Chloe at the End of the Trailer Park by Sam DeLeo

                  ​DaLee_pl CC



Chloe at the End of the Trailer Park


   When I could afford to be, I was a college student during the years I lived in Durango, Colorado. I had escaped an itinerant stretch of homelessness and was trying to finish what I started at a university in Ohio before dropping out.
   Technically, I was still semi-homeless. I lived in the shell of a condemned trailer that had no heat or water. It was located at the fence-restricted base of a uranium mill tailings pile. Some of this uranium had made its way to the Manhattan Project during WWII.
   The campus sat on a mesa that overlooked an Old West panorama. In contrast to the massive San Juan Mountains to the north, rock ridges and foothills surrounded the town in bands of gold and red, sloping toward vistas of desert to the southwest. Flowing from 14,000-foot peaks, the Animas River, or River of Souls, curled along the tracks of an old narrow-gauge, steam engine train that still made daily rounds.
   The school provided free tuition to Native Americans, one of the few colleges in the U.S. to do so, and drew students from the Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, and nearby Southern Ute and Mountain Ute tribes, among others. I once attended a Navajo wedding inside a teepee that opened to Shiprock, a massive formation of volcanic rock resembling a grounded clipper ship jutting from the vast desert floor, and recall feeling how it seemed unlikely for anyone to spend time in this part of the Southwest and not be affected by it in ways that were hard to verbalize.
   The summer had ripened but not cooled by mid-August. As another afternoon of hanging out and drinking in the trailer park wound down, the yellow light of early dusk was reflecting off the chipped paint jobs on many of the trailers. The junipers dotting the base of the smelting mountain, where the uranium tailings lay on a ridge about 1,000 feet above, were lit in such a way you could spot the cobwebs between their branches.
   I had spent three days working anti-construction at a roofless building across the highway from the trailer park. The basic premise was, you sat on top of a cinderblock wall and knocked out the cinderblocks in front of you with a mini sledgehammer, hoping not to knock out any of the blocks beneath your ass and plunge to the ground. I never fell, but I did startle many families of bats, who would explode from the wall in a blur of black wings and chalky cement dust. It happed several times. You never got used to it.
   A dark-haired guy worked the building’s opposite walls. Across the distance we made what felt like eye contact a few times over the three days, as if searching each other for an answer as to what we were doing there. But we never spoke. I’d worked construction without ever gaining much in the way of skills. Anti-construction felt less complicated.
   With some money from the job, I had purchased plenty of vodka and beer. I was drinking outdoors at a picnic table. Lacking insulation, the trailer was a sweaty hothouse. Brief stretches of spring and fall were the only times it was not either a hothouse or icebox.
   I spotted Chloe step out at one end of the trailer park. I called her over to have a beer. She walked over but stopped several feet away.
   “You don’t want a beer?”
   “Not right now. My fiancé is getting out today.”
   “What?”
   With wavy, wheat-colored hair and a slender shape, Chloe was the Queen of the Trailer Park. I had notions but never made an advance. We had become occasional drinking buddies, and now I was feeling it was for the best we had never become more than this with the surprise of her fiancé’s release. She had never even mentioned having a boyfriend to me before. I wanted no part of a reunion with an imminent ex-con.
   “Long story,” she said, “but, maybe later?”
   “I’ll be passed out by then,” I said.
   To my mind, the fact that there was nothing between us other than our drinking companionship was magically written on our foreheads for everyone to see. So I still hoped to chat with Chloe for a while, but was now more conscious of the time.
   “You can have one beer now,” I said. “One damn beer, come on, it’s a nice day.”
   She relented and grabbed the can I extended.
   “So, how much time did your fiancé do?”
   “About two years. He was supposed to get out at five o’clock, they said. So, he’s already almost two hours late. They ‘say’ five, but you know how that goes.”
   “Yeah.”
   I had been jailed for stretches of a few days, so no, I didn’t actually know how it goes in a federal penitentiary, and felt very fortunate not to know.
   “I told him to call me, but I doubt he will. He’ll just show up.”
   “Right.”
   This was the first of many timeclocks I began to keep, checks on conversation to measure the risks of meeting her fiancé while drinking with his girl, against the pleasures of getting to speak with Chloe.
   After the first beer, I opened one for her with nearly every beer I got for myself. It was just good drinking manners. I felt the buzz of my day-drinking easing toward a rosy evening. Once we started in on the vodka, slamming a few shots here and there, I decided the next round of beers must be our last. I’d pretend to call it a night, and she would go back her trailer and wait for her fiancé.
   Toward the town of Durango and up and down the valley along Highway160 West, also known as the Navajo Trail, patches of red rock, sandstone and thin, pale-green grasses glowed in the remainder of daylight, as the shadows began to widen. The summer days were getting shorter. I was not prepared to attend a semester of school, but had already pre-paid for some of the fall classes.
   “You don’t seem very excited about your fiancé coming back.”
