One sentence journal, Dec. 8–14

Time marches on . . .

Stormy weather

12/8, Sunday. Stormy weather, cold wind and clouds rolling over the mountains from the coast, with snow in the high elevations but dry here on the ground—living in a rain shadow.

12/9, Monday. Department of Where Has the Time Flown: Watching Johnny Mathis sing a Christmas song on The View this morning and remembering a concert in Chicago in 1961 when we were both in our 20s.

12/10, Tuesday. With the rest of the country and Canada in a deep freeze, it seems hardly right to complain about 38 degrees outside this morning, so I won’t.

12/11, Wednesday. Starting into chapter 1 of a western in German that begins: “Als Jim Whittaker über den Pass kommt, kann er das lange Tal unter sich bald immer besser übersehen.”

12/12, Thursday. A strip of half-inch weather stripping has finally found its way to the top of a door at the back of the house, and I’m waiting for the next cold snap to see if the room feels any warmer.

12/13, Friday. Edgar Allen Poe notwithstanding, the ravens here in the desert always sound to me like they’re laughing to themselves about something—and just like it’s gallows humor.

12/14, Saturday. Community Service Department: On walks in the desert, I’ve stopped picking up other people’s trash.

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Image credits: Ron Scheer

Coming up: Alfred Wallon, Showdown in Abilene

Glossary of frontier fiction: F(flannel cake – forced draft)

Below is a list of mostly forgotten terms, people, and the occasional song, drawn from a reading of frontier fiction, 1880–1915. Each week a new list, progressing through the alphabet, “from A to Izzard.”

flannel cake = a flat cake of thin batter fried on both sides on a griddle. “Billy pronounced the flannel cakes superior to flapjacks, which were not upon the bill of fare.” Owen Wister, Lin McLean.

flannel face = loudmouth, braggart, one who talks much to little effect. “‘Damned scoundrel’ sliden’ from yer flannel face is like a coyote roundin’ on a timber wolf.” Ridgwell Cullum, The Story of the Foss River Ranch.

flannel-mouthed = slow talking; loud; boasting; characterized by deceptive speech. “You ask for dirty work to be done, an’ when that dirty work’s done, gorl-darn-it you croak like a flannel-mouthed temperance lecturer.” Ridgwell Cullum, The Story of the Foss River Ranch.

flapper = an arm, hand. “Y’u see, I get him in the flapper without spoiling him complete.” William MacLeod Raine, Wyoming.

flat head = a stupid, foolish person. “I enjoyed myself first rate, an’ upset a couple o’ delivery wagons because they wouldn’t make way for me, roped a runaway steer ’at had the whole town scared, an’ chased a flat-head clear into the Palace Hotel.” Robert Alexander Wason, Happy Hawkins.

James Welch, The Indian Lawyer

First published in 1990, this is a thoughtful and suspenseful novel by a Native American writer from Montana. I had previously read his Winter in the Blood (1974) and The Death of Jim Loney (1979). All three novels concern the complexities of living as an Indian in a white-dominated world.

Unlike the struggling social cast-offs in the earlier novels, the protagonist of The Indian Lawyer has by all appearances successfully assimilated to white culture. Sylvester Yellow Calf has parlayed statewide recognition on the high school basketball court into a university education and law school. He is now one of the rising members of a high-end law firm in Helena.

With influential friends, he may well rise further from his humble origins on the Blackfeet reservation, where he was abandoned by parents and raised by a grandmother. Early in the novel he is approached by a member of the Democratic national committee to run for Congress.

His pleased but almost diffident response to that offer signals something not quite substantial in the identity he has assumed as a promising young lawyer. Beneath his confident surface is an uncertainty that the reader suspects and that he is mostly unaware of. The break from his reservation past has left him without either real roots or clear ambitions. Despite his achievements, he remains an outsider.

Blackfeet reservation, Montana

Single, he has known a good many women in his short life, and his current girlfriend is the daughter of a rancher and former Senator. While she is ready for a deepening relationship with Sylvester, he remains tentative, conscious of the disapproving glances of whites when the two are out together in public.

