The Last Good Story They Told About Themselves

The diner was on a state highway in eastern Wyoming that didn’t go anywhere worth going anymore. It had gone somewhere once — to the mines, or the railroad spur, or whatever else had justified pouring asphalt across sixty miles of sagebrush — but that was finished, and the highway remained the way a scar remains after the wound has healed, which is to say permanently and without purpose. The diner was called the Bridger, though there was no bridge in sight. Someone had hung a pair of antelope horns above the door and spray-painted the hours on the glass: 6-2 M-SAT. It was Thursday at noon. There were four trucks in the lot and no one inside but us and a woman behind the counter who looked like she had been born in that apron and would die in it and would consider both events unremarkable.

Proulx was sitting in the back booth with a topographic map spread across the table. Not a highway map — a USGS quad, the kind with brown contour lines so close together in the canyon sections they looked like wood grain. She was tracing a drainage with her index finger, following it down from the divide to where it ran out into nothing, into alkali flat, into the white crust of evaporated ambition that passes for geography in the basins between ranges.

“There,” she said, when I sat down. “That’s where your outlaw goes to ground. Not a town. Not even a ranch. A drainage that runs for forty miles and then stops. Water comes down in spring. The rest of the year it’s dry gravel and bones and the smell of sage so thick it coats the inside of your throat.”

“That’s a place to hide,” I said.

“That’s a place to die. Hiding and dying are the same activity in country like this. The only difference is how long it takes.”

Leonard arrived the way he always arrived — already there, somehow, before you noticed him. He slid into the booth with a cup of coffee he must have gotten from the counter on the way in, and he looked at the topographic map and then at Proulx and said, “You brought homework.”

“I brought the landscape. You’ll bring the people. Someone has to bring the ground they stand on.”

“Fair enough.” He sipped the coffee and winced. “This is terrible.”

“It’s Wyoming coffee. If it were good, you’d know you were in the wrong state.”

He set the cup down but kept his hands around it, the way you hold something you don’t like but need. “So we’re doing outlaws.”

“We’re doing the end of outlaws,” I said. “The moment when the thing that made them possible — the open country, the distance between towns, the fact that a man on a fast horse could outrun the telegraph — all of that closing down. The world getting smaller. The romantic outlaw discovering that romance has an expiration date.”

“Butch and Sundance,” Leonard said.

“That’s the shape. Two men who are good at a thing that’s becoming obsolete. They know it. They can feel the walls. But they keep doing it because it’s what they know how to do and because stopping would mean admitting the world has moved past them.”

“Goldman understood something,” Leonard said. He was talking about William Goldman, the screenwriter, and when he said it I could hear the respect in his voice, the particular respect one craftsman has for another craftsman’s best trick. “He understood that charm is a strategy. Butch talks his way through everything. The talking is the skill. Not the gun — the mouth. And the movie works because you believe the mouth will save him right up until the moment it doesn’t.”

“The mouth never saves anyone,” Proulx said. “The mouth is what men use to narrate their own importance while the landscape waits. The landscape always wins. Goldman knew that too — he just put a sunset on it.”

“A sunset and a freeze frame. Which is a kind of lie. The freeze frame says: they died, but they died beautiful. The truth is nobody dies beautiful in that country. You die ugly. You die with dust in your teeth and blood in the alkali and the vultures find you before anyone who loved you does.”

“We don’t have to show the dying,” Leonard said.

“We have to not lie about it.”

“Annie, I’ve never lied about dying. I’ve just been selective about what happens after the gun goes off. The reader doesn’t need the vultures. The reader needs the look on the man’s face when he understands the gun is going to go off.”

“The look on whose face? The man being shot or the man doing the shooting?”

“Both. That’s where the story is. In the space between two men who both know what’s about to happen and are both still talking anyway, because the talking is what they do instead of accepting it.”

I said I wanted to talk about the pursuit. No Country for Old Men uses a pursuit structure that does something unusual — it gradually removes the protagonist from his own story. Llewelyn Moss starts as the center and ends offstage, killed between chapters, his death reported secondhand. The real subject isn’t the man being chased. It’s the man watching the chase who can’t make sense of it. The sheriff. The one who narrates a story he has no power to change.

“That’s McCarthy’s move,” Leonard said. “And it’s a good one, but it’s cold. It’s ice-cold. He takes the character you care about and kills him in a motel room and doesn’t even show you. That takes a kind of contempt for the reader that I’ve never had.”

“It’s not contempt,” Proulx said. “It’s honesty. People die in motel rooms. People die off the page of their own lives. The people who love them don’t get to watch. They get a phone call. They get a deputy at the door. McCarthy was writing what actually happens when violence arrives — it doesn’t arrive in the scene you’ve been building toward. It arrives in the gap between scenes. In the white space.”

