and a couple of movies
By Steve Polston
Friends have been after me for a
couple of years to read Annie Proulx’s books and I finally relented when one gave
me a copy of the author’s collection of short stories, Close Range, Wyoming Stories.
Turns out that Proulx gives fine
writing that makes fine movie making.
Proulx fiercely loves Wyoming, its
landscape and sorrowful characters caught between the Old West and the New
West. There’s foolishness, wrong love and quick violence.
In Wyoming
Stories, you can find ranchers, mechanics, cooks, drug addicts, and even
gay cowboys.
Two stories in this collection stand
out: “The Half-Skinned Steer,” and “Brokeback Mountain,” the latter of which has
been made into a movie due for American release Dec. 9, 2005.
In “The Half-Skinned Steer,” an
elderly man on the East Coast receives news that his brother has died on the
family ranch-stead in Wyoming. The old man makes a lonely trek in his Cadillac
across winter landscapes, reliving the generation spanning story of his family’s
land and hard times, notably the legend of a steer that was not fully killed
and that ran off to the countryside with no hide, haunting a family.
Eventually,
after wrecking his Cadillac, the man buys another, and wends his way through
rutted roads to his family’s ranch. After a series of mistaken turns, he dies
trapped in a snow bank with visions of the ghostly steer passing judgment on
profligate lives.
A
selection from “The Half-Skinned Steer”: “He walked against the wind, his shoes
filled with snow, feeling as easy to tear as a man cut from paper. As he walked
he noticed one from the herd inside the fence was keeping pace with him. He
walked more slowly and the animal lagged. He stopped and turned. It stopped as
well, huffing vapor, regarding him, a strip of snow on its back like a linen
runner. It tossed its head and in the howling, wintry light he saw he’d been
wrong again, that the half-skinned steer’s red eye had been watching him all
this time.”
One
of Proulx’s novels, The Shipping News,
was made into a movie in 1998, and starred Kevin Spacey and Judith Dench. I
haven’t read the book, but I borrowed the video from the library a couple of
weeks ago. It’s a fantastic story, also a retelling of family hauntings and
legends, but set in Newfoundland.
Bitter
weather and even more bitter emotional landscapes must be a Proulx hallmark,
since this dark story has really mean and twisted moments, including one in
which Dench’s character steals the cremains of her dead brother. Later, she
dumps the ashes in an outhouse pit on the family homestead. As the story
progresses, one understands her smile comes from revenge.
Another
short story, Brokeback Mountain, tells
of the love and violence begat in the lives of two teenage cowboys who half-form
a romance during a summer of sheep herding in Wyoming.
This
has been made into a movie, already winning awards in Europe according to my
friend Vincenzo, the chief inspector of the railway station police in Milan,
Italy. Newsweek magazine has reviewed
the movie and Internet reviewers have been waiting for the movie’s release in
the U.S. for a couple of years.
Here’s
a selection from the gay cowboys’ story, following a reunion between Jack and
Ennis about 20 years after they began their romance and an emotional life
together that never really gelled.
“Like
vast clouds of steam from thermal springs in winter the years of things unsaid
and now unsayable—admissions, declarations, shames, guilts, fears—rose around
them. Ennis stood as if heart-shot, face grey and deep-lined, grimacing eyes
crewed shut, fists clinched, legs caving, hit the ground on his kneed.
“
‘Jesus,’ said Jack. ‘Ennis?’ But before he was out of the truck, trying to
guess if it was a heart attack or the overflow of an incendiary rage, Ennis was
back on his feet and somehow, as a coat hanger is straightened to open a locked
car and then bent again to its original shape, they torqued things almost to where
they had been, for what they’d said was not news. Nothing ended, nothing begun,
nothing resolved.”
It’s
a story of unrequited love, in some ways, but also a hot fire seeking refreshment
in longing and memory.
Another
selection:
“What
Jack remember and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the
time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and
pulled him close, the silent embraces satisfying some shared and sexless
hunger.
“They
had stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing
ruddy chunks of light the shadow of their bodies in a single column against the
rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis’s pocket, from the
sticks in the fire setting into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers
above the fire. Ennis’s breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little
in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations
of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that
was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a
rusty but still useful phrase from the childhood time before his mother died,
said, ‘Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you’re sleepin on your
feet like a horse,’ and gave Jack a shake, a push, and went off in the
darkness. Jack heard his spurs tremble as he mounted, the words ‘see you
tomorrow,’ and the horse’s shuddering snort, grind of hoof on stone.
“Later,
that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless,
charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it,
even the knowledge that Ennis would not embrace him face to face because he did
not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held. And maybe, he thought, they’d
never got much farther than that. Let it be, let it be.”
These stories and movies are a
bountiful feast from an excellent fiction writer.