"Happening in Chosky Bottoms"

The quicksand eels will finally eat all his flesh and bones, but they cannot eat his form or his displacement. But these cranky old ko-el ghosts are the ancestors of some of us. When they kill and dismember one of our children, it may be a descendant of theirs. Cannot dead ancestors do whatever they wish with their descendants?

The NFL season, my favorite time of the year, started last week, which brought to mind one of Lafferty’s great unsung works, an odd one even by Lafferty standards, “Happening in Chosky Bottoms.” It’s his football story, a rewriting of a movie that no one would call a masterpiece, Bonzo Goes to College.

In my imaginary version of an anthology of really cult Lafferty stories, stories that many Lafferty readers haven’t read and that are well worth knowing, it would have its place, alongside works such as “Berryhill” and “Name My Name.”

One reason the story isn’t in most Lafferty readers' imaginations is its publication history. Completed in September 1977, it first appeared nearly eighteen years later in Amazing Stories: The Anthology, edited by Kim Mohan and published by Tor in May 1995. The anthology combined eight original contributions with six reprints, bringing Lafferty together with writers including Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Benford, and Thomas M. Disch.

Kirkus called it “a typical piece of R.A. Lafferty lunacy,” which is the kind of thing people say about Lafferty when they don’t know what else to say.

The story connects deeply to other parts of Lafferty’s imaginary geography. Thematically, it belongs beside “Boomer Flats,” being one of the Lafferty stories where regionalism meets his Oceanic mode, as if the Oceanic has washed over the Oklahoma geography. The story is also a pendant to The Reefs of Earth, since both are set in Lost Haven. While “Happening in Chosky Bottoms” rewrites Bonzo, Reefs rewrites The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Both are stories about outsiders, since both the Dulantys and Chalky are marked by a difference that makes them convenient targets for accusations of murder. In fact, it is in Chosky Bottoms, in Chapter 10 of The Reefs of Earth, that the great murder ballad is sung by Pandemonium John.

The Chosky Bottoms also show up in The Devil Is Dead, where the Bottoms have swamp ghosts, enormous animals, and a platoon lost in quicksand. In “Happening in Chosky Bottoms,” Lafferty shows us what Finnegan just explains, namely that Chosky Bottoms “are everywhere, or just over the next hill from everywhere,” making this local landscape part of the Argo cycle’s larger geography.

For the real Chosky Bottoms, check out Choska Bottoms, Oklahoma, and Polly Choska, who might be the historical basis of Aunt Rhonda Harvestman in the story. Polly Choska was a Creek woman who made her home on the bank of the Arkansas River, settling the rich bottomlands between Muskogee and Tulsa. Yet the Cherokee take the front of the stage in Lafferty’s story, probably because he drew on James Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee for the water cannibals, the bear man, and the four-footed tribes.

I also think that Edgar Allan Poe’s “Thou Art the Man” is an important influence on the story, but that would take us deep in the weeds. Just read the all but ignored “Happening in Chosky Bottoms” if you haven’t. You’ll thank yourself.