Simplified Map of the Real World: The Renata Stories - Softcover

“Funny, sensual, piercing, honest, witty, and a braided woven webbed stitch of stories and people unlike anything I ever read. It catches something deep and true about the brave and nutty shaggy defiant grace of this place. Fun to read and funner to recommend.”
– Brian Doyle, author of Mink River

“You don’t need to be from a small Oregon town to recognize Stevan Allred’s characters. They are your mother, your father, your cousin Cathy. And probably more than you’d like to admit, they even feel a bit like you. A Simplified Map of the Real World is a highly-skilled collection of interwoven stories, surprising in its various styles and voices. But the real surprise is how close Stevan Allred gets to the beating heart of what it means to be human. Petty, profane, sacred, scared, hilarious. We’re all in this book. And that’s quite a triumph.”
– Tom Spanbauer, author of The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon

“Stevan Allred’s characters are delightfully wrong-headed. They make questionable choices—sometimes terrible ones—and get themselves into all kinds of trouble. But the worse their mistakes, the more I care for them, because beyond their difficulties what Allred gives them is the essential dignity of longing. No matter how misguided, all strive toward some ideal, and no matter what mess they make of their circumstances, they end up more alive for having given themselves over to desire. To read their stories is to journey through passions that transcend the confinements of small town life—and it’s a journey that’s by turns funny, surprising, and heartbreaking.”
– Scott Nadelson, author of The Next Scott Nadelson

Fifteen linked stories chart a true course through the lives of families, farmers, loggers, former classmates, and the occasional stripper. In the richly imagined town of Renata, Oregon, a man watches his neighbor’s big-screen TV through binoculars. An errant son paints himself silver. Mysterious electrical humming emanates from an enormous barn. A secret abortion from three decades ago gets a public airing. In A Simplified Map of the Real World, intimate boundaries are loosened by divorce and death in a rural community where even an old pickle crock has an unsettling history—and high above the strife and the hope and the often hilarious, geese seek the perfect tailwind. Stevan Allred’s stunning debut deftly navigates the stubborn geography of the human heart.

Featuring a Faulknerian map and hand-drawn "story trees" that map the characters' connections.

Beginning of "His Ticky Little Mind"

This all begins when I come home from visiting Mother in the rest home last week and taking her down to the Norse Hall for the monthly dinner. Good eats at the Norse Hall, and Mother may not be able to remember what year it is, but she’ll sit there and tell you how that secret pinch of nutmeg made her creamed carrots the envy of all the ladies down at the grange, and that’s about all the female companionship I can handle these days.

It was Saturday evening and almost dark. That long busy drive from the city was behind me and I was eight miles past the last red light when I made the turn onto Gossard Road. I’ve lived on Gossard Road my whole life, and my whole life whenever I turn onto Gossard Road, the world has been made whole again, a place small enough that I can keep track of everything that matters and big enough to hold everything I need.

That first quarter mile the road rises and makes the tree line beyond sink, so you feel the heavens opening up big as God above you. The evening star was bright, and it had risen in its customary spot in the southern sky, which at this time of year puts it almost directly above the bungalow, which is the house I was born in, the house I now live across the road from. It was my parents who sold the bungalow and the farm that goes with it to Volpe.

Something wasn’t right. Underneath the evening star should have been the silhouette of an oak tree standing plumb and true, the only tree on that particular stretch of Gossard Road tall enough and near enough not to disappear below the top of the rise. I come up to the top of the rise and pull over in the wide spot where I like to sit for a minute and see the whole valley stretched out before me, with my little piece of paradise smack dab in the middle, the heart of the heartland, and the best forty acres in the whole damn section.

It must be in the nature of things that paradise wouldn’t be paradise without there was a snake running loose in the middle of it, because all that’s left of that oak tree is the butchery of a stump left to stand there tall, dark, and ugly.

The headlights of my truck picked up the big white ovals where Volpe cut off the lower branches. There was no lights on at Volpe’s house except for the TV, which he’s got the biggest damn TV in the whole damn county. The oak tree was laid out in rounds where he sliced it up after he dropped it. Volpe worked on a logging crew when he was fresh out of high school, so the man knows how to drop a tree. He had to take the fence down at the far end of his yard to keep it from getting smashed when he dropped it.

