Vietnam? He considered the intriguing eligibility of his own narrative as a parallel: A Bad Axe farm boy, 1969, proud to be drafted, returns home damaged by a futile and fraudulent war, having slaughtered fellow humans, inhaled Agent Orange, lost a kidney and a bone-hunk from his right leg, transforming into the kind of young man that no one around the Bad Axe ever expected to see, a longhair with DOW SHALT NOT KILL on his Volkswagen bumper, an angry voice in the taverns saying un-American things. And from there forward, in exchange for one of the smallest salaries in the history of journalism, the former farm boy spends the next forty-plus years breathing fire from the rooftops…

Ugh.

This was pain talking, the over-exercised rhetoric of loss and grief.

Local Man Wallows in Self-Pity

Fanta watched his headline drift away. Tell the truth, asshole. He was only ever of average ability, average disability, and average courage. He had ended up as an average alcoholic widower, staggering around at the end of his rope, unable to let go. From here he tried again.

He was the common man.

An honest pilgrim.

He the people.

Ugh.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

Martyr-to-Be Self-Eulogizes

He swallowed a mouthful of Walker, shot smoke from his nostrils, and chuckled darkly at a favorite memory.

Back when his beloved wife, Maryanne, was alive, whenever he had become overwrought at his typewriter and was being a jerk, mixing a metaphor, dangling a modifier, confusing its and it’s—this was the eighties, Maryanne typesetting on the clumsy Compugraphic machine on the balcony over his desk—whenever he botched the angle on a story, waxed too poetic, wrote a steaming dump of a headline, his dearly departed would reach into her bra, extract her foam-rubber left boob—now in his box of recovered personal effects–and chuck it down upon his head.

He chuckled again darkly.

Something had just hit him on the head.

The story was not just FROM HELL HOLLOW.

The story was himself, the veteran-veteran Grape Fanta, finding FROM HELL HOLLOW, meeting the man, engaging him, their encounter, their dialectic, their reconciliation, that was the story.

Could he find the man?

Of course he could.

If he looked, there would be clues in the letters. To the extent that he had ever given any thought to the matter, he had always guessed that his screed-writer was a homesteader, a reclusive subsistence farmer, educated, radical, pacifist, contrarian, perhaps Amish-like in his willful disconnectedness, howling from the wilds of the Bad Axe.