The Gun Man Jackson Swagger: A Western by Stephen Hunter

 

They were older than you might expect, with many miles and much dust showing on grave faces. It wasn’t a merry crew, more a crowd of sullen individualists. Even at rest, all wore their pistols, as if their sense of the fragility of life demanded perpetual protection. It had the feel of death row in a federal penitentiary, and lacking booze to liberate their weighted spirits, they simply contemplated reality, mildly celebrated life, and thought about the violence they’d seen and the violence they’d unleash. It was the way of a certain kind of man, not the soldier, as Jack had seen and been, but the professional adventurer who roams from war to war and country to country, selling his skill for gold but really for the thrill of battle and the satisfaction of the kill.

We finally get a true-blue Western from Mr. Hunter, whose well-written ballistically accurate tales of lawmen have teased at the genre’s edges for years. Well, like Robert Parker and his Virgil Cole novels, it was well-worth the wait.

Jackson Swagger is offered as a frontier ancestor to the protagonists in Hunter’s lawman universe, and he is a damned worthy addition—I kept wanting to get Kurt Russell on the phone and say, “Snatch this up and deliver this dialogue true.”

Case in point, the following.

“I’m Jack,” he said. “I follow you.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said either Billy or Matt. “We hear you’re the best man on the spread with a rifle and can see like an eagle.” “We feel well protected. You can also tell us stories of the war and your life roaming the West. Rumors say you knew the great gunfighters now passed.”

“Rumors are rumors because they ain’t true. And I won’t be telling you a thing. Let me explain how it works. I’m invisible. You don’t see me, you don’t talk to me, you don’t look to me to join in your conversation. If I speak, you listen because I feel it’s important. But don’t look at me or nod, and I promise to never say anything funny, so you’re spared the need to laugh. I may be with you, I may be ahead of you, I may have gone on the scout, climbing a hill for a better view, looking for sign. That’s my only job and I have to do it at full pitch. It’s when you relax that the ruckus will start, that I can guarantee. So I don’t relax, and if a ruckus starts, being ready before is all that counts. You boys hear me good?”

Mr. Hunter, being a firearm aficionado also gets his violence right. His gunfights have always been less about machismo and more the dry-mouthed, bowel loosening fear that is reality. Mr. Hunter has no patience for mock heroics [nor does this reader] and for that I am eternally obliged to be spared one more scene of adolescent derring-do.

“Don’t these things always go wrong?” said Billy through a raspy throat. “Yes, normally. But it’s better to have them go off plan so that you got something to get back to than to have no plan and just let them tumble along crazy. Then it goes way wrong and that’s when the wrong people get killed.

Another snippet of the fun to be had in these pages.

He slid the revolver across the bar. “Sir,” said the barkeep, “I’ve tended bar in all the bad Western towns for thirty-odd years. I’ve seen more gunfights than any man alive. I’ve seen Wyatt and Doc, I’ve seen Bat, I saw Wild Bill even, and John Hardin. But I’ve never seen gun handling like that. Are you with Buffalo Bill’s big production?”

“I don’t hold with showing off. The exhibition was to turn it around, so I didn’t have to kill nobody. It’ll scare most of your weaker gun people clean out of their pants.”

“Who are you? As I said, I knew ’em all, or heard of ’em, and I know I’d know of you.”

“Just an old man in a dry season, waiting for rain.”

Where Parker’s Virgil Cole novels are laconic marvels composed almost exclusively of dialogue, Hunter handles the dialogue like a pro and sets scenes with equal aplomb.

Her name was Yolanda. She looked to be about fourteen, and under certain circumstances she would have grown to be a pretty, possibly even beautiful girl. These were not such circumstances. She had the zest and bounce of a seventy-seven-year-old. Her face collapsed quickly from artificial glee to a mask of despair. Her eyes held no light, her face no spontaneity. She had been hard used, then put away wet. The makeup, crudely applied, could not mask that pain. Worse, she seemed to favor her left side, so Jack peeled back the shoulder of her dress on the right, to reveal a bruise in brown and yellow with the shape of a billy club to it.

Or this marvelous distillation of a night in a saloon and the “Old West” itself.

Folks came and went, the place filled with smoke, the piano man played on. A fight broke out over cards, but no guns came into play, just fists. It was over so fast—big guy pounding little guy—many missed it, and the others laughed. Whores cruised, mostly connecting with foolish young cowhands, off to get their cherry busted. It was another night in the Old West, except nobody in the joint thought of it as old: it was new, it was fascinating, it was the present. Whatever tales would be told, whatever lies inflated like balloons, whatever form of narrative would offer chronicle of this time and place, it mattered nothing to anyone there, and their imaginations, in any event, were incapable of stretching so far. They had no idea they were the urtext of a myth.

Our protagonist, Jackson Swagger is full of Bushido-like wisdom.

“Do you think—?”

“You clamp it down now, Chandler,” said Jack. “Leave it be where it now is. No chatter, no palaver, no debate exercise. That time is past. You’ll only confuse matters and yourself as well. Doubts? Every soldier has ’em. But you have chosen a course and that’s what will happen.”

“If you’ re not—”

“Clamp it down as well, Charles. Things will happen as they happen. Don’t think otherwise, you’ll just be stirring up your mind.”

Even minor characters who will appear for but a page are given terse lines that paint entire histories and present pictures.

Mrs. Hansen was in a foul mood because she was always in a foul mood and tonight was a part of “always.” You would be too if Indians had killed your husband when you were twenty-two, burned your ranch, and kidnapped your children, thus forcing you into a career in the whore trade. At least she had risen to the executive ranks of that profession, even if such success did little for her mood.

If this reader were to concoct a “Best of Western Novels” list, well, this one would be given serious consideration.

More, please, Mr. Hunter, and thank you for this one.