Excerpt from Treeborne by Caleb Johnson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"There ain't a thing I'd trade," she said. "They tried and they tried and they tried to get me to. Some of our own kin, the government, Authority, different buddies over the years—Jon D. Crews among them. Says he's through begging me. Ain't heard from him in, I reckon, more than a month. Wouldn't trade calling this land home not even to get my eye back. Shit fire, you could say, Janie, we come up with a way to stop all that lakewater from spilling down into the valley, The Peach Pit can stay open for all eternity, but you got to move off from here. No sir. Me and this place—and I don't just mean what you can look out yonder and lay eyes upon—me and this place is just too tangled up. But I reckon you know that, don't you, coming up here with a tape recorder to get a old buzzard's stories."

Days Her Missing
1958

Wooten Ragsdale had always been afraid she'd leave—not just him but this entire place. Tammy'd threatened to since the night she saw her first movie, at the Elberta Rampatorium. Fourteen, sitting on a grassy terrace next to a senior named Bobby Davis.

"Oh my lord," she said after the closing credits.

"What is it?" Bobby had dozed off when he realized she wasn't game to fool around.

"I got to go to Hollywood," Tammy said.

"Hell, right now?"

"No you fool. But one day, you watch, I'll be gone."

This realization occurred before Wooten knew Tammy, before the Ragsdales moved to the valley and he ruined his right hand at work. Tammy was, he thought after they met, more than pretty enough to be on the big screen. A face he could cup in his one good hand, bright-green eyes, thick black hair, and a good-size chest. If a Treeborne ever went for Miss Elberta Peach, though none ever did, Wooten liked to brag that it would of been Tammy.

After she graduated school she'd moved down to the Gulf of Mexico. Not quite Hollywood, but still. Wooten was two years behind Tammy at Elberta County High. He remembered hearing she'd moved away, but they ran with different crowds, and it didn't much register with him busy playing football for the Conquistadors and working at his daddy Leland's chickenhouses. About a year later Tammy moved back and started work for the county water department. Everybody figured her adventure to the Gulf Coast would of satisfied her Hollywood dreams. But Tammy kept making threats, even after she and Wooten began dating. It was cute, he thought—at first. But as she aged, and their relationship did too, the threats wore on him. The way Tammy acted was kin to being a grown woman who still pops and plays with her chewing gum. I'll leave this goddamn place tomorrow! she'd say. Wooten didn't know how to handle her outbursts. He was nervous by nature. Sometimes he wanted to just yell back, Well go on then!

One night a few years into their marriage, Tammy ranting and raving about going to Hollywood and becoming a movie star, Wooten dragged a hard blue-plastic suitcase out from the closet and began frantically stuffing it with clothes from their shared chest of drawers.

"What on earth do you think you're doing?" she asked.

"If leaving's what you want, then come on! Let's go." He was a man without much past anyhow. Why not up and leave?

She stood there watching him for a moment, wondering could they actually leave together, then said, "No. Stop it Woot. If I'm going it's got to be by myself."

Despite Tammy saying this, and the next four years of regular threats, Wooten Ragsdale did not decide till the second night of her missing that Tammy'd finally made good on her promise and gone.

He was sitting in a recliner chair eating fried pork skins from a brown paperbag while the new television bled blue light throughout the living room of their singlewide trailer. The embarrassing realization landed on Wooten from above, like bird droppings. His wife had gone to Hollywood, California, and left him here all by hisself. He finished the bag of pork skins then, knowing not what else to do, got in the new used pickup truck he'd bought from Big Connie Ward and drove out into the county.

Excerpted from Treeborne by Steven Johnson. Copyright © 2018 by Steven Johnson. Excerpted by permission of Picador. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.