Trailerpark
Page 26
Merle, naturally, stayed on at the bobhouse for the few weeks of winter that remained. In early March, the ice began to soften and turn mushy in places. Gauzy fogs hung over the wet, pearlescent surface of the lake, obscuring the bobhouse from the trailerpark and erasing the opposite shore altogether. Before long, V’s of Canada geese were passing northward overhead, and then, at the weirs, a narrow wedge of open water appeared. Long, shallow pools of water lay resting on top of the ice, swelling and spreading in the sunlight, while beneath the ice deep, dark, slowly warming water chewed its way patiently toward the surface, which gradually got blotchy and pale green and then actually broke away from itself in places, making fissures and wide, tipping plates.
No one knew the exact day Merle left the bobhouse, but one morning there was a sheet of open water where the bobhouse had been, dark water sparkling under the morning sun, and Merle himself was seen by several people that same day outside his trailer somberly scraping the bottom of his old dark green rowboat.
He built another bobhouse the following winter, and as usual spent most of the winter inside it. He never spoke of the lottery money, and you can be sure that no one else ever mentioned it to him, either. Until now, that is, when Merle seems to have gotten over his despair and the others their shame.
About the Author
RUSSELL BANKS is the author of Cloudsplitter, Rule of the Bone and Continental Drift, among other titles. He has received numerous prizes and awards for his work, including the O. Henry and Best American Short Story Awards. He lives in upstate New York and Princeton, New Jersey, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark University Professor at Princeton.
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Praise
“The stories that work have the fire and ice that loom over life and the magic that comes from a good story well and craftily told.”
—Boston Globe
“Each story is uncommonly good … surprising, lively writing and believably human characters… Banks has a terrific eye, mordant yet affectionate, for the bric-a-brac and the pathos of the American dream.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Mesmerizing… There are times when Banks’s prose fairly dazzles.”
—Publishers Weekly
Other Works
Cloudsplitter
Rule of the Bone
The Sweet Hereafter
Affliction
Continental Drift
The Relation of My Imprisonment
Success Stories
The Book of Jamaica
The New World
Hamilton Stark
Family Life
Searching for Survivors
Back Ad
THE DARLING
A Novel
ISBN 0-06-095735-2 (paperback)
ISBN 0-694-52423-9 (unabridged CD)
A political/historical thriller of terrorism, political violence, race, and cultures.
CONTINENTAL DRIFT
ISBN 0-06-095673-9 (paperback)
A story of love and sex, racism and poverty, and the failures of the American dream.
THE SWEET HEREAFTER
A Novel
ISBN 0-06-092324-5 (paperback)
A small-town morality play that asks: When the worst thing happens, who do you blame?
CLOUDSPLITTER
A Novel
ISBN 0-06-093086-1 (paperback)
A dazzling re-creation of the political and social landscape before the Civil War.
THE ANGEL ON THE ROOF
The Stories of Russell Banks
ISBN 0-06-093125-6 (paperback)
Thirty years of Banks’s best short fiction, including eight new stories.
RULE OF THE BONE
A Novel
ISBN 0-06-092724-0 (paperback)
A journey of self-discovery through a world of magic, violence, betrayal, and redemption.
AFFLICTION
ISBN 0-06-092007-6 (paperback)
Spellbinding and inexorable as a fuse burning its way to a stick of dynamite.
FAMILY LIFE
ISBN 0-06-097704-3 (paperback)
Transforms the dramas of domesticity into the story of a royal family in a mythical contemporary kingdom.
HAMILTON STARK
ISBN 0-06-097705-1 (paperback)
A thoroughly engaging story of life on the cold edge of New England.
THE RELATION OF MY IMPRISONMENT
ISBN 0-06-097680-2 (paperback)
A work of fiction utilizing a form invented in the seventeenth century by imprisoned Puritan divines.
SUCCESS STORIES
ISBN 0-06-092719-4 (paperback)
Explores the ethos of rampant materialism in a group of conremporary moral fables.
TRAILERPARK
ISBN 0-06-097706-X (paperback)
A portrait of New England life that is at once dark, witty, and revealing.
THE BOOK OF JAMAICA
ISBN 0-06-097707-8 (paperback)
“A compelling novel… Banks achieves effects at once beautiful and brutal. A virtuoso performance.”—Publishers Weekly
Copyright
TRAILERPARK. Copyright © 1981 by Russell Banks. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1981 by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. It is reprinted here by arrangement with the author.
The following stories have appeared elsewhere: “The Right Way” (Boston Globe Magazine); “Politics” (Shenandoah); “The Child Screams and Looks Back at You” (Fiction); “Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat” (Mississippi Review); “The Burden” (Ploughshares); “What Noni Hubner Did Not Tell the Police About Jesus” (Sun & Moon); and “Principles” (Aspen Anthology).
First HarperPerennial edition 1996.
* * *
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Banks, Russell, 1940–
Trailerpark / Russell Banks
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-097706-X
1. New England—Social life and customs—Fiction. 2. Trailer camps—New England—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.A49T7 1996
813'.54—dc20
95-53310
* * *
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780062123268
05/RRD 10
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