The Roughneck’s Lament

By Keith RawsonNovember 19, 2014

Cry Father by Benjamin Whitmer

CRIME FICTION follows a tried-and-true formula — PI, reporter, intrepid reporter/lawyer is drawn into an investigation, they meet resistance, resistance is conquered, heroes go after baddies, hero bests baddies but at a cost, hero is forever changed, and they move on — and before you get your panties in a bunch, I’m by no means crapping on it. I love crime fiction; as a genre it has produced some of the most culturally important works in the last 30 years of American literature. But as I’ve grown older and become more jaded as a reader, I’ve started to question what crime really is. Is it only murder, kidnapping, rape, robbery, and illegal smuggling (human trafficking and drugs), or are there smaller yet still significant crimes? Is beating your wife or taking your young child to the bar to watch you get shit-faced a crime? Is doing lines of blow off your dashboard in a busy supermarket parking lot? Is leaving your infant child home alone while you go and score an eight-ball of crank?


The answer is, of course, yes, they’re all crimes. But crime fiction seems to consider them permissible, or at least chooses to ignore them because the world is full of bigger, scarier bogeys, the ones that fill our TV and computer screens full of horror on an hourly basis. Can these small crimes maintain an entire novel? The easy answer is no. Maybe they could make for a few interesting short stories, but no way could you transform them into an 80,000-word novel. But what if you combined several of them, allowing them to percolate into greater transgressions? Would the result be readable? Would you want to spend your leisure time with this kind of darkness? If your answer is yes, then Benjamin Whitmer’s second novel, Cry Father (his third book after his excellent co-penned autobiography of country music legend Charlie Louvin, Satan Is Real), with its roughhewn bleakness, is for you.


Whitmer has stated on more than a few occasions how much he loves writing his darkly flawed characters, and his protagonists here, Patterson Wells and Junior, are the very definition of dark and flawed. Wells is a modern roughneck. He cleans up disaster areas, removing downed power lines from roadways and demolishing the remains of houses after tornadoes and hurricanes. The work is demanding both physically and emotionally, and his relatively young body is breaking down; knees and elbows ground down to bone, back muscles permanently spasming, his skin a pattern of fading but prevalent scars. The work, however, suits his transient personality, or at least exhausts him enough to forget the loss of his young son, who died at the hands of a careless doctor.


Since the death of his son, Justin — who he continuously writes to in some of the most emotionally affecting and telling sections of the novel — Wells has consciously and subconsciously craved chaos and destruction. This is evident from the opening scene of Cry Father, when he goes to visit his road crew buddy, Chase, for a day of fishing, only to discover him tweaked to the gills and bragging about finding his wife and a biker cooking up what he’s getting high on and (possibly) killing them both. Wells is flustered by the situation, yet doesn’t remove himself. Instead he excuses himself to use the bathroom and discovers Chase’s wife alive:


“She’s naked, hogtied with thin nylon cord, a strip of black duct tape across her mouth. Her blue eyes pleading at Patterson, black mascara streaking down her face.” Wells unties Chase’s struggling wife, an action that proves to be a huge mistake for all three of them as Cry Father progresses.


Wells’s dark personality attracts like minds the way iron filings are drawn to a magnet dragged through black earth, which makes Junior the perfect fit for Wells. Wells is scarred by his loss, and Junior is marked by his emotionally tumultuous childhood. Junior earns his keep as a drug runner, moving coke between Mexico and Colorado. He’s perpetually angry, distant, and looking to vent his frustrations on anyone who dares to enter his gravity.


The thread that initially binds Wells and Junior together is Junior’s father, Henry. Henry is a retired rodeo circuit rider who has lived a long, hard life, a life that Junior blames for his father’s raging, inadequate personality. Henry works at a horse ranch in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, where Wells lives in his as-far-off-the-grid-as-possible cabin. Wells has heard of Henry’s struggles with Junior over the years, and upon returning to the cabin, Junior confronts Wells. Wells states that he wants to stay out of Junior and Henry’s business, but Junior wants a confessor, or at the very least, he wants to make Henry look like a fool in the eyes of Wells, who Henry likes and respects.


“Did he tell you that I gave him the money to move out here?”


“No,” Patterson says. “He didn’t.”


“I sure enough did. Didn’t have a pot to piss in and I gave him everything I had. Never saw it again, neither.”


“I don’t have any interest in getting in the middle of your shit,” Patterson says. “None.”


“Sure,” Junior says. “But there’s a bunch of things you ain’t heard about that old asshole. Don’t let him fool you none.”


“A bunch of things you ain’t heard about that old asshole” is Junior’s mantra throughout Cry Father. His whole existence is based on Henry’s neglect as a husband and father, and because of his own inability to change, he believes no one can, especially his father. Despite Wells saying that he doesn’t want to get involved with Junior and Henry’s problem — or with Junior in general — he is nothing but a mass of contradictions, and this first meeting between the two men strikes up an antagonistic friendship spurred on by booze, coke, and loneliness. They recognize in each other twin souls, two men with nothing left to lose — or so they believe.


Despite their transient, violent personalities, the two men have built lives for themselves. Junior has a steady girlfriend and a five-year-old little girl, but because of the nature of his life, he has the two living in a separate rented house a few blocks away from him. Wells has remained close with the mother of his dead son, Laney. In a parallel with Junior’s situation, he keeps her at arm’s length because of the pain of Justin’s death. Laney and Wells have tried to move on — Wells buries himself in the physical burden of his work, and Laney begins a new relationship that ends when she becomes pregnant. Her new son helps Laney to heal, and her greatest wish is for Wells to do the same. In one scene, Wells and Laney have dinner at the bar in Taos, New Mexico, where they originally met, and she tries to convince him to enter into a class-action lawsuit to have the license of the doctor who misdiagnosed Justin revoked. Wells resists because he’s become comfortable with his pain. He cuts their dinner short and heads back to his isolated cabin.


Over the course of Cry Father’s 300 pages, Wells and Junior are constantly seeking some form of oblivion, whether it’s through work, drugs, violence, or their own loneliness. They are mired in the bleakness of their lives and resist any attempt to change. For both, there is only one end, a violent, careless one, and they welcome it; they court it despite the efforts of those who care about them. Wells and Junior are both allies and enemies. They will stand side-by-side in a bar fight or help the other bury a body (which happens on three separate occasions when Chase, his girlfriend, and the biker she was cooking meth with re-enter the picture with their sights trained on Wells for his brief moment of domestic interference). But in the same breath, they are constant adversaries, with either one of them ready to put a bullet in the other’s head.


Whitmer’s book is a grim piece of storytelling — fans of Cormac McCarthy and the late Harry Crews will rejoice and devour the novel in a single sitting — but thanks to Whitmer’s conversational, darkly humorous prose, the reader never really feels weighed down by the constant self-destructive tendencies of Wells and Junior. There are also moments in Cry Father that crackle with Edward Abbey–esque satire and political dissent, which keeps the narrative from veering too far into the darkness.


Cry Father is by no means a traditional crime novel. In fact, I would be hard-pressed to even call it one. Or maybe it’s simply the evolution of the crime novel, where there are no clearly defined roles, no paint-by-the-number heroes and villains, no one to cheer for or to revile. If that’s the case, I welcome it with open arms.


¤


Keith Rawson is a regular contributor to LitReactor and Spinetingler Magazine.

LARB Contributor

Keith Rawson is the author of over 200 short stories, essays, interviews, and reviews. He is a regular contributor to LitReactor and Spinetingler Magazine and lives in Southern Arizona with his wife and daughter.

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