Unhappy Trails

By MARGARET CARLSON

BUFFALO GIRLS

by Larry McMurtry

Simon & Schuster

351 pages; $19.95

Few writers spin a better yarn than Larry McMurtry, whether he's writing about the frost-free, air-conditioned suburbs of Texas or the wild-and-woolly West of hangings and horse trading. In his third historical novel, McMurtry is back on the frontier, telling of its twilight through the final days of the hard-drinking Calamity Jane, who proves that even buffalo girls get the blues. So rawhide tough that many take her for a man and so down on her luck that only a horse and saddlebags stand between her and homelessness, Jane is willing to try anything when Buffalo Bill Cody invites her to join his Wild West show bound for England.

Better for Jane to have stayed in the country McMurtry knows best, where death waits just beyond the campfire or behind a swinging saloon door, a place recreated so stunningly in the Pulitzer-prize-winning Lonesome Dove. There McMurtry imbued the Western archetype with existential musings, couch-ready angst and buddy-movie sentiments, as two aging gunslingers give up their three square meals a day for one last, impossible cattle drive. But the old coots in Buffalo Girls can do no better than join the equivalent of the circus, to make slapstick out of the wonder of it all.

It may be the failure to make even a marginal living trapping beaver that has rendered this group so lifeless. Or it could be the habit of drinking whisky by the vat nearly every night. Whatever, these rough-and-tumble mountain men, the preternaturally wise old Indian, No Ears, the whore with the heart of gold, all are drawn broad enough for immediate transfer to celluloid. They never fully tell us what it was they had so we can mourn its passing with them.

Buffalo Girls' most powerful moments come in Jane's letters to her imaginary daughter. Full of regret for never settling down, aching with loneliness, Calamity Jane dreams up a child to give meaning to her senseless life and keep her from a solitary death. As she lies dying, she writes, "I made up the best life I could for you Janey, it is the opposite of the life I have lived out here in this mess they call the west." In Buffalo Girls, the West does not seem as mythic as it used to be. Perhaps it never was.