In Rough Country (16 page)

And, in the aftermath of a bloody street shoot-out:

No match for Chigurh is the former Vietnam War sniper Moss, who takes “a couple of rounds in the face”:

Like an invincible figure in a video game of murder and mayhem, Chigurh is flatly portrayed and not very convincing: “I have no enemies. I don't permit it.” When he delivers most of the drug money to the unnamed Houston businessman/drug smuggler, instead of keeping it for himself, he explains that his
rampage has been “simply to establish my bonafides. As someone who is an expert in a difficult field.”

All that keeps
No Country for Old Men
from being a skillfully executed but essentially meretricious thriller is the presence, increasingly rambling and hesitant as the novel proceeds, of the sheriff of Comanche County, one of the “old men” alluded to in the title. Dismissed as a “redneck sheriff in a hick town. In a hick state,” Bell is intended as a moral compass amid the whirligig of amorality. He is courageous and well intentioned but ineffectual as a lawman, unable to stop Chigurh's rampage and hardly capable of identifying him. Where he hadn't had a single unsolved homicide in his jurisdiction in forty-one years, now he has nine unsolved homicides in a single week. The new breed of psychopath drug dealer/assassin is beyond Bell's power to control as the new Uzis and machine pistols are beyond the old-style Colts and Winchesters. It's possible that Cormac McCarthy, described in a recent interview as a “southern conservative,”
²
intends Bell's social-conservative predilections to speak for his own, explaining the high crime rate in Comanche County in this way: “It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight…It reaches into ever strata.” More pointedly,

Bell is evidently unfamiliar with the blood-drenched history of his state and its protracted border wars, so vigorously documented elsewhere in Cormac McCarthy. He's a man left behind by his era confronted with a moral void beyond even Satan: “What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?”

Nowhere has Cormac McCarthy addressed this question more powerfully, and more succinctly, than in his post-Apocalyptic novel
The Road
(2006), the most widely acclaimed of his numerous works of fiction. Throughout this bleakly prophetic short novel with its affinities to such twentieth-century visionaries as Samuel Beckett and José Saramago, we are in the presence of a stripped-down humanity,
in extremis
; utterly vanished is the crude, jocular, tall-tale black humor of McCarthy's earlier novels, and McCarthy's sense of a community of individuals bonded by common loss, or threat of loss, as in the elegiac
Border Trilogy
and the besieged Comanche County of
No Country for Old Men
. Throughout the novel McCarthy evokes an air of antiquity: though we are presumably in a future time, we are more truly in the past, before history: this is the Hades of Homer, the Inferno of Dante. In the way of Bosch, Dürer, and Goya, and in the mode of the most malevolently inventive contemporary doomsday filmmaker—like George Miller, creator of the
Mad Max
series—McCarthy exults in the depiction of human corpses amid his desiccated landscape, and in the suggestion of violent, grotesque deaths: mummified bodies are sighted in doorways and in vehicles, garishly displayed on pikes, or posed like waxworks dummies
in a vast and unspeakable allegory. In a little clearing is a “black thing skewered over coals”—a “charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit.” In this hell, McCarthy's protagonist is shrewd enough to know that he must always be able to see behind him—he has affixed a rearview motorcycle mirror to the shopping cart in which he pushes his belongings, in the kind of small but painstakingly defining detail that makes Cormac McCarthy so vivid a writer. What would be an abstract and perhaps over-familiar doomsday polemic in the imagination of another writer is an emotionally gripping tale in McCarthy's.