“The white space is where I live,” Leonard said. “Elmore Leonard rule number whatever: leave out the parts people skip. McCarthy takes that and turns it into something mean. He leaves out the part you’d never skip — the death of the man you’ve been following for two hundred pages — and makes you understand that the story was never about that man. The story was about the thing chasing him, which was never a person. Chigurh isn’t a person. He’s weather.”

“All antagonists in the West are weather,” Proulx said. “Winter is the antagonist. Drought is the antagonist. The canyon wall that drops a rock on your packhorse is the antagonist. Men are just the form the weather takes when it puts on boots.”

I felt something shift in the conversation then, a turn toward the thing I’d been wanting to raise. I said I’d been thinking about the protagonist being wrong. Not morally wrong — though maybe that too — but factually wrong. Believing something about his situation that isn’t true. Building his whole play on a misreading.

“Every outlaw thinks he’s smarter than the law,” Leonard said. “That’s the job requirement. You rob a bank, you’re making a statement about your intelligence relative to the people guarding the money. Nine times out of ten, the statement is wrong. The bank robber is not smarter. He’s just more desperate. And desperation looks like cleverness when you’re inside it.”

“But what if it’s not just about intelligence?” I said. “What if the protagonist’s wrongness is deeper than that? What if he’s wrong about why he’s running? He thinks he’s running from the law, or from whoever’s chasing him. But the thing he’s actually running from is something he did, or something he is, that he can’t face. The pursuit isn’t the story. The pursuit is the distraction from the story.”

Proulx set down her coffee cup. Her eyes were fixed on the topographic map, on the drainage that ran forty miles into nothing. “The man who runs and doesn’t know what he’s running from. That’s every settlement story in the West. Every pioneer was running from something. They called it opportunity. They called it manifest destiny. They called it the future. It was always the past. The West was built by people running from the past and pretending they were running toward the future, and the landscape let them believe it because the landscape is big enough to hide anything, even a man from himself.”

“So the outlaw believes he’s Butch Cassidy,” Leonard said slowly, testing the idea. “He’s got the charm, the partner, the plan. He thinks the story is about two men against the system, the loveable rogues staying one step ahead. And the story lets him believe that for a while. The dialogue is good, the banter works, they’re funny together.”

“And then?”

“And then the story reveals that he’s not Butch. He was never Butch. The charm wasn’t working. The plan had a hole in it from the beginning, and everyone around him could see the hole except him. The partner could see it. The woman they left behind could see it. The lawman chasing them could see it. The only person who couldn’t see it was him, because seeing it would mean seeing himself, and seeing himself would mean stopping, and stopping would mean — what?”

“Admitting the era isn’t ending,” Proulx said. “It ended. Past tense. He’s not riding the last wave. He’s swimming in the backwash. The romantic outlaw story he’s telling himself — the one where he’s Butch, where the walls are closing in, where they’ll go to Bolivia, where there’s always another move — that story is already over. It ended before the first page. He’s performing a narrative that the world has already discarded.”

I said that felt right but also terrifying. If the protagonist is wrong about everything — wrong about his charm working, wrong about the era ending on his watch rather than having ended before he arrived, wrong about his partner’s loyalty or the plan’s viability — then what holds the reader? Why do we follow a man who’s deluded?

“Because we’re all deluded,” Leonard said. “Every character I’ve ever written thinks he’s the hero of his own story. The good ones are the ones who find out they’re not. The great ones are the ones who find out they’re not and keep going anyway. There’s something in that — the man who learns the truth and doesn’t stop walking. That’s not delusion anymore. That’s something else.”

“That’s stubbornness,” Proulx said. “And stubbornness is the only virtue the West respects. Not courage, not cleverness, not morality. Stubbornness. The willingness to keep doing the thing after the reason for doing it has evaporated.”

“The reason doesn’t evaporate,” Leonard said. “It changes shape. A man starts robbing banks because he needs money. Then he keeps robbing banks because he’s good at it. Then he keeps robbing banks because it’s who he is. The reason hasn’t evaporated — it’s migrated from the wallet to the identity. That’s a more dangerous reason, because you can satisfy a wallet. You can’t satisfy an identity.”

“You can kill it,” Proulx said.

The woman behind the counter refilled our cups without being asked, moving between the tables with a kind of efficiency that suggested she had been pouring coffee for men having conversations exactly like this one for forty years and had learned that the best contribution she could make was to keep the cups full and her opinions private.

“I keep thinking about the sheriff,” I said. “The one in No Country. The one who narrates the frame. He’s watching a story he can’t control and can’t understand and his monologues are him trying to process a kind of violence that his worldview wasn’t built to accommodate. I want someone like that in this piece. Not a sheriff necessarily, but someone on the periphery who watches the outlaw and sees what the outlaw can’t see about himself.”

