Tiny Love

by Larry Brown

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

"Larry Brown wrote the way the best singers sing: with honesty, grit, and the kind of raw emotion that stabs you right in the heart. He was a singular American treasure." —Tim McGraw

A career-spanning collection, Tiny Love brings together for the first time the stories of Larry Brown’s previous collections along with those never before gathered. The self-taught Brown has long had a cult following, and this collection comes with an intimate and heartfelt appreciation by novelist Jonathan Miles. We see Brown's early forays into genre fiction and the horror story, then develop his fictional gaze closer to home, on the people and landscapes of Lafayette County, Mississippi. And what’s astonishing here is the odyssey these stories chart: Brown’s self-education as a writer and the incredible artistic journey he navigated from “Plant Growin’ Problems” to “A Roadside Resurrection.” This is the whole of Larry Brown, the arc laid bare, both an amazing story collection and the fullest portrait we’ll see of one of the South’s most singular artists.

Release date: November 26, 2019

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 480

Sample

Praise for Larry Brown

“Larry Brown writes like a force of nature. Everything he writes seems lived in, authentic, and on the money.” —Pat Conroy

“He has an ear for the way people talk, an eye for their habits and manners, a heart for their frailties and foibles, and a love for their struggles and triumphs.” —John Grisham

“He is blunt and abrasive about subjects that tend to cause flinching. He tells stories in plain language.” —The New Yorker

“He knows things … you didn’t think would get found out until Judgment Day.” —Jack Butler

“He is a master.” —Barry Hannah

“[He] writes as if he owns—legitimately and without challenge, mind you—the entire grief-stricken, joy-ridden world, and a few things beyond it.” —Bob Shacochis

“Direct, powerful, and singularly honest.” —Willie Morris

“Clear, simple and powerful.” —Time

Praise for Facing the Music

“A stunning debut.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“One of our finest writers.” —Charles Frazier

“Larry Brown … is a choir of Southern voices, all by himself.” —The Dallas Morning News

“[These] stories manage to touch us in surprisingly potent ways.” —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Larry has an unerring comic sense, a sensitive ear for talk, an unsentimental commitment to his characters and, above all, the intimate, ruthless, loving connections with the world he writes about that is the hallmark of a good honest writer.” —Ellen Douglas, author of A Family’s Affairs and Can’t Quit You, Baby

“Larry Brown’s work is exceptional by any standard. Talent has struck.” —Harry Crews, author of A Feast of Snakes and Body

“Brown will show you another America—his America—and dare you to try again to forget that it still exists.” —USA Today

Praise for Dirty Work

“An unforgettable, unshakable novel.” —The New York Times Book Review

“One of the most powerful antiwar novels in American literature.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“A marvelous book … Brown’s swift, intuitive dialogue explodes like a land mine and leaves the reader dizzy with shock.” —The Kansas City Star

“A real knockout.” —New York Newsday

“Stunning power … Dirty Work makes the human cost of war achingly real.” —USA Today

Praise for Big Bad Love

“Invested with stunning presence and complexity.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Big, bad and wonderful … A stunning collection of stories about real people and real life.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Rather like some perfect object one has come across in a wilderness, these are stories of affirmation … Human, compassionate and compelling.” —Harry Crews, Los Angeles Times

“A voice as true as a gun rack, unpretentious and uncorrupted. [In] a surprising combination of sharp wit and great sorrow … comes a sure sense of a compassionate writer deeply in touch with the sorrowful rhythms of not just Southern, but human, life.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

Praise for Joe

“Brilliant … Larry Brown has slapped his own fresh tattoo on the big right arm of Southern Lit.” —The Washington Post Book World

“The novel, written in a luminescent prose tempered by wit, moves gracefully forward by tracking the independent movements of its three artfully conceived and skillfully balanced principals. As their lives mesh, the novel’s momentum, and its rewards, build. A fourth major role may be said to belong to the terrain itself, a Mississippi so vividly sketched you can all but mount it on your wall.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Sinewy and lyrical.” —Los Angeles Times

“Brown compels our admiration, Joe himself makes us care.” —Newsweek

“Literature of the first order … Powerful stuff spun by a sure, patient hand … His characters just are. They call to mind the Joads in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and the pictures and people in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It is an understated, powerful, beautiful evocation of a place, a time, a people. It is a book that will last.” —Detroit Free Press

