Flapdoodle

FOOLS' PARADE, by Davis Grubb. 306 pages. World. $6.95.

Davis Grubb tells his fool story just right. The reader is not bitten by the wooden false teeth till page 172, too late for him to pretend that he knew they were lurking all the time in the sinister West Virginia underbrush.

Misdirection sets the ambush. The book's first two sentences read: "It was a late afternoon of savage bottomlands heat in the April of 1935. Johnny Jesus stood between his two companions, leaning back against a high baggage wagon on the warped bricks of the depot landing and facing the big, moonfaced gunman." Serious business; savage bottomlands heat and a big moonfaced gunman. Grubb adds a sentence of smoky poetry to make sure everyone takes his meaning: "Uncle Doc [the gunman] was one of those humped, huge men who, beneath a cloak of paunch, are cat-swift as dainty dancers and hard as sacked salt."

Well, now. What Uncle Doc, who is captain of the guards at the Glory, W. Va., state penitentiary, is really doing is helping Johnny Jesus and two other let-out cons get aboard the evening train out of Glory. Johnny is a dreamy lad of 17 who has just served three years for a rape that he did not commit. Lee Cottrill, standing there beside him, is a daft bank robber. Then there is big old

Mattie Appleyard. Mattie has served 47 years for dynamiting two company finks in a miners' uprising. He has only one eye but is subtle with high explosives; it is said that he can blow the kitchen table out from under a cup of coffee without spilling a drop.

Beyond this, what is unusual about Mattie is that he has a check in his pocket for $25,452.32--the accumulation with interest of his 47 years of prison wages. A large sum in a Depression year, and the good citizens of Glory aren't about to let a freshly pardoned convict walk off with it. "When I hit town at sunup I heared it," says a taleteller. "Talk. Everywheres. A muttering meanness. In the Krogers and the A.&P. and up at Pickett's Store and at the farmers' market out First Street by the glass works. Mean whispering, stranger --grumbling mean."

As a novelist, Grubb has written about Appalachian violence before. The Night of the Hunter (1954), his first book, is a shadowy work about a murderous preacher who chases a couple of kids up and down the Ohio River. The Voices of Glory (1962), a moody, backward-looking novel, has its share of crazy thunderation. They offer some clue as to why the "muttering meanness" guff in this book turns out to be more than just a touch overwritten.

What Davis is overwriting, it turns out, is a marvelous sort of flapdoodle that does not fit into any category that book-jacket haikuists can think of. The tall stories that Faulkner wrote when his mood was bourbon-light are in the same family; The Reivers bears a resemblance to Fools' Parade. Dark violence and piebald absurdity share an uncertain border, and now and then some mythmaker on his day off, like Grubb, manages to write within this uncertainty. A fine book, written for the hell of it, which is a splendid reason.

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