   “I am,” she said, flashing her blue eyes toward her trailer. “It’s just been hard. I visited him almost every month. But a couple of years have gone by.”
   I didn’t want to pry. It seemed a good time to get the final round of beers and make another timeclock assessment on the way.
   As I returned, I lifted my gaze above the embankment of the trailer park and spotted a shirtless man walking on the berm of the highway against the traffic flow. For all I knew, he had been shirtless for miles by now. I stepped into the dirt turnaround in the middle of the trailer park. The man looked to be about 6’3” and heavy set, but he was moving at a good clip. He eventually made a left into the park and headed down the driveway.
   I turned back to the picnic table to ask Chloe if the man was her fiancé, but she was already making her way back to her trailer. I called out weakly but she didn’t turn around. I watched her right calf, the one tattooed with a tug boat and the words “tug life” underneath, pull up in front of the closing screen door.
   As he made his way to Chloe’s trailer, the man held his stare on me until he passed. Orange light began to fade from the ridge where the sun was submerging. I gathered my empties off the picnic table and took refuge in my shell.
   I had the comfort of my candles, battery-operated lamps and flashlights for guidance, as well as the refrigerator I used as an ice chest for my drinks.
   In what could not have been more than 15 minutes since I moved inside, there was a knock at the door.
   “This is Randy,” Chloe said.
   He still had his shirt off. From a few feet away, I could now see he was burned like a lobster over most of his torso.
   I tried to quickly retrieve some drinks and keep them outside at the picnic table, but they walked in and seated themselves on my torn leather sofa.
   “It’s cooler outside,” I said.
   “Too many bugs,” said Randy.
   I put some beers on my rickety coffee table and took a seat on a folding chair in the corner, where I could turn up my battery-powered boom box to drown out conversation if needed.
   “Got any weed?” he asked.
   He had taken out some leaf tobacco and was rolling a cigarette on the coffee table.
   “I’m out,” I said, “trying to save money.”
   “What for?”
   “Going back to school.”
   “If you can pay for school, you have money.”
   He looked at me sideways, rubbed his straggly blonde goatee and licked the seam of the cigarette.
   “I get a little Social Security, father died when I was young. My mother and stepfather send money for my tuition. I get the rent and living expenses.”
   “Rent? For what? This?”
   “Thirty-five dollars. Got to keep it legal — no offense, to each his own.”
   “What the fuck are you talking about?”
   “The couple I rent from say squatting’s against the law in this state.
   “And so you don’t have money for weed?”
   “Not right now.”
   “You got a job?”
   “Not right now.”
   He laughed — at what, I wasn’t sure.
   I looked at Chloe. She wasn’t laughing at me with Randy, but her polite smile felt too practiced for me to take it as an encouraging sign. The lamps I had spread out on the floor of the trailer lit faces from the bottom up. While her neck and mouth softened in the light, her eyes were in shadow, and glistened a dark blue.
   “Need anything, Chloe?” I asked, as Randy had finished the beers on the coffee table. “I’ve got bottles of orange and grapefruit juice on ice, too.”
   “No. I’m good.”
   She hadn’t had a drink since they arrived. I had opened another handle of vodka to fuel the vodka tonics Randy and I dispatched with the beer.
   “What’s the matter?” Randy asked and turned to her on the sofa. “You don’t appreciate his hospitality all of a sudden now that I’m here?”
   “No, Randy,” she said. “That’s not it, I just don’t want to get any drunker right now.”
   “Why not? I thought we were celebrating me being out and all?”
   “I am celebrating, and I’ll have a drink later, just not right now.”
   “But you can drink around him just fine when you’re alone? Huh?”
   I couldn’t tell if Chloe was about to speak again because Randy backhanded her in the mouth with his knuckles so quickly.
   “Hey!” I yelled and scrambled to my feet. “Get the fuck out of here!”
Heroic action wasn’t in my repertoire. Instead, I lifted the thin coffee table in front of the sofa over my head and smashed it against the floor, which triggered a blur of images, starting with Randy getting up from his seat.
   A drunken scrum ensued, though not much more than pushing and shoving. Chloe stood up from the sofa with blood in her mouth. I saw the pain in her eyes and instantly felt guilty for looking away. I motioned with my head for her get out, to go, even though I wasn’t sure where she could go. Maybe to head west for the next town in the desert or the one after that, maybe to keep going until L.A., where broken promises could be more commonly shared, to be anywhere but here.
   That was the way the night should have ended, instead of with Randy screaming threats. And, it was vaguely how I envisioned it had ended as I sweated through the next morning’s hangover, shifting back and forth between sleeping and waking.
   Through fevered images, I saw the back of a girl who looked like Chloe walking west up the Navajo Trail highway. The farther she walked, the more traffic thinned. Until the roadway was completely peaceful, empty except for her.
   It was a near-dusk sky again. The bronzed horizon backlit her hair. A freedom filled her form. She swung her arms loosely back and forth like a child. One stride after another and another, like it was easy.

Sam DeLeo’s writing has appeared in Glass Mountain, Hobart, Paste Magazine, Culture Matters, and the London-based fiction magazine Talking Soup, among others. He currently lives in Denver.

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