He lets her slip away, as he has done earlier with a high school counselor he was once fond of. Sliding into what seems to be an old groove, he violates all professional standards by allowing himself to be sexually intimate with a new client. It may be an old groove for him, but it’s also thin ice.

The Law and Jake Wade (1958)

This noir western from director John Sturges is smaller scale than his big films (Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Magnificent Seven), but a quietly intense gem. Richard Widmark leads the cast in a role that recalls the grinning malice of the hoodlum he plays in Kiss of Death (1947). Robert Taylor, dressed in black, is the handsome marshal who was once his partner in crime.

Plot. Taylor, in an act of good will, leaves his post in another town to spring Widmark from jail. He expects enough gratitude to let bygones become bygones. But Widmark isn’t easily appeased for what he considers as Taylor’s betrayal when he “ran off” after their last bank job, taking the loot with him.

It is buried now somewhere in the desert, and Widmark isn’t about to let matters rest. He wants the money. He and his gang take Taylor and his girlfriend (Patricia Owens) hostage across mountain and valley to retrieve it. Once that is accomplished, it’s not clear whether he intends to let either of his captives live.

Taylor and Owens manage to make an escape, plummeting down a dusty slope and making off on foot along a ravine, but Widmark soon intercepts them. Then their progress is interrupted when they are stopped by a small company of cavalry, whose lieutenant warns them of a band of renegade Comanches roaming the hills.

Widmark, Owens, Taylor

Undaunted, they continue to their destination, which turns out to be a ghost town, where Taylor has buried the money in the cemetery. With the end game in sight, matters take an ominous turn as the Comanches wage a night attack that has them all fighting for their lives. Morning light brings burial of the dead and there’s a final resolution to be reached between Widmark and Taylor.

Highlights. I’m calling this a noir western because many scenes take place at night. Most of the characters are outlaws, each with his own sinisterly dark persona. Particularly menacing is Henry Silva with the occasional leering comment directed at Owens. There’s a hard-boiled edge to the dialogue, as when Middleton is asked whether any words were said over the graves of the men he just buried. “Yeah, goodbye,” he says.

The performances are fine with Widmark and Taylor well matched as adversaries. The supporting cast is also strong. Besides Owens, who easily holds her own in the company of desperadoes, there is the wonderful character actor, Robert Middleton, as a man with torn loyalties. Shot in Death Valley and the Alabama Hills of Lone Pine, California, the film is a Cinemascope travelogue capturing the scenic beauty of the Sierras under winter snows.

Trails of the Wild

This collection of western stories from David Cranmer’s Beat to a Pulp imprint is a welcome addition of new short fiction to the genre. As followers of his online zine already know, Cranmer has a fine eye and ear for picking writers with a gift for storytelling.

Beat to a Pulp readers will find some familiar names here. For sheer volume of output and award winning, that list would be led by James Reasoner and quickly followed by Patti Abbott, Chuck Tyrell, Wayne D. Dundee, Kieran Shea, and Evan Lewis. They are joined by the notable talents of relative newcomer Matt Pizzolato.

Patti Abbott deserves mention first for not only representing her gender in a genre that has long thought of itself as rightly dominated by male writers—and second for venturing into western territory from her usual fictional domains, which I always think of as being situated somewhere in or near Detroit. (I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong about that.) Her offering here, “The True Story of Boy Kaleen,” is an entertaining tour de force of Old West vernacular.

James Reasoner’s “Rattler” works a tight situation between two men with guns and a rattlesnake with opinions of its own. For someone with a snake phobia, the story has probably the surest opening for grabbing attention: “Cobb had been holed up in the rock for about an hour when the big, diamondback rattler crawled over the back of his legs.”

"Go It, You  –   –  "

Evan Lewis in “Too Many Crocketts” plagues a grandson of Davy Crockett with a talkative ghost of the man “born on a mountaintop in Tennessee.” Chuck Tyrell’s spooky “Line Rider” spends time with a cowboy too long alone and too long deprived of female company. It’s an erotic tale best described as a waltz into darkness.

Well into the spirit of western realist noir, you’ll find the expert hand of Kieran Shea. His story “A Decent Man” is a grimly melancholy account of a man attempting vainly to repay another man’s wrong. Matthew Pizzolato’s gunslinger Wesley Quaid is more successful as he confronts some bullies in “Day of Reckoning.”

