That Easyriders story, “Plant Growin’ Problems,” kicks off this collection. The spiraling tale of a marijuana-growing biker’s encounter with a seedy Georgia sheriff, it belongs to a mostly extinct species of male adventure stories, the kind Elmore Leonard and Mickey Spillane used to write for pulp magazines in the mid-twentieth century. It operates, then, within a much narrower compass than Larry’s later stories do. Yet we can already see certain hallmarks of Larry’s style fixed in place, like surveyor’s flags. The universe he sketches, for instance, is characteristically devoid of moral clarity, with the sheriff both a user and distributor of the marijuana at the story’s locus. The vernacular is gutty and fresh (“I wouldn’t try that shit, boy,” the sheriff warns the biker. “Not ’less you want the undertaker packin’ your asshole fulla cotton ’bout dark”). Spurts of humor shoot from unexpected places (as when the sheriff ambushes the biker with an Ed McMahon bellow: “Heeeeeeeeeere’s Cecil!”). Most significantly, perhaps, there’s the moral dilemma with which Larry saddles his biker protagonist: “Against his better judgment, against the nagging little voice of his conscience” is how Larry framed the character’s pivotal action. That’s trademark Larry Brown: the not wanting to do good, but doing good anyway; the not wanting to do bad, likewise.

I’ll note here, as an aside, that Larry did own a motorcycle in the eighties. I asked him about it once, after noticing a bike leaning against the back side of the house, mummified with rust and all but hidden beneath a tangle of vines and scrub. It used to be his, he explained, but he’d sold it to a guy who’d paid him $400 then said he’d be back shortly with a trailer to haul it off. He was still holding it for the guy, he told me. “How long’ve you been waiting for him?” I asked, hiking an eyebrow at the weeds enshrouding it. Larry thought about this for a while. “I guess it’s four years now,” he said. In the intervening years he hadn’t so much as touched the bike, in case the guy finally did return for it. Larry, after all, had gone and spent the four hundred bucks, and a deal’s a deal. That was trademark Larry Brown, too.