PROWLER
THREE HAUNTING TALES
by
Michael D. Britton
* * * *
Copyright 2012 by Michael D. Britton
COULDA, SHOULDA, WOULDA
I’ll never forget the day we went down to Johnson’s RV in Grants Pass and picked up Polly.
That’s what Margie called her – Polly Prowler the Travel Trailer.
It was the weekend before the July 4th weekend, 1979. Must’ve been, oh, a hundred ten degrees – heat waves coming up off Highway 199, making everything look like a mirage. The air was filled with the smell of campfire, and the mountains appeared through a thick haze, since half the Siskiyous seemed to be on fire, with air tankers flying overhead every half hour to dump water on the flames like bombers.
We started to wonder if there’d be any natural wonders left to take the trailer to.
Bill Johnson was a friend of mine from back in the day, and I’d recently hooked him up with a mortgage for a new place he was buying out on the Rogue. His RV dealership was the biggest in Southern Oregon at the time, and we took all afternoon to walk up and down the rows of gleaming campers, trailers, fifth wheels and motor homes.
For Margie, Polly was love at first sight.
Three-tone paint in marigold, white, and a thin strip of brown along the sides, a roll-out awning, retractable footsteps to the dual doors (a new feature for the ’79 model), and a pair of shiny propane tanks perched at the front of the tongue.
We stepped inside and, despite the heat, it cooled off pretty quickly once both doors were open to let a breeze through.
The inside was spectacular. Dining for four that converted into sleeping for four (in the form of a bunk bed), a nice little cooking area, lots of cupboards everywhere, and even a little fridge that could run on electricity or propane.
I ran my hand along the smooth counter top leading back through the place down the left side.
In the back was the bedroom, separated by a handy little concertina door held in place by a strap with a snap. The bed was cozy but comfortable, and the place smelled like a new car.
The bathroom had toilet, sink, and a little shower stall.
There was even a pair of little skylights with crank handles to lift the lids like hatches.
But the clincher for me was the roof antenna. You could actually crank that sucker from flat to fully standing and extended using a hand crank in the ceiling near the front door. Then I could watch the game even if we were somewhere in the woods of – well – wherever!
Margie loved the bright green flowery curtains throughout, and even the pattern in the linoleum.
The only issue to discuss was the price.
“We’re asking $3,499,” Bill had said.
Wow. I had to take Margie aside.
“Are you sure this is the one?” I asked.
My wife of twelve years looked up at me with her soft brown eyes, smiled, and said, “Absolutely.”
“Well,” I said to Bill, “Is that the best you can do?”
He pulled out a pocket calculator and pushed his sunglasses up onto his forehead. After punching some keys and frowning a lot, he said, “How’s $3,000 even sound?”
“Like a sale.”
#
Polly didn’t see much action the first couple years. We took her out to the majestic California redwoods that next weekend for Independence Day, sniffed the misty air, felt the ancient presence of the giant thousand year old trees. But then Polly went into our four car garage for the rest of the summer as life managed to eat up all our “spare” time.
The kids loved it when we’d take her out for weekend trips to the cool south coastal rivers, staying in little campgrounds surrounded by tall fir trees and serenaded by the gurgling of rivers with names like Winchuck, Chetco, and Sixes. We even saw a black bear one time – scared the crap out of the kids.
But we really only got to do the coast trips a handful of times before Margie got sick.
The cancer changed everything.
It wasn’t long before we forgot all about Polly, focusing our efforts, and spending all our vacation money, and using up all our vacation time on trying to beat the Hodgkins.
She was in and out of remission for years. Throughout that time, we spoke of the grand road trip we were going to make once I retired.
First, we’d take Polly out and dust her off real good, shine her right up, check her tires, stock her up with food and supplies.
Then we’d take out the map, throw a dart, and head for it. After that, we’d hit all the National Parks on our way back home. I was looking forward to Yellowstone and Mount Rushmore, with their rocks and trees and rivers and history.
Margie wanted to see just how flat Kansas really was, and said she hoped to see a tornado (from a distance). She also wanted to see the monuments of Washington D.C., and I was hooked on the idea of checking out the Chicago blues scene on our way to the Great Lakes. Neither of us were too interested in visiting the swampy south of James Lee Burke, but the arid Indian areas of New Mexico sounded intriguing with their angular-patterned blankets and colorful foods.
Of course, the deep, orange Grand Canyon was a must.
Before long, we had a list – a huge list – and it seemed like once we got underway we’d be on the road for a full year before we’d seen everything we wanted to.
It gave us something to look forward to, something to live for.
But the month before my retirement, Margie’s extreme back pain kicked in – a sign that the Hodgkins was gaining momentum.
The day after my last day at Capitol Mortgage, she was officially in Stage IV. A party for me one day, a sock in the gut the next.
She needed round the clock care, so we packed our bags - not for the great lap of America, but for a one-way trip to Rogue Valley Medical Center.
Two months later, Margie was fading. She wasn’t responding to treatment anymore. She’d accepted that fact.
I hadn’t.