That leaves the long story, “The Empty Badge,” by Wayne D. Dundee, who brings us another tale of the outlaw marshal, Cash Laramie. This one, set on the high plains borderland of Nebraska and Wyoming involves a traveling medicine show, a case of amnesia, bank robbers, and a Cash Laramie impersonator.

Together, I can say from firsthand experience, the stories collected in Trails of the Wild make for great bedtime reading. They are currently available in ebook format for kindle and the nook. 

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Further reading:

BITS reviews and interviews

Patti Abbott

James Reasoner

Chuck Tyrell

Matt Pizzolato

Wayne D. Dundee

David Cranmer

Image credits:

Illustration by F.W. Schulz, 1907

Coming up: Richard Widmark, The Law and Jack Wade (1958)

One sentence journal, Dec. 1-7

The neighbors' Christmas lights

Time marches on . . .

 12/1, Sunday. Looking over the backyard fence after nightfall and watching the slow crawl of headlights along the interstate, folks headed home from the holiday.

12/2, Monday. So great seeing Clark Johnson again in a TV series (amazon’s Alpha House), and in a comedy with John Goodman.

12/3, Tuesday. Nicked my thumb carving Thanksgiving turkey with a newly sharpened knife, and the darn thing still wants a bandaid.

12/4, Wednesday. Getting yet another Privacy Notice from yet another service provider, I have to wonder whether I have any privacy left.

12/5, Thursday. There’s a mesmerizing light show on the wall as late afternoon sun slants through the window blinds, throwing flash-dancing shadows of the windblown palms outside.

12/6, Friday. I guess it was time for a remake of that recurring dream of missing a flight—always either to or from Heathrow, and this time a little red sport car I once owned figures into the plot.

12/7, Saturday. The neighborhood Christmas light show has begun.

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Image credit: Ron Scheer

Coming up: Trails of the Wild

Glossary of frontier fiction: F(facer – flannel band)

Below is a list of mostly forgotten terms, people, and the occasional song, drawn from a reading of frontier fiction, 1880–1915. Each week a new list, progressing through the alphabet, “from A to Izzard.”

facer = an unexpected problem or obstacle. “A facer lay ahead of them beside which the mere receipt of the five letters was nothing.” Edgar Beecher Bronson, The Red-Blooded.

fade = to put at a disadvantage. “‘Twas a foight av his own pickin’, an’ he knows ye’ve got him faded.” James Hendryx, The Promise.

Faille

fagging = to tire, weary. “It was his way to pick out the roughest possible path before him, to settle within himself that it was that of duty, and to follow it without fagging or complaint.” Gwendolen Overton, The Heritage of Unrest.

faille = a slightly ribbed, woven fabric of silk or cotton. “I’ve had things ’most as fine as Lutie’s. Satins, brocades, failles, grosgrains, taffetas, all kinds, anything I wanted.” Nancy Mann Waddell Woodrow, The New Missioner.

Caroline Norton

“Fair Bingen on the Rhine” = a sentimental poem by British poet Caroline Norton (1808-1877) about the death of a soldier in Algiers. “By his side was his wife, Amelia, the reigning favourite, who could play the piano and sing ‘Fair Bingen on the Rhine’ with a dash that was said to be superb.” Harry Leon Wilson, The Lions of the Lord. Full text here.

fairy lamp = a small, glass candle lamp that gained popularity during the 1880s and '90's. “A fairy lamp burned over the great open fireplace, and by this he saw her go to the child’s little crib.” Frances Charles, In The Country God Forgot.

fairy well = a small pool of water or spring into which visitors dropped pins or buttons for wishes to be granted. “Judith, going to her favorite pool to bathe, saw that it had shrunk till it seemed but a fairy well hid among the willows.” Marie Manning, Judith of the Plains.

fakir = a street salesman of cheap goods. “It’s but a little phrase, ’tis true, / ‘ Its meaning well each ‘fakir’ knew.” William De Vere, Jim Marshall’s New Pianner.

fall into snap = achieve success easily. “Brother Josh, now he was little fellow, fell right into snap t’once.” Frances Charles, In The Country God Forgot.