The Road
is quintessential McCarthy: a variant upon a picaresque adventure tale. Where in the
Border Trilogy
the boys' quests began as romantic pilgrimages, however bleakly the last novel,
Cities of the Plain
, ends, and there is a youthful vigor to the prose suggestive of ceaseless, restless, exuberant motion—usually on horseback—
The Road
is a work of numbing bleakness, pessimism; the journey is on foot, very slow, haphazard, less an adventure than an unmitigated ordeal. An unnamed father and his son—Everyman, Everyboy—are embarked upon a journey with no destination other than the hope of escaping the impending Appalachian winter by taking back roads along the southern coast. Here is a return to McCarthy's eastern Tennessee roots—though in tone very like the rough country of McCarthy's West. Civilization has been destroyed in what seems to have been an instantaneous flash of nuclear energy—ash sifts down from overcast skies, most wildlife has become extinct, and other surviving
Homo sapiens
, observed
with great caution and horror, have reverted to barbarism in graphic visual imagery of the kind scattered through
Blood Meridian
:

As McCarthy has never shown the slightest interest in politics or history—even his most realistic novel,
Suttree
, takes place in a topical vacuum—so in this parable of human folly and its tragic aftermath there is no explanation of why war was waged, and by whom; if in fact the devastation is global, as we are led to assume; from this point onward, history itself is extinct. It's as if the demons of
Blood Meridian
—the men who “settled” the West by imposing their barbarism upon an exquisitely beautiful nature—have triumphed. McCarthy's vision is Manichean: there are “good” people and there are “evil” people—the former at the mercy of the latter. Horribly, in
The Road
, evil people are devouring good people in orgies of desperate cannibalism.

This monochromatic vision would be unbearable except for McCarthy's beautifully rendered “poetic” prose. Here is an
incantatory voice that makes of devastation—doom itself—something rich and strange, as in the late poetry of T. S. Eliot:

And in the richly evocative final passage of the novel:

As usual McCarthy's perspective is coolly omniscient: his narrative voice seems to hover just above individuals like the questing father and his son, without entering into them fully. We see through the father's anxious eyes—we share his anxious thoughts—but we are simultaneously distinct from him and are aware at all times that he's a (fictitious, allegorical)
character in a tale. Admirers of McCarthy's more varied prose may miss the flashes of his droll, deformed wit, always evident amid the excesses of
Blood Meridian
, the novel that most resembles
The Road
; McCarthy's favored theme is male barbarism, in contrast to the brotherly sentiment of the boy-heroes of the
Border Trilogy
, or the tender feelings Billy Parham has for the (female) wolf in
The Crossing
—the (female) wolf as the boy-hero's
anima
. In
The Road
, it's significant that there is no maternal figure: McCarthy has disposed of the mother, as a suicide. (McCarthy's female portraits are flat as cartoon figures set beside his men. The wife in
The Road
speaks as no woman in recorded history is ever likely to have spoken—“I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time.” No word more inexorably male than
whorish
!) Only a father remains—only
the father
—pushing the possessions of his depleted family in a shopping cart—an ironic, disfigured artifact of a lost consumer culture—armed with a revolver containing only two bullets. It's significant—and alarmingly timely—that father and son are wearing masks to protect them from the befouled air. Their primary tasks are to scavenge food and to stay out of sight of other people. In the course of the journey the boy begins to perceive that the father, intent upon his and his son's survival, is gradually changing into a savage like the others. One is reminded of Faulkner's terse summation of the Negro housekeeper of the afflicted house of the Compsons, in
The Sound and the Fury
: “They endured.” (As if the singular Dilsey were in fact multiple, emblematic.)

The Road
is McCarthy's most lyric novel as it is his most horrific and perhaps his most personal: there is an acknowl
edgment of human love here missing in McCarthy's more characteristic work. Who could have imagined, given the lurid and zestful black humor of
Child of God
and
Blood Meridian
, and the celebration of unfettered bachelorhood of the
Border Trilogy
, that in later years Cormac McCarthy would write so feelingly about parental love for a child? Of course the child is a boy as the parent who has been courageous enough to survive to protect him is male. In McCarthy's Manichean/Old Testament cosmology, the female has yet to be born.

