Status Updates From The Killing Hills

"-¿Te gusta beber bourbon y dormir bajo la lluvia?
-Si.
- ¿Por qué?
- Porque en Irak, Afganistan y Siria no pude hacerlo. No había bourbon. Ni lluvia."

My first Offutt, and loving it. He knows his subject because the people speak and act just as they would in a closed hill community.

Mick continued east, thinking about the Caudill brothers, Virgil and Boyd. He wondered if every family history was that sad, or just in the hills. Appalachian people lived by old codes that compelled them to take action. Affronts were always personal. Acts of vengeance maintained themselves through generations.

A sense of despair settled over him like a quilt made of concrete.

Wilson looked at Mick as if he were a pup who’d shit on the porch.

Four had brightly dyed hair. The other two, male and female, wore their hair in short mohawks greased to a woodpecker’s crest. In the way of small-town rebels everywhere, they conformed to each other. Mick wondered who owned the car, who paid for the gasoline and hair dye.

He had often imagined a life like this for Peggy and himself—finishing their days side by side on a porch, quietly enjoying the birds, trees, and flowers. He wanted to measure time by the growth of trees.

He drove to Bob’s, a gas station that sold milk, eggs, cigarettes, and fishing tackle. A shelf held a row of orange life-preservers inside plastic bags covered in dust, evidence that people in the hills were less concerned with drowning than spending money. As his grandfather said, people who can’t swim should stay off a lake.