I knew there was no use fighting it, but I couldn’t imagine life without her.
The kids were all there when she slipped away.
Off to her own solo adventure.
I went home and opened the garage to the smell of rubber tires. The sunlight glinted off Polly’s still-shiny paint. After twenty years, she hadn’t aged at all.
I dropped to my knees and placed a hand on the tow hitch, the other flat on the cold garage floor, hung my head, and cried like a baby.
PROWLER
I’d been skinned and gutted.
Five and a half years of trauma and abuse stripped away who I was, made me nearly empty inside, made me utterly alone.
In retrospect, it seemed almost methodical, the way she’d isolated me. First, she eliminated my friends, then she alienated my family, leaving me floating and unanchored.
Once I was hers alone, she smelled blood and began to dismantle my mind and scoop out my quivering soul.
Before long, I’d allowed myself to be placed under her control, like a cheap plastic toy. If she lifted a finger, I jumped. If she gave me a certain look, I knew a fruitless all-night “discussion” was ahead.
I lived in constant, utter, desperate fear.
The fear smelled like alcohol and vomit and stale smoke, tasted of Alka Seltzer and saltine crackers. It took my breath away and made my hair stand on end. To the untrained eye, the fear looked like a good time, masqueraded as a party. But it was really the devil laughing at you, cursing you, shooting verbal daggers at you, pulling you down into black quicksand, suffocating you.
Or rather, suffocating me.
Despite the removal of the shackles, the invisible chains of fear lingere
d on for those ten months in the travel trailer after she left.
The travel trailer: my place of exile and the place where I began to reconstruct my life – to rediscover myself.
My heart still pounded when I thought I heard something outside that 1979 Fleetwood Prowler – thought it was her mistakenly coming “home” from another bender.
It was easy to remember each night to lock each of the two doors to that little cage. Inside, it smelled like twenty year old vinyl. It rocked and creaked a little as I walked through it, ducking to avoid the miniature crank handles in the ceiling for raising the skylight hatches - even though they were slightly higher than my head. My footsteps caused barely-audible metallic vibrations in the screened doors and windows.
As my brain was beginning to re-open, having been closed for business the past several years, I had to carefully cordon off certain areas that were condemned and too dangerous to wander around in. Like when I went to bed at night on that too-short bed in the back – a spongy four inch “mattress” atop a plywood surface. I simply had to ignore the fact that we’d slept in that firm, cramped bed together. If I considered that too closely, I’d surely find myself lying awake, nauseous from the taste of my salty tears.
#
I think Dale and Jamie Lopez saved my life.
I was alone and in a slow state of recovery. They saw my need. They showed me genuine friendship – offering their driveway in White City as a place of refuge to park my lowly twenty-foot home with the twin, cream-colored propane tanks perched on its nose.
I ran a bright orange extension cord from their garage outlet to my trailer, so I could read at night, and run my CD player with a library of cathartic music from Pink Floyd, to Eric Clapton, to Tom Petty. None of the music from the last five years, mind you.
As the weather warmed, I’d crank open the little louvered windows and let the breeze ruffle the stiff green flowery curtains that were clearly original to the trailer. The smell of dry grass would drift in, mixed occasionally with barbecue smoke.
Most nights I’d eat dinner inside with the family – lots of cheap-easy food, as you’ll find in any struggling family with five kids – tacos, hot dogs, beans, bread and stew. The untidy house smelled like the family’s black lab. Seeing a relatively normal family interact over a humble meal was jarring and comforting at the same time.
Back in the sacrosanct privacy of my trailer, I avoided using the toilet, in order to prolong the time between “emptyings.” A trailer has two large tanks housed under the floor – gray water (from the sink and shower) and black water (from the toilet). The black water needed to be discarded into an approved drain at a service station (a major pain when you don’t own a truck with which to tow the trailer), but the gray water could simply be bailed out, a bucket at a time through the external valve, carried into the house, and poured down the toilet (also a pain).
Gray water is only a small step up from sewage when it comes to the smell. Step into a porta-potty that hasn’t been serviced all summer, shut the warm plastic door, and take a deep breath. The Lopezes let me carry that stomach-turning stuff through their house, fifteen, twenty trips. Every few weeks.
That’s friendship.
As summer wore on, I learned a little of what it must be like to be placed in a North Vietnamese sweatbox. The metal roof of the trailer absorbed the sun’s rays and radiated the heat inward. As the temperature rose, twenty years of crud started to cook. Even a trailer that is clean on the surface has microscopic detritus ingrained into the green-and-brown fabric of the dining banquet, the stainless steel edging around the tiny kitchen sink, and the corrugated magnetic strip around the dinky refrigerator door. The stifling energy caused it all to begin evaporating. Despite my effort to reflect heat by painting the roof white, the summer was thick, stuffy, sweaty, and long.
#
When she came to visit me, a surreal experience, it felt like an invasion of friendly enemies. Like someone suffering from Stockholm syndrome, I’d actually missed her a little, and seeing her sober and seemingly humble twisted my stomach in knots.
The last time she’d been here, we were married. This was our place.
