Surprises in American West’s Terrain

AT THE JIM BRIDGER

Stories

by Ron Carlson

Picador USA

194 pages, $23

Contemporary stories and novels about the American West have developed certain conventions.

There is a down-at-the-heels motel on a poor road at the edge of a wind-worn town. Its manager, an aging man with a dubious past, sits on a folding chair watching the flicker of the TV. Outside, a car pulls up on the gravel. A couple comes in and rents a room. A plot ensues. It unfolds and, in the end, flings the characters back into the rootless past from which they blew in. Ron Carlson’s nine stories and two stream-of-consciousness bits in “At the Jim Bridger” contain some of the conventions. There is a joint called the Blue Bird. There is a motel in Arizona called the El Sol. There are characters whose pasts are indistinct.

But Carlson goes beyond the conventions to create characters who in their strangeness become suddenly rich with life, their situations lying just beyond the edges of commonplace existence.

In “The Clicker at Tips,” Eve is a third of the way through the English beer menu when the narrator opens the big wooden door and joins her. They talk, she getting tipsier and louder. The young men in their blue blazers and pinstriped shirts want her to keep quiet so they can watch “Monday Night Football.” Eve and the narrator haven’t seen each other for two months, but she learns that he is, after all, a friend, as he will prove at some cost to himself.

In “At the El Sol,” the narrator is on the lam, running from a woman’s sinister boyfriend and the minor swindle of a casino. He sits on the patio and watches the people on a bare budget drive into the little paved courtyard, the ranchers and roughnecks and runaways to whom the motel is like a welcome oasis. He does odd jobs for Mr. Cuppertino and becomes increasingly frightened that he will be discovered by his pursuers. A surprising act of kindness saves him and ennobles Mr. Cuppertino.

“Gary Garrison’s Wedding Vows” is, in its sweet, quiet way, just about perfect, a story that in the 19th century way clicks neatly shut like the lid on a metal box. Driven by feelings she can neither decipher nor control, a young woman with the unlikely name of Gary quits Radcliffe after her sophomore year and takes a job as a bird counter at a wildlife refuge in northern Utah. The Canada geese arouse her feelings, make her nerves tingle. She meets a man who moves her, and then another man, and decides at the end of the season to marry the second one. The little wedding congregation waits; the call of the Canada geese will pronounce the marriage vows.

In some of the stories, the chief character, observing from outside like a writer, does not quite comprehend what is going on around him. In “Towel Season,” a mathematician wrapped up in his work is bewildered by the way other people’s towels accumulate around his pool and house in the Arizona desert. In “The Ordinary Son,” a non-genius in a family of geniuses finally manages to find and keep his footing.

In this and two other stories about high school boys, Carlson brings freshness to a hackneyed genre. In “Evil Eye Allen,” two teenagers concoct a manic magic act that propels the aloof and most desirable high school girl into the arms of one of them. In “At Copper View,” a double date ends in an ordinary way that we know is tragic.

But most of the time in Carlson’s tales, cheerfulness, and plain personal resilience, keep breaking in. “The Potato Gun” is a fine, funny and scary piece about families and how they raise their kids, what the kids expect and how the families in their kind and fumbling ways try to make it all fit together.

Carlson’s most ambitious story is the title piece. In its complexity, it is really a novella. In the mountains at the Jim Bridger Lodge, named for the mountain man and scout, a man who is with a woman not his wife has told her of getting caught in a blizzard on an earlier mountain trip, and how he and another man, saving themselves in the storm, experienced an almost involuntary but powerful erotic encounter with one another.

Carlson tells that story with both delicacy and force. In fact, this collection of stories about people in the uncertain moral terrain of the American West consistently surprises and delights.