Literature VIII

 This right here partner is an essay on the boys in Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses (1992). About six months back I had written in my notes on my Ipad to have written some kind of buddy film about a couple guys going to prison together. This inspiration was more of a tongue in cheek cautionary joke to myself about having friends and good times that led to unbridled mischief. Unbridled mischief is mostly what the boys in All The Pretty Horses receive from the start of the book to the very end although our protagonist does keep his saddle on his horse.

I will start this essay with a quote from the dream the boy, our protagonist, has in jail when they are first caught up in the Mexican justice system. “They ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.” This reminds me of a song lyric from the Turnpike Troubadours that mentions something being like the act of taking a picture of grace. This sentiment has echoed with me for the last week and a half as I had participated in a story that I can’t tell to anyone because it doesn’t have anything to do with anyone except the people involved in the actual story. I took pictures too, beautiful pictures, but the pictures have got nothing to do with anything in the whole world except the moments I happened to take them alone. Like a sex tape between two arduous anonymous lovers, there are times that are personal.

Obviously I am getting a bit carried away. So I have had some times that I like to keep private for myself. What about this book though? It is sold in your bookstores and online. It won a book award. The author recently died. I had the book on my bookshelf for over a year. I have known about the author for even longer. I watched some interviews that he did shortly before his death. I revered him as the last great American author living. I didn’t dare read his material until he was dead. I guess it might have something to do with all of my favourite writers being of one piece: morte.

This dream that John Grady, our protagonist, has is a positive, beautiful, enlightening dream. When he wakes up he is meshed in a conspiracy. We find out later that the reason he was not arrested earlier is because his ranch boss had kept the law at bay because John Grady was such a good hand. Then later on in the story we find that the reason the law came down suddenly on John Grady and his friend Rawlins was because the same ranch boss, owner, called the police to come pick him up so that he did not have to kill the boy himself for having an affair with his daughter.

In the jail the boys are made to confess and acquiesce to crimes and stories that they had no part or truth in. This is because the original crime that the law was after them for they did not actually commit and the new crime that had got them arrested was not actually a crime at all rather a person in power using his leverage to have them disciplined. Innocent of the crime and guilty of an offence against the wealthy they are shipped to a bigger jail in a bigger town. Along the way the boy who had actually committed the first crime was shot dead.

Once in the penal system of Mexico the boys reckon amongst themselves that they never thought such a place could exist until they got there. They are bought out of the situation after both are sent to the institutions hospital. The aunt of the girl he had an affair with sent John Grady the money for the release. After taking a bus away from the jail they eat at a diner, get a hotel room and buy new clothes. Rawlins takes off for home which is in Texas while John Grady goes back to the ranch for his woman. Being a man of no means, no family and no station leaves him with no room to manoeuvre besides the broken heart of the furious father. This puts John Grady in a situation of deference to the desires of the aunt and the daughter whose desires are in deference to the owner of the ranch, the father. Needless to say he does not win back the girl but he does get a horse for his trouble.

All this crazy what was it for? The boy was a hand and grew up on a ranch and it got sold out from under him. So he left his family behind in America and broke for Mexico with his buddy Rawlins. Along the way a boy with horrible luck fell in with them. He had such bad luck that our protagonists prophesied to each other repeatedly that it was enough to rub off on them plenty. It did. It rubbed off enough that the good name the boys were able to establish for themselves at the ranch in Mexico only inverted itself as quick as it could when the bad luck of the boy, Blevins was his name, caught up with John Grady and Rawlins. It all had to do with a lightning storm and a curse and a horse and a lost pistol and a murder and another murder, all of which Blevins tried to rationally justify when they met him at the first jail. The law didn’t see eye to eye with Blevins and the fact that John Grady and Rawlins could see things from Blevins point of view only meant they were headed for trouble themselves.

What happened in the big time prison? They had to fight from the time they laid foot in there just like everyone else. The only thing was they were singled out because they were Americans in a Mexican prison so no matter how many fights they had they could never gain any ground in the way of status in the prison. Rawlins got cut up by a knife in the stomach pretty bad but not to the gut. John Grady had made friends with a couple outliers of the community. Finally he bought a knife within the prison from a gang with the money Blevins had taken out of his boot before he was shot dead by the law.

About the time that John Grady had bought the knife he was made to use it. Someone had hired a pretty good knife fighter to kill him. John Grady is a very handy character and this time he snapped off a switch blade into the killers heart. It is unknown who hired the killer, whether it was the gang that Grady bought the knife from or from a man inside the prison who continued to claim he could help the boys if only they submitted to his protection, which they never did, or some other outfit is never revealed. After the knife fight John Grady himself is cut up pretty bad and gets medical attention. After he his healed up with stitches and all is when he finds out the aunt has bailed him out.

In an essay a person addresses a certain question about a certain topic. I could of talked about anything to do with the book and any other ideas in the world but I just wanted to tell you about how these boys got in trouble down in Mexico in a general way. People have written much more comprehensive studies on McCarthy’s work as well as relate it to other ideas and philosophies. Did I leave anything out that I could have addressed? Possibly. Or maybe I gave my reader the most complete picture of the scenario that I could without mucking it up and making a clear picture less clear.

