Muddy Backroads: Stories from off the Beaten Path

By Madville Publishing

Stories that move away from the norms of daily life to explore the side roads that take us away from the known. Where will those backroads and back alleys take us?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Madville Publishing
• Release date: Jun 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781956440157

Book preview

Preface

Luanne Smith

There’s this short story I taught for decades. Students loved it, no matter the years between its setting and their reality. Like classic rock music, T.C. Boyle’s story, Greasy Lake, reached across time and connected.

When writer and friend, Jodi Angel, and I started tossing around ideas for a new anthology, she came up with Muddy Backroads. I immediately thought of Greasy Lake. We added the Stories From Off the Beaten Path to capture what we both had in mind, those stories that veer away from our comfort zones, away from what we know as routine or normal.

There’s a line in Greasy Lake, that takes us where we wanted these stories to go.

Through the center of town, up the strip, past the housing developments and shopping malls, street lights giving way to the thin streaming illumination of the headlights, trees crowding the asphalt in a black unbroken wall: that wasthe way out to Greasy Lake.

Just as T.C. Boyle was inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s Spirit in the Night for Greasy Lake, I have always been inspired by Boyle’s one-sentence ability to move us away from civilization to a place where anything can happen.

Muddy Backroads is the third anthology I have curated, and in all three, I have sought out stories and memoirs that take us to the edge. In an interview about the second anthology, Taboos & Transgressions: Stories of Wrongdoings, edited by me, Kerry Neville and Devi Laskar, the interviewer asked what drew me to such stories. I’ve been thinking about the answer to that question for a long time now. Yes, those stories and those writers are the ones I prefer to read. Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, Richard Ford, Russell Banks, Jesmyn Ward, my co-editor for this anthology, Bonnie Jo Campbell. All of them take us away from what we know of civilization. But why am I drawn to these stories and memoirs?

Because I always have been, doesn’t sound like a real answer. But I was the kid who left our tiny Kentucky elementary school in third grade on a trip with my parents to New York City for Dad to attend a training session for his job. Upon return when I was asked to tell the class about New York City, I forgot all about the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building and told my classmates about seeing hippies (it was in the 1960’s), about the drunk on all fours in Little Italy throwing up on the sidewalk, about the woman in the bus station riding the escalator up and down singing at the top of her lungs, about the waiter at the deli who only knew how to say, Hello, may I help you? in English. It was the individuals of NYC who caught my attention, the outsiders, the ones who did not quite fit, even in that big city.

Around that same time, I watched this movie on our little black and white TV. Television was still a fairly new thing, and my parents had no idea they needed to censor what I watched. So, I sat there on my own and watched Natalie Wood, Charles Bronson, and a young Robert Redford in a film version of Tennessee Williams’ This Property is Condemned. I can’t claim now that I completely understood all of what was going on in that story at that time, but I loved it. It was right up there with 101 Dalmations as my favorite movie. I still love it—and all of Tennessee Williams’ work.

So how do you explain to an interviewer something that probably requires years of professional therapy to understand? I prefer stories that don’t pull punches. I prefer characters who are off the beaten path. I prefer riding down that road past the shopping malls and finding myself in a place where anything can happen.

It was a pleasure to read the many stories submitted for consideration for Muddy Backroads. They took us so many places and off so many beaten paths. I want to thank Jodi Angel for brainstorming the theme with me for this book. Jodi had to step away from co-editing for personal reasons, but we still owe a lot to her for the existence of this anthology. I want to thank Bonnie Jo Campbell for co-editing with me. Who better to edit such a book? I want to offer a personal thanks to my friend, Dorothy Allison, who always encourages me, and I’m so happy to include her work here. Special thanks to Cat Smith and Kim Davis from Madville Publishing for all their hard, hard work and for supporting my visions, however dark they may be. Thanks, too, to Alan Heathcock, author of Volt: Stories, who is judging the unsolicited manuscripts within Muddy Backroads for cash prizes. Finally, I don’t know how many times I indirectly thank T.C. Boyle in this foreword, but Mr. Boyle, what an inspiration your work is to me and my many creative writing students. Thank you hardly seems like enough.

Lastly, thank you to all the writers who are in the anthology and all who submitted work. Please, keep walking your own paths, writing your own stories, and taking us to all places where anything can happen.

