Excerpt from 'Boomer Flats'

I'm studying Lafferty's short story 'Boomer Flats' right now for my forthcoming essay for Feast of Laughter volume 3.  Just had to share the following excerpt.  Up to this point in the story, the style has been fairly plain (but Lafferty's prose at its plainest still tends to be graceful, taut, and often lyrical - even if the difficult concepts and narrative experimentations sometimes obscure his generally mellifluous style).  I suspect the sudden change in style here reflects the new and strange and heightened setting the characters have suddenly found themselves within, for they have entered a sort of 'shadow' town not shown on maps, in search of monsters. 

Dr. Velikof Vonk twinkled his deep eyes in their orbital caves: perhaps he cogitated his massive brain behind his massive orbital ridges: and he arrived, by sheer mentality, at the next step. 

“Have you a menu, young lady?” he asked. 

“No,” she answered simply, but it wasn't simple at all. Her voice didn't go with her prettiness. It was much more intricate than her appearance, even in that one syllable. It was powerful, not really harsh, deep and resonant as caverns, full and timeless. The girl was big-boned beneath her prettiness, with heavy brindled hair and complex eyes. 

“We would like something to eat,” Arpad Arkabaranan ventured. “What do you have?” 

“They're fixing it for you now,” the girl said. “I'll bring it after a while.” 

There was a rich river smell about the whole place, and the room was badly lit. 

“Her voice is an odd one,” Arpad whispered in curious admiration. “Like rocks rolled around by water, but it also has a touch of springtime in it, springtime of a very peculiar quality.” 

“Not just a springtime; it's an interstadial time,” Willy McGilly stated accurately. “I've noticed that about them in other places. It's old green season in their voices, green season between the ice.” 

The room was lit only by hanging lamps. They had a flicker to them. They were not electric. 

“There's a lot of the gas-light era in this place,” Arpad gave the opinion, “but the lights aren't gas lights either.” 

“No, they're hanging oil lamps,” Velikof said. “An amusing fancy just went through my head that they might be old whale-oil lamps.”

“Girl, what do you burn in the hanging lamps?” Willy McGilly asked her. 

“Catfish oil,” she said in the resonant voice that had a touch of the green interstadial time in it. And catfish oil burns with a clay-colored flame. 

“Can you bring us drinks while we wait?” Velikof of the massive head asked. 

“They're fixing them for you now,” the girl said. “I'll bring them after a while.” 

Meanwhile on the old pool table the Comet was beating the hairy man at rotation. Nobody could beat the Comet at rotation. 

“We came here looking for strange creatures,” Arpad said in the direction of the girl. “Do you know anything about strange creatures or people, or where they can be found?” 

“You are the only strange people who have come here lately,” she told them. Then she brought their drinks to them, three great sloshing clay cups or bulbous stems that smelled strongly of river, perhaps of interstadial river. She set them in front of the eminents with something like a twinkle in her eyes; something like, but much more. It was laughing lightning flashing from under the ridges of that pretty head. She was awaiting their reaction.

Velikof cocked a big deep eye at his drink. This itself was a feat. Other men hadn't such eyes, or such brows above them, as had Velikof Vonk. They took a bit of cocking, and it wasn't done lightly. And Velikof grinned out of deep folk memory as he began to drink.

~R. A. Lafferty, 'Boomer Flats' (1971) 

I think it's a pretty good example of Lafferty's odd yet robust prose when he really lets it out of its cage (though he can wax even richer and wilder than this).  The dialogue sparkles, humour abounds, yet the language becomes injected with imagery of the huge and redolent, hinting at a dark, green, muddy, deep vitality beneath the effervescent chatter.

This exchange between the 'eminent scientists' and Crayola Catfish (the waitress) is followed by plenty more fearful wonders and laughing horrors in 'Boomer Flats', but the high-ish prose style here starts to crack and recede, probably to reflect one of the characters' stubborn unbelief in the redemptively monstrous nature of the place and people they've encountered (and which they discover is in themselves as well).

The description of Velikof's eyes here also reminds me of some passages in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian where men's eyes are described similarly, as caves and the like, but I'm not going to go hunt up the exact references right now.  Here too the woman's voice is said to call forth deep geological time, green spring times between ice ages - deep geology being another theme dear to McCarthy also, especially in Blood Meridian.  Both McCarthy and Lafferty share a tendency to describe human features - soulish as well as bodily - in the imagery of landscapes (as well as other aspects of ecology).  Another example from Lafferty that springs to mind is the enthralling description of a man's large and contoured hand at the opening of his short story 'Hands of the Man' (1970).  

Here in 'Boomer Flats' you can see the clear connection Lafferty is making between ecology and people, between the non-human and human, troubling a complete disjunction, re-enfolding subjects into objects. Notably in this story, outside of the excerpt above, Lafferty folds regional fauna and humanity together as well, especially catfish and bears.  These kinds of anthropo-eco boundary blurrings and hybridities are part of what I mean by the  'ecomonstrous' and what I'm researching in Lafferty's writing.  (The PhD is now 100% funded by the way, thanks to the generosity of a lot of kind and supportive folks out there.)

