The Story Behind the Story: “Hogdoggin’,” by Anthony Neil Smith

(Editor’s note: This is the fourth installment of our “Story Behind the Story” series. Today we welcome Anthony Neil Smith, editor of the Webzine Plots With Guns and author of the new novel Hogdoggin’ [Bleak House Books]. The sequel to Yellow Medicine, one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2008, Hogdoggin’ is a violent yarn about motorcycles, murder, and cold-blooded revenge. How could one hope for a better storytelling mix? Smith also blogs at Crimedog One.)

Let’s back this up a minute.

In the summer of 2005, I moved to rural southwest Minnesota, which felt more like Iowa and South Dakota, with their vast prairies and corn and bean fields, than this “Land of a Thousand Lakes” I kept hearing about. I rented a house on the river in Yellow Medicine County from a colleague at the university where I worked. A couple of months later I sold my second novel, The Drummer, to indie publisher Two Dollar Radio. And a few days after that, Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coast, where I had been born and reared and where my family still lived.

My parents and sisters had fled Slidell, right across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, for my grandmother’s house on the eastern edge of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, which looked like it would avoid the strike. They were wrong. Two feet of water got into their house--and nearly half the city’s other homes--and the storm surge wiped out almost all the residences on the beach. They lost power. They were hungry. Their cars were flooded. And all I could do was listen to their horror stories … when I could connect with them at all. In fact, it took my uncle and grandmother nearly 12 hours to make what was usually a two-and-a-half hour drive between her house and Baton Rouge, because the only way to get gasoline was to drive four hours north to Jackson and then wait in line for two or three hours. I finally got back in touch with them while I was in Chicago for Bouchercon a week later.

When I said I was coming down to help, they said, “You’d just end up as hungry and miserable as we are. Stay put.”

So I did. Until Christmas.

What I finally saw in New Orleans and along the coast over those few weeks of my visit was reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic video game. Burned-out houses. Abandoned neighborhoods. Cars and boats heaped together as if made of paper. An entire community of fishing cabins along Lake Pontchartrain erased as if they were never there. My parents had finally come back to Slidell after several months to find that their neighborhood had been flooded--nearly seven feet of standing water in their home, everything on the first floor completely wrecked and unsalvageable. By choosing to return when they did, my folks had to agree to get tetanus shots and wear surgical masks. A truck carrying food came by occasionally, and that’s when they found out who was still in the neighborhood. They had to sleep lightly, on guard for looters.

Still, they were determined to make the house livable again, and they even refused one of the infamous FEMA trailers. Good thing, too, because those became a crutch for many people in that neighborhood who were either too shell-shocked or unable to move as quickly as my folks did. On my visits over the next several years, those trailers remained parked on front lawns, becoming people’s main residences while the homes behind them rotted away.

As cold as it may sound, I knew pretty quickly that I would never want to live on the Gulf Coast again. Not so much for the fear of hurricanes--I’d been through several as a child, and we persevered every time--but rather the sense that so many people in my hometown and in New Orleans had just given up. Their spirits were broken. Sure, on the surface it’s great to think that New Orleans will return to her former glory and status, and that the Gulf Coast’s best days are ahead of it. But with so much abandoned wreckage still polluting the scenery four years later, that might not be the case--although I wouldn’t be disappointed if I were proven wrong.

Following my initial post-Katrina trip to Mississippi, I returned to my little river home and began to write Yellow Medicine, about a disgraced and dirty cop from the Gulf Coast, Billy Lafitte, who took advantage of the chaos and need in Katrina’s wake and got popped for it. After he was bounced from the force, Lafitte’s ex-wife took pity and had her brother hire Billy as a deputy in Yellow Medicine County, all the way up in Minnesota. Lafitte moved into a little river home and immediately went back to his old ways, turning the lucrative backwoods methamphetamine economy into his private savings account.

One thing I realized while writing the book was that even though the Mississippi and Minnesota accents were very different, rural was rural. I began to break through the surface and get a feel for how people here viewed family, the land, their town, and other aspects of rural life. We had more in common than we had differences.

