Joe Read online

  JOE

  Praise for JOE

  * * *

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

  “Goes for the jugular... painfully honest... a focused, driven story.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “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

  “Masterful. . . . There isn’t a bad sentence anywhere in this book. Joe is tougher than a night in a Georgia jailhouse.” —The Kansas City Star

  “A tragic, compelling new novel.” —The Associated Press

  “Gifted with 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

  “Brown has quietly established himself as among the finest of the new generation of Southern writers. His latest work is absolutely riveting in its rawness. Brown has unleashed all his skills in this story.” —The Denver Post

  “Larry Brown is one of the more distinctive prose artists of our time. . . . His prose is starkly poetic, his characterizations, occasionally darkly comic, are always uncompromising and convincing . . .” —The Houston Post

  “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 lronweed

  “This raw and gritty novel ranks with the best hard-knocks down-and-out work of Jim Thompson and Harry Crews. It’s lean, mean, and original.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Brown’s voice is distinctive enough to make it impossible to confuse it with any other writer.... Whatever he writes, I will read.”

  —HARRY CREWS, author of A Feast of Snakes

  “Demands to be read, reread, talked about, and relished.” —Booklist

  “There is a lot to like and admire in Joe. . . . It is no small accomplishment for Brown to demonstrate that evil can entertain, . . . that the devil can make us laugh.” —Los Angeles Times

  “An unadorned account that is powered by the sheer force of the storytelling.” —The Orlando Sentinel

  “Reading Larry Brown’s work can give you a chill... has the rawness of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road with a touch of William Faulkner’s brooding theatrics.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “A fine piece of fiction. A story has been fully told to us, a story that is significant.” —CLEANTH BROOKS, author of William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country

  “[Brown] has earned his place as one of the best new Southern writers— Joe has some of the best and most real writing around.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “Asserts a strange compelling beauty ... fills one with pleasure, awe, and sorrow.” —The Memphis Commercial Appeal

  “With Joe, Larry Brown has emerged as one of our finest writers... a book to be savored, studied, and admired for years to come.” —Cox News Service

  “Near-epic sweep. It makes good on an ambition Brown’s earlier books barely hinted at.” —Mirabella

  “With this powerful, immensely affecting novel Brown comes into his own as a writer of stature.” —Publishers Weekly

  “This is the major novel that will catapult Brown to the forefront of living Southern writers.” —Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

  Also by Larry Brown

  Facing the Music, stories

  Dirty Work, a novel

  Big Bad Love, stories

  On Fire, essays

  Father and Son, a novel

  Fay, a novel

  Billy Ray’s Farm, essays

  JOE

  A novel by

  LARRY BROWN

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing Company, Inc.

  708 Broadway

  New York, New York 10003

  © 1991 by Larry Brown.

  First paperback edition, Warner Books, October 1992. First Algonquin

  paperback, October 2003. Originally published in hardcover by Algonquin

  Books of Chapel Hill in 1991.

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Design by Molly Renda.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places,

  and incidents are either the products of the author’s

  imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to

  any real person is intended or should be inferred.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brown, Larry

  Joe : a novel / by Larry Brown. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-945575-61-0

  I. Title.

  PS3552.R6927J64 1991

  813.54—dc20 91-12026 CIP

  ISBN 1-56512-413-8 paper

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  for my big bad bro,

  Paul Hipp

  JOE

  The road lay long and black ahead of them and the heat was coming now through the thin soles of their shoes. There were young beans pushing up from the dry brown fields, tiny rows of green sprigs that stretched away in the distance. They trudged on beneath the burning sun, but anyone watching could have seen that they were almost beaten. They passed over a bridge spanning a creek that held no water as their feet sounded weak drumbeats, erratic and small in the silence that surrounded them. No cars passed these potential hitchhikers. The few rotting houses perched on the hillsides of snarled vegetation were broken-backed and listing, discarded dwellings where dwelled only field mice and owls. It was as if no one lived in this land or ever would again, but they could see a red tractor toiling in a field far off, silently, a small dust cloud following.

  The two girls and the woman had weakened in the heat. Sweat beaded the black down on their upper lips. They each carried paper sacks containing their possessions, all except the old man, who was known as Wade, and who carried nothing but the ragged red bandanna that he mopped against his neck and head to staunch the flow of sweat that had turned his light blue shirt a darker hue. Half of his right shoe sole was off, and it flopped and folded beneath his foot so that he managed a sliding, shuffling movement with that leg, picking it up high in a queer manner before the sole flopped again.

