The Accuracy of the Disinterested Witness

Portis was drinking coffee from a thermos he’d brought himself. The diner had coffee — I could see the pot right there behind the counter, the orange-handled kind that means decaf, which this wasn’t, but he didn’t trust it. He’d driven down from Little Rock with the thermos wedged between his knees the whole way, or so he claimed. He was wearing a canvas jacket despite the heat and had the look of a man who had already decided how long he was willing to stay.

“I don’t care for meetings,” he said, by way of greeting. “I find that most things that need to be discussed don’t need to be discussed.”

Machado arrived on foot from somewhere south of the building, which was odd because there was nothing south of the building for about a quarter mile except a drainage culvert and a stretch of sunburned grass that ended at a fence. She had a notebook with her and a pen that she clicked once, hard, before sitting down, like cocking a pistol.

“I walked from the motel,” she said, answering a question nobody had asked. “I wanted to see what was between here and there.”

“And what was between here and there?”

“A culvert. Some grass. A fence with a dead bird caught in the wire.”

“That’s usually what’s between here and there,” Portis said.

She looked at him and smiled, and the smile had something in it that I couldn’t identify except to say it was not simple friendliness. It was the look of someone who has found exactly the opponent she wanted. “The bird was a grackle. It had been dead long enough that something had eaten through the chest cavity, but the feathers were intact. Iridescent. Beautiful, actually. The fence was keeping nothing out of nothing.”

Portis unscrewed his thermos cap and poured. “I once wrote a man who’d describe that bird and then move on. He’d note its condition the way you’d note a road sign. No lingering.”

“And I’d linger,” Machado said. “I’d open the bird up.”

“It’s already open. You just said something ate through it.”

“I’d open it further.”

I had the combination spec on my phone, and I tried to steer the conversation toward the territory. The Western as a landscape where the impossible happens and no one remarks on it. The Gunslinger’s desert — that sense of traversing a world after something has already ended. The border in The Power of the Dog, where law and crime share a bed.

Portis held up a hand. Not dismissively. More like a traffic cop who has seen what’s coming and is unimpressed.

“I know about the man in black,” he said. “I read that book in 1982 and I thought it was a very serious young man’s book. Which is not a criticism. A very serious young man wrote it. The desert in that story has the quality of a headache. Everything is portentous. Every cactus means something.”

“You’d have the cactus just be a cactus,” I said.

“I’d have the cactus just be a cactus and the man walking past it would mention it was the third cactus he’d seen that day that was bent in the same direction and then he’d keep walking. If that starts to mean something to the reader, that’s the reader’s problem. I am not in the business of telling people what things mean.”

Machado turned her pen over in her fingers. “I am, though. Sometimes. Or — no. Not telling them what things mean. Telling them what things feel like. Which is different. A cactus doesn’t mean grief. But a cactus can feel like grief if you describe it right. If you describe its spines as having the quality of hair, if you describe its fruit as something that splits open and reveals a color that shouldn’t exist in nature — then the reader’s body responds before the reader’s mind does.”

“That’s a trick,” Portis said.

“Every sentence is a trick. Yours too. Your trick is to pretend you’re not doing anything. Mattie Ross reports on a world that is brutal and strange and she reports it in a voice so flat and certain that the reader believes every word. That flatness is a construction. It’s as artificial as anything I do with fairy-tale structure.”

Portis looked at her for a while. He screwed the cap back on his thermos and then unscrewed it again. “Mattie Ross is not a construction. Mattie Ross is a woman who has no interest in telling you more than what happened. The voice is flat because the character is flat. Not flat as in shallow. Flat as in level. As in: the ground she’s standing on does not tilt.”

“And what if it did?”

He didn’t answer right away. The waitress came by and Machado ordered a glass of water and I ordered coffee from the pot and Portis put his hand over his thermos cap as if she might try to take it from him. When the waitress left, the silence had changed quality. It had thickened.

“If the ground tilted,” Portis said carefully, “Mattie would report on that too. She would say: the ground has tilted. She would say it the same way she’d say the horse has gone lame. She would not find it remarkable. She would adjust her footing and continue.”

“And that’s terrifying,” Machado said quietly.

“Is it?”

“A person who encounters the impossible and does not flinch — that’s the most frightening narrator I can imagine. Because the reader flinches. The reader knows something is wrong. And the narrator keeps going like nothing happened. The gap between the narrator’s calm and the reader’s alarm is where the horror lives.”

I wrote that down because I knew I’d need it later. The gap between the narrator’s calm and the reader’s alarm. That felt like the whole project in one sentence.

