The Crossing: McCarthy Says Build the Wall (2024)

McCarthy's second book in the Border Trilogy is the hardest to get a handle on. It's not at all related to the first book in the trilogy and has a completely different time period and structure. For a writer who nearly always wrote books that were difficult to categorize, All the Pretty Horses was delightfully simple in its construction. Four chapters, fifty-ish pages each, a plot-heavy story of a man born too late to be a cowboy and getting dick-smacked by reality. Sorry, Cole, you're poor and white. The Mexican princess talks a good game, but when it comes time to make even the tiniest of sacrifices on your behalf, the honeymoon ends, and she goes back to dating doctors and lawyers, and all those guys who she insisted weren't all they were cracked up to be. See, you don't understand; she only cares about personality. It’s just that personality is best expressed through the medium of fancy degrees, exorbitant wealth, and unceasing social approval. Doctors and lawyers are famous for their personal charms. The Crossing isn't about Cole, but it is just as excruciating a bildungsroman as any novel the reader could care to name.

The story centers on Billy Parham, hereafter referred to as Parmesan, the son of a pair of settlers in New Mexico. His little brother, Boyd, keeps getting into trouble because he won't stop chatting with the Indian that hangs around the farm; the parents are poor as dirt and stressed beyond all hope; and Parmesan is worked to the bone hunting, trapping, and planting all over the farm, trying to scrounge up enough for the family to eat. Parmesan is out trapping one day and he finds in his coyote trap a full-grown pregnant she-wolf, swollen with a brood of pups and far from her natural home in the Mexican mountains where they breed. The broken leg is bad enough, but a caught she-wolf on a farm property is a threat to livestock and most farmers have a shoot on sight policy for lupine immigrants. Especially because pups mean more wolves, hungry wolves, who are destined to be a problem for the cattle breeders and horse farmers who rely on livestock to scrape out a living. Most farm kids would shoot the wolf without a second thought, but Parmesan, fresh from the hurts of being a poor as dirt farm kid with zero experience of the outside world, decides he is going to take this wolf home. Or not home, but far enough into the Mexican wilderness that it will pup. And just like that, he saddles a horse, muzzles the wolf, splints its leg, and sets off, dragging his erstwhile furry companion into the orange inferno of the Mexican desert.

A few notes. McCarthy has no illusions about what wolves are and what they do. This is not a buddy-cop adventure with a disobedient canine as a side piece. Wolves are bigger than German shepherds by a full head, with much thicker bones and muscles. Yellow eyes like burnished slits. Diamond pupils. Maws for which the only appropriate terms are "frothing” and “yellowed," and "snapping." The she-wolf is half the danger on the journey, constantly biting and pulling and howling and trying its level best to eat Parmesan, not the least because she is fucking starving and recovering from a nasty leg break that she associates with Parmesan. Billy spends most of his time with the wolf trying to survive it, and his remaining time trying to make sure it doesn't kill anybody else. The other travelers along the Mexican border have negative interest in a lone traveler with the world's worst petting zoo on a fraying lead, and few people will spend time with him. This part of the journey resembles the picaresque bits of Huckleberry Finn, except that in this case Mark Twain isn't a gregarious southern Dickens with an eye for drama but a profoundly depressed Faulkner with a taste for mushrooms, the kind that makes you hyper-aware of nature and your absolute insignificance when compared to the cosmic scale and intimidating beauty of the Mexican desert. The few people that associate with Parmesan are a motley crew of freaks and weirdos. He spends the night with a traveling circus act who tries to buy the wolf and subject him to a dramatic rendition of the Italian opera Pagliacci. He is threatened by bandits and by local strongmen who understandably don't like the idea of someone abandoning a pregnant she-wolf in their territory, and he runs into a mad prophet, a previous Mormon who converted to Catholicism and who preaches a bizarre sermon about the oneness of the universe and the grandness of its narratives and how all fit into a single story, the Corrido, that is an all-consuming kind of the Leibowitz-esque theory that the current world is filled with the power and awesome majesty of a singular God.

