Sam Shepard: The Highwayman

By WALTER KIRN

DAY OUT OF DAYS

Stories

By Sam Shepard

282 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.

For Sam Shepard, the prizewinning playwright and short-story writer (and sometime Hollywood actor) whose work might be characterized as Grass-Roots Gothic, infused as it is with a sense of folksy madness and populist brutality, the American landscape is a sprawling cemetery, a field of bad dreams spread out between two oceans. Its markers, commemorating acts of violence that seem to repeat themselves through the generations in a cruel infinity loop, consist of dark highways stretching to the horizon. Under them lies a dense matrix of remains. The bones of Plains Indians, Confederate soldiers, hard-luck homesteaders and hellbound drunks mix in a democratic necropolis capped by thousands of miles of oily blacktop. These routes, which for some writers promise liberation — an escape into unbounded freedom and possibility — are, for Shepard, roads of no return. Laid out north and south and east and west, they all lead in the same direction: down.

In “Day Out of Days,” his new collection of stories (many of them no longer than a few paragraphs and some of them styled as dialogues or poems), the anonymous narrator drives and drives, compulsively, logging the names of the towns he beds down in as though reciting a roll call of the dead. Williams, Arizona. Alpine, Texas. Valentine, Nebraska. Butte, Montana. They’re the sort of forsaken, in-between locales where travelers don’t usually stop except to buy gas or wolf down truck-stop breakfasts before moving on to bigger, brighter places, but Shepard’s restless, red-eyed alter ego treats them as destinations, not just pit stops, abiding in them until they yield their secrets. Unlike Kerouac’s seekers, his seeming models who blasted across the map in hot pursuit of long-lost comrades, hip diversions and rare epiphanies, the figure who’s sometimes referred to as “the actor” (and who shares with his celebrated author certain biographical features like a part-time movie career and a passion for fast, expensive horses) isn’t in much of hurry to get anywhere. He’s fine with being nowhere. He prefers it.

Escape isn’t his goal. He craves perspective, a meditative immersion in deep particulars that allows him to access broader truths. In a Bossier City, La., motel whose rooms are crowded with Katrina refugees, he wraps his consciousness around the gears that endlessly generate man-made cataclysms. “You can see the trucks pouring back and forth from Dallas. You can hear the B-52 bombers big as small cities running low patterns all day long. Running circles from the local air base; practicing for Iraq, I guess. Practicing for some new catastrophe. . . . Big long ropes of black fuel trailing out across the sky, out past Louisiana Downs, across the greasy Red River where the big, glitzy casinos flash their neons bragging about jackpots and payouts and fun trips to the Bahamas, and nobody out here’s got a pot to piss in. Nobody on this side of the river anyway.”

Shepard’s narrator is an eagle-eyed introvert, part observer, part silent monologuist. He addresses himself like a stranger in the stories, reporting back on his encounters to a hidden, secondary self that he seems to be curiously removed from, even baffled by. He besieges this self with queries and accusations that seldom elicit a response. “What’s going on? You’re not going to last very long if you keep this up, you know. You’ll burn yourself out. Can’t you just follow some sort of itinerary, at least?” Hovering in his background, in his past, is an ill-defined series of missteps, the reader senses, that seem to stem from a long romance that has grown cold and, possibly, unsalvageable. He’s also beset by the specter of a lost father: a raging, sadistic alcoholic cut down in a fatal hit-and-run whose habits are cropping up in Shepard’s narrator. The clock of ruin is ticking deep inside him, tracking the revolutions of his odometer. He knows better than to believe he can outrun it, though.

Breaking the collection into acts is a series of surrealistic interludes in which Shepard’s mobile man of mystery converses with a chatty severed head. The head seems to stand for his father’s abiding influence, but also for the actual dismemberments that have come to dominate the news stories playing in the background of the travelogue, from the mayhem unleashed by amphetamine-crazed killers to the beheadings of captured G.I.’s by ruthless masked enemies in the war on terror. This war, as Shepard would have us understand it, is just the latest engagement in an old battle against the alleged foes of civilization that targeted the likes of Crazy Horse. The head, discovered in a filthy ditch, its eyes squeezed shut, its thoughts unknown, is a mocking, teasing entity. It demands to be heard and acknowledged by an America that all too easily buries its atrocities under roadside bronze-plaqued monuments that, all too often, go unheeded because we zoom past them at such high speeds, pursuing errands of little consequence.

Shepard’s fables of roadside parlays with gruesome demons and his reflections on our fraught geography are cut with more mundane realistic tales concerning the traveler’s brushes with his own past, which he seems to be having trouble recollecting as he ages and his health declines. “Day Out of Days” is a tale of failing memory, on the personal level as well the collective, and the motive behind its hero’s wanderings is to confront the chaos that’s overcome him and, if possible, correct it. This turns out to be a tricky goal. In a snowbound Holiday Inn in Indianapolis, he bumps into an old lover who still seems fond of him. She offers him a sofa — the only one to be had for miles around — but he coolly begs off and sets off into the blizzard. Later, blinded by the storm, he turns back around, accepts his old flame’s kindness, and finds himself reduced to tears by her pure, undiminished loyalty. But he’s far too estranged and exhausted to respond, we sense. He’ll wake up early, slip out and cruise away.

He blows it again on a visit to his hometown. He’s waylaid in a diner by an old partner in adolescent delinquency who recognizes him from his movie roles. Playing Judas to his younger self, he denies his own identity, ducking the sentimental moment. It’s a perverse but profound American urge: to achieve solitude through perpetual motion. Descended from colonists who tamed the wilderness and one in a long line of tough-guy soldiers, Shepard’s existential soloist can’t shake his stoic attraction to isolation. Instead he finds companionship in ghosts — Kit Carson, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie; lonesome, iconoclastic ramblers all — and he lives every day as though it were Memorial Day, quietly roaming the continental graveyard, seeking intimacy with the long gone. Occasionally he goes home to see his loved ones, but he can’t abide their tiny concerns and flees. In the book’s finest story, “Saving Fats,” he loses himself in a stranger’s far-fetched tale of the waterborne rescue of Fats Domino from a Katrina-swamped New Orleans slum. The tale is too outlandish to be convincing, but Shepard’s character lets the lies sink in. He’s come to see that fantasies beat facts — or rather, they are facts — in a land like ours. Fantasies organize experience in the manner of a good journey, while facts retard progress, pulling up short.

Shepard’s book has no normal beginning, middle and end. Its structure is not sequential but vertical. Using fanciful anecdotes, lyric riffs, seemingly lifelike reminiscences and quotes from our nation’s founding thinkers, he drills down through the strata of our history into the bedrock of American myth. He sinks his wells at random, in offbeat spots, taking core samples from all over the country that often contain fossils of shared experience, some of them heavily crusted over with legend. His words have a flinty, mineral integrity, especially when he describes the people around him, who come off as distinctive individuals but also have an enduring archetypal feel, like the iconic figures in Whitman poems. His crackpot vagabonds, working-class survivors and footloose fellow wanderers have been with us always and probably always will be. Their names may change over time but not their souls, which eventually form the ground we’re forced to cover us as we fan out to seek our fates. But their moans are still audible over our engine noise — if we only slow down enough to hear them in the way that Shepard does.

Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review and the author, most recently, of “Lost in the Meritocracy,” a memoir. His 2001 novel “Up in the Air” is the basis for the current film of the same name.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/books/review/Kirn-t.html?ref=books