Evan Carlyle, a bright young man on the make who emigrated to Canada during the Vietnam War, returns to his hometown and runs into the last person he wants to see, his old buddy, the legendary hell-raiser, Alex Warner. Evan’s life has been a series of successes; he has a flashy girlfriend and makes good money as a producer for CBC Radio. Alex has not been so lucky; he’s trapped in a dead-end marriage and owns a failing service station hit hard by the 1970s energy crisis.

Fueled by several cases of beer, these two head south in a snowstorm in an attempt to recreate their lost glory days. Inevitably they must confront unfinished business from the past, including their haunting memories of Elaine Isaac, the wild girl they both loved in high school.

Alex Driving South is the first of Keith’s first novels set in the “part-real part-fictional” town of Raysburg, West Virginia, modeled on his hometown of Wheeling. A story of a past that cannot be forgotten or forgiven, of courage and betrayal, and of coming home to Appalachia, Alex Driving South is now widely regarded as a foundational work in West Virginia literature.

 

Excerpt from Alex Driving South

“Carlyle, you simple shit!”

 Evan didn’t recognize his friend.

 “Come on, fuckhead, you know me.”

Evan looked—a huge, muscular man in faded coveralls, short curly black hair, grease on his hands—and then he remembered. There was no way he could have forgotten that pleasantly ugly face and those expressionless brown eyes so pale that they were nearly yellow. “Alex,” he said. Then: “Christ, you look different. You’ve gotten heavier—” Not as though Alex Warner had gone to fat, rather that the boy in Evan’s memory had been worn to the bone and the man who stood there now was massive. Well, here he is, Evan thought, the one person in town I didn’t want to see. “You look fit,” he said uneasily.

     Alex laughed; that is, his single short bark must have been intended as a laugh—“Haw!”—harsh, like a crow. “Fit, my ass! I’m burning out faster than a racehorse. . . . But shit, man, you look young. You look like a fucking college kid.” And again Evan regretted his whimsical suit with its curved lapels and flared pants. Dana had talked him into it; theatrical lady, she loved playing dress-up as a party game, had been at him for months over his flannel shirts and baggy pants—his “leftover sixties conservatism,” she said. They’d bought the suit the day he’d heard that his contract had been renewed; he wore it now because it was the only suit he owned. He should have known how it would look on the streets of Raysburg, West Virginia. “Yeah, you really look young,” Alex was saying. “I didn’t know you till I damn near run you down. Come on, I’ll buy you a drink.”

It’s been over ten years, Evan thought, thirteen years, to be exact, since I’ve seen him. Do I want to have a drink with him? What could we possibly have to say to each other now? But Christ, there’s no way in hell I can get out of it.

     He had planned to fly in from Toronto, pay a duty visit to his parents, and fly out again, untouched, unmoved, detached as an anthropologist. Worrying about it on the plane, he had decided not to see Alex at all, to keep him fixed in the past, set into those surreal nights that spun in memory like pinwheels: both of them sixteen or seventeen or eighteen, careening from bar to bar in Alex’s truck, getting drunk and then drunker, trying halfheartedly to pick up girls, and always ending the night by driving south with a case of beer between them on the seat. Driving south to look at the fiery open-hearth furnaces that burned hellishly (no other word would do) out into the West Virginia night. That’s where Alex belonged, Evan had decided, pushed firmly back into the mist of nostalgia that was growing over his high school days—“The Old Friend,” a piece of the legend, the central figure in his stock of down-home stories to be trotted out at dinner parties with Dana urging him on: “Hey, tell them about that crazy guy you went to school with. The one who stole all the cars. What was his name?” Alex Warner was his name, and now here he was, a grown man, solid and grinning. At least that cracked, ironic grin hadn’t changed in thirteen years.

©Keith Maillard, 1980

Alex Driving South is the only book of mine that has inspired a song. Corin Raymond, playing with The Undesirables on their album Travelling Show (2009), recorded a song called “Alex Warner Revisited.” Corin has caught Alex Warner’s voice beautifully.

“Alex Warner Revisited,” Corin Raymond with the Undesirables, on the album, Travelling Show.

Song inspired by Keith Maillard’s novel, Alex Driving South.

If you liked the song, you might like what Corin Raymond is doing now.