<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" The tweakers gather in the yard next door. Some of them collapse in lounge chairs as if they have fallen from a great height. Others huddle around a rusted-out free-standing range with an orange extension cord snaking from it. Smoke coils upward and taints the air with a smell somewhere between cat piss and burnt plastic. The chef is a ropily muscled, shirtless man with long stringy hair and not an ounce of body fat, every button of his spine clearly visible. A toddler wearing nothing but sodden diapers wanders around, picking up cans of Keystone Light, bringing them to his mouth to drink. This is the view through the living-room window of writer Daniel Woodrell. &amp;quot;Not the kind of fuckers you invite over for dinner or ask to borrow a cup of sugar,&amp;quot; he says, yanking the cord and dropping the blinds. Perhaps not, but this is what passes for normal here on the outskirts of West Plains, Missouri, where many of his stories are set. A dark-hearted author of nine novels\u2014including Winter&amp;#039;s Bone, adapted into an Oscar-nominated film by Debra Granik; Woe to Live On, which Ang Lee made into Ride with the Devil; and The Maid&amp;#039;s Version, out next week\u2014Woodrell may be the best writer you&amp;#039;ve never heard of. And he captures the run-down, put-upon underbelly of America better than anyone, because he knows it better than anyone. His family has lived here since before the Civil War.  Just a week earlier, when he was in Florida on vacation, he got a call. His neighbors\u2014the tweakers\u2014broke into his house, ripped the door off the hinges: a bad case of life imitating art, a scene that channels the opener to one of his novels, Tomato Red. Woodrell cut short his vacation to come home and arm himself. Next to his bed and in the hallway he has baseball bats. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re going to come knocking again,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;And I&amp;#039;ll be ready.&amp;quot; Though a little thick around the middle, the standard writer&amp;#039;s paunch, the sixty-year-old Woodrell looks like he could do some damage. A bristly porcupine of a goatee offsets his thinning hair, and his jaw is permanently set, as if he is trying to crack a walnut between his molars. His gaze is fuck-you fierce. Despite his irritation with the tweakers, he has a great fondness for this place. West Plains, a town of 12,000 tucked into the central Ozark hill country, is a quilt of big homes and cracker-box shacks\u2014&amp;quot;all mixed together by a lack of civic planning,&amp;quot; says Woodrell. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a friendly place of good solid citizens, but leavened with unambitious miscreants and local characters others might call nuts, but who are cherished here as sources of amusement and occasional wonder.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s the kind of insular community\u2014surrounded by the dense forests of the Ozark Mountains, and with the nearest decent-size city, Springfield, two hours away\u2014that tends to breed deep roots and fierce loyalties. Woodrell&amp;#039;s kin have been here as long as the town, and for the past sixteen years he and his wife, the novelist Katie Estill, have lived in this single-story hundred-year-old house with books lining the walls and creaky hardwood floors and a cave beneath the basement once used as a hideout for the Underground Railroad.  Everything here has a story beneath the surface. The boarded-up schoolhouse where his grandmother once studied. The row of shotgun shacks his grandfather once rented. The general store where a man stove in another&amp;#039;s skull with an axe handle. The ridge where someone gunned down Woodrell&amp;#039;s game-warden great-uncle. Everything haunted. Everything told with a sigh preceding it, as if his lungs are dark closets full of ghosts. And everything fodder for his stories. Woodrell has long been considered a world class prose stylist and storyteller: a writer&amp;#039;s writer. Yet despite his acclaimed novels\u2014among them, the darkly brilliant The Death of Sweet Mister (about a deeply troubled mother and son living in a graveyard) and the PEN West\u2013winning Tomato Red (about an out-of-control criminal who tries to make right but always ends up wrong)\u2014he has somehow remained one of American literature&amp;#039;s best-kept secrets. It was not until Winter&amp;#039;s Bone, published in 2006, was adapted into the 2010 Oscar-nominated film about the poor, desperate, and unforgettable Ree Dolly on a mission to save her family and find her meth-cooking father that Woodrell received widespread attention.  