“The partner,” Leonard said. “The Sundance figure. The quiet one. He sees the hole in the plan. He’s always seen it. But he follows anyway, because the alternative is being alone, and being alone in that country is worse than being wrong in company.”

“That’s the saddest thing you’ve said,” Proulx said.

“It’s not sad. It’s practical. Partnership on the frontier was a survival mechanism. You rode with someone not because you liked them but because a man alone in that drainage” — he pointed at her topographic map — “a man alone there is dead in three days. A man with a partner is dead in five. The partner doesn’t save you. The partner postpones you.”

“Postpones your death.”

“Postpones your encounter with what you actually are when there’s nobody to perform for.”

We sat with that. The diner had emptied while we talked — the four trucks had become two, and the light through the windows had shifted from the white blaze of noon to something more tentative, more yellow, the light of a day that had made its argument and was no longer sure it had won.

Proulx folded the topographic map, creasing it along lines that had been creased many times before. “The landscape has to do the work the protagonist won’t do,” she said. “He won’t look at himself, so the land looks at him. The drainage narrows. The walls get higher. The sky gets smaller. Not metaphorically — literally. That country does that. You ride into a canyon and the sky becomes a ribbon and then a thread and then you can’t see it at all and you’re in the dark at noon. The land is a mirror that shows you your actual size, which is smaller than you thought. Much smaller.”

“And he doesn’t look,” I said.

“He doesn’t look. That’s the wrongness. The land is showing him and he keeps his eyes on the trail, on the next bend, on the plan, on the exit that doesn’t exist. He’s narrating his own movie and the landscape is narrating a different one and the reader can see both and the protagonist can only see his.”

“Two movies playing at once,” Leonard said. “The one the outlaw is starring in, and the one he’s actually in. I like that. That’s a story. The comedy of the first movie rubbing against the tragedy of the second.”

“Is the first movie comedy?”

“The first movie is always comedy. Two charming men robbing banks, staying ahead, cracking wise. That’s comedy. The second movie — the one where the charm doesn’t work and the plan is broken and the partner has been looking at the exit for fifty pages — that’s the Western. The real Western. Not the one with the sunset.”

“Not the one with the freeze frame,” Proulx said.

“No. The one that keeps rolling after the freeze frame would have saved them.”

I asked about the ending. Whether the protagonist gets to learn he was wrong. Whether the story grants him that.

“He doesn’t earn it,” Proulx said immediately. “The land doesn’t grant revelations. The land grants exposure. Exposure is different from knowledge — you can be exposed to the truth and still not see it. A man can freeze to death in a blizzard he was warned about. The warning doesn’t help. The knowing doesn’t help. The cold doesn’t care what you know.”

“But the reader knows,” Leonard said. “The reader has both movies. The reader sees the man walking into the canyon with his wrong idea and his wrong plan and his mouth going the whole time, and the reader knows — the reader has to know, long before the end — that the mouth is going to stop. And when it stops, the silence is the story.”

“Whose silence?”

“His. The charming man’s. The moment Butch stops talking. There’s a version of that movie where Butch runs out of things to say and just sits down. Doesn’t die heroically, doesn’t go out in a blaze. Sits down. And the Bolivian army is out there and the sun is going down and there’s nothing left to say and the man who survived on talk is sitting in the quiet and for the first time in his life he can hear the country.”

“What does the country sound like?”

Leonard turned his coffee cup in his hands. He’d barely drunk any of it. “Like wind. Like nothing. Like the sound a place makes when it’s done with you.”

Proulx looked at him. Something passed between them — not agreement exactly, but recognition. The recognition of two people who have spent their lives writing the same landscape from opposite ends and have arrived, for one moment, at the same coordinate.

“The country doesn’t make a sound,” she said. “The country is the sound. The wind, the gravel shifting, the sage, the distance — that’s not background. That’s the text. Everything else is annotation.”

“I annotate,” Leonard said. “That’s what dialogue is. Annotation on the silence.”

“Then stop annotating. Let the silence have the last page.”

He didn’t agree. I could see him not agreeing, holding the objection behind his teeth the way a man holds a cigarette he’s decided not to light. He believed in the last line. He believed a story ended with someone saying something true in a voice you could hear. Proulx believed a story ended when the voice gave out and the land was still there. These were not reconcilable positions. They were not supposed to be.

I drove out of the parking lot and turned onto the state highway that went nowhere. The sagebrush was silver in the late light, running to the horizon in every direction, and I thought about a man on a horse in a narrowing canyon, telling himself a story about who he was, and the canyon walls getting closer, and the sky getting thinner, and the story getting louder because the louder it got the less he could hear the silence underneath it, which was the sound of the country, which was the sound of the truth, which was the sound of a man being wrong about everything and riding hard in the wrong direction and calling it freedom.