The rest of the novel is about putting that idea to the test. Ripping off the metaphorical bandage, the wolf dies. The pups die too. The wolf is shot in a pointless misunderstanding by a man who is, by all accounts, a total bastard. Parmesan has zero recourse and no way to affect revenge. So the first third of the novel is all for nothing. Then Parm crosses the Mexican border again to return home and finds that the friendly Indians hanging around his home were, in fact, not friendly. Unless you consider murder and arson housewarming presents. Crucially, Boyd's remains are not among the burnt corpses of his family and he goes off on a mad quest to find his brother. Which he eventually does. Boyd is doing well for himself, living it up in the big city and making a name for himself as a man about town with a new girl on his arm and a shiny new six-shooter on his hip. He spends most of his days drinking in saloons and planning some kind of vague revenge on the Indians that killed his family.

Parm and Boyd have zero luck tracking the men who did the deed, but they do find their father’s horses stabled in a nearby farmstead and a happy purchaser who insists that even though he might feel for the boys and their plight, those horse were legally purchased and seeing that there is no way for him to track down the thieves that sold them to him, he is unwilling to give away thousands of dollars of investment in horseflesh because the horses in question have a passing resemblance to the ones owned by a dead man. Parm is willing to leave it at that, but Boyd decides to take matters into his own hands and gets shot through the chest trying to steal them. Parm and Boyd's new girl spend six months and money that neither of them have nursing Boyd back to health, only for him to pull a Parm and sneak out in the middle of the night, new girlfriend in tow, leaving nothing but a note that blames Parm's disappearance for the deaths of their parents. Parm gets no closure on this. He chases leads and follows their tracks, but the tracks lead nowhere and Billy vanishes into the ether. Maybe he gets a place in a slum in southern Texas; maybe he crosses the border; who knows? Parm gives up and settles down as a ranch hand. Then he gets a message that his brother was shot in a drunken gunfight. This time, the shooting took.

Parm is without family. Nothing matters to him more than finding his brother's remains and returning them to the soil of their little burnt-out homestead. He gets his boots on, buys a couple guns and a bowie knife, and goes south looking for his brother's remains. Even more wild encounters. He gets lost and nearly dies of thirst in the desert. He gets shot at, stabbed, robbed, beat up, and shook down by every petty tyrant, every gunslinger with an attitude south of the border. When he finds his brother's remains, they are a dessicated pile of bones tossed in a shallow grave at the bottom of some unmarked pit. He takes what he can gather in a burlap sack and heads home. At the borderline, a pack of Mexican bandits stops him while he fords the Rio Grande. They cut him, stab his horse, searched his possessions, and slash open the sack with his brother's remains. What's left of Boyd goes flowing down the river. Parm snaps and reaches for a gun in anger for the first time in the whole novel and his gunpowder is too wet to go off and there is this cruel moments where the bandits laugh at him, don’t even threaten him but laugh at the helpless man on the dying horse. The bandits leave him because a priest intercedes on his behalf. Parm buries his empty sack in the burned-out rubble of his home and finds work. One night, an old, tattered dog comes to him begging and he drives it away, throwing stones and shouting. The novel leaves him chasing after the dog in sobbing apology while the world watches mute. Cheery stuff.