—Luanne Smith

Foreword

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Like American painting, American writing often returns to landscapes, vistas where the names of flowers and birds and stars and makes and models of automobiles matter—before cars and trucks it was breeds of horses and temperaments of mules. These unpeopled places serve as proving grounds for our social selves and mirrors for our lonely American souls, and they give room and board to our twin longings for freedom and rootedness. When the problem is feeling lost at home, the solution is often a road trip. The stories in this book belong to this tradition of getting ourselves lost in order to find ourselves.

These stories are filled with weather and wildlife, Jesus and canned beer, motels and trailers and marijuana gardens. Some take us to other forms of wilderness, places we get lost while writing a story, while dealing with an icy stepmother, or negotiating with a ghost only we can see. These stories explore emotionally difficult places as well as physically challenging ones, spaces we must enter alone because the rules of the community do not apply. This is how protagonists end up in predicaments from which they (and we, by extension) can be saved only by their (our) own wits. In the wilderness, we have the freedom to sing loudly whatever we want, and our greatest fear is that what we sing doesn’t matter.

On a personal note, I’m glad to see so many richly envisioned small-towns, so many fleshed-out rural characters. These are people who struggle against the elements in concrete ways that can serve as metaphors for the more abstract struggles we are working through on a daily basis. Anybody who doubts the importance of understanding small town and rural characters should notice that these places have given birth to our most recent populist political movement, a movement that many consider to be the dangerous to democracy, and that is why it behooves us to explore the isolated places where bitterness and anger brews and where firearms are plentiful.

I want to applaud the writers in this book for showing us what happens at the end of the road, what happens when folks reach the end of their ropes, when they are out on a limb with a handsaw. I want to thank Luanne Smith for brainstorming this project that allows us to explore some of the best-known American back roads voices and new voices from regions we have yet to discover, many of them working class voices. And I want to thank the readers of this book for believing in fiction writers as deliverers of truths and images that matter.

When I teach fiction writing, I ask my students Why do we even need fiction? We have poetry to explore emotional avenues, and we have non-fiction and journalism to hit us hard with life’s surprising joys and injustices and to spur us to protest and celebration in the streets. We have memoirs to help us reflect upon myriad lives lived and examined. Still, I am certain that fiction can get at the difficult truths in a way those other forms cannot. Only fictional characters are allowed to honestly express the complexity of real human thoughts, the thoughts of the victims and the perpetrators, the dark and the light. Fiction is the most honest literary form, and therefore the most potent and most democratic

Please enjoy these lively, soulful stories we’ve chosen to include in this anthology from among dozens of other worthy tales. They will give you glimpses into backyards, gardens, great sweeping vistas and lonely aching hearts. Please get lost in these pages and try to find yourself, and when you do, take a good look in the mirror.

—Bonnie Jo Campbell

Barrio Walden

Luis Alberto Urrea

Imagine my shock. I was living in Massachusetts for the first time. Adjusting. The first time I saw snow falling past my Somerville apartment window, I told a woman on the phone that a neighbor was on the roof shaking out a pillow. Not many snowstorms in my desertified homeland. The first time I saw ice on the sidewalk, I thought a prankster had smeared Vaseline on the bricks to watch businessmen fall down.

This old world was all new to me. I was manhandled by quotidian revelations, wrenched by the duende of Yankee cultural hoodoo. So when I realized I could walk over to Porter Square (where the porterhouse steak was first hacked out of some Bostonian cow) and catch a commuter train to Concord, to Walden freakin’ Pond, I was off and running.

Perhaps I was a barrio Transcendentalist. Well, I was certainly one by the time I hit the San Diego ’burbs in my tweens. I loved me some Thoreau. Civil Disobedience, right? What Doors fan couldn’t get behind that? I also had copied passages of Self Reliance by Emerson and pasted them to my walls amid posters of hot rods and King Kong and John Lennon and trees. Even in the ’70s, I was deeply worried about trees.

So I trudged to the T stop and went down to the suburban rail level and caught the Purple Line. I, and all the rambunctious Concord high school kids, were deeply plugged into our Walkmans. I was all Screaming Blue Messiahs and class rage, scribbling in my notebooks about rich bastards giggling self-indulgently and shrieking Eau my GWOD! at each other as they ignored the woods and the mangy deer outside. For me, it was a Disneyland train ride, all this stuff I had only experienced robotically before. I was imagining the ditch diggers from my old neighborhood tripping out over all this water. These goddamned New Englanders had water everywhere. And deer.

