Books like Town Smokes: Stories

Town Smokes is a book of short stories, which often centered on the interactions between rural people and animals—which particularly interested me. We see occasional compassion, such as that of a family that became too attached to the rabbits they bred to sell them for meat, but the majority of these interactions are characterized by the casual cruelty of a man scooping up fleeing crawdads and dumping them into a boiling pot. This is a world of shooting harmful-only-to-rodents black snakes and jacklighting deer. There’s Booze, the elderly boar who is coming to the end of a life spent terrorizing a community. His viciousness and appetite were the stuff of legend. “That Booze,” Tobe said, moving on to another hog. “Like to put him up against a pit dog one day.”Hog-dogging is the lesser-known cousin of the infamous “sport” of dog fighting. Either way, the breeds of choice are the usual abusees—the pit bull terrier and the Staffordshire bull—dogs which are the “for us, by us” of sadistic animal abusers. This book contains a dog fighting story titled “Pit,” however; the dogs featured are not the usual fighting breeds. The spitz was awful quick and a better fighter than his size might make you think. He was out of King Generator up in Pocahontas County, and King Generator was a dog that was born to fight.Interestingly, this image of the Spitz as a relentless beast may have been borne out of early vilification of the breed by New York legislators. The medium-sized, long-furred dogs were thought to have been especially susceptible to rabies, and worse, closely associated with the German immigrant population. Despite this early panic, the dogs’ behavior simply didn’t live up to popular fears. However, this passage does give us an important insight into the dog fighting mentality: top winners are carefully guarded as important breeding animals. These animal abusers realize violent aggression is not just a product of nurture, but also nature. So they do train and condition their dogs to be better killers, but they start out by choosing a vicious bloodline first. When the black mongrel the spitz was fighting comes out on top, we readThey liked his style, and there was no telling how much a dog that could kill a son out of King Generator was worth. Top fighters are worth huge amounts of money in the breeding fees they generate alone. “Blame the deed?” I say, “Blame the breeder”…Messed-up stuff? Indeed. But unlike other books of this nature, I feel the author was only reporting, not glamorizing or idealizing these inhumane “rural ways.” Reporting the truth is something I can respect, even when it is done in the context of fictional stories.