up an old soda can that looked like it’d been there since the 90s and discovered it was: Crystal Pepsi. I wrestled with another from the 80s. I retrieved a solid white plastic bag and stuffed more garbage into it.

“Arrrrrrr…” Poopsie roared—a sudden crescendo.

“S’okay, Poopsie.”

“Errrrr…”

A rhythm nearly formed, lift-and-scoop above the noise of Poopsie, but as I lifted a half-rotten McDonalds bag, the stench of rotting chicken washed over me once again. With a dim sense of dread, I realized the garbage provided insultation against the stench. I stuffed my nose into my cardigan, closed my eyes and inhaled the soft scent of Bath and Body Works: Apple Blossom body spray. The splotchy pattern of ancient, half-rotten carpet appeared, wet to the touch.

Two weeks, which means fourteen days times three hundred a day which equals—I paused to calculate—forty-two hundred. You can do this.

“Poopsie,” I mumbled into the cotton of the shirt, “it’s okay. You’re okay, sweetie.”

The poodle snarled with a spring-loaded snap but remained fixed to the yellowing sheets. Its eyes bulged; its pupils dull like sea glass.

I reached for another bag, this time with an Albertsons logo, but older. It seemed vintage. Maybe I could sell this on eBay, maybe it’s a collectable—and the top half of the grocery bag broke off. The plastic had decomposed and turned into a putrid, brown mass, mangled with the garbage below it. Didn’t grocery bags take 10,000 years to break down?

I groaned. Betsy created an environment so pro-biotic that plastic couldn’t escape, and I was to sleep in it. I looked to Poopsie, who growled—and passed gas. It startled and looked around.

“It’s okay, Poopsie. It’s just your butt.”

Poopsie growled.

It would be a long day.