We pulled into Concord as if it were a normal thing, and I detrained and stepped into the Friendly’s. At the time, if I could have had deep-tissue grafts of Americana I would have, and a striped-awning ice cream place where the happy lady called me Deah was just about the shiniest moment of my Americanness to date.

I’m looking for Walden, I announced. Pond. Helpful-like, as if she didn’t know.

Right out the door. Doah. Go out and walk about a mile.

I drank some soda. She called it tonic. And I was off. She didn’t tell me I had to turn south. I turned north. And walked away.

Before we proceed much farther on our first New England early autumn country walk, before we grow dizzy with red maples actually turning red in a natural psychedelic blowmind, we might consider the dearth of what you might call ponds where I come from. To me, a pond was a muddy hole you could jump across, and it housed six or seven crawdads and some tadpoles. (My friend Mark put dead polliwogs in a jar with hand lotion and charged kids a nickel to look at elephant sperm. We were guttersnipe naturalists.) When Thoreau said, Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in, I thought I knew what he was talking about, though my stream was rain-shower runoff in an alley. I had been fishing exactly once in my life, and I felt guilt about the poor worm that came out of the water not only impaled on the hook but stiff as a twig.

So there I was, marching at a splendid pace! Away to Walden Pond! Or, as my homeboys would have spelled it, GUALDENG! Delighted by every tree! White fences! Orange and yellow and scarlet leaves! Concord thinned and vanished and I was suddenly among farms! Huzzah! Well-met, shrieking farm dogs threatening me! Bonjour, paranoiac farm wives hanging laundry and glaring at me from fields of golden, uh, barley! Eau my gwod! I saw stacks of lobster pots. I saw pumpkins. It was a shock to me that pumpkins grew somewhere. Next to lobster pots! And a red tractor to boot.

Behold the festive black-and-white New England moo-cow. Scenes bucolic and poetic—scenes the Alcotts might have penned. Sad autumn light, what a hipster pal in Harvard Square had called Irish light, slanted through the trees to make everything tremble with the most delicious melancholy I have yet to see again. I was bellowing along to Sisters of Mercy: Oh Marian, this world is killing me. Cows regarded me. Goths in paradise.

Right about then, I beheld it. In a field of mown hay. Next to a small house and a slanty barn. Walden Pond. It was about twenty feet across and surrounded by meditative heifers. I removed my headphones and went to the fence and leaned upon the topmost rail and communed with the transcendent. I wrestled with man’s fate and the epic movements of the universe and the natural splendour of the Creator’s delight in the temple of His Creation.

The farmer came out of his house and stared at me. I waved. He jumped in his truck and banged over ruts in his field. He wasn’t smiling.

I help you? he shouted.

Just looking at the pond, said I.

What pond?

Walden Pond!

Jesus Christ! he reasoned. He looked back at his cows. He looked at me. He looked at the cows. He said, You’re not from around here, are ya?

California, I said.

That explains it.

What ho, my good fellow!

You walked the wrong damned direction. It’s about four mile that way.

I looked back, as though the great pond would reveal itself in the autumnal haze.

Could you give me a ride? I asked.

Hell no!

He smoked as he watched me trudge back toward Concord with a slightly less splendid cadence.

Yeah, whatever. Barking dogs. Screw you. Farm wives gawking. What’s your problem? My feet hurt. Past Friendly’s. Don’t do me any favors, Deah. And south, out of town again, across the crazed traffic on the highway, and past a tumbledown trailer park and a garbage dump. What is this crap? Tijuana?

Gradually, I became aware of a bright blue mass to my right. A sea. A Great Lake. This deal wasn’t a pond, man. Are you kidding? Who called this Sea of Cortez a pond?

Down to the water. A crust of harlequin leaves lay along the shore. It was dead silent. Thin wisps of steam rode the far shoreline. I squatted and watched and fancied myself living in a shack, smoking my pipe, scratching out one-liners with a quill, changing the world.

An ancient Dalmatian came along. He was stiff and arthritic, walking at an angle, grinning and making horking sounds. His tag said his name was Jason.

