I've been keeping this one under my hat, but if stopped at school or at the grocery store and someone asks what I am reading these days, I don't tell them. Instead, I ask them if they have read Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty.
Two years ago, maybe, a gal who knows I like to read stopped me and asked me the same thing, "Have you ever read Lonesome Dove?" She said, "There is lots of gore, cursing and sex, but the characters become your friends, you feel like you would know them if you met them on the street." I was intrigued and even more so when I went to the bookstore and the paperback was around $7.95. Good book AND cheap? I probably could have uploaded it for free on my Kindle, but I still like the feel of paper between my fingers and the swish of the pages as they brush by. Plus, when it's this good, I want to look at it on my shelf and remember it.
Lonesome Dove is "A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Epic Masterpiece of the American West," according to the cover of my Pocket Books edition. It is a western. A novel about cowboys who trek across the west encountering danger and drama along the way.
I recently met a man while I was outside of Troas, Turkey. He was 80ish years old, missing a few teeth and had a round belly and thick walking stick leaning up against his perch inside his son's small gas station/general store. All around the store were hung charcoal drawings that this man had created over the years. He smiled when I told him I liked his artwork and told me that he had some drawings of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky he had drawn as well. He chuckled.
In a thick Turkish accent, he went on to tell me how much he loved John Wayne. John Wayne, the cowboy who had captured the imagination of even a man at a little pit stop in rural Turkey.
Cowboys and Indians. The story never gets old, it is universal, I guess, in a way.
Larry McMurtry takes it to a new level with his genius for telling what feels like a true story. I have even seen a map of the journey this fictitious bunch takes from southern Texas to Montana.
The two main characters, Augustus and Call, are retired Texas Rangers with plenty of glory on which to rest.
Augustus is the lazy partner of the stubborn Call, whom McMurtry so adeptly sums up in the first few pages by saying, "Give Call a grievance, however silly, and he would save it like money." (p. 9) I loved that line. I know people just like Call, those saved hoarded grievances ruin lives and the unraveling begins in the plan that Call hatches to move their Hat Creek Cattle Company from Lonesome Dove, Texas across the country. Augustus is too lazy to object and the rest is too good to give away.
Those are only two of the cowboys in this story, there is young Newt, Pea Eye, Deets, the prostitute Lorena among others. I love them all. I want to sit outside some warm night around a campfire and shoot the breeze with these figments of the author's imagination.
I haven't seen the tv miniseries, yet, but I don't want to ruin the story by watching someone else's interpretation of my friends, the characters of Lonesome Dove.
