Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy

The wind outside and the cold in the room were like those winter nights on the north Texas plains when he was a child in his grandfathers house.  When the storms blew down from the north and the prairie land about the house stood white in the sudden lightning and the house shook in the thunderclaps.  On just such nights and just such morning in the year he'd gotten his first colt he'd wrap himself in his blanket and go out and cross to the barn, leaning into the wind, the first drops of rain slapping at him hard as pebbles, moving down the long barn bay like some shrouded refugee among the sudden slats of light that stood staccato out of the parted board walls, moving through those serried and electric prosceniums where they flared white and fugitive across the barn row on row until he reached the stall where the little horse stood waiting and unlatched the door and sat in the straw with his arms around its neck till it stopped trembling.

In the third book of Cormac McCarthy's "Border Trilogy," John Grady Cole, the protagonist of All the Pretty Horses, and Billy Parham, the protagonist of The Crossing, are working as cowboys at a ranch outside Alamogordo.  It's a crossover episode!  Both men, isolated and long-suffering as they are, like being cowboys.  But it's a life that might not be long for this world; the federal government wants to turn the land they graze on into a military installation (today's White Sands Missile Range, probably).  In the middle of the century, cowboys are a dying breed.  One character, I forget who, remarks that the war changed everything.

It's not clear how the war changed cowboying, but it does remind me of the terrific ending of--which?--I think The Crossing, with its reference to the Trinity nuclear bomb test.  And it aligns with McCarthy's notions of history, all of which he believes was written at the beginning of time, down to the life and death of a single man.  For McCarthy, the arc of history is the same as entropy, it bends toward destruction and chaos.

The end is hastened by John Grady's falling in love with a Mexican prostitute.  Their love poses its difficulties: she's fifteen, but that's nothing compared to the fact that she lives over the border in Juarez and is kept by a madman pimp who is also in love with her.  Oh, and she has epilepsy, but she hasn't told John Grady that.  It all unfolds in a recognizably violent fashion, remarkably recorded but with very few surprises.

At one point, Billy says:"I damn sure dont know what Mexico.  I think it's in your head.  Mexico."  Which of course, is true.  Both Billy and John Grady, despite fluent Spanish and extensive experience in the country to their south, understand Mexico as a kind of reflection of their own inner darkness.  That's because McCarthy thinks about it as a reflection of their own inner darkness as well.  Going to Mexico, especially in The Crossing, is something like the descent into hell in Greek epics.  It's easy to excuse the way McCarthy exoticizes Mexico because he does that to America too, in a different way.  After all, it's under a Texas overpass that the long epilogue takes place, in which an aged Billy meets a wise beggar who tells him about a mysterious dream.

I can accommodate that, but did I need another Mexican waif to fall in love with?  I certainly didn't need her to be fifteen years old.  Her age, her illness, all add up to extreme vulnerability and powerlessness, mark her for violence and death, make her the center of male rage, whether Eduardo's in keeping her or John Grady's in defending her.  Her relationship with John Grady seems borrowed from his love for Alejandra in All the Pretty Horses, but with more mythology and more blood.  In McCarthy's books, tragedy repeats itself as even darker tragedy.

The most well-wrought relationships in Cities of the Plain are between men.  Between John Grady and Billy, outcasts and pilgrims who end up finding each other, and the other cowboys, who are mostly of the same stock.  McCarthy has an ear for their language that sits in lovely tension alongside the mythopoetic gibberish he likes so much.  (I don't mean that as an insult--I like that stuff, even when it's gibberish.)  His belief in an irrevocable destiny, as violent as it is, ennobles these plainspoken cowboys.