Sometimes the world just doesn't seem to contain all that much hope. The slivers of it that exist have to be found in quiet moments and in the resilence of people mourning loss. Those people are like the ones who live in Krafton in Alan Heathcock's Volt, a series of connected stories.
Krafton is a farmtown in the middle of nowhere. Nobody is rich. A lot of people are poor and the mean-spirited run rampant. The main characters in each story try to take charge, or control a small part, of their crazy world after events show them just how helpless they are in controlling their own destinies.
winslow accidentally kills his son in a farming accident in "The Staying Freight". Devastated and guilt-ridden, one day he drives his truck across a railroad track in front of an oncoming train. The train stops, the engineer runs up to the ironically nicknamed Win's tractor, chews him out and runs away across the field. Later that night, Win goes out for a walk. And keeps on going, knowing that train engineer will find him at times and, like a silent messenger, remind Win of why he cannot rest. The end shows just how the guilt has transformed him even more than his sojourn as a strong man in an impromptu freak show.
Vernon's father wakes him up one morning to help with an errand. Sewn up with green thread after being knifed, his father needs Vernon to help dispose of a body. It may have been a matter of weird road rage, self-defense, but then again, it may have been avoided entirely. Either way, the guilt and wanting to make it right is there:
"When a fire goes out there's a smoldering and a little smoke to trail," he said in "Smoke". "This man wasn't snuffed like a fire. I switched him off like a houselight, and it don't seem right."
Vernon, minding his daddy's instructions, still needs Roy Rogers to help him make sense of it all. What Roy has to offer is a song. "I just sing a song every now and again to take off the dark edges," he tells the boy who says he knows Roy better than his own father. What Vernon makes of his life and what he does when it looks like he has lost everything shows the redemptive power of considering others' needs first, and Heathcock tells about that in another story. Vernon isn't a winner, but what he does in a moment of kindness is one of those shining moments that is stunningly powerful. Considering singing with Roy Rogers, that later moment is one of those full-circle events that illuminates a life.
And then there's Helen Farraley. She used to work at the mayor's store, but somehow won Krafton's first vote for law enforcement and is now the town's "first and only law enforcement". A teenage girl goes missing. Helen soon finds her body, then the killer. And then takes care of matters in her own way in "Peacekeeper". The story is told partly in flashback to the year before, when the crime was committed and later that month on Christmas Eve, and in the present time, when Krafton is flooded and Helen steers a boat around the steeples and gas signs to get inside the second stories of homes.
At one point, Helen sits in her cold police cruiser with the motor off, sipping peppermint schnapps as she "considered the world made of her design. My religion is keeping peace, she thought. It hadn't begun that way, was nothing she'd planned, but now she saw that's how it was. I just ran a grocery, she thought. I don't want this. I ain't the one to make the world right." But there is no one else to make it right either, so Helen continues on her quest.
The last story of the collection also features Helen trying to put the world right and keep the peace, by going to talk to a wanted member of a renegade family before county law enforcement come for him. Things don't go right for her, and it's easy to make the case that she arranged things that way. It's not just Helen who can't put things right. "Three months since the flood and the world still reeked of silt." If there was any rainbow after this flood, it was hidden by the clouds.
This dank atmosphere pervades Krafton and the outlying area. The flood hasn't made the world new. Instead, it's as if hope has been submerged and is having trouble keeping its head above water. That feeling is especially pervasive in "The Daughter", a story about a mother who has just lost her own mother to carjackers who murdered her in a parking lot. When one of the boys who lives nearby is lost after she is attacked in her own corn maze, the twists and turns in the plot can make a reader change ideas about who is the victim and who is the prey. Again, a woman tries to make things right. But whether she accomplished her goal is a good question.
Other fiction that delves into similar territory includes Shann Ray's American Masculine, Daniel Woodrell's The Outlaw Album and Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff. Gritty crime fiction is closely related. Woodrell often is shelved in that section, and the work of Wallace Stroby and Ace Atkins's latest novel, The Ranger, are recent examples.
These novels and stories are set throughout the country in the forgotten spots that don't even figure in fly-over rhetoric. Lives are hardscrabble. Not every person is decent. But all of them deserve attention as much as Willie Loman. And sometimes, just sometimes, the sun shines for a few moments into someone's life and they find the strength to carry on.