In Pursuit of Spenser (29 page)

Of all Parker’s Westerns,
Appaloosa
is my favorite, but the following scene from
Brimstone
is the single most powerful moment in any of the Westerns. It occurs early in the novel.

The book begins with Cole and Hitch looking for Allie French. They have been searching for almost a year. They ride into a nothing town and find her working in a dump of a saloon as a whore, looking terrible. Cole and Hitch take her out, much to the displeasure of the owner and bartender. When the bouncer tries to stop them, Cole knocks him on his ass with the butt of his revolver. The next day, they get ready to leave town, and the boys from the whorehouse are waiting for them to get Allie back. The gunfight is Parker’s masterstroke. The clipped prose and stark dialogue conveys Virgil’s courage and Allie’s terror.

“I count six,” Virgil said to me softly. “Anything develops, I’ll take the first man. You take the last, and we’ll work our way to the middle.”

I nodded. At this range, with the eight-gauge, I might get two at a time.

“Virgil,” Allie said. “What is it.”

“Nothing to worry about,” Virgil said.

Allie looked for the first time at the men across the street.

“Oh my God, Virgil, it’s Pig.”

“That his name?” Virgil said.

“Don’t let him take me back.”

“Nope,” Virgil said.

“Everett . . .”

“We’re fine, Allie,” I said. “We’re fine.”

Pig was carrying a big old Navy Colt in a gun belt that sagged under his belly. There was dried blood on his shirt. It appeared that he hadn’t changed it since Virgil hit him. The left side of Pig’s face was swollen and dark, with a long scab where Virgil’s front sight had dragged across the cheekbone. The five men with him were all carrying. I thumbed back both hammers on the eight-gauge.

We kept walking our parallel walk. Allie held tight to Virgil’s left arm. At the end of the street was the Barbary Coast Café, and across the street from that the railroad station, and beyond that the river. And nothing else. It was obvious where we were going.

“I need you to let go of my arm now, Allie,” Virgil said.

The gunfight itself, like many of the scenes in all of Parker’s Westerns, is so cinematic a director could shoot the printed page and knock off for the day. The final Cole-Hitch book is
Blue-Eyed Devil
. The police chief of a small town invites Cole and Hitch to his office to introduce himself and to offer them jobs as part of his force. The problem is that Cole and Hitch have already figured out that Chief Amos Callico (great name) is a pig. Callico, of course, has political ambitions (governor) and won’t abide these two standing in his way.
Blue-Eyed Devil
has a little bit of everything, including pissed-off Apaches and a mysterious stranger who Parker describes thusly:

He was wearing a beaded buckskin shirt, an ivory-handled Colt on his hip, and a derby hat tilted forward over the bridge of his nose. He looked like somebody from a wild west show, except, somehow, I knew he wasn’t . . .

He had black-and-white striped pants tucked into high black boots, and his skin was smooth and kind of pale, like a woman’s. He didn’t look like he spent much time outside. His hands were pale, too, with long fingers.

In Western fiction lore there is always room for an eccentric killer.

The stranger’s name is Chauncey Teagarden (another great name) and he is a gunman too, possibly sent to kill Virgil Cole. And Allie, in her sad yet infuriating way, shows she hasn’t changed one bit as Cole finds her buttering up the gunman. Virgil and Everett watch, and this is the conversation between the two about Allie’s nature:

“And she knows that Chauncey is here sooner or later to kill me,” Virgil said.

I nodded.

“And she knows that he might succeed.”

“Always possible,” I said.

“And so you know she’s thinking ahead,” Virgil said.

I was quiet for a moment, looking across the street. Then I took in some air and blew it out slowly.

“And lining up replacements,” I said.

Once again a Parker protagonist must face the sorrow of love gone awry. Spenser and Stone have both faced this kind of grief.

There’s more gunplay and dying here than in any of the previous books, and the pages turn even faster. An exciting and fitting conclusion to the Cole-Hitch saga.

The Westerns of Robert B. Parker work within the parameters of popular culture. In reviewing them we’ve dealt with crooked sheriffs, gunfights, women who can’t be tamed, male
bonding, and lawless towns. These are the mythic elements of a century and a half of Western genre fiction. And for the most part Parker presents them as they’re usually depicted. Readers of traditional Westerns will not feel cheated by these books. Parker knows you have to give readers what they pay for. In this case, they want the myth.

But, again, as with his crime novels, he brings his world-view and his own sensibility into play, enriching the books for more demanding readers. While the trappings may be mythic, the characters are more realistic. There are many legends about the Earp brothers, but as we see with Virgil, the legends forgot to include the human element.

For all the action, for all the crossing and double-crossing, for all the colorful and clamorous history of the mythic West, finally it is the characters we will remember most about Parker’s Westerns. The same way we recall the characters in the Spenser and Stone novels.

| ROBERT B. PA RKER |

SUSAN AND I
sat at a table in the Charles Square courtyard having a drink in the late afternoon with Susan’s friend Amy Trent. It was one of those days in late June. The temperature was about 78. There were maybe three white clouds in the sky. The quiet breeze that drifted in from the river smelled fresher than I knew it to be.

