He came home at last, driving an old car packed with clothes. It was November 1964, and he somehow had managed to make his way back to Plain Dealing, La., without running off the road and finding a ditch. His breath smelled of cigarettes and his clothes reeked. If he looked as if he didn’t care anymore, it was because he didn’t. Behind him, in Alabama, where he’d been living for the last 17 years, were an ex-wife and their four young children, a well-paying job as a pharmaceutical rep and a grand house on a waterfront lot with sweeping views of Mobile Bay. Behind him, too, were losses more difficult to quantify, like his notion of the future and what it might hold.

He had suffered a heart attack in the last year, and yet at 45 he seemed resolutely opposed to making even the slightest adjustment to his way of living. He would drink and smoke all he wanted.

His name was John Joseph Pershing Holland — Purr-shun, to those who’d loved him the longest — and he once said that he preferred a hot beer to a cold one because it provided a better buzz. Even when he had a home with a refrigerator, he kept his beer in the trunk of his car.

The place where he’d grown up, Carterville, wasn’t a town so much as a curve in the road halfway between Plain Dealing and Springhill, in the northwestern corner of the state. Pershing attended high school in Plain Dealing, population 1,100, and many of the town’s older residents remembered him as the finest athlete they’d ever seen. If Pershing wasn’t the best, they would tell you, it was only because they’d also seen his identical twin brother, Woodrow, play...