The Books: “Close Range: Wyoming Stories” – ‘The Half-Skinned Steer’ (Annie Proulx)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction

Close Range : Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx.

Oh God, I love this collection of short stories. I read many of them (like “Brokeback Mountain”) when they first appeared in The New Yorker – and remembered them vividly (even cut some of them out and saved them). You get used to how most writers sound. You get used to nice language, eloquence, delicate plot development … but, to me, Annie Proulx stands apart from all that. Her prose feels muscular to me. Emotional, yet in a fierce way. Kind of blunt and primal. She doesn’t veer into the sheer apocalyptic ferociousness of Cormac McCarthy – but her sense of the landscape (especially the Western landscape) is just as specific, just as important to her books as Texas and the borderlands are to McCarthy. It’s not atmosphere, it’s a character. I mean, the collection is called “Wyoming Stories”. Wyoming is evoked here in all its guises – bleak, beautiful, wide open, disorienting, calming … And then I think of Proulx’s evocation of Newfoundland in The Shipping News, and that whole landscape – completely different from what’s here in Close Range (and also in her second collection of “Wyoming Stories” called Bad Dirt) – and I’m just in awe at her own range. It’s all in the specifics. But the words she chooses to describe things … cannot be said to have anyone’s stamp but her own. I’m trying to think of someone to compare her to. There’s certainly a Hemingway-ish feel to some of her characters, and how they express themselves. She does not write about verbal people. She does not write about people who ever say the words, “I feel …” They have no introspection. They are blunt, stoic, and deep. Her writing is more grandiose than Hemingway’s, though – I don’t know, I find it hard to compare her to anyone. The stories in the collection seem stripped bare of extraneous things … editing just one word out would unravel the thread. They are tight.

If you haven’t read the collection, I obviously highly recommend it – and I also recommend reading it front to back, like you would a novel. At least the first time. I normally don’t read short story collections like that – I dip into whatever story grabs me the most from its first paragraph, and then skip around. But with Close Range, I read it beginning to end – and it had a cumulative effect, very important to the feeling of the work as a whole. Bad Dirt, her second collection of “Wyoming Stories” takes an almost slapstick tone, the stories are funny, ridiculous, small slices of life, a bit more absurd. In Close Range we have none of that. It’s life stripped to its essentials, by the wind across the plains. It’s people up against their dreams for themselves in their youths … lost now forever … memories in the wind, the grasses, the sky … Mortality approaching. All you have to do is get through the rest of your life. Just put your head down and bear it. And so the effect of the whole collection is basically a giant heart-ache. There’s no real redemption here. Nothing like that last paragraph of The Shipping News. We’re in a different world here. More brutal.

And the people she creates! They leave indelible marks. And their names: Rollo. Mero. Sweets Musgrove. Diamond. Leeland. Roany. Jaxon. Even their names sound like ghost towns.

The first story in the collection is ‘The Half-Skinned Steer’. Garrison Keillor chose it for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories (1998) and John Updike chose it as inclusion in 1999’s The Best American Short Stories of the Century. In the story we meet Mero, a man in his 80s, who just got a call that his brother, Rollo, has passed away. He hasn’t seen his brother in, what, 50 years? Some insanely long time. They grew up on a ranch, rough and tough, with their father and his trashy girlfriend … and Mero got out of there as quickly as he could. He went to war. He married a couple of times. He became a vegetarian. He got a regular job, not a cowboy-job. He moved far far away from Wyoming, and got into local politics, I think. But the news that his brother died brings back memories – which comes in spurts … as he drives back to Wyoming for the funeral. By now, the old ranch where he grew up has been turned into a tourist attraction called “Down Home Wyoming” – a kind of faux ranch for tourists. Sad (although life on that ranch was no picnic, and Mero has no nostalgia about it at all. As a matter of fact, his memories of it are almost uniformly full of dread and gloom. There was a “bad luck” feeling to the ranch … which ended up being played out after he left – with bankruptcy, etc.) It takes Mero 4 days to drive home. He drives in a Cadillac (his customary car). We go back and forth from the past to the present. He’s haunted by a memory (although that’s not quite right … that suggests he’s been walking around with it all these years. No. It is quite conceivable that Mero has not thought of Tin Head and the half-skinned steer for 60 years – it is just the landscape of Wyoming approaching, the landscape of his long-lost youth … that brings the memory to the foreground.)

I wouldn’t dream of revealing what the actual story is of “the half-skinned steer” – what happened back there that made such a deep scar in everyone – you’ll have to find that out yourself. Suffice it to say, it haunts me now, too.

Here’s an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Close Range : Wyoming Stories, by Annie Proulx – ‘The Half-Skinned Steer’

He was half an hour past Kearney, Nebraska, when the full moon rose, an absurd visage balanced in his rearview mirror, above it a curled wig of a cloud, filamented edges like platinum hairs. He felt his swollen nose, palped his chin, tender from the stun of the air bag. Before he slept that night he swallowed a glass of hot tap water enlivened with whiskey, crawled into the damp bed. He had eaten nothing all day yet his stomach coiled at the thought of road food.

He dreamed that he was in the ranch house but all the furniture had been removed from the rooms and in the yard troops in dirty white uniforms fought. The concussive reports of huge guns were breaking the window glass and forcing the floorboards apart so that he had to walk on the joists and below the disintegrating floors he saw galvanized tubs filled with dark, coagulated fluid.

On Saturday morning, with four hundred miles in front of him, he swallowed a few bits of scorched eggs, potatoes painted with canned salsa verde, a cup of yellow coffee, left not tip, got on the road. The food was not what he wanted. His breakfast habit was two glasses of mineral water, six cloves of garlic, a pear. The sky to the west hulked sullen, behind him smears of tinselly orange shot through with blinding streaks. The thick rim of sun bulged against the horizon.

He crossed the state line, hit Cheyenne for the second time in sixty years. There was neon, traffic and concrete, but he knew the place, a railroad town that had been up and down. That other time he had been painfully hungry, had gone into the restaurant in the Union Pacific station although he was not used to restaurants and ordered a steak, but when the woman brought it and he cut into the meat the blood spread across the white plate and he couldn’t help it, he saw the beast, mouth agape in mute brawling, saw the comic aspects of his revulsion as well, a cattleman gone wrong.

Now he parked in front of a phone booth, locked the car although he stood only seven feet away, and telephoned the number Tick’s wife had given him. The ruined car had had a phone. Her voice roared out of the earpiece.

We didn’t hear so we wondered if you’d changed your mind.

No, he said, I’ll be there late this afternoon. I’m in Cheyenne now.

The wind’s blowing pretty hard. They’re saying it could maybe snow. In the mountains. Her voice sounded doubtful.

I’ll keep an eye on it, he said.

He was out of town and running north in a few minutes.

The country poured open on each side, reduced the Cadillac to a finger-snap. Nothing had changed, not a goddamn thing, the empty pale place and its roaring wind, the distant antelope as tiny as mice, landforms shaped true to the past. He felt himself slip back, the calm of eighty-three years sheeted off him like water, replaced by a young man’s scalding anger at a fool world and the fools in it. What a damn hard time it had been to hit the road. You don’t know what it was like, he told his ex-wives until they said they did know, he’d pounded it into their ears two hundred times, the poor youth on the street holding up a sign asking for work, and the job with the furnace man, yatata yatata ya. Thirty miles out of Cheyenne he saw the first billboard, DOWN UNDER WYOMING, Western Fun the Western Way, over a blown-up photograph of kangaroos hopping through the sagebrush and a blond child grinning in a manic imitation of pleasure. A diagonal banner warned, Open May 31.