Southern Discomfort

“Fiction, Powell once wrote, is taking strange truths and making them into less-strange lies. Here the relative levels of strangeness might be debatable. But in Powell’s world strange truths do seem to manifest themselves regularly. When I arrived to visit him this summer at his house in the woods, he was engaged in a furious war against the local raccoons, which had murdered 17 of his 18 chickens. Powell, who is 57, thick-chested and muscular, had come home from a trip to Morocco to find the neighbor he left in charge — a shoeless machinist Powell paid to build the coops and safeguard the birds — gone AWOL, having taken Powell’s truck, leaving only a note, written on the back of a receipt for $70 of cheap liquor, asking for some money from Powell’s teenage daughter. All that was left for Powell to do was to revenge himself on the raccoons.”

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