Fine Just the Way It Is
Wyoming Stories 3
by Annie Proulx

L
ike a flash flood rushing along a normally meandering stream, Annie Proulx's most characteristic short stories move with a deceptive sort of sinister casualness, before the point of impact, and of disaster—but “disaster” for Proulx, as for her kinsman-contemporary Cormac McCarthy whose
quasi-mystical western territory is to the south (New Mexico, Texas, Mexico) of Proulx's photo-realist Wyoming territory, is likely to be tersely and ironically noted, as the fall of a sparrow might be noted, one more event in the hard implacable heart of Nature. In Proulx's words:

And:

Through a sequence of vividly imagined and boldly idiosyncratic works of fiction—
Heart Songs and Other Stories
(1988),
Postcards
(1992),
The Shipping News
(1993),
Accordion Crimes
(1996),
Close Range: Wyoming Stories
(1999),
That Old Ace in the Hole
(2002),
Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2
(2004)—Proulx has explored rural America
in extremis
with an admirable passion and patience for research of all kinds, both scholarly and reportorial. As she acknowledges in the front matter of
Close Range
, she is “an aficionado of local histories [who has] for years collected memoirs and accounts of regional lives and events in many parts of North America” for her Texas/Oklahoma panhandle epic
Ace in the Hole
, Proulx allegedly spent three years of travel gathering information, of which in the end she could use but a relatively small portion; researching
The Shipping News
, by her account she fell asleep for two years reading
The Dictionary of Newfoundland English
. Lacking the Old Testament-prophet vehemence that permeates Cormac McCarthy's similarly elegiac work, but suffused with a similar aesthetic wonderment for the physical terrain of the West and the big skies above—both Proulx and McCarthy are tireless, if not relentless in their exacting depiction of Ansel Adams–like scenery—Proulx often laces her grimly naturalistic tales with flashes of bawdy humor, even an appealing goofiness, as if to suggest that, from the Olympian perspective of the Rockies, the mishaps, follies, and even the tragedies of humankind are of minuscule significance in a world in which “demons [are] sprinkled throughout…like croutons in a salad.”

With the publication of this new collection of Wyoming stories, Proulx has now three volumes of Western tales of which the most famous—and the masterwork—remains the long, lyric, tenderly erotic “Brokeback Mountain” (originally published in
The New Yorker
in 1997) from the first volume
Close
Range
. This initial collection of Wyoming tales is perhaps the most substantial of the three volumes as well as containing, in its hardcover edition, poetically evocative watercolors of Western scenes by the artist William Matthews. Having moved to rural Wyoming in her early sixties, in 1994, after having lived for most of her life in small towns in New England, Proulx assimilated her vast new territory in much the same way that Cormac McCarthy, moving west from his longtime home in Tennessee, in 1976, assimilated his new Southwestern territory, as a landscape both historical and symbolic: a terrain of great physical beauty dwarfing the merely “human” in ways to evoke the allegorical Yukon tales of Jack London and the North African desert tales of Paul Bowles. Already in her fifties when she first began publishing short stories in magazines like
Gray's Sporting Journal
,
Harrowsmith
, and
Ploughshares
, and fifty-eight when she came to literary prominence with
The Shipping News
, Proulx is far less oracular than Cormac McCarthy, predisposed to vernacular speech and characters sketched in the broad, blunt strokes of such old-fashioned comics as “Dick Tracy,” “Little Orphan Annie,” and “Krazy Kat” in which caricature is the norm and the grotesque is signaled by “funny” names in abundance; we know that we are not in the rarefied literary territory of post-Jamesian, post-Chekhovian, post-Joycean fiction when we encounter such rural specimens as Pake Bitts, Diamond Felts and his rodeo sidekick Leecil Bewd, Dirt Sheets, Sutton Muddyman, Roany Hamp (female), Creel Zmundzinski, Reverend Jefford J. Pecker, Orion Horncrackle, Plato Bucklew, Gay G. Brawls, Georgina Crawshaw, Deb Sipple (male), Fiesta Punch, Budgel Wolfscale, Condor Figg, Hard
Winter Ulph, Chad Grills, Chay Sump, Queeda Dorgan, Sink Gartrell, Mizpah Fur, Hi Alcorn, Antip Bewley, Fenk Fipps and his friend Wacky Lipe, Fong Saucer, Bracelet Quean (male), Pastor Alf Crashbee, and numerous others whose hard-luck fates seem predestined in their names as in Proulx's thumbnail sketches that leap from the page like crude comical Weegee portraits:

As Proulx observes in the tongue-in-cheek endings of two tall tales included in
Close Range
, “When you live a long way out you make your own fun” (“55 Miles to the Gas Pump”) and “If you believe that you'll believe anything” (“People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water”).

Proulx's more sympathetically and realistically imagined stories, however, transcend caricature and are frequently mov
ing, and memorable: characters may be foolish, hardly more than puppets or ants seen from the ironist's distance, but the prose in which they are rendered is likely to be sinewy, supple, tensely impacted and “poetic” in the best sense of the word. In a grimly powerful tale aptly titled “The Mud Below” from
Close Range
, a doomed young bull rider lives for “the turbulent ride [that gives him] the indescribable rush, shot him mainline with crazy-ass elation”:

When the end comes for the bull rider, it comes quickly:

In fact, Diamond Felts doesn't die just then: he survives, if barely, to consider how “it was all a hard, fast ride that ended in the mud.”

Close Range
is bracketed by “The Mud Below” and the equally poignant and powerful “Brokeback Mountain,” whose cowboy-lover protagonists

Herding and watching over sheep in a remote mountainside setting, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, seemingly “straight” boys, begin to have sexual relations as if by chance, and opportunity; no word tender as “love” will ever pass between them, but their lives are forever altered, their subsequent marriages blighted. The reader's intimacy with the young lovers on their mountainside tending sheep is rudely interrupted by Proulx's sudden switch of perspective:

In Wyoming, as in most of America in the 1960s and 1970s, it would not have been likely that two male lovers could be tolerated, nor even feel that living together outright might be an option for them; Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar part, and come together in secret, and part again through the years until the mysterious death of Jack Twist that might have been an accident, or an act of savage homophobia, and the brooding Ennis del Mar is left to consider the significance of discovering, in the closet of his dead lover's boyhood room, his own shirt hanging inside a bloodied shirt of Jack's:

Bad Dirt
, more explicitly concerned with socio-economic changes wrought in rural Wyoming during the postwar fifties—“the Eisenhower era of interstate highway construction that changed Wyoming forever by letting in the outside” is characterized by saga-like narrations broken up among numerous protagonists, most of them seen at a bemused distance, as through a rifle scope (“By the weary age of thirty, [Deb Sipple] had been married twice, and it hadn't taken permanently either time despite the fact that he had small feet and a big pecker”) and by breezily jocular tall tales like “The Hellhole” (in which Wyoming Game & Fish Warden Creel Zmundzinski discovers a sulfurous sinkhole into which poachers in the state forest can be manipulated into falling—“a fiery red tube about three feet across that resembled an enormous blowtorch-heated pipe. With a shriek the preacher disappeared. The whole thing had happened in less than five seconds”—and “Florida Rental” in which a woman besieged by her rancher-neighbor's voracious grazing cattle arranges to rent Florida alligators from a relative to scare them off. It's as if Proulx is determined not to draw too close to her characters, nearly all of whom are luckless and doomed, yet there is a quick sympathetic portrait of a woman named Suzzy New who has made a bad marriage to a rancher in “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?”:

With a similar sympathy for her young protagonist in “Them Old Cowboy Songs” in
Fine Just the Way It Is
, Proulx evokes the forlorn and lonely life of the “cowboy”—not the romance of Hollywood westerns but the drudgery of rural hired labor: