Western Book Roundup

Funny Lines from 2009 Books

By Jenny Shank, 12-23-09

2009 has been a rough year for many people.  But there’s nothing like a good book to take your mind off your troubles, so I’d like to send 2009 out on a good note with this collection of some of the most amusing passages from the books I read this year.

From American Buffalo by Steven Rinella

“Taking off to wherever the animals are strikes me as a perfectly noble reason to move around.  In my life, maybe half of my moves around the country have been with that goal in mind.  The other half were meant to get me close to particular women.  (I’ve been frustrated to find that one move seldom accomplishes both of those things.)”

From Episode by Robert Garner McBrearty

“I help my father up and we hurry after Len to the fence in time to see the Doberman, old Jeeter, seventeen now, go into his Hound of the Baskervilles’ act.  With the guttural snarl of an enraged drillmaster, he staggers stiff-legged across his turf.  He’s a horrid looking thing, with scabby patches of orange-tinted medicated fur.  The old dinosaur moves on memory.  One last glorious mission.  One last neighborhood ass to chew.”

From Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson

The narrator in the story “Shauntrelle” meets her roommate at Laventura, a Houston corporate housing complex:

“‘Don’t answer the land line, is my advice.  Some gal named Felicia had this number before, all the calls ask for Felicia, and they leave messages on our machine, too, all Poed because Felicia is up to her eyeballs in debt, no wonder she got rid of that number.  The thing is, the answering machine is not Felicia’s, nor mine neither.  The answering machine is Ray.’ She poked the little unit to make it recite its former owner’s deep suave voice.  ‘You’ve reached Ray,’ he said, enticingly.  ‘And you know what I need…’ Then a chuckle, then the beep.”

From Yellowstone Autumn: A Season of Discovery in a Wondrous Land by W.D. Wetherell

Wetherell describing why he drives into Yellowstone early in the morning:

“The nice thing about driving early is that you miss most of the elk jams, where RV drivers suddenly slam on the breaks in the middle of the road and disgorge camera-toting occupants who immediately surround an embarrassed squirrel (quite often it’s squirrels), while behind them other RVs screech to a stop and disgorge similar creatures, backing things up.”

From Lucky Billy by John Vernon

“Don’t be such a squitter-ass.”

“The blacksmith there liked bullyragging me. So I bought a gun and the next time he done it I shot him in the gut.”

“If you rode a hundred miles nonstop for two days you’d look wappered, too, said Fred.”

From The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards by Robert Boswell

“One night after interviewing a victorious high school football coach who said, ‘We literally knocked their heads off,’ Paul became discouraged with his job.”

“The house had a peaked roof and plank porch.  The windows showed a waffling brightness like the memory of actual light.  Some kind of Mary Chapin Carpenter warbled inside, and I had a momentary fear of live music.”

From The Signal by Ron Carlson

“These were drug dealers.  There wasn’t going to be fresh oil in the engines or good tires or a tight lug nut or any single thing done right.  This was a free fall at the shiterie.”

From Where the Money Went by Kevin Canty

From the story “The Birthday Girl”:

“Saturday Night at the Sip ‘n’ Dip: Piano Pat is bellowing out her 35,000th rendition of ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ while the college boys and girls—home for Christmas, stuck in town till New Year’s—suck mixed drinks off the piano-top bar and sing along.  It’s ten o’clock or ten-thirty and the snow is coming down like a freight train outside.”

“I leave this alone for a minute and the both of us sip our drinks and watch the underwater couple, back behind the bar.  The magnifying effect of the water makes their legs look huge, like manatees.  They might know we’re watching but they might not.  In the blue light, their giant legs twine together.  God knows what their upper halve are doing but their legs can’t seem to stop touching.”

From the story “Burning Bridges, Breaking Glass”:

“One night at dinner he overheard a television producer refer to his sobriety as if it were another person standing in the room.  He said, ‘I really felt that she was endangering my sobriety,’ and after that it was like there were three of them in the room all the time, Rossbach drunk and Rossbach dry and then Rossbach’s sobriety.  He took his sobriety with thim everywhere, unwillingly, like a country cousin, or the child of your parents’ friends, in town for a week and dumped on you to entertain.”

From Just Like Us by Helen Thorpe

“Marisela and Zahra moved on to discuss the social dynamics in their quad.  The four roommates had agreed they would take turns cleaning the bathroom, but that was not happening.  ‘Well, Alison is middle-class, and Beatriz is upper-class,’ observed Marisela.  ‘So they will clean the sink, but they won’t touch the toilet or the floor.  Us working-class people, we know how to clean.  I cleaned the toilet yesterday.  They were like ‘Wow!  It’s really clean!’”

From The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter

A bit of Walter’s excellent stoner dialogue:

“Dude, Oprah don’t write O. She just own that shit.”

(If you’re looking for a book full of laughs, Walter’s fits the bill.)

From Dagoberto Gilb’s story “Willows Village” in Best of the West 2009

“There were lots of jobs in Santa Ana and around it when you looked in the paper.  There were lots of construction sites but I saw so many car dealerships I finally decided, I really made up my mind.  I wanted to be a car salesman.  I had a high school friend from El Paso, up a couple of streets and right near Fort Boulevard, who told me that when he moved out here, that he started at car sales and the next he knew, he was making a really great living and he loved it…I just thought what he did was original and smart.  Not that it was.  Everybody had heard of car salesmen.  What was original was to be one.”

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