His die-hard fans range from celeb chef Anthony Bourdain to best-selling authors Annie Proulx and Dennis Lehane. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s as good a novelist as there is writing in this country,&amp;quot; says Lehane. &amp;quot;All the labels people try to attach to Woodrell\u2014&amp;#039;country noirist&amp;#039; comes to mind\u2014are laughable to anyone who understands what he&amp;#039;s doing and how hard it is to do at his level. He is who he is\u2014and he&amp;#039;s a giant in my opinion\u2014precisely because none of the labels quite apply. He writes high Greek tragedy about low people, and he never panders or looks down on the people he writes about. As a prose stylist, he&amp;#039;s done what all the best do: taken the regional voice of the world he writes about and turned it into poetry. It&amp;#039;s like he reached through the hard, cold Ozarks earth and pulled that voice back out with him.&amp;quot;  We load whiskey and steaks into the car for what his wife calls, with a roll of her eyes, &amp;quot;man camp.&amp;quot; Woodrell and I are headed deep into the Ozarks to stay in a friend&amp;#039;s cabin for the next two days. Woodrell isn&amp;#039;t happy about leaving Katie behind\u2014he&amp;#039;s worried about the tweakers\u2014but she urges us on, fingering a baseball bat. She is used to this sort of thing. If it isn&amp;#039;t the tweakers, it&amp;#039;s a husband chasing his wife into the yard and threatening to strangle her. Or a man hammering on a nearby door and getting a load of buckshot to the face. Or a neighbor waking one night to the sound of growling at the foot of his bed. It was a naked man, a soldier not long back from Afghanistan, and the neighbor stabbed him to death. The soldier&amp;#039;s shit was discovered smeared across a chair downstairs, his clothes and butcher knife stacked neatly outside.  Katie leans in the passenger-side window. Her hair frames her face like the wings of a crow. Her eyes jog from Woodrell to me, seeming at once narrowed and bemused, when she says, &amp;quot;Good luck with this one. He&amp;#039;s a bit of a challenge.&amp;quot;  Woodrell seems not to have heard her. His forehead crinkles up, and he points out the other car in the driveway, says the tweakers will know someone is home and won&amp;#039;t come sniffing around. &amp;quot;Everything will be fine,&amp;quot; she assures us.  Which, if you&amp;#039;ve read a Daniel Woodrell story, seldom turns out to be the case.   The road winds out of town, never a straight line, always sliding down a hill or coiling around a farm. Barbed-wire fences sag. Coneflowers and daylilies cluster in the ditches. A coyote darts in front of us. A road-killed possum grins at us from the gravel shoulder.  Woodrell says we&amp;#039;re about to enter the rough country, and just like that, a sunken trailer appears, and in its weed-choked yard a pit bull strains against a chain. We pass tar-paper shacks. Pickups on blocks. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a lot of cooking out here.&amp;quot; Meth, he means. And when we&amp;#039;re at the top of a rise, with the hill country sprawling all around us, I spot trails of smoke rising from the many secret chimneys of these woods. The Ozark hilltops are all about the same height, the remains of an uplifted plateau. Spring-fed rivers and streams drain through them and over the years have eaten away the sedimentary rock, creating so many valleys pocketed with caves.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a good place to hide,&amp;quot; he says, his voice a bit rusty, like a guitar strung with old baling wire. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a place where people can go off the grid, mind their business, avoid the law.&amp;quot;  He writes of these people in his short story &amp;quot;Twin Forks&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;pioneer-lean old men who poached deer whenever hungry and wouldn&amp;#039;t pay taxes, their wives wearing gray braids and cowboy hats, clasp knives sheathed at their belts; men with the beards of prophets who read the Bible at a certain slant and could build anything, their women smelling of lavender, in gingham and work boots; folks living hidden in the hills and only reluctantly coming into contact with the conventional world for want of baby formula or headache powders.