Smashwood Trailer Park

Books

Smashwood Trailer Park was on the outskirts of town. It was a haphazard jumble of trailers and roads made by piling gravel atop endless streaks of mud and clay in a clearing slashed from the dense Appalachian forests. It rained enough here — and the snow meltwater from the nearby mountains added enough — to keep this little hollow lightly swampy year-round. In the winter, it was a frozen, firm swamp, but it still stank of swamp even then.
But it was summer now, and here, it was humid and dank like a stashbox. It would be depressing living here. He could sense it. His upcoming loneliness loomed in front of him, sparkling, inky, sticky, just like the detritus that clogged the trailer park. There was trash everywhere — not just humdrum bottles and shopping bags, but abandoned appliances, a shattered washing machine, a rain-ruined box of ammunition (empty) and even a dead frog crawling with maggots on a log near the entrance to the park.

From Trailer Park Noir

The Smashwood showerhouse got nine showerheads, but Buck was in there alone. T’was a Friday night, t’was why. It’d be crowded ar’y weeknight.
Buck stood there and let the water run down his back. The showerhouse was primitive, without even a roof. He liked showering outside. The shower”heads” was li’l more’an holes cut in a hose.

From Buck the Workin’ Man

There were a bunch of burned-out and abandoned trailers here. This was a hobo part of the park. Omar wasn’t even sure it was officially part of Smashwood, it seemed like more of a shantytown addendum to the real trailer park, which was itself a glorified shantytown. This was a shantytown’s shantytown.

From Omar the Muslim

In the other half of Smashwood Trailer Park the trailers had running water. Those trailers were for women and families with children. Nobody cared about men pissing in the grass in an area fulla other men.
When they got into the showerhouse, they went to the row of toilets. They weren’t in stalls, they were wide open, and the showerhouse too had no door, simply a little bend in the wall that blocked outsiders from seeing in. It had no roof either.

From Wayne the Ex-Cop

The park was just as he remembered. All the little details had changed, of course: there was a playpen in front of a trailer that hadn’t had one two years ago; the Tanners got a new mailbox, shaped like a church; the trailer at that corner had a new deck. But it was still the trailer park Buck remembered. The barbecue-and-beer-and-peeling-paint smell still hung in the air, and a dog still incessantly barked somewhere. It was a different dog though. Yappier.
From The Redneck Ex-Con

Most of the trailers in this park didn’t have hot water — Lucy’s was an exception, so her boyfriend must have a good job — and the residents shared the showerhouse. There was a small area for women and one for children too, but they were separate; they were roofed and had a door, and no one really used them. There were not many children here, and what women there were mostly lived in the west side of the park (where there was hot water). So the men’s area was the only one in use.
It was small, rickety, barely functional — exposed pipes, no roof, some extra showerheads added via garden hoses with holes drilled into them; the floor was cold concrete worn down like sandpaper so that it was painful to walk on without sandals.
He knew that’s what everyone who saw him thought, especially with his unkempt beard. He ignored the stares of folks waiting at the bus stop by the entrance to the park. He didn’t get on a bus. He just walked a half-mile or so away, then slipped into the woods and around to the back of the park. He suspected the south end of the park still had a bunch of abandoned trailers.
That was the trashy end, the area where Mr. Clay didn’t even usually go. A bunch of winos and dealers hung out there. Buck cast a harsh gaze at the only wakeful man in sight when he tromped out of the woods. It was some tweaky dude Buck didn’t know, scuttling about and twitching as he took apart an alarm clock. He was shirtless, his skin pockmarked with sores and too tautly stretched across his bony frame.
He looked away from Buck, who went to the nicest-looking yet obviously abandoned trailer, a big graffitied one with a giant hole in the roof partially plugged with a collection of car parts. It smelled bad in here, he thought, but it just smelled like spilled booze, not shit or rats. Those were the two smells he couldn’t live with anymore (he had had plenty of that in prison).

From The Redneck Ex-Con