Portis was looking out the window at the parking lot. “I wrote a man once — Norwood Pratt — who drove across most of the South to retrieve a debt of seventy dollars. People he met along the way were unusual. A midget. A man with a chicken. The chicken was trained to do arithmetic, supposedly, though in my experience chickens are not strong with numbers. Now. Norwood did not find any of these people unusual. He dealt with them the way you’d deal with anyone. He was polite. He was persistent. He did not observe that his life had taken on the quality of a folktale. If you’d told him he was in a folktale he would have asked you what a folktale was and then he would have gone back to trying to get his seventy dollars.”

“That’s the narrator we need,” Machado said, and there was urgency in her voice that surprised me. “Someone who walks through a landscape that is actively wrong — wrong the way a fever dream is wrong, wrong the way a body is wrong when it starts growing things it shouldn’t — and this person does not remark on the wrongness. They remark on the weather. They remark on the cost of feed. They remark on whether the general store has the right gauge of wire.”

“And meanwhile—”

“And meanwhile the preacher’s shadow is going the wrong direction. And the well in the town square whispers back when you speak into it. And the woman at the boarding house has too many teeth, not in a way that anyone mentions, just in a way that the narrator notes the way you’d note that someone had brown hair.”

Portis set his thermos down. “I don’t write horror.”

“I know you don’t.”

“I write comedy. Comedy about people who are in situations that they do not understand and that they manage through a combination of stubbornness and a failure to recognize danger.”

“And I write horror about people who are in situations they understand perfectly and that they manage through a combination of stubbornness and a refusal to let the danger define them. We’re writing the same person from two directions.”

He was quiet for a time that felt long. Outside, a pickup truck pulled into the lot and sat idling. Nobody got out. The truck just sat there with its engine running, and after a while it backed out and left, and Portis watched it the whole time with a neutral expression.

“The drug war angle,” I said, because we hadn’t talked about it and I felt the conversation pulling toward something too abstract. “The Power of the Dog. The border as a contested zone where rules break down.”

“I lived on the border,” Portis said. “Not the Mexican border. I lived in countries where borders were things that happened to you. Where the line on the map moved and suddenly you were in a different country eating the same breakfast. The idea that a border is real — that it does something, changes something — this is a fiction that men enforce with guns, and because men with guns enforce it, it becomes real. That’s the only magic I’ve ever believed in. The magic of enforcement.”

Machado uncapped her pen. “The body is a border. I’ve been saying this for years and people think I’m being metaphorical. I’m not. The skin is a line between self and not-self. And it’s constantly being crossed. Every breath. Every meal. Every time someone touches you. The border of the body is as negotiable as any border on a map, and it is enforced by the same combination of violence and agreement.”

“So in this story,” I said, “the town itself—”

“Don’t say the town is a body,” Portis said.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You were building up to it. I could hear you building up to it. The town is not a body. The town is a town. If the town is strange, it’s strange the way towns are strange, which is to say: because people are strange and towns are made of people. I don’t want a town that breathes or digests or has organs. I want a town where the barber hasn’t changed his sign in forty years and nobody can remember when the church was built and there’s a woman who lives in the house at the end of the road who everyone agrees has always been there, even the people who built the house.”

Machado was smiling again, and this time the smile was warmer. “That’s better than the body thing. That’s much better. A town where the strangeness is embedded in the social fabric. Where the uncanny is just — a fact of civic life. The well answers questions and everyone knows it and nobody finds it worth discussing because the well has always answered questions and what are you going to do, fill it in?”

“You’d have to get a permit from the county,” Portis said.

“Exactly.”

I was trying to hold on to the thread that connected The Gunslinger’s wasteland to The Power of the Dog’s border country. Both are landscapes where the usual rules have been suspended. Both have figures who move through those landscapes with purpose that the landscape itself seems to resist or corrupt. The gunslinger is pursuing someone. The DEA agents are pursuing the cartels. Both pursuits take on the quality of a quest that the world does not want completed.

“The pursuit is the thing,” Portis said, reading my notes over my shoulder without apology. “A man pursuing another man across difficult country. That’s the oldest story. Older than the Western. Older than anything. And the man being pursued has the advantage, always, because he’s going somewhere and the pursuer is only going where he goes. The pursuer has no destination of his own. He has borrowed his destination from his quarry.”

“The man in black fled across the desert,” Machado said, quoting it. “And the gunslinger followed.”

“That’s a fine opening,” Portis said. “I’d have written it differently. I’d have written: ‘A man in a black coat was making his way across the flats at a pace that suggested he was expected somewhere. Rooster followed at a distance that he felt was appropriate, which was to say close enough to shoot but far enough that a miss would not be embarrassing.’”

Machado laughed — an actual laugh, surprised out of her. “You’d put the comedy in the pursuit.”

