Frank Bill’s ‘Crimes in Southern Indiana’ reviewed by Charlie Stella

Community Organizers Beware. We often wonder how or why others act in ways we can’t begin to understand. Whether it’s violence for the sake of violence or violence for the sake of survival, we often shake our collective heads in amazement at what men are willing to do to one another. Most often that type of head shaking has to do with images we see on a cable news show reporting the insanity going on somewhere across the world where limbs are being cut off with machetes or a minority indigenous population is being gassed or some poor woman is being stoned to death (often by members of her own family) because she’s been raped by some piece of shit who found the opportunity to do so.

And while there are times we have similar head-shaking reactions to some of the violence in our urban areas (i.e., during particularly destructive riots when many of the people doing the looting and burning are doing so within their own neighborhoods), we don’t often wonder about the backwoods of America. Daniel Woodrell certainly opened some eyes with his body of work featuring the Ozarks. Cormac McCarthy has scripted a few masterpieces as dark as any you’ll find (so don’t stop at seeing the movie, No Country for Old Men, read the rest of his brilliant works). Recently there’s been Bonnie Jo Campbell’s collection of stories, American Salvage, which I learned about through Patti Abbott’s blog. It is a wonderful and revealing collection of stories dealing with what happens when jobs leave a community to waste.

Frank Bill joins a special class of authors who have brought home the realization that it’s time to store the American Dream alongside that of the tooth fairy and Easter bunny. It just ain’t doing it anymore. Crimes in Southern Indiana showcases interweaving stories and characters living the hell of a hopeless existence; desperate people living by the only code that counts, the only one they’ve ever known – survival. Clan comes first, then a culture that doesn’t include the law and requires the strictest kind of adherence. And while some manage to retain their humanity, it’s never easy and it’s never clean.

It is essentially a pragmatic world; people making the best of what they have. Be it cooking, selling or distributing meth, raccoon hunting or dog fighting, the people in these stories are not ashamed of how they make it day to day. They can hunt and fish and cook meth, curse and deliver raw violence as soon as say hello. Women (children) are sold off for sex to pay debts (in one story, to pay for cancer medications) and rape is sometimes a thrill in a local bar (the Leavenworth) where a few men gather to engage in a sexual assault the way others might play darts.

The time is now and the place is as brutal as any state of nature known to man. People are living off what they know and who they can depend on. ‘Omerta’ in Southern Indiana is for real and not what the modern day mob has turned into a Boy Scout oath joke; the people in these stories don’t speak to the law without the genuine fear of a horrific end.

Author Frank Bill offers tales of families way beyond crisis. Nobody in this collection is waiting for a modified mortgage. Living in a shack isn’t necessarily shameful, it’s shelter. And when a kid crosses the path of a war vet lost in the adrenalin of meth and booze and the images of war he can’t escape, some might say the kid has been spared the brutal future that awaits him.

No, amici, there are no community organizers promising hope and change, not to this part of America. The question is, is this where the rest of America is headed? The answer, I’m afraid, is very possibly so. And if I haven’t mentioned it yet, it’s high time I do. The writing is terrific. Frank Bill has the chops necessary to keep this ball rolling a long way down the literary road. Some examples from his stories in Crimes in Southern Indiana:

From: Officer Down (Tweakers)

“But in a world that took and took from the workingman, Moon guessed there was a breaking point between right and wrong.

He hadn’t seen Rusty Yates in years. His wife had left him after he’d lost a good factory job, at a battery separator plant that had sold out, moved to Mexico. Hired a cheaper workforce. Cost a lot of men and women their livelihood.”

From: Rough Company

“His uncle Lazarus explained, ‘Some people believe sweating their lives away in a factory is making a living. That dream died when Regan became president couple years back. Scamming. Swindling. Stealing. It’s the only life your uncle Lazarus and mama know. And it’s all you’ll ever know, little man.’”

From: Old Testament Wisdom

“Rusted ringer washers. Gas stoves. Dry rotted tires and busted television sets decorated the flat rock hollows. The county yards of rusted trailers and broken-down farmhouses with abandoned red clay tractors. Vehicles on cinder blocks. It was the poor man’s fairy tale of rural survival. Hines could smell the survival’s waste like the sweat that his pores excreted as he sped down the valley road.”

From: Trespassing Between Heaven and Hell

“Deputy Pat Daniels stood shaking his head, watching the boy being pulled from the green river. He wondered why God sometimes took the simple and innocent, let unexplained evils of the world live on.”

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