Jason, I said. I’m looking for Thoreau.

Snork, he said, and headed out. I followed. We walked past cove and bog and found ourselves at Henry’s stone floor. The cairn of stones left by travelers. I was glad my homeys did not see me cry over mere rocks.

The shack was about the size of my small bedroom back home in San Diego. I put my hand on the old pines and felt Henry’s bark against my palm. Jason sneezed and thumped along to his own meditations. The pond moved in slow motion before us, Henry and me. A train rolled past the far trees like some strange dream.

Crows went from shadow to shadow, arguing.

Was it just me, or did I smell pipe tobacco burning?

I placed my stone on the cairn. I tipped my collar to my chin. Fall turned cold fast in those days. Adios, Enrique, I said. Then I headed back to town for a hot cup of coffee and a ride home on a dark train.

Memory Stone

Siobhan Wright

My father’s wife Cindy pats down the soil around hyacinths planted around a polished granite stone erected in memory of my sister, Lee, who disappeared two years ago. I don’t like the stone. I don’t like anything about it. For one, it reads In Loving Memory of Leah Susan Porter. No one calls my sister Leah. We call her Lee. The granite is gray. I didn’t want a memory stone at all, especially not next to the Trinity Bible Church. I wanted to plant a tree, an oak tree, like the one that used to stand in a field behind our house, behind all the houses on our street. We hung out there. Not just Lee and me. Lots of kids. We called it, simply, the tree. I want to replace it because it once held Lee in its branches, but I’m too afraid to say so. Instead, I imagine Lee smoking a joint, contemplating the unlikely piece of granite, agreeing with my unspoken wishes, remarking Assholes. Thin blue smoke escapes her lips as she dissolves in my imagination.

Cindy brushes off her jeans as she stands up. She’s been kneeling on a yoga mat. She’s clean and dry. What do you think, Betsy? she asks, digging for my approval. The memory stone was her idea. I push my glasses up to the bridge of my nose. It makes her seem dead, I say. My father and Cindy exchange a look that is a full conversation about me. They think I’m in denial, that I need spiritual intervention, that I need to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as my savior. I gaze across the road at the purple and yellow field that bursts with promise and wonder how I will make it through a candlelight service tonight at a church that Lee never attended with people who don’t know her, but who will come to pray for her because they know other addicts. I don’t think of Lee as an addict.

My father says, Let us bow our heads. He joins hands with Cindy and my 10-year-old brother. They wait for me to complete the circle. I do. But I can’t bring myself to bow my head or close my eyes. Help us, Jesus, to accept our loss, he says, beginning a prayer that’s not mine. A gust of wind, cold as snow, bends the hyacinths and lifts Cindy’s blond ponytail from her shoulder.

Lee called Cindy Malibu Barbie behind her back because she’s tan even in the winter. She’s barely old enough to be my mother. Lee didn’t like Cindy. I like Cindy more than I like my father. I know she tries, too hard sometimes, but she tries to be parental without pretending to be my mother. My mother lives in a motel room at the other end of town. I realize during the prayer that the field across the street is connected to the field behind our house where the tree grew. It’s a big field.

Amen, my father says. Amen, Cindy and Liam echo. I say nothing. I’m still thinking about the size of the field. They’re all looking at me. The pressure to say something bears down on me, and I blurt out, Liam and I are late for school. My father’s eyes narrow. His jaw flexes. Let’s go, he says. The contempt that surfaces on his face is familiar and puts me right back in the bunkbeds I shared with Lee, back when we curled up together on the bottom mattress, listening to hurled insults to see if my mother would step over the line. If she stepped over the line, we would hear her hit the wall or the floor or a piece of furniture.

Betsy? Cindy asks. I snap out of it. My father strides across the flat lawn in front of the church. His steps are too long. I watch until he reaches the minivan, which straddles two spaces in the otherwise empty parking lot. Cindy rolls up the yoga mat. I head across the grass with Cindy and Liam. All at once my foot sinks into a soft spot in the lawn and ice-cold water soaks my canvas tennis shoe. Shit, I say. I try to tiptoe out of the muck. By the time I reach the parking lot both shoes are ruined. I’m splattered in mud and shivering.