“Sheer storytelling power.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Simple and powerful … Great rowdy fun to read.” —Time

“Gifted with a brilliant descriptive ability, a perfect ear for dialogue, and an unflinching eye, Brown creates a world of stunted lives and thwarted hopes as relentless as anything in Dreiser or Dos Passos … A stark, often funny novel with a core as dark as a delta midnight.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Joe appalls, repels, but ultimately fascinates … Larry Brown is a writer whose language and imagination redeem the very worst life has to offer; a novelist of unusual power.” —William Kennedy, author of Ironweed

Praise for On Fire

“One of the finest books I know about blue-collar work in America, its rewards and frustrations … If you are among the tens of millions who have never read Brown, this is a perfect introduction.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Larry Brown has an ear for the way people talk, an eye for their habits and manners, a heart for the frailties and foibles, and a love for their struggles and triumphs. His fireman’s diary is a wonderful book.” —John Grisham

“Larry Brown is never romantic about danger … In this book he goes through his life with the same meticulous attention with which Thoreau circled the woods around Walden Pond.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Clear, simple, and powerful, and great rowdy fun to read.” —Time

Praise for Father and Son

“Larry Brown will cause you to be disappointed with every other novel you may pick up this year.” —Thom Jones

“His most wise, humane and haunting work to date.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Riveting.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“This is a novel that will live with you day and night.” —Kaye Gibbons

“A powerful tale of love and betrayal, family ties and brutal revenge.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“The model is Faulkner, but his influence has been absorbed and transcended.” —The New York Times Book Review

“So vividly written it is almost cinematic.” —The Orlando Sentinel

“It reads like a stud poker game of life, tension growing with the turning of each card.” —The Dallas Morning News

“Cancel the competition for suspense thriller of the year. Larry Brown has already won it with Father and Son.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Praise for Fay

“Larry Brown is a true original, and Fay is among his best works. Follow Fay past the kudzu-draped woods and cinderblock bars and sunburned fields of Brown’s imagination. It’s a journey you won’t regret.” —Chicago Tribune

“For years, Larry Brown has been known and respected as a writer’s writer. But now, with Fay, this profoundly southern novelist may win the broad readership he so richly deserves … Spellbinding.” —People

“A well-oiled machine … More ambitious than any of Brown’s previous novels, Fay might just be his best work yet.” —The Denver Post

“A novel of the first order. … Gripping and virtually seamless … The writing, the characters, and the plot are so compelling that you can’t help but stay with the book until its conclusion.” —The Washington Post Book World

Praise for Billy Ray’s Farm

“Brown is the real thing.” —The Washington Post

“Brown makes us care about these rural days and nights—and the people who pass through them.” —Southern Living

“Brown’s muscular sentences hold us in the intensity of the moment … forceful description with unexpected tenderness.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Equal parts Henry David Thoreau and long-suffering Job.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Like his novels, Brown’s essays are built out of small, often raw details.” —USA Today

“Read this book. Read it for its emotional honesty and humor.” —The Roanoke Times

Larry hated me telling this story. But Larry also understood that the most natural place to begin is at the beginning, and this was ours.

Late in 1992 I was sitting at the upstairs bar at the City Grocery in Oxford, Mississippi, when a man approached me. He was older than me by a couple decades: neither tall nor short, sparely built, with doleful-looking eyes and a narrow face etched in worry lines. Shyly, in a smoky, murmury drawl, he asked if I was the one who’d written the short story in that week’s issue of SouthVine, a local alt-weekly. I told him I was. “My name’s Larry Brown,” he said, and while this should’ve knocked me back, it didn’t. Larry had published four books by then, the covers of which I’d seen down the block at Square Books, but I’d yet to read any of them. The writers I was reading then were all long dead; literature, I guess I thought, was the handiwork of ghosts. I was too young and too dumb, in other words, to feel any weight in the moment; I certainly didn’t sense the gears of my life shifting.

He said a few generous words about the story, and, softened, I admitted it was the first piece of fiction I’d ever published. This triggered something in him—a flash of a grin, a gleam in his expression—that I’d only understand later. “My wife and I are headed downstairs to eat some quail,” he said, pointing behind him to a woman who stood waiting with a look of tender exasperation. “Why don’t you come on down with us and we’ll celebrate?”