&amp;quot; This is where, during the Civil War, Union and Confederate loyalties split fifty-fifty, and tender feelings exist to this day. This is where the &amp;quot;mountain boomers&amp;quot; took to hiding and fought anyone in their territory, whether they wore a blue coat or a gray one. This is where, the government declared martial law because the revenge murders were making the period indistinguishable from war. Where the long-lasting Alsup-Fleetwood feud took place\u2014far worse but less famous than Hatfield-McCoy\u2014with the many clans from the area taking sides and waging pitched battles. And where the moonshiners have set up their stills since Prohibition and where the taverns still pass the stuff off as whiskey after adding food coloring. Outlaw country.  &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a reason I&amp;#039;ve got better access to the mind of a criminal than the mind of an IBM executive,&amp;quot; Woodrell says. &amp;quot;These are my kin.&amp;quot;  He&amp;#039;s lived other places\u2014from Kansas City to Cleveland, to Iowa City, to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to San Francisco. He worked odd jobs through his twenties, and hitched America &amp;quot;pretty good back when you could do that easily,&amp;quot; stopping in many places for weeks, sometimes months, from Albuquerque to Denver and down to Tijuana. &amp;quot;I came back when I&amp;#039;d had a taste of other places and realized that I would never feel the same sense of connection to any place other than the Ozarks.&amp;quot;  We veer off the blacktop and onto a skinny rock road the color of old blood. We cut past a farm and five dogs explode from a barn and pace us a quarter mile, barking, snapping their teeth outside the window, one of them leaving saliva on the glass. Gravel crackles against the undercarriage. I feather the brake and we slow from forty to twenty to ten to five, the rutted road worse and worse, chewed up by floods.  The road drops deep into a holler and I gun the car across a creek and the water splashes up around us, but we make it through. The trees open up and Woodrell says, &amp;quot;There.&amp;quot; The two-story cabin is set back on a half-acre spread. There is a garden choked with vegetables. Stained glass artwork and bird feeders decorate the grounds.  All of this was built by Woodrell&amp;#039;s friend Ralph, a carpenter who has lived here ten years, who served in the Rhodesian army, who worked as a bit actor in Hollywood and as a roadie for Pink Floyd and the Who, who speaks with a slippery German/British accent and looks like a slimmer Jack Nicholson and can recite sentences from every book he has ever read and builds exquisitely detailed stained glass windows\u2014and somehow ended up here, at the bottom of this Ozark holler, where he feels at home among his fellow misfits.  He welcomes us inside the stone-floor vaulted-ceiling cabin, and we throw down our bags and retreat to the deck. We toss steaks on the grill. We fill pint glasses with beer and tumblers with bourbon. Soon our bellies are full and our heads are buzzing, and the sun sinks behind a ridge and a twilight gloom settles over us. Whip-poor-wills call. Fireflies blink along the banks of the creek below us.  Ralph and Woodrell have the easy banter of good friends, and they talk about sampling single-malts, walking in the woods, soaking in cold springs. &amp;quot;We spend a lot of time together just being quiet,&amp;quot; Ralph says. &amp;quot;Daniel doesn&amp;#039;t require much in the way of stimulation. He&amp;#039;s always busy noticing. That&amp;#039;s what makes him a great friend and great writer\u2014he&amp;#039;s taking in every word, every detail, and backlogging it.&amp;quot; When we clink our glasses together, the fourth or fifth toast of the evening, Woodrell cringes. He can barely lift his arm past his chest since he broke his shoulder. He was a guest at the time on the Travel Channel&amp;#039;s No Reservations, for an episode set in the Ozarks. (&amp;quot;I couldn&amp;#039;t think of a better tour guide,&amp;quot; says host Anthony Bourdain. &amp;quot;In the same way that, say, George Pelecanos owns D.C., Woodrell owns the Ozarks, and nobody should even bother writing about the place after he&amp;#039;s done it.&amp;quot;) The sun had set\u2014the air was bitterly cold\u2014and he and Bourdain stood at the bow of a boat, cruising along the nearby Current River, each with a pronged spear in hand, gigging for suckers.  Disaster struck. Bourdain lost his grip on his gigging pole when he stabbed it downward. It sank into the mud and the handle caught Woodrell in the chest, flipping him into the air and slamming him to the bottom of the boat. All while the cameras rolled.