Texas Short Stories ed. by Billy Bob Hill (review)

310 WAL 3 3 (3 ) Fa l l 1998 most cases fails to match) the quality of similar western works. Hemesath obviously knows of some better Colorado stories, for he dedicates When Past Met Present to Jean Stafford. None of her work appears in his book, however, presumably because, as Hemesath notes, her Collected Stories has “been reprinted by the University of Texas Press at Austin” (x). Still, since Hemesath excerpted parts of novels to make up several of his selections, one wonders why he chose not to include excerpts from novels such as Upton Sinclair’s King Coal or Frank Waters’s Pike’s Peak. Perhaps obstacles such as exorbitant permission fees made some choices virtually impossible. Whatever the ideal anthology might be, Hemesath has compiled an interesting collection with some memorable stories. Sanora Babb’s “That Presence Out There” hauntingly evokes a strange childhood encounter on Colorado’s southern plains. John Fante’s “In the Spring” captures a moment of discovery in the tragicomedy known as adolescence. Damon Runyon’s “My Father” rivals the period’s best western comedy (as, for example, in works by Alfred Henry Lewis). Hemesath’s greatest achievement lies in having assembled stories with such a rich variety of subjects, characters, and settings. From a dirt dugout to a sculptor’s studio, from Hispanic villagers to a girl homesick for China, When Past Met Present brings to life the Colorado of the years from about 1890 to 1960, a place illustrative of the view that there are many Wests. Texas Short Stories. Edited by Billy Bob Hill. W ith an introduction by John H. Irsfeld. Dallas: Browder Springs Publishing, 1997. 549 pages, $16.95. Reviewed by Robin Cohen Southwest Texas State University Texas Short Stories is the quintessential Texas book. It is big— 549 pages, with 54 authors represented. Its editor has a quintessentially Texan name— Billy Bob. It even has a cowboy on the cover. This is not to say, however, that either the book or the stories therein indulge in shopworn stereotypes of the West in general or of Texas in particular. To be sure, readers will find the more familiar yet authentic Texas: rural, hard-scrabble, wide open spaces, the border culture of the United States and Mexico, of indigenous and immigrant, of old and new. But readers will also find a less familiar yet equal­ ly authentic Texas: sometimes urban, sometimes academic, sometimes as much southern as western. Even the perception of Texas as a “man’s world” is challenged; more than half of the writers represented here are women. “Rock-Ola,” by James Ward Lee, falls into the category of the typical, but not stereotypical, Texan. In the fall of 1941, the opening of a new honky-tonk inspires one indignant matron to say, ‘“ Every slut and whore­ bo o k Reviews monger in Eastis County is gonna be up at that there Moon River Beach whiskey house when it opens tomorrow night.’” The narrator tells us, “She was right: every slut and whoremonger and cottonchopper and tie hacker and coal miner and iron worker and round-dancer in four counties and part of Oklahoma showed up. And had a good time.” That good time includes dancing to the music on the twelve-record Rock-Ola, drinking white whiskey, and brawling, with unmistakably Texan voices threatening to “bust your head open with this Coca-Cola bottle.” Yet even typical Texas themes get atypical treatment in these stories. For example, “Weasel Loves,” by Michael Verde, both pays homage to and sends up Texans’ rabid love affair with high school football. In Mark Busby’s “The Promise,” small-town religion gets a new twist when a boy experiences a Joycean epiphany in response to his mother’s prayers in a hospital chapel. The failed academic in Paul Christiansen’s “Buried Horses” discovers, on his way to spiritual awakening, the simple profundity of a neighboring farmer’s philosophy: I believe in lots of gods, one for every tree and bush. The Comanches thought their gods were everywhere; you can’t find a hill or a bit of rock that wasn’t sacred for something in their world. That’s the only way...