I need to be honest here: My stomach hollered yes before the rest of me did. On that night, like many before and after, I had about eight dollars to my name—enough for a few beers and, if any bills remained, a half-pint of chicken salad from James Food Center. (Mary Annie, Larry’s wife, would later say that’s why she put up with him inviting some random kid to dinner with them—I was clearly starving.) The City Grocery, now a Mississippi dining landmark, was brand-new that year. While the upstairs bar was humble and rowdy, with drinks served in plastic cups and a rack of Zapp’s potato chips behind the bar, the downstairs restaurant was urbane and elegant—what back then we called fancy. Candlelight shimmered across white cotton tablecloths. Servers carried expensive bottles of wine as gently as they would infant children. The green beans called themselves haricots verts.

We drank and ate and smoked and talked: about writing, some, but more about reading. Larry talked about writers the way other folks talk about athletes: staggered by their prowess and feats, quoting lines and scenes as excitedly as one might recount a game-buzzer three-pointer. We talked about music, too: another subject that always brought a glow to him. But something was gnawing at him. Every now and again, sipping a Crown and Coke, he’d glance darkly at a neighboring table, and then at Mary Annie, who’d shake her head no. Tracking his glance, I saw two couples at the table: two gray-haired men, wearing suits, with two women glinting with jewels. They had easeful laughs that, at a certain volume level, caused Larry to tighten. The more he drank, the more he kept glancing.

Finally he stubbed out a cigarette, wadded his napkin onto the table, and stood up. These were quick angry gestures, but Larry was smiling: an inscrutable, boyish smile. He walked over to the table, placed the toe of his cowboy boot on the edge of one of the men’s chair, hopped onto the table, and started—dancing. Dancing, yes: a slow tabletop version of the twist, his boot heel stirring a plate of shrimp and grits, Larry swiveling his hips and pistoning his elbows and all the while wearing a look of profound satisfaction. The restaurant, of course, froze; even the servers stopped mid-stride. The only sounds were the music, and the clinking of plates and flatware under Larry’s shuffling boots. The two couples at the table stared down into their laps. Mary Annie rolled her eyes and hid her face. But I kept staring, enthralled, even mesmerized, until the song ended, when Larry descended from the table, took his seat again, and, as though nothing had happened, lit a fresh cigarette and resumed what he’d been saying about Flannery O’Connor.

I didn’t know then why he’d done it. (One of the men, a local banker, had refused Larry a loan—insultingly, I suspect—when he was trying to quit his job at the fire department to write full-time.) I didn’t know about his long and tortured struggle to make himself into a writer, the infinite rejections he’d endured (from dozens of editors and at least one banker), the faith to which he’d clung when almost everyone and everything suggested he quit, the singular literary vision that emerged only after he’d typed his millionth midnight sentence on Mary Annie’s old Smith-Corona typewriter, the deep roar of his artistry. All I knew, in that moment, was that I wanted to hang out with this guy forever.

Larry Brown, as you’re about to see, wrote about human frailties. He wrote about people whose lives have come to feel stunted, or unmoored, and who find themselves unable or unwilling to resist perilous impulses: for sex, for alcohol, for violence, for numbness, for the kind of crazed love that doubles as a wrecking ball, even for art. He wrote about people in dire straits—emotional, financial, romantic, existential—who often choose, with varying levels of awareness, to make things more dire: to burn it all down, in some cases; in others, just to feel a new kind of heat. Among Larry’s many strengths as a writer, maybe foremost, was a kind of negative capability: He never flinched. His characters flowed onto the page without dilution or filtering, their defects left intact—their confusions, bigotries, lusts, fears, cruelties, all the sediment of their weaknesses. That’s one reason, aside from deadline glibness, that reviewers sometimes likened his stories’ effects to moonshine’s: they burn, they bite, they leave a scalded sensation in your chest. Larry never sought for us to admire his characters, or even to side with them; but he refused to let us scorn or pity them either. What he asked us to afford them was the same thing he applied, rigorously, to their creation: unsparing empathy. The source of his achievement, I think, is this very empathy—his clear and tender regard for human frailties, his adherence to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s assertion that both good and bad people are invariably less so than they seem. It also happens to be the one thing he didn’t have to teach himself when, in the autumn of 1980, he decided to become a writer.