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve never felt pain like that,&amp;quot; Woodrell says now, and closes his eyes. &amp;quot;It was rapturous. They say you can&amp;#039;t remember pain, but I remember.&amp;quot; So much so that he could not move, could not speak, and in the dark, in the confusion that followed, Bourdain and the crew scrambled to find him.  &amp;quot;It was goddamn terrifying,&amp;quot; Bourdain recalls. &amp;quot;We had no idea where he was. I thought he had gone overboard. I thought I had killed one of my heroes.&amp;quot;  It was minutes before they found him\u2014and hours before he reached a hospital, where the doctor told him he had shattered the bone. His muscles had seized up so completely that over the next few weeks the tissue began to die. His arm will never be the same. He will never not hurt. And every day, he must exercise in a medieval-looking piece of equipment that breaks up the dead tissue. &amp;quot;Pain in my ass,&amp;quot; Woodrell says. &amp;quot;But it&amp;#039;s helping, day by day.&amp;quot; Woodrell drains his whiskey. A silence falls over us, and in it, we hear what sounds like a great exhalation. We look to the ridgeline. The trees there\u2014black silhouettes against a moonlit sky\u2014are shaking. &amp;quot;The hell?&amp;quot; I say.  The first black strands of a cloud appear. It moves impossibly fast, as fast as spilled ink, blotting out the stars. For a moment the air remains still at the bottom of the holler, but we can see the wind coming toward us, can hear the leaves whispering, see the trees bending. &amp;quot;My God,&amp;quot; Woodrell says.  Then it hits us.  The table between us has a huge sun umbrella attached to it, and the wind catches it. The table and our plates and our drinks lift into the air as if yanked by an invisible string. We barely hear the crash of it flying over the porch railing. We sit there stupidly, our hands raised, our eyes watering against the force of the wind, unable to make sense of what has happened. Then the first growl of thunder comes, like a chair dragged across the sky\u2014and soon after, the rain. We rush inside. Lightning flashes so often that we see the storm in strobe. The thunder snarls and shakes the windows and drowns out our curses. The rain, mixed up with hail, comes down so hard we can see no farther than the deck railing. In this cabin, there is no basement. In this holler, there are no sirens. No cell signal either. And soon enough, no electricity.  Some call Missouri misery. It has certainly seen its share of it. So has Woodrell.  During Vietnam, he enlisted in the Marines the week he turned seventeen\u2014&amp;quot;because I wanted to escape.&amp;quot; At Camp Pendleton in Southern California, he says, &amp;quot;I fell in with salty and considerably older jarheads who were already dedicated to most vices and more learned at them all than I.&amp;quot; Instead of being sent to war, he was stationed in Guam in the early seventies as a lance corporal who liked every flavor of drug he tried. One day a sergeant he was friendly with alerted him that he was being investigated and would be &amp;quot;popped in a matter of hours and could possibly get federal time.&amp;quot; So he went in for the drug amnesty program: &amp;quot;Admit your foul ways and they would either discharge you or keep you, but they couldn&amp;#039;t arrest you.&amp;quot; They discharged him, after twenty-two months in the service. He laughs about this now, saying he hopes to &amp;quot;live heartily enough to get in at least a few more such jams between here and the grave.&amp;quot;  He views his time studying at the Iowa Writers&amp;#039; Workshop as an extension of that rocky path. In his second year there, he wasn&amp;#039;t offered financial aid, &amp;quot;which was their way of signaling who they hoped would stay, and who they hoped might depart.&amp;quot; He stayed anyway and graduated in &amp;#039;83, at the age of thirty. He began working on a novel, doing odd jobs to make ends meet; three years later, Under the Bright Lights came out to wide critical praise.  But none of these troubles\u2014not the Corps, not Iowa, not the empty pockets or the broken shoulder\u2014can compare to the colon cancer that nearly killed him and his brother a few years ago, both of them diagnosed within days of each other.  &amp;quot;I couldn&amp;#039;t write,&amp;quot; Woodrell says. &amp;quot;Couldn&amp;#039;t even read. I&amp;#039;d just lie around all day. It&amp;#039;s the chemo, the poison they pump into you. Sometimes I&amp;#039;d be walking across the room and think, There it is; I got to rest. And I had to, right then.