All the Pretty Horses is the first book of Cormac McCarthy's border trilogy. The characters of the first book come from Texas. They return to Texas after their adventure with their horses except for the slain boy. After getting released from prison Rawlins high tails it back to Texas without a horse while our hero, John Grady, goes back to get his girl and instead is presented a recently broken in wild horse to ride back with to the town where they lost their horses initially after getting arrested. On arriving in the small town he engages in a gun fight to retrieve his horse, Rawlins horse and Blevins bay horse. Succeeding he makes it back to Texas with all three. In the second book of the trilogy, The Crossing (1994) the reader is presented with new characters in New Mexico that are trying to trap a she-wolf that came from the mountains of Mexico.

“They would be coming out onto the plain in the new snow to run the antelope in the moonlight.”

This prose about wolves and antelope in the quiet night still of wilderness snow is majestic and what I would like to comment upon here in this blog. 

“They were running on the plain harrying the antelope and the antelope moved like phantoms in the snow and circled and wheeled and the dry powder blew about them in the cold moonlight and their breath smoked palely in the cold as if they burned with some inner fire and the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such that they were the smallest of figures in that dim whiteness and then they disappeared.”

The character finds these wolves at night but does not tell anyone about them. He comes from a ranching family and wolves are a more controversial subject amongst ranching communities than the topic of transsexuality among conservatives. 

“Then he saw them coming. Loping and twisting. Dancing. Tunneling their noses in the snow. Loping and running and rising by twos in a standing dance and running on again. There were seven of them and they passed within twenty feet of where he lay. He could see their almond eyes in the moonlight. He could hear their breath. He could feel the presence of their knowing that was electric in the air. They bunched and nuzzled and licked one another. Then they stopped. They stood with their ears cocked. Some with one forefoot raised to their chest. They were looking at him. He did not breathe. They did not breathe. They stood. Then they turned and quietly trotted on.”

Billy has just had a transcendental spiritual experience with wolves in the wild that ends with recognition, understanding and respect. From now on he is bonded with the wolf. 

“The inward parts of the beast who dreams a hundred thousand years and more. Dreams of that malignant lesser god come pale and naked and alien to slaughter all his clan and kin and rout them from their house. A god insatiable whom no ceding could appease nor any measure of blood.”

Billy’s father and brother Boyd and Billy himself hunt a she wolf that is alone. She has come from the mountains of Mexico. Eventually they trap her and the rest of the book from page fifty to four-hundred is about what happens after they trap her.

“At night she would go down onto the Animas plains and drive the wild antelope, watching them flow and turn in the dust of their own passage where it rose like smoke off the basin floor, watching the precisely indexed articulation of their limbs and the rocking movements of their heads and the slow bunching and the slow extension of their running, looking for anything at all among them that would name to her her quarry.”

This is the she-wolf on her own driving the antelope. 

“Her and others of her kind, wolves and ghosts of wolves running in the whiteness of that high world as perfect to their use as if their counsel had been sought in devising it.”

Cormac McCarthy’s characters will have this, well damn it all to hell moment, when they commit to a plan of action. Like that third Mexican beer and that third shot of tequila are my thoughts of the third book of the Border trilogy, Cities of the Plain. (1998)

John Grady wants to marry a sixteen year old prostitute from Mexico

It’s a long road that ain’t got no turning. What the hell’s wrong with you? Have you been drinking paint thinner or something? That’s it. I’m having your ass committed. I’m an absolute son of a bitch. I never heard the equal of this. They’re going to hook your head up to one of them machines and throw a big switch and fry your brains to where you won’t be a menace to yourself no more. You think I don’t mean it? I’m going to help em hook up the wires. I want a goddamn quart of whiskey. You’re in a dangerous frame of mind, son. Did you know that? How did you ever get in such a mess? How did you let it get this far? More craziness. It ain’t too late, you know. It’s never too late. You just need to make up your mind. Well, unmake it. Start again.

What’s this we shit? You got a rat in your pocket?

Truth is, I wouldn’t pull on your boots at gun point.

Billy goes to speak with the pimp

Your friend is in the grip of an irrational passion. Nothing you say to him will matter. He has in his head a certain story. Of how things will be. In this story he will be happy. What is wrong with the story?

… What is wrong with this story is that it is not a true story. Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the one they dream of.

John Grady still wants to marry the sixteen year old prostitute from Mexico

Why don’t you take a good look at yourself. Look at what it’s brung you to. Talkin about sellin your horse. It’s just the old story all over again. Losin your head over a piece of tail. Cept in your case there ain’t nothin about it makes any sense. Nothin.

… She ain’t American. She ain’t a citizen. She don’t speak English. She works in a whorehouse. No, hear me out. And last but not least—he sat holding his thumb—there’s a son of a bitch owns her outright that I guarangoddamntee you will kill you graveyard dead if you mess with him. Son, ain’t there no girls on this side of the damn river?

Not like her.

Well I’ll bet that’s the truth if you ever told it.

…Do I think you’re crazy?

…No. I don’t. You’ve rewrote the book for crazy. If all you are is crazy then all of them poor bastards in the loonybin that they’re feedin under the door need to be set loose in the street.