The Trailer Park Princess
‘Tis the Friggin’ Season
a short story by
Kim Hunt Harris
First, I probably need to explain why I had signed up to be walking, alone and unarmed, into the creepiest house in town, belonging to the creepiest guy in town – a guy who was rumored to believe he was an alien and to have an impressive collection of Shirley Temple dolls in his bedroom.
Here’s a little back story. You know that one relative who’s always so lame at Christmas, and instead of thoughtful gifts, brings pathetic excuses? That’s me. Except instead of being the one relative, it’s my entire family. Mine is a small family – it’s just me, my mother, and my G-Ma. But we all equally suck at giving gifts.
G-Ma’s problem is, she’s a tightwad. She hates to spend money unless she thinks it will impress others. Her “Midnight Maroon” Lincoln. Her clearly-fake dyed red hair. She mentions to anyone who’ll listen that she’s an independent businesswoman who has owned a hospitality business for twenty years. She doesn’t mention that it’s a seedy motel on the old highway that’s frequented by prostitutes and drug dealers, and a favorite of vice squad sting operations.
My mom is not a cheapskate, she’s just completely self-involved. She doesn’t think of another human being unless they’re standing right in front of her, and sometimes not even then. I have clear memories of helping her work out her excuse for not bringing a gift to countless Christmas dinners, birthday parties, etc. “Okay, here’s what I’m saying. I ordered the gift, but it got all banged up on the delivery truck so I had to send it back. They’re supposed to send a replacement within two weeks.” Mom had a stock set of answers for follow-up questions: the company re-sent the gift, but this time it was the wrong color, and she’d picked that color out special just for you; they sent it to the wrong house – it ended up in Idalou, Ohio, for Pete’s sake, not Idalou, Texas – doesn’t anyone know what a zip code is for?; she spent two and a half hours on the phone with company management trying to iron out the problem, and by the time it was all over Mom made herself sound like a true friend who would stop at nothing to get the perfect gift for her friend. No one had taken “It’s the thought that counts” more to heart than my mom.
As for me, I’m not cheap. I’m happy to spend money on me or anyone else. And I’m not self-involved (much). I have lots and lots of ideas for Christmas gifts for the people in my life. I found a navy blue cashmere sweater for my friend Viv at the mall. It would look gorgeous with her white hair, and I thought she would love it. Plus it was a turtleneck, which could be a nice gift for Viv’s neighbors at Belle Court Retirement Village, since Viv is sometimes inordinately fond of showing off her cleavage. Apparently the rest of her body was eighty-something years old, but the cleavage was somewhat newer.
I found a yearlong once-a-week car wash membership for G-Ma at her favorite full-service place. For my neighbor, Frank, tickets to the MMA tournament coming to town in January. For Mom, nothing but cash would ever do, so I didn’t get to devote too much “thought” into that gift.
Anyway, I’m not cheap, and I’m not self-involved. What I am is broke. Perpetually, consistently broke. Despite the fact that I have a job. Despite the fact that I rarely spend money on myself. Almost always, what I am is stupid with money.
Case in point, this Christmas. I had actually managed to save ahead. Not much, but a few hundred dollars, and I was kind of excited when Christmas decorations started to go up all around town.
And then, Rodney.
This stupid old friend from high school showed up at Flo’s Bow-Wow Barbers, where I work as a dog groomer, with an “exciting income opportunity.” Normally I have better sense when it comes to falling for a sales pitch. Okay, not really. Normally I’m too broke to fall for a sales pitch. You can’t spend what you don’t have, right? I’d ruined my credit years ago, so I couldn’t even afford to go into debt. But like I said, I had saved a few hundred dollars and Rodney brought out this laminated flip book with flow charts and arrows and dollar signs, and showed me how I could make six figures selling water filters to my friends and family, and all for a very minimal investment.
