CLOSE RANGE: Wyoming Stories
By Annie Proulx
Scribner, 283 pages, $25
Setting out for the Wyoming literary frontier, Annie Proulx has collaborated with Annie Oakley in this new collection of 11 short stories. With dazzling language, Proulx lassos together desperate fictional characters and wide-eyed readers. “Close Range” is an elaborate operetta of innocence, greed, violence and aching loneliness in 19th and 20th Century Wyoming.
Fans of “The Shipping News” and “Accordion Crimes” will recognize classic Proulx themes of boundless hope mired in rotten luck. In recent years, the author has moved from her long-time residence in Vermont to Wyoming. There she has closely studied ancient and modern range wars, political campaigns, developments in agricultural economics and the individual tragedies of families drowning in cash-flow quicksand and social isolation. “Close Range” reveals impressive archival research as well as long hikes and strenuous rides across the gloriously varied landscape of Wyoming. Clearly Proulx has spent many evenings listening to the vocabulary and cadence of local speech. This all adds up to lively fiction.
“The Half-Skinned Steer,” already canonized in John Updike’s “The Best Short Stories of the Century,” propels 83-year-old Mero on a picaresque road trip from his comfortable Connecticut retirement home to his brother’s funeral at the family ranch near the Big Horn Mountains. In Mero’s absence, the land had been turned into an emu farm called Down Under Wyoming:
“He’d got himself out of there in 1936, had gone to a war and come back, married and married again (and again), made money in boilers and air-duct cleaning and smart investments, retired, got into local politics and out again without scandal, never circled back to see the old man and Rollo bankrupt and ruined because he knew they were.”
Mero steers his Cadillac through the Northeast, over to Des Moines, past Kearney, Neb. As he nears home, the Wyoming ranch becomes more elusive:
“He traveled against curdled sky. In the last sixty miles the snow began again. He climbed out of Buffalo. Pallid flakes as distant from each other as galaxies flew past, then more and in ten minutes he was crawling at twenty miles an hour, the windshield wipers thumping like a stick dragged down the stairs.”
“Job History” is a deceptively simple case study of family hope cursed by capitalist expansion. Born Nov. 17, 1947, in Cora, Wyo., Leeland Lee grows up, marries the wrong girl, joins the Army, raises his children and struggles to find stable employment-at a gas station, on a hog farm, doing road construction, packing meat, driving trucks, raising hogs again, driving trucks once more, opening another gas station. His unlucky life turns tragic when his wife dies of breast cancer. But grim inevitability carries him (and his family) forward. “The oldest son comes back and next year they plan to lease the old gas station and convert it to a motorcycle repair shop and steak house. Nobody has time to listen to the news.”
Maybe people should listen to the news; it might help them see their lives in a larger context. But Proulx’s romanticization of working-class paralysis inhibits such shifts in character consciousness. She’s photographing at close range, and the insistent viewfinder flattens her subjects’ lives and possibilities. Occasionally, you wish she’d back up from the examination, take off the pathologist’s lab coat and sit at the back of the theater to meditate on individuality, integrity and initiative, traits that are imperceptible to author and reader at such close range.
The most sorrowful and powerful story here is “People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water.” Proulx signals doom on the first page:
“Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere.”
In the early 20th Century, the Dunmire family arrives in Wyoming from Texas, and the Tinsleys come a few years later from St. Louis, carrying different dreams, different backgrounds, different vocations. But disaster is a wild contagion in this world, and strangers are soon eternally bound by boredom, despair and murder. “People in Hell” ends with one of Proulx’s frequent homilies:
“That was all sixty years ago and more. Those hard days are finished. The Dunmires are gone from the country, their big ranch broken in those dry years. The Tinsleys are buried somewhere or other, and cattle range now where the Moon and Stars grew. We are in a new millennium and such desperate things no longer happen.
“If you believe that you’ll believe anything.”
“The Blood Bay,” based on a folk tale, “The Calf That Ate the Traveler,” provides macabre comic relief from constant mayhem. During the bitter winter of 1886-87, two visitors swindle a farmer by persuading him that his horse has eaten their friend. The horrified farmer bribes the travelers not to report the “crime.” His guests walk away with pocketfuls of loot, although the only body here is that of an unfortunate stranger frozen in the blizzard. There has been no violence, horse or human, just a joke.
“Brokeback Mountain,” which won an O. Henry Short Story Award and a National Magazine Award, is a suspenseful tale of a summer’s lust that irrevocably shapes the lives of two young men: “They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state, . . . both high school dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life.”
Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are hired to tend sheep one summer on remote Brokeback Mountain. They are surprised by a passionate sexual relationship. Even as they enjoy one another’s bodies, they know this love is dangerous, a threat to their futures as ranchers and rodeo stars, husbands of pretty women, stalwart fathers of handsome children. Thus, at the end of their lusty summer, they part, determined to erase the experience. Of course neither can forget the other, and the denial and loss and brutality of subsequent years is beautifully drawn. Proulx’s story serves as a rough, delicate epitaph for Matthew Shepherd, the university student tortured to death for his homosexuality last year outside Jasper.
“Close Range” conveys some hard truths, fine yarns and musical language, but how much of the book has to do with Wyoming? The wounded, mute, maniacally restless people in it are more recognizable as citizens of Proulx’s fictional world than of the Wyoming I know. Just as 19th Century Euro-American pioneers traveled west to claim land and shape it into personal homesteads, so, too, do 20th Century artistic speculators recast places to their own dreams and sensibilities. It’s worth remembering that the real source of regional literature is the region within the individual author’s heart.