Unfortunately, one of those aspects of rural life is the same thing I noticed along the Gulf Coast in the years following Katrina: the slow death of the small-town existence. Although Minnesota hadn’t been swamped by a hurricane, I had a sense of decay and abandonment as I traveled around this area and discovered many small towns on the way to somewhere else. The emptiness hits immediately, like hunger, and just from a look around the town square you can tell there used to be more people here. The local bar, the gas station, the co-op and grain elevator, they all look … done. As bad as a meth addict’s teeth. Old before their time, just waiting for it all to be over. I’m sure the locals would argue with me about this, but my response would be, “Then do something. Make it look the way you think it really is.”

People in the town where I live and work really treasure it. So I wonder why the Christmas decorations strung along the light poles each year are in such lousy shape--dirty, torn, and with some of the lights not even working. Is that pride? I’m told over and over again by residents that this is one of the best places to live. OK, so what’s with all the empty downtown buildings, their signs left to molder even after a sprucing-up of the sidewalks and roads? A strange contradiction, it seems to me. Why is it that the same buildings that were for sale or rent along the main drag when I arrived four years ago are still sitting empty, waiting for someone to do something?

But guess what? There’s not much to be done about it. Just hunker down and wait it out.

So if Yellow Medicine was about the exile experience and the clash with one’s new surroundings, then Hogdoggin’ is about realizing you can never go home again.

* * *

I began Hogdoggin’ before we’d even sold Yellow Medicine. While I wasn’t usually a “series guy” in the stuff I’d written to that point, Billy Lafitte drew me back as I was driving through a small Minnesota/South Dakota border town, rusty and fading, and saw that the “Welcome to ...” sign was surrounded by gnomes. Your everyday garden gnomes, welcoming you to town. For some reason that brought up the contrasting image of Lafitte riding through town on a tricked-out chopper, his return to Minnesota after being out on the run. But that left me with two questions: 1) Why was he back, and 2) where had he been?

The motorcycle answered the first question for me, and it made sense. Out on the road, alone, being hounded by the law, of course Lafitte would turn to a place where his talents could be useful while also giving him shelter. So he joins a new family, Steel God’s splinter motorcycle club--more like a cult out in the wilderness--as an enforcer. But he doesn’t quite fit in. Although he was a bad cop, he had still been a cop, and the line between right and wrong was visible even if Billy had skipped back and forth across it willy-nilly. Now that line is so far behind him, he can’t see it over his shoulder.

In order to get him back, it takes a distress call from his family--his ex-wife and the kids he abandoned in Mississippi. Behind that call, though, is really rogue FBI agent Franklin Rome, beaten to a pulp by Billy at the end of Yellow Medicine, who threatened Billy’s ex if she didn’t cooperate. Rome knows his prey. Knows Lafitte can’t resist a chance to feel normal and right again. It barely takes a second thought for the man to hop on his hog and roar back into town, planning a trip to the Deep South.

He doesn’t get very far. Though not for lack of trying.

But let’s leave it at that for now.

To tell the truth, after one Minnesota winter, the Southern Guy in me wanted to make a break for warmer climes, too. I applied and interviewed for a job in Arkansas. Didn’t get it, but that was OK. By then I’d fallen in love with a Minnesota woman who began to show me what I was missing across the state. We took road trips. We went camping at several different state parks. We toured Minneapolis and she showed me the shortcuts through traffic, plus all the nooks, crannies, and neighborhoods that put Minneapolis on top of my list of cool big cities. We eventually got married in Itasca State Park, where the Mississippi River begins, and it had been a long trip, beginning at the mouth all those years ago and winding my way to the source. I wasn’t so eager to leave anymore. I was beginning to love the place.

Now, I can’t say that Billy Lafitte ever came to love his place in the world, but he did learn to accept it. He’d observed enough of southwest Minnesota and South Dakota to understand that he belonged here. Me? Well, I came to realize that I was a former Southerner, only going back to visit family and friends for short stints. And I was OK with that.

Still, the wanderlust hasn’t left me. Of course, my wife and I are part of our community. The reason we can criticize it is because we care. We’re invested here. We want to see the potential for this town that everyone else tells us is right in front of our noses. Really, we’re rooting for this place. But you’ll find us planning lots of little adventures up to the lake country, Duluth (my idea of heaven, really), the Twin Cities, Sioux Falls, Fargo, Omaha, and wherever else we can drive off to for a while. We pass through so many small towns along the way, wishing we’d seen them at their peaks. Wishing we didn’t have to witness the decline. Crossing our fingers for some miracle but also reading the lay of the land.

After all, I am a noir writer. I’m sure I’ll squeeze plenty more dark and twisted stories out of this landscape.