| Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 | |
| Author: | Annie Proulx |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Short story collection |
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Release Date: | 2004 |
| Isbn: | 978-0-7432-5799-2 |
Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 is a collection of short stories by Annie Proulx published in 2004.[1] It was not as well received by critics in comparison with Proulx's 1999 .[2]
The collection consists of eleven stories, all set in Wyoming; Proulx moved to the state in the 1990s.[1] Five of the eleven stories are set in the fictional Wyoming town of "Elk Tooth",[2] a town of 80 inhabitants in which each individual "tries to be a character and with some success. There is little more to it than being broke, proud, ingenious and setting your heels against civilized society's pull".[3] A number of the stories had previously been published in The New Yorker.[4] "The Wamsutter Wolf" appeared in The Paris Review a few months before the collection was published.[5]
Creel Zmundzinski,[6] a Wyoming Fish and Game warden, finds that a small patch in a roadside parking area will incinerate hunters without the correct licenses.[7] In Pee-Wee, one of Elk Tooth's three bars, his best friend Plato Bucklew commends Zmundzinski for sending wrongdoers literally to Hell.[8]
An extended exposition about a family of small town Wyoming lawyers and polo players leads up to a narrative about a Native American woman who is employed to clear out the family's decaying office building.[9]
The widow of the last lawyer marries Charlie Parrott, who is of Oglala Sioux descent.[10] Parrott's daughter Linny is accepted by his new wife on the proviso that Linny clean through the lawyer family's archives and categorize what may be of value.[11] Amongst the detritus she finds reels of the 1913 Essanay Studios film The Indian Wars Refought produced by William "Buffalo Bill" Cody.[6] Linny is prompted to discover her hidden heritage: she reads Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and asks her father to take her back to the reservation he was born in.[10] He declines: "She would get involved, and after a few years of passionate activism she might fall away from it and end up on urban sidewalks in the company of street chiefs and hookers".[11]
Elk Tooth resident and drinker at Elk Tooth's three bars (according to the book, "the Wyoming trickle down effect"[12]) Deb Sipple agrees to haul hay from Wisconsin to the drought-stricken[6] ranch of "lady rancher" Fiesta Punch.[13] Sipple tosses cigarette butts out the window of his flat-bed truck, igniting the hay and resulting in "the closest thing to a meteor ever seen in Elk Tooth... his truck a great fiery cylinder hurtling through the darkness".[4]
Rancher Gilbert Wolfscale tries and fails to adapt to modern realities. His wife leaves him and his children have no interest in him or his farm.[9] Despite what has been described as a "hokey title",[14] it was critically received as one of the stronger stories in the collection.[2] [9]
In what has been described as a "weird tale", three talking badgers gossip amongst themselves.[6] One of them – an untenured Creative Writing professor[8] – is convinced that a rancher's wife has fallen in love with him.[1] When the rancher shoots at him, he fancies this is out of jealousy; "but then, he'd been denied tenure and was a little sour on things".[15]
Mitchell and Eugenie Fair are newcomers to Wyoming.[1] Though both are initially attracted to life there for their own separate reasons, they grow apart rather than together in the new environment.[7] The "man crawling out of trees" of the title is a skier with a broken leg who Eugenie Fair takes for a prowler instead of giving him aid, breaking a "cardinal rule" of the place.[16]
The men of Elk Tooth pass the long winter with a beard-growing contest.[9] One contestant resorts to applying Viagra to encourage his beard.[8]
Greybull-born Buddy Millar[17] dislikes highways, preferring back roads, some the "serious bad dirt" of the title of the collection.[18] Millar finds himself back in Wyoming, in Wamsutter, more a huge trailer park off the I-80 than a town.[18]
The stories set in Elk Tooth were variously described as "mere squibs"[9] and "genuinely terrible".[2] Character names in the short story collection, "quirky characters with names to match",[13] include Orion Horncrackle,[19] Creel Zmundzinski and Plato Bucklew from "The Hellhole", Deb Sipple and Fiesta Punch from "The Trickle Down Effect". The A.V. Club review of Bad Dirt described them as a "helpful guide through this uneven collection... The wackier they are, the more disposable the story."[6]
"The Wamsutter Wolf" was awarded the 2004 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction.[20] [21] In an interview with The Paris Review in 2009, Proulx stated that she preferred her short fictions to her novels.[21]