The thing is, the water in Theta, Texas is really bad. And Rodney was convincing. He’d sold water filters to his entire family (“I wouldn’t dream of letting my kids drink plain tap water now, no way!”) and they sold filters to everyone they knew, and they sold filters to everyone they knew, etc. It was a multi-level marketing thing, and Rodney was planning a vacation to Aruba and he only worked a couple hours a week.
I didn’t care about a vacation to Aruba, and I didn’t even really care to change careers and be a full-time water filter kingpin. I did care about having some extra money, though. Being broke all the time has kind of lost its luster. I could take my few hundred dollars and turn it into a few hundred more. Pay for Christmas gifts, maybe save up for a new-ish car, keep my head above water for a change.
So I plunked down my few hundred dollars and signed up, thinking I could start with G-Ma. Her little strip motel had twenty rooms.
No go. “My customers aren’t here to get a drink of water, Salem.”
I tried Viv, but swanky Belle Court already filtered their water through some master system. I asked my neighbor Frank, but he just blinked and stared at me. Frank pretends not to understand much English unless it starts with, “Se habla stay for dinner?”
I sold one filter to Tony, but it was clearly a pity sale, and even he couldn’t convince anyone else in his family to buy. Yes, the water in Theta was bad. But guess what? Walmart sells these nice little filters that screw right to the faucet and cost about twenty bucks. Work like a charm.
So I was depressed and annoyed with myself when Trevor Jergensen came to the grooming shop and said he needed a house sitter for three days while he went on a ski trip to Santa Fe. He was willing to pay decent money, too.
Normally I looked for reasons to leave the room when Mr. Jergensen came into Flo’s Bow Wow Barbers. For one thing, he’s creepy. He talks like a robot, completely monotone. And he never looks directly at you. He stares at a point just beyond your left shoulder the entire time he’s talking to you. No one knows why. There’s nothing obviously wrong with his eyes – they look normal enough. It’s like he’s stuck in a perpetual game of “Made You Look!” It is pure torture watching Flo first dart glances over her shoulder, then try really hard not to look over her shoulder.
For another thing, Flo is unsure how to pronounce his name, and every time she says it, it’s different. Jorgensen. Yurgensons. Jurnigen. And once, inexplicably, Shermanson. It’s impossible for me to stay in the same room with all that and not get the giggles.
Mr. Jergensen had some kind of tropical bird at home, and he came to Flo’s once every few weeks to buy seed and toys for it. He wanted someone to stay overnight, and was having a hard time because all the university kids had already left for winter break.
No one wanted to break it to him that the reason he was having a hard time wasn’t because the students were gone, but because he was a friggin’ weirdo. He was a single guy who talked in a weird robot voice and he never made eye contact. Years ago he had dated one of Theta’s most beautiful and richest girls, Desiree Boulder, and she said he confessed to her that he had been brought to Earth by his alien parents (hello Man of Steel?) and that he collected Shirley Temple dolls. That’s why he was having trouble finding someone to watch his bird.
But then, he’d never met anyone as desperate as I was. “I’ll do it,” I said, without even thinking about it.
Flo’s head whipped around and she gave me a bug-eyed look.
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I ignored her and walked to the counter. “I’d be happy to do it,” I said. “I take care of the boarders here sometimes. Flo can vouch for me.”
Another bug-eyed look from Flo. I eased over and stepped on her toe.
She scowled at me and drew her foot back. “She’s very responsible,” she said flatly.
Mr. Jergensen stared at the wall behind me. “Please be at this address by 3:30 tomorrow afternoon.”
He handed me a card, then turned and left.
The moment the door closed, the entire shop was on me.
“Salem, are you insane?” Flo shouted.
“Oh Lord!” Tammy, the dog bather, said. “You cannot go over to that man’s house. He thinks he’s an alien, you know. What if he tries to, you know, beam you all up or something?”
“You guys need to get real,” I said, in part to reassure them, in part to reassure myself. “If there was any truth to those rumors, don’t you think he’d be locked up in some hospital somewhere? People just talk about him because he’s a little different.”
“A little different? A little different?!”
“Take deep breaths, Tammy. You’re about to hyperventilate.”