We’ll take you home to change, Cindy offers. My throat burns. I haven’t missed a moment of school since Lee disappeared. I know without being able to say how that if she comes to find me, she will go to the school. I stare at my soaked feet and cannot speak. If I speak, my voice will crack. If my voice cracks, I will cry. If I cry, I will sound like I’m dying. It’s okay to be late sometimes, Cindy says. I nod my head and get into the van. The door closes automatically.

My father drives toward town. The elementary school isn’t far. It sits on the outskirts of town. It’s a flat town with brick streets and a fountain in the center. There’s no water in the fountain. Ever. The sky stretches like an umbrella, horizon to horizon, but beautiful skies make the town even more grungy. It’s no wonder that Lee got away from here. Even the movie theatre is closed. We pull up in front of the elementary school. There are no swings on the swing set. Bye, Ma! Liam says to Cindy, flashing a defiant look at me. He has wavy red hair and looks like our mother. I’ll see you after school, I say.

He catches my eye. Who cares! he snaps. It stings, but he’s ten and confused. I know that when he sees me in the afternoon when the school bus pulls up outside our house, he will have forgiven me for not going along with the prayer circle, for not wanting a memory stone. Cindy whispers something into his ear that I don’t quite hear as she hands him his lunch box outside the van. Bye, Betsy, he says without looking at me. As my father pulls away, I watch Liam avoid the cracks in the sidewalk so that he doesn’t break his real mother’s back. He misses her.

We pull out onto the road again. Up ahead is the motel where my mother lives. No one says a word until we pass it. My mother’s old Honda isn’t outside her room, number 33. I don’t know how that woman lives with herself, my father says to Cindy, but it’s loud enough for me to hear. I hate this lobbying effort, the indirect way he asserts that he’s a better parent than my mom. I’m glad when Cindy doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move, doesn’t look at the rundown place my mother calls home. As we pass, I have this weird feeling, like a gumball of pain falls from my throat and through my chest all the way to my stomach. I wish that I was angry. I wish that I wasn’t grateful for knowing my mom’s address and phone number. She sends me a kiss and a hug, XO, by text message every night at 10 o’clock. My father doesn’t know this. It’s a secret.

My mother’s love for me is real but difficult to explain. She’s trying to get herself together. To recover, I guess. She used to work at the factory before it closed. Then she had no job. Now she cleans houses closer to the city. She’s embarrassed by her life. This is just how I understand things, though. When Lee was fifteen, she was caught selling pot in the girls’ lavatory next to the school office. Believe it or not, it’s the most active drug market in town, at least now that the tree is gone. Mom wept and packed a bag—all over pot that Lee sold.

Where are you going? Lee asked.

I don’t know, my mother said, her face raw and pink like a slice of jumbo bologna.

I wasn’t selling anything, Lee insists. I just fronted them money, and they were paying me back for pot. It’s legal.

It’s not legal, my mother said flatly.

Just ground me or something, Lee begged.

I’ll leave that to your father.

No, Lee replied.

When my mother walked out the front door with her suitcase, my father was sitting on the couch. You’ll have to cook dinner, he yelled.

Fuck off, Lee spat, spinning on her heel. Her auburn hair swept around her like a cape, and her black suede boots clicked on the parquet tiles all the way to our room.

Where the Hell do you think you’re going? he bellowed after her. The sound of his voice shook me up inside. I know that I’m making him sound like a bad person. He’s just loud. He was so loud when he yelled at Lee that it felt like the windows would crack. Lee answered him by slamming the bedroom door. My father looked at me, his face twisted and red, and said, Don’t you say a word.

There were no words in me. I opened the Betty Crocker Cookbook and followed the recipe for macaroni and cheese. I couldn’t get the look of his face out of my head. Liam must have been at a friend’s house. I don’t remember to be honest. I hope Liam wasn’t even there. He could have been hiding under his covers.

Not long after my mother left to live at the motel, my dad accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal savior at the mall near the city. There are no clothing or shoe stores in our town anymore, even though some of the signs for them are still up. The storefronts are empty. Anyhow, I had outgrown my shoes. Dad sat down on a bench under an indoor tree, near a water fountain with wish pennies in it. Water droplets sparkled in the air. You’ve got thirty minutes, he said, tapping his watch. It was a Saturday afternoon in November.

He’s fucking miserable, Lee