The sky was just this side of full dark, and those fresh cut rounds lay there white as a sliced cucumber, and sliced up the way it was, there was nothing left to do but split those rounds into firewood. Enough firewood to keep Volpe warm for five or six winters easy. When I was a boy I spent whole summers in that tree, me and my brothers and sisters and our cousins who lived on Gossard Road. We built a pirate ship high up in her branches and sailed off to the new world. We hung a swing from her thickest branch and we swung ourselves dizzy. We laid in the dirt beneath her and looked up at puzzle pieces of blue sky through her branches, and we made a game out of putting those pieces together.

Now everything that tree ever was would go up Volpe’s chimney and be gone forever. Everything except the stump. He left that stump standing twelve feet high to provoke me. I know how his ticky little mind works. We been neighbors for thirty-four years, and we went to all the same schools before that, and I got plenty of history with Volpe. That stump sat in the view from my front porch to his like the upraised middle finger of Volpe’s hand.

I know a dick when I see one.

* * *

I didn’t even go in my house after I parked my truck. Walked straight over to Volpe’s and knocked on his door.

“Evening, Arnie,” he said. On the TV was one of those fishing shows where some guy takes you out to a river and pretends he ain’t bragging about all the fish he’s caught. Volpe’s wife never would’ve let him buy a TV that big, but Volpe and me, neither one of us could keep a wife past the time our kids grew up and moved out of the house. I never thought my marriage to Viv would fail the test of time. They left us less than a year apart, and Volpe told me right after Viv left, he thought his wife caught the leaving disease from my wife. Like his wife didn’t leave first, and like that artificial inseminator fellow she ran off with had nothing to do with it.

There was a dish of ice cream half eaten on the coffee table in front of Volpe’s recliner, and the word “mute” in blue letters across the bottom of his big TV. I stepped back from his front door and pointed at his butchery.

I said, “What’d you do that for?”

“And what a fine evening it is,” Volpe said, “thanks for bringing it up.”

Volpe stepped past me and I got a whiff of whatever fancy cologne it is he puts on now that he’s divorced. He stood out in the yard, looking up at the evening sky.

“Have you seen the evening star?” he said. He was sideways to me. The man’s got no more chin than a hen does, and a long stick of a neck, and with his big beak of a nose cantilevered out over the bottom half of his face, he looks like he’s part weasel.

“Going to be hot in August without the shade of that tree,” I said.

“I got air conditioning,” Volpe said. “I’ll be all right.”

“That so?” I said.

A pair of bats was working the sky over our heads, all swoop and flutter, quiet as the grave, doing their level best to keep the flying insect population down to a dull roar. Volpe’s face was white and bloodless in the porch light. I stepped down and stood so I could talk straight into that chinless face of his. “Why on earth would you cut down your shade tree?” I said. I knew for a fact that my grandparents had situated their house to take full advantage of the shade of that oak.

Volpe’s mouth pulled up into that tight curve he’s been smirking with since he was five years old. “Have you seen my new satellite dish?” he said. “I been meaning to ask you over to watch one of my five hundred channels.”

He walked out into his yard further and pointed up at the roof. “You mount it so it faces the southern sky,” he said. The satellite dish was a round white circle against the darkening sky. It had that baked-on enamel look of a household appliance, but there was something sausage-like about the bulbous gray hunk of electronics that pointed at its center.

“Wasn’t getting the kind of reception I needed,” Volpe said. One of the bats flew low over his head and Volpe swatted at it. He pointed at the oak tree laid out like a dead relative down the length of his yard. “Did you see all that rot running through those rounds?”

“You couldn’t put that dish on the back corner of the house?” I said.

Volpe tightened up his smirk and put crinkles at the corners of his eyes, just in case I didn’t already know that he was laughing at me. He stuck his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. His arms are so long the man can practically tie his shoes without bending over, so his elbows stuck way out, and that left his gut wide open and just begging for me to sucker punch him.

“Well now, I suppose I might have,” he said, “but right here is where the signal is strongest.”

Course it ain’t me that’s got a history...