Not that he set out to write about the broad spectrum of human frailties in Lafayette County, Mississippi—not at first, anyway, and not at second either. No, after lugging Mary Annie’s old typewriter into their bedroom that autumn, Larry Brown set out to write about a man-eating bear terrorizing Yellowstone National Park. The ambition, then, was merely to earn some extra money, but with his mind instead of his hands.

He was twenty-nine years old, and the father of three young children. (A fourth, Delinah, died shortly after her birth in 1977.) For seven years he’d been working as a firefighter in Oxford, the county seat. Before that, and also on his offdays from the fire department, he’d worked as a grocery sacker, housepainter, hay hauler, pulpwood cutter and hand-loader, fence builder, bricklayer’s helper, carpenter, carpet cleaner, truck driver, forklift driver, dockworker, pine-tree planter, timber deadener, surveyor’s helper, plumber, and answering-service employee. The cumulative weight of these jobs was sapping him; his own life, as thirty loomed, was beginning to feel stunted. His father had worked as a sharecropper then a factory worker before dying at the age of forty-six, a destiny Larry didn’t wish to inherit. “I didn’t want to work with my back for the rest of my life,” he later told an interviewer. “I didn’t want to remain poor. I wanted my children to have better opportunities than what I had. I wanted to work for myself. I saw people work their whole lives in factories, standing on concrete forty hours a week, and I didn’t want that life. I wanted more than that from life.”

The means to that end, he thought, might be writing. As Larry would later concede, this scheme of his was, at first, almost tragicomically naïve. Merit of the work notwithstanding, fiction pays dividends the way slot machines do: lavishly for some, meagerly for others, none for most. The Man Booker Prize, as I write this, has just been awarded to the northern Irish novelist Anna Burns, for her third novel; she relied on food banks to sustain her during its writing. But Larry had more than just these structural odds stacked against him. Aside from school assignments, he’d never written before: not as a child, not as a teen, not ever—he was starting from scratch. The last piece of writing he’d done, a senior term paper about deer hunting, earned him an F, derailing his high-school graduation. Hence Mary Annie’s dry, muted response when Larry announced his intention to write: “Oh yeah?” A shrug. “Well … okay.”

The killer bear novel—all 327 single-spaced pages of it (“I didn’t even know about double-spacing,” he’d later say)—came bouncing back from publishers, as did the next four novels he wrote. (As with first loves, however, Larry never quite forgot that first novel; you’ll see it affectionately lampooned in his story “The Apprentice.”) The short stories he wrote suffered the same boomerang fate. “I know I’m ignorant of things like theme and mood, grammar in places, the basic things,” he wrote to the editor Gordon Lish in 1983, upon receipt of a rejection. “You’re talking to a twelfth-grade flunkout here.”

Yet Larry Brown’s ascent, from his humble, almost impetuous start to his eventual rank among the vanguard of American realists, wasn’t quite so improbable as some observers have characterized it. The idea of fiction writers as trained professionals—all but licensed by the nation’s guild of MFA programs—is a relatively recent one. The writers with whom Larry was most familiar in 1980—Jack London, Zane Grey, Stephen King, even William Faulkner—had essentially done what he was setting out to do: taught themselves to write while supporting themselves with other jobs, channeling their imaginations into words, and, consequently, themselves into a new and more vivid life. “I had one burning thought that I believed was true,” he later wrote. “If I wrote long enough and hard enough, I’d eventually learn how.”

This is where, in the cinema version, you’d see the writer at his desk. Fingers clacking typewriter keys. Wadded-up paper overflowing a trash can, cigarette butts clumped in an ashtray. (Larry’s editor, Shannon Ravenel, once told me she could tell immediately when a manuscript of Larry’s entered her office—the smell of Marlboro smoke, even through the envelope, would herald its delivery.) Through a window you’d glimpse the seasons passing: the steel-colored Mississippi winter morphing into the yellowy-green dog days of summer. Maybe a calendar on the wall, its pages blowing off as in old-timey films. But the typewriter, in that scene, as in Larry’s life, wouldn’t ever stop clacking.