This is my space now.
My life.
Say your peace and get out, please.
She didn’t smell like the alcohol and the vomit – she wore that one perfume she used to wear when we first met – the high-class one that mixed flowers with dollars.
And yet, behind it somewhere, as behind her subtle smile, there was the same odor of death and misery, deceit and subterfuge, villainy and debauchery, confusion and pain.
#
Several months later, I sold her the trailer. I had a place of my own now – a real place – and no more need for the charity of the Lopez family.
I hadn’t learned my lesson yet, though, and I trusted that woman one last time. At least this time it was with my money, not my heart.
She promised to make payments on the trailer. As any healthy and sane person could’ve easily predicted, I never saw a dime. After months of forbearance, my calls were met with attitude, excuses, lies, vitriolic anger – all the usual weapons from her arsenal – ones I’d seen her rotate through in a matter of minutes when drunk, like someone with multiple personality disorder, or a soul possessed.
So I repossessed it.
The trailer, that is.
It was sitting abandoned on her dad’s property, so I just hooked up to it with a friend’s truck (I felt on pretty safe ground, legally, since this friend was a lawyer and local judge) and towed it back to his place.
Mission accomplished.
Next day, I was sitting at my desk in the dry air-conditioned air of the KDRV newsroom, the bank of monitors overhead showing what all the competition was up to. Mid-morning, I organized my show and wrote a few voice overs - all the reporters out gathering stories for my newscast – only the sound of the muttering police scanner to keep me company. My ears pricked up when I heard: . . . report of theft at 4626 Corbey Road, complainant says trailer was stolen some time yesterday.
I immediately picked up the phone and dialed the Jackson County Sheriff.
“Uh, yeah, that was me. Yes, it’s actually my trailer, I was just repossessing it. Uh huh. Oh, sure, I understand. No, no problem. Yes, I appreciate it. I’ll take care of that. Okay, thanks again. Bye.”
The Sheriff was on my side, but kindly recommended I return the trailer and file a small claims suit instead.
Before taking it back, I went inside. The air was stale. She and her boyfriend had really trashed the place over the last few months. Something sticky remained on the narrow kitchen counter, and it was clear she’d been smoking inside. I opened the cupboards and junk poured out – papers, receipts, books, bags, shoeboxes – probably dislodged from all the recent towing around of the little camper.
I sat on the edge of the bed, but immediately got back up.
It felt like sin.
I could feel her eyes on me, sense her tendrils snaking into my brain once again.
I stepped out down the two little retractable black metal steps of the back door, and closed the door with a metallic thud that shook the attached screen door.
#
It took months longer for my day in court (she’d filed for two continuances), and when it eventually came, I was beyond prepared. Wearing my dark blue suit and a clichéd red power tie, I arrived in the echoey corridors outside Jackson County courtroom number two a full twenty minutes early, carrying my manila folder with exhibits “A” through “G” carefully organized behind my well-crafted opening statement. My parents came along as witnesses, dressed in their Sunday best.
I dreaded having to see her again – I could feel my blood pressure rising as the hour drew near.
That dark soul was stalking somewhere, and soon we’d be face to face once again.
The fear-induced adrenaline made my temples pound as the heavy courtroom doors opened and I
took my seat at the long, curved oak table, but the confrontation I dreaded was not to be.
She was a no-show.
I didn’t even get to present my masterful case, the automatic, bittersweet “winner.” The judge ordered a new title be issued in my name, and I was free to repossess and resell the trailer.
Hooray.
I returned to my former home at its location on her dad’s property and performed the gruesome task of emptying all of her belongings – her personal effects – out of the trailer and into a little dark brown wood shed nearby. I felt no reverence for her things – I had to resist the urge to literally chuck them out onto the ground.
Touching her stuff actually felt sickening, like a mutual violation.
I went home and washed my hands, then took a shower.
#
Like my psyche at the beginning of the year, my court victory was somewhat hollow. She’d used up the trailer as she’d used me up, leaving it in much the same condition she’d left me – dirty, broken, nearly useless, of little value to anyone but a patient, ambitious restorer.
In fact, the trailer was so beat up, when it eventually sold, I only got a fraction of what I’d originally paid for it.
But now the trailer had become money, and the money would soon become something else, and sooner than later, I’d be several degrees of separation from the smell of fear, the taste of betrayal, the sound of the devil cackling, the sight of decay, and the touch of the prowler.
LIBERATION
Alone in the travel trailer, summer crickets chirping through the screened, louvered windows and little skylight hatches.
But this time, the fear is on a backburner, simmering gently. It used to boil quickly, bubble over and sizzle – and I’d always get burned.
This time, I was safe, but years of conditioning kept that back burner softly lit.
Shara would never find me here in this out-of-the-way camp spot down by McKee Bridge on the Applegate River out past Ruch. We’d shared this trailer as our home for the last few weeks of those seven awful years, and the thick green curtains, creaking floor, and the knife-hole in the brown pseudo-wood cupboard made me think of the times she’d terrorized me in her drunken rages.