“I’m trying to write a book,” Amy said. “The working title is
Men Who Dare
, a series of profiles of men who are strong and tough and do dangerous work. Mountain climbers, Navy Seals, policemen, firemen.”

“Amy needs a sample profile to submit with her proposal, in hopes of getting a contract and an advance,” Susan said. “I said you’d be perfect.”

“Amy’s looking for sexual splendor as well?” I said.

Amy smiled.

“Always,” she said. “Will you talk with me?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Okay, I have a bunch of questions written down,” Amy said. “You can answer them, dismiss them, respond to a question I didn’t ask, anything you want, I’m interested in what you’re like. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Susan, feel free to jump in any time,” Amy said. “You know him better than anyone. “

“Don’t rat me out,” I said, “about the sexual splendor.”

“Our secret,” Susan said.

Amy took a notebook out of her book bag and opened it. She was a professor at Harvard, and, faced with that limitation, not bad looking. If she had dressed better and done her hair better and improved on her makeup, and worn more stylish glasses, she might have been good looking . . . but then the faculty senate would probably have required her to wear a scarlet A on her dress.

She studied her notebook for a moment. I looked at Susan. She smiled. Zing went the strings of my heart. Then Amy took out a small tape recorder and put it on the table.

“Okay?” she said.

“Sure.”

She turned the recorder on.

“Okay,” Amy said. “Just to warm up a little. Why are you such a wise guy?”

“It’s a gift,” I said.

Susan frowned at me.

“If you’re going to do this,” Susan said, “you have to do it.”

“You didn’t tell me I had to be serious,” I said.

“Well you do,” she said.

Amy waited. She had a lot of kinetic intensity about her, but she knew how to keep it in check. I nodded.

“I seem to have an unavoidable capacity for seeing a thing and seeing beyond it at the same time.”

“Would you say that you have a heightened sense of irony?” Amy said.

“I probably wouldn’t say it, but it’s probably true.”

“It is also,” Susan said, “a distancing technique. It keeps people and events from getting too close.”

“Except you,” I said.

She smiled again.

“Except me.”

“Besides Susan, are there things that can get through that ironic barrier?” Amy said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Because?”

“Because if they did,” I said, “I couldn’t do what I do.”

“But if you refuse to care . . .” Amy said.

“I don’t refuse to care,” I said. “I refuse to let it control me.”

“How do you do that?” Amy said.

“It’s a matter of perspective.”

“Meaning?”

“There’s a line from Auden,” I said. “
The torturer’s horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree
.”

“A poem,” Amy said.

“
Musee des Beaux Arts
.”

“Life goes on,” she said.

“Something like that,” I said. “Though not for everyone.”

“And you find that consoling?”

“I find it instructive,” I said.

“Perspective,” Amy said.

I nodded.

Amy wasn’t reading her questions now. She seemed interested.

“In such a world,” she said, “do you have any absolutes?”

I nodded at Susan.

“Her,” I said.

“Love,” Amy said.

I shook my head.

“Her,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I see.”

One point for Harvard. The waitress came by and I had another beer, and Susan had another white wine. And Amy had more iced tea.

“So why do you do it?” she said.

“What I do? “

“Yes.”

“Because I can,” I said.

“That simple?”

“I’m pretty simple,” I said.

Amy looked at Susan. Susan smiled.

“He is,” she said. “And he isn’t. That will show itself if you talk with him enough. But I warn you he is almost never one thing.”

Amy nodded and braced herself with another slug of iced tea.

“So you do what you do because you can,” Amy said. “You’re good at it.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you like it?”

“Most of the time,” I said. “It allows me to live life on my own terms.”

“Aren’t their other jobs?” Amy said. “That allow you to do that and don’t require you to carry a gun?”

“Not that many,” I said. “And almost none at which I’d be any good.”

“You say you want to live life on your own terms, what are they?”

“The terms?”

“Yes.”

I thought about it. As the afternoon moved along more people were coming in for a drink. Maybe several. It was a relatively glamorous crowd for Cambridge. Few if any ankle length skirts and sandals with socks. I looked at Susan.

“What are my terms,” I said.

“He’s being cute,” Susan said to Amy. “He understands himself very well, but he wants me to say it.”

“It’s pretty hard for me not to be cute,” I said.

Susan rolled her eyes slightly.

“He can learn; but he can’t be taught,” Susan said. “He can find his way; but he can’t take direction. He will do very difficult and dangerous things; but he cannot be ordered to do them. Voluntarily, he is generous and compassionate and quite kind. But he cannot be compelled to it.”

“Autonomous,” Amy said.

“To a pathological extreme,” Susan said.

Amy checked her tape recorder. It appeared to be doing what it was supposed to.

“Can you get him to do things he doesn’t want to do?” Amy said.

“I’m doing this interview,” I said.

Neither of them paid me any attention.

“Up to a point,” Susan said.

“What is the point?” Amy said.