“Promise me you won’t go out there by yourself,” Flo said.
“Who’s going to go with me?”
“Not me,” she and Tammy said in unison.
“Although I kind of want to,” Flo said. “Just to see.”
“I know!” Tammy said. “I’ve heard so many rumors about that place. They say all those Shirley Temple eyes follow you as you walk by.”
I lifted a schnauzer to my grooming table and started to brush him out. “He’s just a guy,” I said calmly. I wasn’t going to let them talk me out of this. I had actually prayed for help just that morning, and then Mr. Jergensen had come in. He was the answer to a prayer. God loved him even if he was frigging creepy.
I did a mental calculation. He said he was going to be gone for three days, and it was a week until Christmas. Plenty of time to get paid and get my shopping done. It was all working out as if it was, indeed, divinely inspired.
Promptly at 3:30 the next afternoon I drove up to Jergensen’s address. Out of habit, I drove past the house and stopped a few down. I always park a few houses away when I go see someone, because I’m embarrassed about my car. Go ahead and think it’s silly, or fake. You haven’t seen my car. You can’t judge me.
But then I whipped the car around and drove slowly back by the house, scoping it out. It was a light stone, with a rusty iron fence around the yard and iron balcony on the second floor. It looked like a haunted house from a 1970s sitcom.
I drove a few houses the other way and stopped, then flipped open my phone. I punched in a number.
“Patrice Watson, please,” I said as formally as I could muster. I’ve known Patrice Watson since Kindergarten, when she was called Trisha Thompson. That was before she was married, of course, and an anchor on the local news.
“You’ll never believe where I am,” I said when she picked up.
“Jail?” She sounded a little bored.
“Not this time. Remember that haunted house when we were selling Girl Scout cookies?”
“What? Salem, I am at work, you know.”
But she didn’t actually sound that busy, so I went on.
“We were in second grade and you had to sell all those Girl Scout cookies. So your mom dropped us off in town and we went door to door, remember?”
“I have a vague recollection.”
Overachieving runs in Trisha/Patrice’s family. Her mom was the Girl Scout leader and she’d overzealously ordered several cartons of cookies too much, in the belief that there would be a run on Thin Mints. However, we lived in a little town in West Texas, and even though everyone loves Girl Scout cookies, in Idalou, Texas, “everyone” means what it means, and when the market is tapped out, it’s tapped out. So we had a surplus to unload. What Trisha’s mother was thinking when she dropped us off in a residential neighborhood in Theta (the “big city” compared to neighboring Idalou) and left to run errands I don’t know, but it sure as heck wasn’t Stranger Danger.
I looked around. I guess I couldn’t fault her too much, though. It was a nice enough neighborhood. And she was still better than my mom, who had offered to teach the kids how to make vanilla extract out of vodka and vanilla beans, except she never got around to buying the vanilla beans and all the vodka went down her own throat.
“Remember when we came to that haunted house and we couldn’t decide if we should go up or not?”
“Haunted house? What are you talking about?”
“That creepy stone house with the iron balcony and the crooked fence? Remember? We stood on the sidewalk for the longest time before we finally worked up the courage to go up. We lugged that box of cookies up to the porch and rang the doorbell. Then this old stooped-over old guy came around the corner and yelled at us. ‘What do you want?!’ And you screamed and ran? Is it coming back to you now?”
Trisha laughed. “Oh, yeah. I remember that. That was hilarious!”
“Yeah, it was hilarious for you. You ran while I stood there with the scary old man and a big box of cookies. Your cookies.” My mom had refused to pay my Girl Scouts dues, so I got to “visit” the group from time to time as a prospective member. I couldn’t have the official Girl Scout t-shirt with the clover on it. I really wanted one of those t-shirts. “Then I picked up the box and tried to run, but the box was too heavy. I made it to the sidewalk, but then I tripped over the box and bonked my head on the concrete.”
“Yeah, I do remember that!” Trisha said. Like we were skipping down memory lane, holding hands.
