New West Book Review

How to Get Out of Butte: Sam Shepard’s “Day Out of Days”

By Jenny Shank, 1-11-10

Day Out of Days
by Sam Shepard
Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $24.95

Sam Shepard’s new Day Out of Days is a refreshingly odd collection of stories centered around several recurrent characters who drift down the highway, most often fetching up in the American West in places such as Williams and Kingman, Arizona, Taos, New Mexico, Quanah and Seminole, Texas, and Livingston and Butte, Montana.  The narrator is not fond of Butte, offering this vignette: “Roofs keep blowing off the meth-lab shacks sitting directly across the street from neat little Scandinavian bungalows, geranium flower boxes in the windows.  Chemical explosions out of nowhere.  Shirtless rapists, spiderwebs tattooed across their faces, sift through the wreckage…” To underscore his point, Shepard follows that tale with a poem entitled “Get Out of Butte Altogether.” Day Out of Days reads like the scrapbook of a singular mind, filled with wry humor, startling observations about human nature, and plain glorious weirdness. 

Shepard writes each piece with poetic concision and an intimate level of gritty detail that indicates the Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright and Oscar-nominated actor has not isolated himself from the world.  The structure of Day Out of Days is as free as the open road, with poems and dramatic dialogues scattered in among the stories, but a few landmarks recur.  The second story in the book, “Haskell, Arkansas (Highway 70),” begins: “Sunday, midday.  Not many cars.  Man’s out for a stroll.  He comes across a head in a ditch by the side of the road.” The head, nestled in a wicker basket, begins to speak and coerces the man into carrying it to a nearby lake, precipitating the man’s existential crisis.  In several stories later in the book, the head speaks of its experience, and we learn in “These Recent Beheadings” that there has been a rash of these incidents, coming out of nowhere like those meth lab explosions in Butte: “Nobody could predict this.  Not in 1957, anyway, when Chevy came out with that great fin on the Bel Air, and Little Richard was just hitting his stride.”

We also hear from a disgruntled hit man on several occasions as he gripes over his assignment: skinning the face off his victim.  There’s an endless road trip that the narrator takes with some ne’er-do-well friends, Dennis and John, on which Shepard reports occasionally.  One man—it isn’t clear if it’s always the same man—has hit the road, leaving his significant other behind, and in one tale he runs into an old lover with flaming red hair whom he apparently lived with in 1965, an episode he cannot remember.  Many of the narrators are reminded by characters they encounter about mutual experiences that they had forgotten, wild times that would seem to be of a memorable nature.  Toward the end of the book, a cluster of stories addresses a family’s vacation to Mexico.

One of the best stories is the hilarious “Costello,” which begins, “I made the great mistake of returning to my hometown after not being anywhere near the place for over forty-five years.” The narrator goes to sit in an old haunt, a donut shop, and watches the clientele.  But then when he’s studying a gangsterish character holding a copy of Racing Form, he realizes he’s been caught.  “I prefer not to be stared at when I’m furtively staring at others,” he reports.  The narrator’s mind reels: “This guy could be anybody, I thought.  What if he’s part of some cartel.  Some ring of evil.  You never know.  Out here on the edge of nowhere.  This is exactly the kind of territory they like to operate in.  Semirural.  All kinds of agricultural pesticies available.  Fertilizer.  Methamphetamine.  Bombs.”

The narrator and the man, Costello, get to talking.  Costello thinks he recognizes the narrator as a famous actor who grew up in town and changed his name, but the narrator doesn’t admit to being him.  Costello shares an astonishing litany of activities he says he and the actor once engaged in: “We used to run all kinds of scams, back then.  Stole cars and drove ‘em down to Mexico.  Dismantle the bastards and sell all the parts.  Made tons.  Buy Benzedrine down there by the sackful.  Right across the counter…Back then you got away with anything.  Wide open.  Whores.  Pills.  Slaves.  You name it.” “Slaves?” the narrator asks.  What’s perhaps most impressive about this story is how it takes an everyday setting, a small town donut shop, and expands it to include a world of unruly experience through the narrator’s racing mind and Costello’s odd revelations.

In “Cracker Barrel Men’s Room (Highway 90 West),” the narrator tells the story of the poor soul who was trapped in a Cracker Barrel Men’s Room overnight, forced to listen to Shania Twain songs on an endless loop.  After the night of torture, Shania herself appears to him, a vision, “towering before him in her spectacular body, her spectacular red hair, her spectacular lips, her spectacular tits.  She was singing her head off.  She was singing like there was no tomorrow.  She didn’t seem to notice the man on the floor, bleeding to death.”

Throughout Day Out of Days, bits of folklore and history filter through, with stories that reflect on Casey Jones, Kit Carson, Crazy Horse, and various conquests. One such story is “Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge Reservation,” which begins, “The large metal sign on the dusty shoulder of Highway 27, explaining, front and back, the horrific events that took place here in December 1890, has been altered.  The word battle has been covered over with a patchwork metal plate riveted to the sunbleached narrative reading massacre in bold black letters.”

Day out of Days is a road trip of the spirit through the American West, a book that should cure anyone’s mental rut with its quirky tales and unexpected observations.  In this collection, Sam Shepard has proved himself an enormously inventive writer, working in territory that seems familiar, but that proves to be surprising and revelatory.

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