Larry wrote ghost stories, Westerns, Civil War stories, African hunting tales, and detective stories. He wrote tongue-in-cheek outdoors instruction (under the pen name Uncle Whitney) and essays about gun safety, coon hunting, and lingerie. In the meantime he tried enrolling, as a special student, in a one-semester writing class at the University of Mississippi. When the instructor, the novelist Ellen Douglas, asked if he’d written anything before, he said yes ma’am—three novels and about a hundred short stories. (“Come to class,” she told him.) Through Douglas he discovered Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Ambrose Bierce, and Flannery O’Connor—and also the existence of a bookstore on the Oxford town square, which he’d somehow failed to notice. Its owner, Richard Howorth, added Raymond Carver and Harry Crews and Cormac McCarthy to Larry’s self-styled syllabus. Season by season, book by book, the scope of Larry’s ambition began broadening, his determination hardening all the while. “Know this,” he wrote to Lish. “I pump a fire truck ten days a month but that ain’t my life’s work. Writing is. And nothing has happened yet to make me change my mind.”

The only thing that came close to deterring him was the walk from the mailbox. It stood on the side of Highway 334, about eighty yards from Mary Annie’s mother’s house, where they were living in the early eighties and where Larry’s eldest son lives now. (Larry would build another house on the property, in 1986, and move the family there.) He’d walk out there every afternoon, on days when he wasn’t at the firehouse. Mary Annie grew to hate watching him return, carrying a deadening stack of manila envelopes: his stories, all of them returned to him affixed with form rejection notes, some stories clocking ten, twelve rejections. It sank him every time. He’d walk back slowly, as though studying the gravel.

Until one day he didn’t. One day Larry got an envelope—letter-sized, the right kind—and this time he came up the driveway fast. Easyriders, a magazine for Harley-Davidson riders (and the breast-baring women who love them), was publishing a story of his. First publication carried, for him, an intense and specific type of joy—the ecstasy of validation, as though his passport had been stamped for entry into a new and greener land. (His memory of it, I think, was the source for the grin he gave me, and the dinner invitation, when I revealed I’d just published my own first story: the headwaters of our friendship.)

When the story appeared, in the June 1982 issue, Larry’s mother, Leona, went seeking a copy at an Oxford newsstand. The salesclerk hesitated to hand it to her. One imagines the clerk anxiously scanning the cover, with its pouting, crimped-hair model, the words “evil, wicked, mean, nasty” printed on her tank top, a cover line beside her hip promising “Lotsa Motorcycle Women!” Finally he said: “Mrs. Brown, you’re a nice lady. Why’re you buying this magazine?” I never heard what Leona said back to him, but I suspect it was the same thing the writer Lewis Nordan’s mother exclaimed when she went seeking a story of his in an unfamiliar-to-her magazine called Playgirl: “My son’s in there!” Leona Brown, it bears noting, was a spectacularly proud mother, and Larry often said his mother’s reading habits—family legend says she read every book in the Oxford library—were the seeds of his own. In 1991, he inscribed his second novel, Joe, to her as follows: “For Mama, the most important one … It was a long time coming, but the world sees it now. I know some laughed at my dream but you never did. Thank you for my life. Your loving son, Larry.”

That Easyriders story, “Plant Growin’ Problems,” kicks off this collection. The spiraling tale of a marijuana-growing biker’s encounter with a seedy Georgia sheriff, it belongs to a mostly extinct species of male adventure stories, the kind Elmore Leonard and Mickey Spillane used to write for pulp magazines in the mid-twentieth century. It operates, then, within a much narrower compass than Larry’s later stories do. Yet we can already see certain hallmarks of Larry’s style fixed in place, like surveyor’s flags. The universe he sketches, for instance, is characteristically devoid of moral clarity, with the sheriff both a user and distributor of the marijuana at the story’s locus. The vernacular is gutty and fresh (“I wouldn’t try that shit, boy,” the sheriff warns the biker. “Not ’less you want the undertaker packin’ your asshole fulla cotton ’bout dark”). Spurts of humor shoot from unexpected places (as when the sheriff ambushes the biker with an Ed McMahon bellow: “Heeeeeeeeeere’s Cecil!”). Most significantly, perhaps, there’s the moral dilemma with which Larry saddles his biker protagonist: “Against his better judgment, against the nagging little voice of his conscience” is how Larry framed the character’s pivotal action. That’s trademark Larry Brown: the not wanting to do good, but doing good anyway; the not wanting to do bad, likewise.

