Junkyard Wilderness

Until I read this book, I thought the Ozarks were just in Missouri. This was because my only knowledge of the region came from the TV show ‘Ozark’. Wiki tells me that the mountain region also covers north Arkansas, and it is there that Eli Cranor‘s novel takes place. 

The small town of Taggard can trace its decline to the loss of the nuclear power plant, which closed after ‘the reactor scare back in 1999. The sirens had wailed, sending the entire town into the surrounding Ozark Mountains. Turns out, there wasn’t a problem with the reactor, just a faulty alarm system.’ After the plant closed, ‘Taggard became a ghost town with barely ten thousand residents’ and things got worse from there:

A chicken plant popped up in the aftermath, a sprawling compound similar to Nuclear One but filthier. What jobs the plant had to offer went to men and women who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty, immigrants who’d work for pennies and didn’t ask questions. Wasn’t long before racially charged factions like the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Steel, and the White Arkansas Resistance, or W.A.R. for short, started forming across the Ozarks… Times had most definitely changed in Taggard, but the cooling tower still stood ancient and imposing out on the edge of Lake Dardanelle, a totem of days gone past.

In this febrile moonscape Jeremiah must raise his granddaughter Jo, left in his care after her father Jake was sentenced to life for murder. Eighteen years later, he has managed it – Jo is a grown woman with college acceptance letters and even a good shot at being crowned Homecoming Queen at the graduation ceremony on the football field. The story begins at this event, and Jeremiah, who rarely leaves the junkyard he operates for a living, is considerably nervous at the graduation, full of townspeople he feels are judging him. His fear and resentment are palpable. Jo doesn’t make Homecoming Queen – the title goes to the daughter of some local bigwig – but Jo doesn’t care: she leaves the event with her football hero boyfriend. Shortly afterwards, she is kidnapped – and then begins the real story of Ozark Dogs: it’s not so much about a postindustrial community as the mountains, rivers and lakes themselves. 

In James Dickey’s Deliverance, four men from the Georgia suburbs take a two-day canoe trip into the river wilderness. Things go awry when they are jumped by two locals with shotguns. The city men are lost in the wilderness, and tested by this unfamiliar terrain. In Ozark Dogs, the characters are mostly local people who know the landscape well – but it’s still a long terrible night for everyone concerned. Jo is brave and smart enough to escape the neo-Nazis who kidnapped her, but the Ozark river is a far greater challenge. The novel is a long night running wildly through dark forests. 

Ozark Dogs is a Western novel. The characters are distinctive, brilliantly written but, well, kind of Western. There is a hardass Mare of Easttown style woman sheriff. A hooker with a heart. Generic cartel bad guys. Moody fatalism and the weight of the past. Family feuds that go on for generations.

Bunn Ledford is an old-school Klansman who also cooks meth. His face is half ruined from an explosion in his makeshift lab. While Bunn is ‘leading revivals way up in the hills, preaching the gospel of white supremacy to a meth-mouthed congregation’ his son Evail, the real villain of the story, has yet more sinister ideas on how to grow the Ledford business and help his family dominate the region. Jeremiah himself is a Vietnam war veteran and a recovering alcoholic, haunted by guilt and grief. 

We return briefly to civilisation when Evail sends his henchman, Dime, to find a woman called Lacey Brewer. He discovers Lacey in a cheap motel, ‘face deep in the lower fold of a fat man’ – the same man whose daughter took the Homecoming title from Jo, earlier in the evening. Dime tosses out the fat man and hits Lacey in the back of the head. But Lacey is about to turn the tables. ‘Dime looked as if he were going to spit again, but instead swallowed. ‘You know why I’m here?” he asks… shortly before Lacey tricks him, stealing his car and gun. 

There are other subtleties in this book, too. When Jeremiah remembers the family of Vietnamese civilians he massacred in the war, he thinks ‘The girl was still beneath his feet’ – always, wherever he goes, beneath his feet.

In this broad-brush Mexican standoff of a book there is also marvellous detail like points of mica glowing in the mud. It is also a powerful novel of the wilderness, and the old lie that blood is thicker than water.