&amp;quot; He talks about passing out on the kitchen floor. He talks about losing weight\u2014a frightening amount\u2014and indeed his eyes look sunken and often lost to shadows, as if his body were made of Ozark limestone, pitted, eaten away. He talks about memory loss, difficulty concentrating, issues that linger but didn&amp;#039;t stop him from digging into the forthcoming The Maid&amp;#039;s Version\u2014a compact, lyrical account of a 1928 dance hall explosion in West Plains that left 37 dead and 22 injured. The blast twisted cars out of shape with its heat and so damaged the courthouse next door so badly it had to be torn down and rebuilt. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a local legend, and a family legend, and I&amp;#039;m drawing a good amount of the story from my grandmother&amp;#039;s account of that night,&amp;quot; he says.  Click here to read an excerpt from Daniel Woodrell&amp;#039;s new novel, The Maid&amp;#039;s Version. He&amp;#039;s cancer-free now. And though he is a natural cynic, with some prodding, he gives a half smile. &amp;quot;Life ain&amp;#039;t bad.&amp;quot;  * We wake the next morning, after not a lot of sleep, to a low ceiling of clouds. A lawn littered with branches, a road blocked by snapped trees. A creek rushing too high, too close to the cabin. The phone is dead. So is our conversation. Woodrell is worried about Katie. Ralph\u2014always good-natured, always the talker\u2014tries to fill the silence with idle chatter. Woodrell finally snaps, &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t think straight. Will you please shut up?&amp;quot;  Ralph goes dead quiet and his smile settles into what looks like a thin bloodless gash. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s one of the things I like about Daniel,&amp;quot; he later tells me. &amp;quot;He has no tolerance for nonsense and won&amp;#039;t take any shit. I love that he isn&amp;#039;t afraid to call anybody out. And, too, I love that he&amp;#039;s quick to apologize.&amp;quot; Sure enough, after a few minutes, Woodrell comes over and throws an arm around Ralph and says, &amp;quot;You know I love you, bud,&amp;quot; and Ralph smiles and says, &amp;quot;I know, I know.&amp;quot; We need to get out. Woodrell has a bad feeling. We try the road we followed in\u2014and find it blocked by waist-high rushing water. A jacked-up pickup soon appears on the other side, idles a moment, and then shifts into reverse and disappears back the way it came.  We try another route. &amp;quot;The long way,&amp;quot; Woodrell calls it\u2014twenty-some miles of washboard back roads. We stop often to heave fallen trees off the path. We creep around sections of gravel washed out by rain and pray aloud that our tires don&amp;#039;t sink into the mud.  Eventually we find asphalt, and then, at the top of a rise, a convenience store with a rusted line of Farmall tractors next to it. The cell signal here is weak, but enough for Woodrell to call home. His voice is sharp with relief when Katie answers\u2014and then his face goes slack.  In West Plains, she slept in the basement with sirens wailing through the night\u2014and three hours west, a tornado laid waste to a town nearby.  At a check-cloth table, in the middle of the convenience store, we order hush puppies and catfish sandwiches and splat our plates with ketchup and eat in silence. * In Old English, the name Woodrell translates to &amp;quot;lives in the woods,&amp;quot; and for the last few years, he has been eyeing some of the property near Ralph&amp;#039;s cabin. He&amp;#039;s at his peak career-wise\u2014even Obama was spotted purchasing a copy of The Bayou Trilogy\u2014but he craves the space, the silence. He wants to get away from the tweakers, who, at last report, smashed out the windows of his car with a baseball bat. On our way back to West Plains, the clouds are opening up, making way for patches of blue, shafts of sunlight. We see fire trucks and ambulances and squad cars and church vans racing along the highways, hurrying toward the aftermath of the tornado. Whenever lights flash behind us, we pull onto the shoulder, and it is then that he points out a nearby hillside, imagines a cabin built upon it.  &amp;quot;Wouldn&amp;#039;t that be nice?&amp;quot; he asks, and I say, Yes, it would indeed. &amp;quot;Then again,&amp;quot; he says and rolls down the window and spits. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know how I feel about being the highest thing around.&amp;quot;  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a24632/daniel-woodrell-outlaw/>