Joe

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.” —W
ILLIAM
K
ENNEDY
, 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.”

—H
ARRY
C
REWS
, 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.” —C
LEANTH
B
ROOKS
, 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

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.
PS
3552.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.”