“I had a knot on my forehead for class pictures.”
Trisha laughed again. “Oh yeah! Oh man, you looked funny.”
“Thanks.” Trisha and I had been best friends until about halfway through high school, and only recently reunited. At the moment, I was re-thinking the reuniting. “Anyway, I’m about to walk up the sidewalk to that same house. I’m pet-sitting for a client. Trevor Jergensen.”
Trisha gasped. “Salem, no! You know he’s completely psychotic, right? He thinks he’s an alien trapped here and his overlords communicate with him through Shirley Temple movies.”
“That’s just a rumor, though, isn’t it? I mean…do you know something?”
“Nothing official, just rumors. It’s not like we can get a news story out of someone being weird. Someone has to actually die before it becomes news.” She sounded bored again. “He lives in that old house now?”
“This is the address he gave me. Do you think that old guy was his father? Or his grandfather?”
“I suppose se. His dad died a few years ago, if I remember right. Maybe he inherited the house from the same place he inherited the creepiness.”
Because I really was starting to get kind of freaked out, I said, “You know, you’re in the news business. You aren’t supposed to be going around saying stuff like that unless you put ‘allegedly’ in front of it.”
“Oh, please. You know everything I say to you is off the record. I have to go. Try not to get probed.”
I stared at the phone, the call now disconnected. “You get probed,” I muttered, not happy. I slipped the phone in my purse and got out of the car.
About 90 percent of the houses on Jergensen’s street had Christmas decorations of some kind. Not Jergensen’s. If the black iron fence had had a gate, it would have creaked. The grass was brown and no shrubs or bushes grew along the walk or near the house. It almost looked like abandoned property. I regretted not bringing Stump with me, but I was afraid Jergensen wouldn’t like it if I showed up with my own dog.
I had raised my hand to knock when the door swung open.
“Ahhh!” I shouted, jumping back. My heart hammered in my throat.
Jergensen scowled over my left shoulder, which of course made me think someone was behind me. I started to look back, but then caught myself and froze, planted a sm
ile on my face and stuck out my hand. “Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t expecting you to be so quick.” The entire left side of my body was on high alert.
“Come on in,” he said, turning. “Let’s go over the instructions. “
Turns out, the instructions were numerous. Plus, there was quite a lot to stare at along the way. The house appeared to be stuck in about 1974. Green shag carpet stretched from the living room into the kitchen, and heavy dark wood furniture with gold velvet cushions filled the room. There were paintings of a big-eyed boy and a big-eyed girl in pastel colors on the wall behind the sofa. No Shirley Temple dolls that I could see.
I tried to focus on the three pages – front and back! – of typed instructions and not get distracted by my surroundings. Mr. Jergensen walked over to a humongous black bird cage that took up a quarter of the room. He stood in front of the cage and made this kissy sound.
Nothing happened.
He kissed again.
Still, nothing.
The hairs started to rise on the back of my neck. Was there really even a bird? Was he crazy and imagining a bird? Or was he merely a psycho who’d lured me over on the pretense of a bird, so he could introduce me to his Shirley Temple overlord?
Something slammed against the inside of the cage.
I screamed and jumped back.
Jergensen cocked his head at me. The bird in the cage – because that’s what had launched itself at the bars, not an inhuman science experiment gone horribly wrong – cocked its head at me. It was a huge red macaw, with gold and blue on its wings and long red tail feathers. The area around his beady green eyes was white with thin red wobbly lines snaking through the white, making them look weirdly bloodshot.
“Good God,” I gasped, not bothering to hide my panic this time. “You scared the…you scared me.”
“You said you weren’t afraid of birds.” Jergensen narrowed his eyes at me. “Did you lie to me? Did Flo put you up to this?”
“Ummm,” I said, because…what?
He continued to look at me as if he suspected me of
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “The thing is, on the way over here this car almost T-boned me, and I’m a little jumpy now.” One of my strengths, as it happens, is making up credible lies on the spot.
The Trailer Park Princess 'Tis the Friggin' Season Page 1
