Eastlake captures the Southwest vividly. This is part of a loose series (I don't think it's necessary to read them in order) including Go in Beauty. I have not read the third. At times hilarious, at others very somber, the heat and expansive desert weigh on Eastlake's characters and readers alike. A true shame its not in print anymore. ( )

Eastlake captures the Southwest vividly. This is part of a loose series (I don't think it's necessary to read them in order) including Go in Beauty. I have not read the third. At times hilarious, at others very somber, the heat and expansive desert weigh on Eastlake's characters and readers alike. A true shame its not in print anymore. ( )

In northern New Mexico, a rattlesnake is both good magic and bad medicine. Shrove Tuesday and Ass Wednesday. On the longest day of the year, a man slowly drowning in quicksand recalls a series of episodes that mark him. Death and life in the same instance. Jails of mud and tombstones dissolve. A rodeo clown never says anything funny. The jazzman starves after selling his trumpet so that the Indians can eat. A taut leather hogan rope goes slack, then tightens around a neck. A poet about to jump from the mesa is shown the long way down instead. Eastlake avoids psychologizing and lets the characters speak and act in plain straight prose, give or take a few horses.

“You’re almost smart too,” Ring said. “But you’re not. You’re an artist. And those city people when they come back, they’ll never find the rest of that pot and that’s fine because they’ll need another reason for living now that there’s no revenge, and there’s no better reason for living than to be searching for something that can never quite ever and completely be found, discovered for certain, without reservation, never quite. Although I suspect that thing, that person, that animal or bird in Navajo pre-history, He Who Brings Darkness Back To The Canoe, is probably an owl. I’ll never know, and their piece of pot will never be joined, but that’s the whole joy.”

Santa Fe State Pen Porter
Uinta Trader IPA

Of the Checkerboard trilogy, Portrait… is easily the hardest to write about, to even talk or think about. It brings no sense of closure to this loosest of trilogies, making the comparisons to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha that much stronger: A connection of character and culture, desert and history, but not so much of the story department.

[N.B. This review includes images, and was formatted for my site, dendrobibliography -- located here.]

What It Entails
Medicine man Tomas Tomas heads to the mountains to die because it’s going to be cold soon
Peter Winger tries his hand at smuggling illegal immigrants over the Mexican border with sociopathic intent, only to be felled by a wandering heifer
Famed poet Phillip Reck is accidentally talked out of suicide
The jazz Prince spends his last days blowing his trumpet at the Checkerboard; starves to death
The Navajo word for bad spirit translates to “He Who Brings Darkness Back to the Canoe”; the expression for planting “snow sprinkled on the ground”
Two city men with severe ADD and severe interest in armchair archaeology attempt to murder an ex-Nazi who only wishes to atone under Christ
A clown in a brand new white sparkling Lincoln plummets off a cliff—a shortcut; an innovator—and swims ashore for a drink at Maria’s
”Nothing is wrong that’s natural” twice before a fight doesn’t quite break out because dudes don’t fight but sing
Three clueless Texas teachers seek out authenticating an authentic cowgirls-and-Indians, John-Ford shootout at the Bowman trading post

All this surrounds and involves Ring Bowman, Little Sant all grown up, in a comic tussle with death—no longer a bronc rider—and, indeed, seemingly a different character with a different character’s background—he sinks into quicksand: Over 140 pages he sinks into quicksand and stares at a painting with 24, 25, 26 horses left by Son of Twenty-six Horses, a reminder of the marks left on the world, however small, by his artist friend and himself, of the marks shared between friendships and those left with strangers.

Having it compiled before me, I realize only now what this final Checkerboard story was all about. Marks. It’s a confusing conclusion, a let’s-re-read-this-and-discover-new-meaning s conclusion, being almost exclusively the series’ and Eastlake’s meaningful vignettes with the barest minimum connecting them into a cohesive (or incoherent, I might suppose) whole.

”Look up there. It just came to me. I can see for the first time. I have been trying to see with my eyes and eyes are not for seeing—they are only a small part of seeing. You have got to feel. Now I see up there because I feel it, because I am beginning to understand and feel. I see up there that all those strokes add up to twenty-six horses—not twenty-five—twenty-six—all running across the cliff. He did it. My friend left a mark. I guess I never made it. I have not left anything. Wait. If that’s all the mark he made he didn’t leave much either. But he left a lot of other things. He did a lot of other things. He left his mark on me. That’s quite a lot. He affected another person. That’s small but that’s quite a lot. And I buried a medicine man. I rescued a poet, saw the end of a flyer and brought animal life into the world, lay with a girl and knew what Nice Hands held. Small things but maybe they affected this world—left a mark. I was here....Ring Bowman was here.”

[16] ( )