West is a Sexy Place in “Best of the West 2009”

By Jenny Shank, 11-08-09

Best of the West 2009: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri
Edited by James Thomas and D. Seth Horton, foreword by Rick Bass
University of Texas Press, 268 pages, $19.95

Best of the West 2009 is a welcome revival of anthology series that ran from 1988 through 1992, collecting outstanding stories set in “the Wide Side of the Missouri” that previously appeared in literary journals.  Unlike some recent one-off Western story anthologies, such as New Stories from the Southwest (also edited by D. Seth Horton) and Forge Books’ Best Stories of the American West, Volume I, the editors plan to make this an annual publication, and in the 2009 edition, the quality of the stories is just as high as those in the well-known national Best American Short Stories series.

In the foreword, Rick Bass tries to put his finger on “what constitutes a Western short story,” and although he notes, “Is it my imagination, or are there extra teaspoonfuls of loneliness in these stories, extra pinches of desperation?” and “a good many Western short stories tend to possess a kind of intensity or power of the felt physical senses,” he decides, “I’m not convinced there is a Western short story, yet.” Bass doesn’t remark on it, but in this year’s anthology, the overwhelming common theme is sex: the people in these stories might be lonely, but they manage to partner up pretty well.

Susan Streeter Carpenter’s steamy “Elk Medicine” wears its metaphors on the surface in this story of a married, middle-aged woman who is staying alone in her family’s cabin in the Colorado Front Range, supervising as a man drills a well on the property.  As the quest for water goes unfulfilled and the man drills deeper, the woman begins to find herself oddly attracted to him.  “She’s been watching him thrust stiff rods into the earth for two days--what a macho cliché, she thinks.  There is a welter of thoughts she cannot yet think; she feels them pressing forward in a mass.  I want water to come into the well. That much is true.”

In Louise Erdrich’s vivid “The Reptile Garden,” set in 1972 in North Dakota, an Anaïs Nin-loving college student named Evelina takes acid for the first time, goes a bit mad, and decides to take a break from school by working at a mental hospital.  There she meets the foul-mouthed, sexy patient Nonette, who seduces her, then leaves the hospital, leaving Evelina a wreck, thinking “how unaccountable and shameful my breakdown was, as was the fact that I had just loved a woman to the point of literal madness.  I was just a nothing, half-crazy, half-drugged half Chippewa.” When Evelina confesses to her cousin her worry that she might be a lesbian now, he counsels, “Hey, you don’t have to go anywhere with this thing just yet.  Take it easy.”

“Willow Village” shows off Dagoberto Gilb‘s unmistakable voice to perfection in this story of a down-on-his-luck construction worker who leaves his family behind in El Paso while he seeks work in California, staying at his wealthy, sexy aunt’s house.  His aunt and her friend spend all day in bathing suits drinking wine, and though Guillermo, or Billy, as he prefers to be called, tries to resist the friend’s advances, he cannot.  For a while he finds work painting houses with a partner named Gabe, but the arrangement fizzles out.  I adored this sentence, plain as it is: “I called and I called that Gabe, but he didn’t pick up and he was not going to pick up.” It epitomizes the understated emotion and fresh, natural voice in everything that Gilb does.  I am a fan of his work, but then so are a lot of people—"Willows Village” previously appeared in Harper’s, he’s written for The New Yorker, and he’s won the PEN/Hemingway Award.

In keeping with the sex-in-the-West theme, Lucrecia Guerrero’s two-page story, “A Memory,” begins: “Rigo and Marisol lie on the army surplus blanket that he’s thrown over a patch of desert sand.” He’s 25, she’s 16, and he calls her “Mamita” as they have sex for Marisol’s first time.  In Stephen Tuttle’s “Amanuesis,” when the middle school science teacher in a community in the Wasatch Mountains goes missing in the snow and his wife leaves town, the townspeople discover a scale model he’s made of the town in his basement.  At first they’re charmed, but then they notice coded markings on all the houses, through which intimate details, including townspeople’s sexual peccadilloes, are revealed.  In Antonya Nelson‘s rich “Or Else,” a 39-year-old compulsive liar who spent childhood summers at a friend’s house in Telluride uses the line, “My family owns a house in Telluride,” on his latest girlfriend and breaks into the house, site of many of his sexual conquests.

Don Waters‘ funny “Mormons in Heat,” features, as one might expect from the title, a Mormon missionary failing to adhere to the dictates of his professed religion.  Eli, in his mid-thirties, converts to Mormonism in the wake of a divorce and insists on completing a mission.  He’s assigned to the desert southwest, and though he starts out by achieving a conversion right off the bat, his enthusiasm wanes, and his attention is captured by a group of middle-aged biker chicks in a gang called The Beaver Rockets.  This story is bawdy, irreverent, and hilarious.  Of all the new-to-me writers that Best of the West introduces, it’s Don Waters’ work that I most look forward to reading more of.

Apart from the sex-focused stories, another standout in Best of the West 2009 is Ernest J. Finney’s “Sequoia Gardens,” in which a sharp, bilingual young man from Mazatlan who needs money to complete his education in hotel management joins up with a team sneaking across the border to camp out in the wilderness and grow a drug crop (probably marijuana, but Finney never specifies).  The innocent voice of the unnamed narrator is charming, as in his description of LA traffic, “Once you merged it was like you were propelled along in your slot among the other vehicles by some mastermind computer,” and his perspective on the events he participates in is illuminating.  One other non-sex-related story that stands out is Daniel Chacón’s lovely, funny “Velocity of Mass,” in which an aged priest suffering some kind of dementia earns a reputation for performing speedy masses, gaining him a huge following among busy people who “could certainly spend ten minutes in a Mass so fast that it was like a shot of whiskey.”

Best of the West 2009 is a thoroughly enjoyable collection, filled with memorable characters who find ways to assuage their lonesome hearts.