Mountain Blood by Will Baker (review)

226 Western American Literature To Skin a Cat. By Thomas McGuane. (New York: E. P. Dutton/Seymour Lawrence, 1986. 212 pages, $16.95.) New York and Hollywood have been quick to embrace Thomas McGuane as one of our most nimble contemporary writers. Western literature scholars, however, have been hesitant to accord McGuane the place he deserves in the western regional canon. This collection of short fiction should help. Reading it is as much fun as returning to the High Plains to drink coffee in your favorite cafe with your oldest home-town friend. You ask your friend, “Who’sdoing what, and who are they doing it to?” and the afternoon stretches into evening, the stories coming with the easy walk of a meandering horse. You hear about people you don’t like and people you do, but you hear noth­ ing that doesn’t contribute insight into human vulnerability. You learn once again that when people are out for themselves, they become their own vic­ tims. In this world of dog trainers, duck hunters, lawyers, owners, workers, ranchers, and judges, you begin to see what the westering impulse has done to the West; the frontier, as the title piece makes clear, has vanished, even for the idling rich. The last beckoning adventure for the last romantic is to become a dilettante pimp for his unwilling girlfriend. Nothing, you begin to understand, is too sacred to destroy;everything is for sale. These people, these events become too real to be borne easily. But even as their lives become silhouettes too dark against a glare too bright, the writing itself begins to calm you. Crisp and ironical sentences come at you like cleanly strung baubles: “He looked like a modernized station of the cross”; “These domiciling arrangements seemed thunderous after an unexceptional small­ town courtship” ; and “Harvey Perry, a sober acountant, led Mrs. Callahan by the elbow to the Mexican snacks, where her guests stood and stared in the anesthesia of the punch.” Then when you realize that one character has just turned to another and said, “You’re an insufferable crumb,” you discover anew what you have always known: Tom McGuane is Scott Fitzgerald in cowboy boots. DEXTER WESTRUM Ottawa University Mountain Blood. By Will Baker. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. 192 pages, $14.95.) It is the blood of heritage that suffuses these narratives of the American West with their particular life and nourishes the continuity of public and private events over time. Inspired by the oral tradition, these stories (part fact, part fiction) begin, usually, with the recollection of a family tale being told Reviews 227 by the author’s father, complete with interruptions from various relatives. Somewhere along the line there is sure to be one or several digressions, dia­ tribes, historical notes, informative asides and private admissions. There is love, anger, and humor — each somewhat reminiscent of Mark Twain. Meandering through the underbrush of puberty, small town life, love and death, American hegemony, manifest destiny, violence, environmentalism, international trade, pop psychology, and the woman who sold out to Bing Crosby—you name it—anywhere along the road taken, Baker employs the cat skinner’s art of exposing the stones. Several stories use the family’s connection to the gold rush as a starting point. In “The Legend Of Great Uncle Jim,” for instance, the original tale is about a relative who, though fatally wounded, killed another man in a brawl over a woman. Attempting to understand his own streak of jealousy, Baker visits the old town of Tuscarora, with phrases of modern psychology and country western lyrics running through his head: “open relationship,” “one’s needs not being met,” “tiger by the tail.” He interviews an old ranch lady who provides details to uncle Jim’s fight, but whose own life, by contrast, stands as a tower of strength and sanity despite the loss of husband and five children. The piece ends like a barroom song. Driving through the dark dodging jack rabbits, Baker concludes that women, no matter what kind, are stronger, and they drive men crazy. “Crazy as these rabbits, Jesus hundreds of them, now I have hit four. They take the children or...