  The boy’s name was Gary. He was small but he carried the most. His arms were laden with shapeless clothes, rusted cooking utensils, mildewed quilts and blankets. He had to look over the top of them as he walked, just to be able to see where he was going.

  The old man faltered momentarily, did a drunken two-step, and collapsed slowly on the melted tar with a small grunt, easing down so as not to hurt himself. He lay with one forearm shielding his face from the eye of the sun. His family went on without him. He watched them growing smaller in the distance, advancing through the mirrored heat waves that shimmied in the road, unfocused wavering shapes with long legs and little heads.

  “Hold up,” he called. Silence answered. “Boy,” he said. No head turned to hear him. If his cries fell on their ears they seemed not to care. Their heads were bent with purpose and their steps grew softer as they went on down the road.

  He cursed them all viciously for a few moments
and then he pushed himself up off the road and went after them, his shoe sole keeping a weird time. He hurried enough to catch up with them and they marched on through the stifling afternoon without speaking, as if they all knew where they were heading, as if there was no need for conversation. The road before them wound up into dark green hills. Maybe some hope of deep shade and cool water beckoned. They passed through a crossroads with fields and woods and cattle and a swamp, and they eyed the countryside with expressions bleak and harried. The sun had started its slow burning run down the sky.

  The old man could see beer cans lying in the ditches, where a thin green scum nourished the tan sagegrass that grew there. He was very thirsty, but there was no prospect of any kind of drink within sight. He who rarely drank water was almost ready to cry out for some now.

  He had his head down, plodding along like a mule in harness, and he walked very slowly into the back of his wife where she had stopped in the middle of the road.

  “Why, yonder’s some beer,” she said, pointing.

  He started to raise some curse against her without even looking, but then he looked. She was still pointing.

  “Where?” he said. His eyes moved wildly in his head.

  “Right yonder.”

  He looked where she was pointing and saw three or four bright red-and-white cans nestled among the grasses like Easter eggs. He stepped carefully down into the ditch, watchful for snakes. He stepped closer and stopped.

  “Why, good God,” he said. He bent and picked up a full can of Budweiser that was slathered with mud and slightly dented, unopened and still drinkable. A little joyous smile briefly creased his face. He put the beer in a pocket of his overalls and turned slowly in the weeds. He picked up two more, both full, and stood there for a while, searching for more, but three were all this wonderful ditch would yield. He climbed back out and put one of the beers in another pocket.

  “Somebody done throwed this beer away,” he said, looking at it. His family watched him.

  “I guess you going to drink it,” the woman said.

  “Finders keepers. They ain’t a fuckin thing wrong with it.”

  “How come em to throw it away then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well,” she said. “Just don’t you give him none of it.”

  “I ain’t about to give him none of it.”

  The woman turned and started walking away. The boy waited. He stood mute and patient with his armload of things. His father opened the can and foam exploded from it. It ran down over the sides and over his hand and he sucked at the thick white suds with a delicate slobbering noise and trembling pursed lips. He tilted the can and poured the hot beer down his throat, leaning his head back with his eyes closed and one rough red hand hanging loose by his side. A lump of gristle in his neck pumped up and down until he trailed the can away from his mouth with his face still turned up, one drop of beer falling away from the can before it was flung, spinning, backward into the ditch. He started walking again.

  The boy shifted his gear higher and stepped off after him.

  “What’s beer taste like?” he said, as the old man wiped his mouth.

  “Beer.”

  “I know that. But what’s it taste like?”

  “I don’t know. Shit. It just tastes like beer. Don’t ask so many fuckin questions. I need to hire somebody full time just to answer your questions.”

  The woman and the girls had gone ahead by two hundred feet. The old man and the boy had not gone more than a hundred feet before he opened the second beer. He drank it more slowly, walking, making four or five drinks of it. By the time they got to the foot of the first hill he had drunk all three.

  It was that part of evening when the sun has gone but daylight still remains. The whippoorwills called to each other and moved about, and the choirs of frogs had assembled in the ditches to sing their melancholy songs. Bats scurried overhead, swift and gone in the gathering dusk. The boy didn’t know where he and his family were, other than one name: Mississippi.