“The comedy is already in the pursuit. All pursuit is comic. A man chasing another man is inherently funny. The man in front has dignity. The man behind has only effort.”

“Unless the man behind has something wrong with him,” Machado said, the laughter gone now, replaced by something speculative and a little cold. “Unless the man behind is changing as he chases. Unless the pursuit is doing something to his body. The desert is doing something to his body. Not symbolically. Physically. He is losing things. Teeth. Fingernails. Memories of his own name. But he keeps going because the pursuit is the only structure he has left, and without it he’d have to acknowledge what’s happening to him.”

Portis looked at her. “That’s gruesome.”

“Yes.”

“It’s also true. I once knew a man in Korea — this was during the war — who walked seventeen miles with a piece of shrapnel in his calf because he was carrying a message that he believed was urgent. The message turned out to be a requisition for blankets. But the walk was real. The damage to the calf was real. The urgency was entirely a product of his belief in the urgency, and the belief did not make the shrapnel hurt less but it did make the hurt irrelevant.”

“That’s what I want,” Machado said. “The hurt being irrelevant. The narrator noting the lost teeth the way your man noted the shrapnel. As a logistical problem. ‘Having lost two more molars in the night, I was obliged to cut my jerky into smaller pieces.’ That’s the sentence. That’s the whole horror.”

“It’s not horror if the person experiencing it doesn’t find it horrible.”

“It’s worse.”

They looked at each other across the table and I understood that something had been settled between them, though neither would have called it agreement. It was more like two people discovering that the room they’ve been standing in has the same dimensions from both their perspectives, even though one entered through the door and the other through the window.

Portis poured the last of his coffee. “The well that answers questions,” he said. “I like that. But I want to be clear — the well answers badly. It gives answers that are technically true but useless. You ask the well where your cattle have gone and it says ‘east,’ and east is a hundred thousand square miles of territory. You ask it who killed your brother and it gives you a name that might be a person or might be a town or might be a disease. The well is honest. The well is just not helpful.”

“And the preacher.”

“The preacher is a man who arrived one day and gave a sermon and the sermon was acceptable and so they let him stay. Nobody asked where he came from. His shadow—” Portis stopped. He looked uncomfortable for the first time all morning. “I don’t know about the shadow.”

“The shadow moves independently,” Machado said. “Not dramatically. Not crawling up walls. Just — when the preacher turns to face the congregation, the shadow is already facing the congregation. It’s ahead of him by a quarter-second. As if it knows where he’s going to look before he looks.”

“That’s a detail for people who are watching very closely.”

“Most people don’t watch closely. The narrator watches closely. The narrator watches closely because that’s the kind of person the narrator is — not suspicious, just attentive. The kind of person who notices the tilt of a fencepost and the exact color of a bruise and whether the dog at the general store has been favoring its left hind leg this week or just today.”

Portis put his thermos in his jacket pocket. It didn’t fit well but he was committed to it. “I’ll tell you what I don’t want. I don’t want a revelation. I don’t want a scene where the town is explained. Where someone sits the narrator down and says: here is what this place is, here is why the well talks, here is what the preacher is. The moment you explain it you’ve killed it. The whole thing only works if nobody ever explains it and nobody ever asks for an explanation and the narrator rides out of town at the end the same way he rode in, which is to say: with incomplete information and no particular distress about that fact.”

“What if the narrator doesn’t ride out,” Machado said.

Portis looked at her.

“What if the narrator becomes part of the town. Not captured. Not trapped. Just — absorbed. The way a town absorbs anyone who stays long enough. The narrator starts noting the strangeness and then the narrator stops noting it and the reader realizes that the narrator has stopped noting it and that’s—”

“That’s the ending.”

“That’s not the ending. That’s the thing that happens before the ending, and the ending is something else, something smaller, something about the price of feed or whether the fence needs mending, and the reader understands that the narrator is gone. Not dead. Just — incorporated. Part of the civic machinery. Like the well. Like the preacher. Like the woman who has always been there.”

Portis stood up. He buttoned his jacket over the thermos, which gave him the silhouette of a man smuggling a small animal. “That’s a fine idea,” he said. “I don’t agree with it. But I recognize its quality.”

He put two dollars on the table for coffee he hadn’t ordered and walked out into the parking lot. Through the window I watched him get into his car, a beige sedan of uncertain decade. He sat in it for a while without starting the engine, looking at something I couldn’t see from where I was sitting.

Machado was writing in her notebook. Small, fast handwriting, left-handed, the pen moving in a way that suggested she was not composing sentences but drawing a map.

“He’s right about one thing,” she said without looking up. “The explanation kills it. Whatever the town is, it can’t be a mystery that gets solved. It has to be a condition. Like weather. You don’t solve weather. You