('Boomer Flats' was first published in IF magazine, then the collection Does Anyone Else Have Something Further To Add?; but I'm obviously not the first to see the story's eco implications as it was also later included in this 1994 anthology)

Short Story Review # 6: Narrow Valley (1966)

4.5/5

This story genuinely deserves to be included in anthologies of the American (USA) short story.  It is a regional yarn of post-colonial irony, highly amusing, its wonders deftly described, and a narrative richly layered with allusive material for class discussions and the writing of essays.  May the day speed on when we see this title listed next to stories by Flannery O'Connor, Mark Twain, Jack London, Charlotte Gilman, Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Langston Hughes, and so on.

I wrote a very short section about this story in my recent dissertation.  It was only in doing this that I properly realised just how many themes and elements Lafferty folded into this one short, seemingly light, tale.  In the dissertation, I could only talk a tiny bit about the land itself as a sort of character in the story.  It pained me not to even touch on the other elements.  If I could have done so, it would have strengthened even the discussion of the land because all the elements of the story reinforce each other (as well as leading off on individual tangents).

The story's three main themes that seem most central to me are:  1) the delightfully portrayed marvel of the valley's anomalous spatial-perceptual behaviour (with its political as well as ontological implications); 2) the wry lampooning of white reductionist views of Native Americans; 3) the equally wry lampooning of 'scientific' explanations and our modern psychological need for them in order to keep a mysterious universe at bay.

But these don't exhaust the story's charms and riches.  The dialogue, for example, is some of the funniest and sharpest in all of Lafferty's output.  One of my favourite instances is the exchange between the Rampart children and the Indian Clarence Little-Saddle when they're down in the valley together.  For example:

“Is there any wild Indians around here?” Fatty Rampart asked.

“No, not really. I go on a bender about every three months and get a little bit wild, and there's a couple Osage boys from Gray Horse that get noisy sometimes, but that's about all,” Clarence Little-Saddle said.

“You certainly don't intend to palm yourself off on us as an Indian,” Mary Mabel challenged. “You'll find us a little too knowledgeable for that.”

“Little girl, you might as well tell this cow there's no room for her to be a cow since you're so knowledgeable. She thinks she's a short-horn cow named Sweet Virginia; I think I'm a Pawnee Indian named Clarence. Break it to us real gentle if we're not.”

This badinage carries on, disabusing the children of their ethnic stereotypes.  Mary asks Clarence where his war bonnet is if he's a real Indian.  He in turn asks her why she's not wearing the Crown of Lombardy if she's supposed to be a real white girl.  After a little more back and forth, including asking where his bow and arrows are and him admitting he only did archery once and poorly at a range in T-Town, we get this:

“Hey, you old Indian, you lied!” Cecilia Rampart shrilled from the doorway of the shack. “You do have a war bonnet. Can I have it?” 

“I didn't mean to lie, I forgot about that thing,” Clarence Little-Saddle said. “My son Clarence Bare-Back sent that to me from Japan for a joke a long time ago. Sure, you can have it.”

An example of other elements buried in the story is the very occluded reference to the Rampart matriarch's own possible non-white ethnicity.  Her name is Nina, and she confesses to sometimes having an urge to disappear to Mexico forever.  This might be another reason why she and the children, unlike Robert Rampart the patriarch, are able to enter the fun and humour of the recalcitrant valley and thus 'play along' and experience its true dimensions.  At least for a little while.

I suppose that's a fourth central element:  humans having or lacking true dimensionality, which determines their ability to experience the true dimensionality of the world in which they exist (and the true dimensionality of one another, especially across racial lines).  Cue the concluding punny joke between Clarence and the ever-popular Lafferty stalwart, Willy McGilly the 'eminent scientist':

“Did we overdo it, Clarence?” Willy McGilly asked. “What did one flat-lander say to the other?”

“Dimension of us never got around,” Clarence said. “No, I don't think we overdid it, Willy.”

It's an all round great tale of magic, theory, repartee, and subversion of Manifest Destiny, supplying a variety of pleasures only truly appreciated on repeated readings.  It also, along with the other American Indian short stories Lafferty wrote, is deepened by (and deepens) a reading of Lafferty's historical novel of the Choctaw people Okla Hannali (1972).  There are various interesting resonances, but the poignancy only lightly implied in 'Narrow Valley' gets full voice in Okla, along with plenty more wonders and horrors and hilarities.

* Discussion of 'Narrow Valley' on Facebook

* 'Narrow Valley' on ralafferty.org (including many links to other blog reviews of this story)

'Narrow Valley' appeared in this anthology among several others, as well as being included in Lafferty's seminal short story collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1970)