I’ll note here, as an aside, that Larry did own a motorcycle in the eighties. I asked him about it once, after noticing a bike leaning against the back side of the house, mummified with rust and all but hidden beneath a tangle of vines and scrub. It used to be his, he explained, but he’d sold it to a guy who’d paid him $400 then said he’d be back shortly with a trailer to haul it off. He was still holding it for the guy, he told me. “How long’ve you been waiting for him?” I asked, hiking an eyebrow at the weeds enshrouding it. Larry thought about this for a while. “I guess it’s four years now,” he said. In the intervening years he hadn’t so much as touched the bike, in case the guy finally did return for it. Larry, after all, had gone and spent the four hundred bucks, and a deal’s a deal. That was trademark Larry Brown, too.

Once the thrill subsided, it became clear to Larry that first publication was just that: first. More than a year of unremitting rejections followed. If he ever feared that his single publication might’ve been an aberration, a fluke, he wasn’t alone. Barry Hannah, the South’s analog to Samuel Beckett, had recently arrived in Oxford as the university’s writer-in-residence. Larry pressed enough stories on him—“Brown’s early badness,” Barry called them—that Barry took to ducking out the back of the bar, as he’d later write, “when I saw [Larry] coming down the walk with the inevitable manila envelope.” When “Plant Growin’ Problems” appeared, “I cheered but secretly believed he’d peaked out.” (Barry confessed these doubts, I should note, for the sole purpose of eating them, crow-style, years later. “Passion begat brilliance” is how he summarized Larry’s career.)

It’s this period of Larry’s apprenticeship I find most interesting, because at some point therein Larry moved the goalposts for himself. The ambition was no longer to earn extra money, or to merely see his work in print; the ambition, as great as it gets, was to make Art. You see glints of this in the next two stories—far more dazzlingly in the latter—that he published: “Nightmare,” which the horror writer and editor T. E. D. Klein ran in Twilight Zone magazine in 1985, and “Boy and Dog,” which appeared in Fiction International a few months earlier (and later took a slot in Facing the Music, Larry’s debut collection). “Nightmare” is a brief, bilious fever dream chronicling a man’s passage into the afterlife, with a wretched caucus of ghosts attending to his destiny. It’s a horror story, down to its (exposed) bones, but note the way Larry heaped adjectives and gerunds at the front of his sentences, as if to sustain a funereal drumbeat through the story. He was playing with language now, using it less as a tool than an instrument. In “Boy and Dog” he took a much further leap, close to quantum. On one level it’s a formalist exercise, a late-night self-dare: 293 five-word sentences, stacked as evenly as coins. Yet the story it relates—a Butterfly Effect–maelstrom resulting from a car running over a dog—is wrenching and complex, with deadpan humor woven into deadpan tragedy, the constraints of the story’s form somehow magnifying its unsettling effects. With his depiction of firefighters (ineptly) battling a car fire, moreover, Larry was now drawing from firsthand experience and observation, grounding his fiction in his native soil. He was applying what he’d learned to what he’d already known.

A stray line from “Nightmare,” in retrospect, begs for repurposing: “And finally he found his voice, found that indeed he did have a voice.” Passion had started begetting brilliance.

Among Larry’s pastimes, lowriding was the favorite. That’s what he called it, anyway, and what it meant was driving around, most often alone but sometimes with a friend, without any errand or destination, in the twilit hour of the day he called “the gloam.” He’d climb into his truck and from his driveway head right or head left, depending on his mood or his whim or where the big pinkening sky of the Yocona river bottom looked most inviting. The route stuck to back roads, never coming near the bustle of Oxford, about ten miles northwest of his homeplace. He drove slowly—so slowly, in fact, that his own mother used to complain about getting stuck behind him; she’d gun the engine and shake her fist at him as she passed. The truck was always a comfortable mess inside: a scree of cassette tapes on the passenger seat and floorboards, empty cigarette packs atop the dash, a book or two wedged somewhere. Sometimes he’d throw a small cooler of beer in the truck bed; at other times he’d stash a half-pint of schnapps up front. If he was alone, he’d ride around and think, engaging in a kind of county-road meditation, chewing his mental cud until the sun petered out.

If he wasn’t alone, of course, he’d spend the ride talking. It was the best kind of talking, because unlike at the bar, or even back at the house, there were no interruptions or competing voices. There wasn’t any rush, no need to get to the point; you weren’t going anywhere to begin with. He’d talk about his writing, his reading, his famil