Blood Meridian sometimes gets called the anti-western because it's all the parts of the west that people don't like to talk about or don't want to acknowledge. Most of the romanticized heroes of the West were thin caricatures papered over some deeply dubious characters. To be totally honest, the western movement is extremely complicated and nuanced and the real question of how societally violent it was depends on a ton of factors and extenuating circumstances and no simplistic narrative truly captures it. However, people who read these books, like some kind of finger-wagging Doctor Laura sermon about the evils of colonialism, western expansion, or the nativist movements are missing the point. McCarthy isn't making some banal point about the nature of premodern society or the West in particular, but about the ontological absurdities of suffering. Namely, life is mostly suffering, and much of the suffering is both 1) pointless, as in, doesn't make the person better or stronger or more moral or result in any of the kind of character growth that certain pain-fetishes tend to point to when asked why suffering seems so omnipresent in the world, and 2) totally and completely arbitrary. Over and over, Parm suffers. Over and over again, the reason for his suffering is esoteric, cruel, and nonsensical. His family is massacred by simple bad luck. His she-wolf is killed because a drunken fool cannot control himself. His brother dies in a pointless gun battle. His noble quest to intern his brother's body is meaningless on a variety of levels. Firstly and obviously, Boyd's bones won't know the difference. Secondly, the world seems to take an almost malicious glee in keeping Parm from his brother, and when he does find him, he finds that Boyd's wife has left without so much as a backwards look and that the body is nothing but a burden that Parm feels selfish for recognizing as such. And then the banditos destroy the body out of greed and a kind of sheer, blood-curdling maliciousness. It's like if Huckleberry Finn's picaresque adventure was just him getting violated by strangers over and over again and Jim was forced to watch. The world is relentless, barbaric, cruel, and a thousand other terms. Parm doesn't learn from these experiences and becomes some paragon of strength or virtue. He doesn't become a badass gunfighter who stands for the weak or even retire somewhere to live peacefully. He shrugs his shoulders and gets back to the same old drudgery that he has to live with every day. His life is long stretches of working ennui punctuated by intense tragedy.

Kurt Vonnegut has a famous speech about plot structure. In it, he shows how most stories follow the arc that your English teacher probably shoved down your throat in English literature. But some stories don't seem to follow this structure. Hamlet has a plot, barely, but it doesn't follow the traditional structure of highs and lows. It's one long line to a hard low. Vonnegut makes the point that really good literature is a reflection of reality, and most of the time we are not able to parse the events of our lives into simple structures or plots that make sense. "We don't ever really know." He says, "What's the good news or what is the bad news?" That all comes from hindsight. From the story. The Corrido. And a story implies a storyteller.

McCarthy's writing is deeply biblical in tone and form. Most southern Gothic writers ape aspects of the biblical style, such as the rolling series of -ands and lists and the tendency towards tight declarative. The Crossing both takes cues from the style of the Bible and takes a nihilistic critical tact in its religious questions. What does a religious person say to the recipient of so much relentless, Job-like arbitrary cruelty? It's not an easy question to answer. Parm's destruction seems complete when he chases away the dog. He lost his love of life and his somewhat misplaced kindness. Suttree is also about spiritual emptiness. McCarthy's novels are sometimes written off as the literary equivalent of slash-flics or torture porn because of his unrelenting violence, but the violence exists to posit whether a cosmos that allows, seemingly requires, so much violence is worth preserving. It would seem that McCarthy doesn't see much value in the world, but for the atmospheric prose that delineates his own cosmos. McCarthy can make reading about Mexican brush riveting. And it reminds me of Nietzsche's interesting comment about Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer, the philosopher so dour that his school of thought is called the pessimists, played the flute for an hour every day after dinner. How could someone so outwardly that truly saw no value in the world love anything, let alone anything as abstract as music? This writer reaches a similar conclusion about McCarthy. For all the darkness in his novels, his love for the world and its order shines through. The tracts of mad poetry he produces speak to a deep appreciation of beauty and the written word. And Billy repents, in the end, to a God that he insists he doesn't believe in. There are no atheists in foxholes, after all. McCarthy's personal religious convictions are amorphous, but the end-result is, in this writer's estimation, still a deeply religious worldview, a fiery, blood-drenched, and savage religion that informs, commands, and eventually conquers the various characters play-actors in some mad corrido told by some truly unfathomable storyteller. Perhaps all that can be done is to play our parts as well as can be expected and shoulder what we are demanded to shoulder. Not an easy or pleasant worldview, but it has the smarting of truth to it.