  In the cooling evening light they turned off onto a gravel road, their reasons unspoken or merely obscure. Wilder country here, also unpeopled, with snagged wire and rotten posts encompassing regions of Johnsongrass and bitterweed, the grim woods holding secrets on each side. They walked up the road, the dust falling over their footprints. A coyote lifted one thin broken scream down in the bottom; somewhere beyond the stands of cane they could see a faint green at the end of the plowed ground. They turned in on a field road at the base of a soapstone hill and followed it, stepping around washed-out places in the ground, past pine trees standing like lonely sentinels, where doves flew out singing on gray-feathered wings, and by patches of bracken where unseen things scurried off noisily through the brush.

  “You know where you at?” said the woman.

  The old man didn’t even look at her. “Do you?”

  “I’m just followin you.”

  “Well, shut up then.”

  She did. They went over the last hill and here the whole bottom was open before them, the weak light that remained stretching far down across an immense expanse of land that had been plowed but not yet planted. They could see all the way to the river, where the trees stood black and solid.

  “It’s a river bottom,” said the boy.

  “Well shit,” said the old man.

  “Can’t cross no river,” the woman said.

  “I know it.”

  “Not in the dark.”

  The old man glanced at her in the falling light and she looked away. He looked around.

  “Well hell,” he said. “It’s bout dark. Y’all see if you can find us some wood and we’ll build us a fire.”

  The boy and the two girls put everything they had on the ground. The girls found some dead pine tops next to an old fence and they pulled them whole into the road and began breaking them into pieces small enough to burn.

  “See if you can find us a pine knot,” he told the boy. The boy left and they could hear him breaking through the brush up the hill. When he came back he was dragging a gray hunk of wood with one hand and carrying in the other arm some dead branches. He threw all this down and started off for more. The old man squatted in the dust of the road and began to roll a cigarette, his attention focused finely, aware of nothing but the little task at hand. The woman was still standing with her arms clutched about her, hearing something out there in the dark that maybe spoke to no ear but her own.

  The boy came back with another load and said, “Let me see your knife.”

  The old man fished out a broken-bladed Case and the boy fell to shaving thin orange peelings of wood away from the pine knot. He drew the blade down, breaking the chips off close to the base. When he had a good handful whittled, he arranged them in some unseen formation of his own devising in the powdered gray dust.

  “Let me see some of them little sticks,” he told his little sister. She passed across a bundle of brittle tinder and he set this around and above the pine chips. He drew a box of matches from his pocket and struck one. In the little fire that flared, his face loomed out of the dark, curiously intense and dirty, his hands needlessly cupping the small flame. He touched it to one of the chips and a tiny yellow blade curled up, a tendril of black smoke above it like a thick waving hair.

  “That stuff’s rich as six foot up a bull’s ass,” the old man said. The little scrap of wood began sizzling and the resin boiled out in black bubbles, the flames eating their way up. The boy picked up another one from the pile and held it over the fire, got it caught, and added it to the fire. One of the sticks popped and burst into flame.

  “Give me some of them a little bigger,” he said. She handed them. They smiled at each other, he and little sister. Now they began to be drawn out of the coming dark, the five of them hunched around the fire with their arms on their knees. He fed the sticks one by one into the fire, and soon it was crackling and growing and red embers were breaking off and falling into the little bed of coals already fo
rming.

  He kept feeding it, jostling and poking it. He got down on his knees and lowered his face sideways to the fire and began to blow on it. Like a bellows he gave it air and it responded. The fire rushed over the sticks, burned higher in the night.

  “Y’all go on and put some of them big ones on it,” he said, getting up. “I’ll go up here and get some more.”

  The girls hauled limbs and piled them on the fire. Soon there were red sparks launching up into the smoke. The stars came out and enveloped them in their makeshift camp. They sat under a black skyscape beside woods alive with noise. The bullfrogs on the creeks that fed the river were hoarse and they spoke from the clay banks up into the darkness with a sound the ear loves.

  The woman was digging among her sparse duffel, pawing aside unusable items at the top of the sack. She pulled out a blackened iron skillet and a pint can of green beans. She set these down and looked some more.

  “Where’s them sardines?” she said.

  “They in here, Mama,” the oldest girl said. The youngest one said nothing.

  “Well, give em here, honey.”

  The boy came crashing down through the bushes and laid another armload of wood by the fire and went away again. They could hear him casting about like an enormous hound. The woman had the knife up and she was stabbing at the can of beans with it. She managed to open it and with careful fingers she pried the jagged edge up and turned the can over, shaking the beans into the skillet. She set it close to the coals and started in on the sardines. After she got the can open she rummaged around in her sack and pulled out a package of paper plates partially wrapped in cellophane and set them down, took out five. There were five of the little fish in the can. She put one in each plate.