Hawk Flights: Visions of the West (review)

118 the minnesota review nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man-who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that maylead nowhere."The reader, unfortunately, may end up sharing some ofthis feeling. Perhaps this is the inevitable dilemma of the skeptical liberal, but one had hoped to learn more. WILLIAM H. CLAMURRO Gerald Haslam. Hawk Flights: Visions ofthe West. Big Timber, Montana: Seven Buffaloes Press, 1983, 77 pp. $5.00 (paper). Gerald Haslam answers Brecht's question (posed in "A Worker Reads History"), "Who built the seven gates of Thebes?" In Haslam's short stories, the question becomes, "Who settled California?" and, "Who still works the land?" Haslam's answers: Chinese and Mexican laborers, poor whites farming and working wildcat oil rigs, Indians and JapaneseAmericans and other groups whose lives make up the rich historical fabric of the San Joaquin Valley. Given his geographical limitations, Haslam's range is wide. Many of his stories are humorous, a few terrifying; they mix elements of popular culture with local legend. But each is a slice of this rural locale: 2000 words on one central California story. Haslam has been publishing these "delightful and powerful" stories (Max Westbrook) for over ten years, and his latest collection confirms his right to greater recognition. While his range is immense, Haslam's best stories follow a recurring pattern: a young boy (as in Twain) narrates a story whose significance is finally beyond him. He tells us the events, but only we understand them fully. In the title story, a young Indian (Hawk) watches as the "blue savages" (cavalry) destroy his village. As the "shaman" (chaplain) reads last prayers before the boy is hung, Hawk chants his own warrior's song—and then kills the officer in charge of the hanging before being shot down himself. The real history of the West, but told through the eyes of one of its victims. In "The Killing Pen," Sam Dawkins, the old black ranch foreman dies, but not before he passes on to the young narrator something of the pain and dignity of his life. Grandaddy finally stood, holding Sam's battered hat in his hand. He turned toward Joaquin and me. Then he handed me Sam's greasy old hat. "Grow into this, boy," he ordered. It is a scene out of Steinbeck's Salinas. Similarly, in "The Horned Toad," a young boy convinces his family that his dead Mexican grandmother would be carried home to be buried—just as she taught the boy his pet should be: "We must return him to his own place." The boy tells the simple story, but the reader sees its lesson of family strength first. In "Dust," we watch frustrated Dust Bowlers on a brutal rabbit drive that is at the same time a cry for help and recognition. Finally, in "Joaquin," the legendary bandit Joaquin Murieta returns to teach a young actress something of his pride and porwess. In perhaps the best story of this collection, a boy narrates a funny story of three rural misfits who go to a modern country and western bar to witness the wet T-shirt contest, but who miss most of it after they are evicted for fighting. We learn the shallowness of the fashionable world, but the strength of certain abiding Western values. Haslam can be moralistic and sentimental, a danger that most writers who strive for this kind of social significance fall into. Certainly Haslam's models, Twain and Steinbeck, fell into it often. But, at his best, Haslam makes us laugh and think about our history at the same moment. He is not afraid of taking chances, and as a consequence we get vivid glimpses of lived human history in a land that is often overlooked. In a day of Hollywood storytelling, Haslam's is a truly human vision. DAVID PECK ...