Thar She Moos

By R.Z. Sheppard

Cities of the Plain (Knopf; 293 pages; $24) is the concluding novel of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. Like All the Pretty Horses, winner of the 1992 National Book Award for Fiction, and The Crossing, published two years later, Cities tells the story of cowboy John Grady Cole and his trailmates as they drift south of the border to find respite from modern encroachments. The time is 1952, about when pickups started looking prettier than horses. The starting place is New Mexico, nursery to the atomic age.

Unlike Larry McMurtry, the other contemporary master of the artful oater, McCarthy is concerned more with the what-was of storytelling than with the what-next. In McMurtry's Old West, cowboys ride off in clouds of eventful folklore. McCarthy's brooding buckaroos fade slowly, like denim, into a meticulously authenticated past. The novels are both stoic laments for the vanishing wrangler and lively repositories of regional landscape, foods, clothes, gear and idioms--enough of them in Spanish to suggest the coming of the bilingual novel.

McCarthy strives hard to do for cowpunching what Melville did for whaling: describe in documentary detail how the job is done. Similarly, his Ishmaels on horseback try to harpoon the mysteries of an indifferent universe. Of course they fail, but at least they don't end up talking like cafe philosophers. That role falls to an old Mexican who is trundled out in an epilogue to vaporize about death, dreams and history.

The murky conclusion to McCarthy's epic contrasts unfavorably with the clarity of his cowboys' laconic dialogue ("Pass the salsa yonder") and terse fatalism ("When things are gone they're gone"). On the other hand there is something unfashionably noble in McCarthy's uncompromising passion to land the big one. It takes a risky independence to still use old-fashioned symbolism with obvious religious overtones. To some, Cole's romance with Magdalena, an epileptic Mexican prostitute, will suggest the New Testament and a disorder once thought to be a gift from God. To others, the relationship of a young cowboy and a convulsive whore will sound like the subject of a bunkhouse joke.

McCarthy's abundant literary skill barely keeps him on top of his material. It can be a spellbinding ride. He is a virtuoso of the lyric description and the free-range sentence, as well as a connoisseur of cantinas and ranch kitchens. A lot of whiskey and coffee goes down and many wooden matches are ignited by horny thumbnails before John Grady Cole and a Mexican pimp named Eduardo square off with knives over the fate of Magdalena.

The fight, even more exciting than the battle of the blades in All the Pretty Horses, fully realizes McCarthy's attachment to formal manly rituals. Aficionados of the bullring should appreciate the choreography of the action. Fans of bloodless sports may find the whole thing too stagey. Yet there is no denying the drama and inevitability of McCarthy's climactic mano a mano. What seems less fated is that white whale of an epilogue.

--By R.Z. Sheppard