Happy Trails

John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, the young wranglers whose tale is told in Cormac McCarthy’s “Cities of the Plain,” belong in the same vast pantheon of cowboy heroes in which we find Shane, Clint Eastwood’s “Man With No Name” and the Marlboro Man. McCarthy has reinvented and reinvigorated the old cowboy saga in the series of novels that he calls the Border Trilogy, and the third volume brings the chronicle of these two iconic cowpokes to a grand climax.

The plot of “Cities of the Plain” is as simple and straightforward as a B-western. The story is set in the early ‘50s in New Mexico, where John Grady and Billy are hired hands on a small cattle ranch. On a day off, in the nearby border town of Juarez, they glimpse a 16-year-old prostitute named Josefina, and John Grady promptly falls in love with her. He vows to marry Josefina and bring her back to the ranch, and Billy seeks to buy her freedom from the pimp who runs the brothel where she is locked away. But the pimp is also in love with the beguiling young woman, and the matter is settled with an old-fashioned duel.

Yet McCarthy manages to boost “Cities of the Plain” from matinee fare to the stuff of myth. “You just got a outlaw heart,” Billy says to John Grady, but the fact is that both of them are purely good and noble young men, knights-errant on a quest to rescue a damsel in distress. As they make their way through a dark and dangerous landscape, they are assisted by a series of kindly and faintly mystical old men: an old rancher on a mission of mercy, a blind whorehouse musician and a grizzled desert rat who might or might not be Death. McCarthy tells his tale with all the stylistic quirks that are his unmistakable signature: long passages in which the rhythms and textures of cowboy life are expressed in aphorisms that would be corny if they were not so earnest (“A good horse has justice in his heart”) and occasional bursts of the author’s ornate prose, as when he describes an unbroken stallion, “some struggling and gasping chimera invoked by sorcery out of the void into the astonished day-world” or the range itself.

“The thin green line of the river beyond lay like a child’s crayon mark across that mauve and bistre waste. Beyond that the mountains of Mexico in paling blues and grays washing out in the distance. The grass along the mesa underfoot twisted in the wind. A dark head of weather was making up to the north. The little horse dipped its head and pulled it about and rode on. The horse seemed uncertain and looked off to the west. As if to remember the way. The boy booted him forward. You dont need to worry about it, he said.”

For any reader who has not yet read the first two volumes in the Border Trilogy--the best-selling “All the Pretty Horses,” a 1992 winner of the National Book Award, and “The Crossing”--the latest and last title in the series will seem idiosyncratic and sometimes downright cryptic. Both John Grady and Bill are first introduced in earlier volumes of the trilogy, and thus “Cities of the Plain” is almost entirely lacking in back story. The three books function as one long novel that reaches a crescendo in “Cities of the Plain.”

To understand what happens to John Grady Cole in “Cities of the Plain,” for example, it is illuminating to know--as McCarthy explains in “All the Pretty Horses”--that he is bitterly estranged from his mother, a restless widow who chose acting over ranching and seemed to prefer the company of strange men over his father, thereby breaking young John Grady’s heart. But it is essential to know that John Grady possesses a gift for horsemanship that is primal and even preternatural.

“The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway,” McCarthy writes of John Grady’s last ride in the company of his dying father in “All the Pretty Horses.” “Would have known that there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been.”

Billy, too, is explained outside the pages of “Cities of the Plain.” He is capable of utterly wild but wholly principled adventures, as when he refuses to kill a pregnant she-wolf who is bringing down calves on his father’s ranch and, instead, contrives to smuggle the animal deep into Mexico with the notion of setting her free in the mountains. The catastrophic loss that Billy suffers as the result of a ramble through Mexico with his kid brother in “The Crossing” helps us to understand why he bonds so tightly to John Grady in “Cities of the Plain” and why he makes John Grady’s grand obsession his own.

John Grady and Billy share a passion for the cowboy life that drives each of them to pursue an elusive dream that is vanishing before their very eyes. “Daybreak to backbreak for a godgiven dollar,” Billy muses out loud to John Grady in “Cities of the Plain.” “I love this life. You love this life, son? I love this life. You do love this life dont you? Cause by god I love it. Just love it.” But the little ranch where they reenact the old rituals of the roundup and the cattle drive is already targeted for purchase by the U.S. Army, and they are forced to ponder a dubious refuge in Mexico.

“Dont you think if there’s anything left of this life,” Billy muses out loud to John Grady, “it’s down there?”

Indeed, Mexico is the beckoning far country in all three books of the Border Trilogy, a place of aspiration and honor, pleasure and death. McCarthy shows us the people of rural Mexico without overlooking the hunger, disease and violence that afflict their lives, and yet he insists that something fine and true is to be found just beneath the surface. As a romantic at heart--and McCarthy, despite his postmodernist cast of mind, is among the most romantic of all contemporary American novelists--he plainly prefers the folkways of Mexico to the bland affluence of the United States, and so do Billy and John Grady, who would rather die there than live in a land with no room for cowboys.

“Your kind cannot bear that the world would be ordinary,” says the pimp, Eduardo, in the heat of a knife fight with young John Grady. “But the Mexican world is a world of adornment only and underneath it is very plain indeed. While your world totters upon an unspoken labyrinth of questions. And we will devour you, my friend. You and all your pale empire.”

McCarthy is not always an easy read. Only rarely does he identify who is saying what to whom, he does not bother much with quotation marks or other helpful forms of punctuation, and he insists on writing long passages of dialogue in untranslated Spanish. Because much of the book is set in Mexico, the conversations in Spanish are perfectly authentic and appropriate, but they go far beyond what can be understood by context alone, and I found myself resorting to a Spanish-English dictionary and occasional urgent consultations with bilingual neighbors to be sure I was getting what he intended. Much effort was required, for example, to confirm that the idiomatic expression used to describe John Grady’s lover (la china poblana) means “a poor cowboy’s girlfriend.”

Even when he is writing in English, McCarthy’s flights of rhetorical fancy are sometimes a bit daunting. The cowboys, to be sure, are made to speak to each other in taut and terse phrases: “Old Mac,” says an old rancher about the man for whom John Grady works. “He’s one of the good’ns. Aint he?” “Yessir. He is.” “You’d wear out a Ford pickup truck findin a better.” “Yessir. I believe I would.” But I was pretty much defeated by the words uttered by an enigmatic old man to Billy in the dreamy sequence that serves as a kind of coda to “Cities of the Plain”: “Those heavens in whose forms men see commensurate destinies cognate to their own now seemed to pulse with a reckless energy.”

Clearly, we are no longer in the Old West of Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour. Indeed, McCarthy has been likened by some critics to Melville and Faulkner, although I see even stronger resemblances to Jack London and John Steinbeck, and his work is rich and promising terrain for the grad school game of pinning the tail on the author’s sources and influences--Billy and John Grady embrace a latter-day chivalry right out of Malory’s “Le Morte d’Arthur,” they embody something of the noble folly of Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and one of them finds his way to a shamanic old man reminiscent of Carlos Castan~eda’s Yaqui sorcerer.

Above all, John Grady and Billy remind me of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, another pair of restless young men in search of adventure on the American landscape, sometimes bumping up against the hard realities of life and always finding redemption in each other’s fidelity and friendship. Despite the challenges and eccentricities of McCarthy’s literary enterprise, I was won over by his cowboy heroes in much the same way that I took Huck and Tom to heart. And that is why I felt such a sharp stab of regret when the saga of Billy and John Grady finally comes to an end in “Cities of the Plain”--the sense of loss at the moment of parting is something that only a master storyteller can evoke.