Radium

"Radium is about two bad luck brothers, from a bad luck town in the flat farmland of western Minnesota. My narrator Jim is 15 and damaged in some ways. He was in a car accident years ago which gave him a head injury and tweaked his view of the world. He sees his big brother, Billy Quinn in near mythic terms. Billy is wild and strong, and capable of things other men are not. They live together in a trailer house on the ditch side of a beet field, until Billy gets in bad trouble and they go on the run. That's what young men, grown up rangy and unsupervised in the desperate middle of this country, do when trouble comes. They run. The bones of this book came to me many years ago. My own big brother got in a little trouble. Nothing major, or even against baseline morality, but laws were broken and there was one night where it seemed a judge might make an example of him. I was maybe 15 at the time, and my brother was my only friend on this earth. The thoughts that went through my head that night, when I believed he might serve time -- the things I would have been willing to do to keep him free -- there was no limit, understand? Of course my brother is light on his feet in every sense of the word, and dodged through the whole thing with a clean record, and some college scholarships too. A miracle for a kid from Aitkin County Minnesota, the poorest county in the state at the time. I'm still not sure how he did it. There's some magic in him I suspect. But years later, when I got in the mood to write fiction, I thought back to my wildness on that one bad night. It's strange and a little frightening to me now -- my mental state back then -- but it got me thinking, how far will a boy go for his big brother? A brother he loves more than his next breath. And what kind of story might I tell to find out?"--