Finding Billy White Feather, a short story by Percival Everett,
is among those packed into your survival kit of art and ideas, and stowed
between the covers of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2013.
Everett does not waste your
time. The story begins: “Oliver Campbell had never met Billy White
Feather.” That is enough to start. You will learn the rest along
the way.
A story is like a car.
Literature is supposed to take you somewhere—when it’s not up on blocks.
This story is not up on blocks.
It is a four hundred horsepower 4 X 4 and it took me to Everett’s destination
quicker than a dog with hot sauce on its ass. Such is the power of the
story.
This time, I think I could have stayed
right there, and been happy about it, and telephoned back home to tell them to
sell the house and to wire me the money. I like the way these people talk.
Oliver is a rancher, and a good one by
the sounds of it. Mrs. Campbell (Lauren) is the best wife that ever
skipped happily off an altar. The ranch folk include Hiram Shakespeare, a
ranch hand named Oscar, a ranch owner named George Big Elk, Duncan Dwight (a
lawyer who investigates cattle rustlers), and Sam Innis—the local vet.
I like these people. Sam
delivers the second of two meditations.
A horse gives birth to twins. I
hate to call the two foals a plot device, but in their brief lives, that is the
work they do. They are beautiful, but they don’t make it. The vet
tells us it was “failure to thrive.” He tells Oliver: “I’m going to
do an autopsy on them, but nothing is going to turn up. It just happens.”
The supporting cast also lives on
Everett’s pages. They include store clerks, waitresses, and the boss of a
hamburger stand. They each sound like they should.
The one person we never encounter is
Billy White Feather and his is the first, and the foremost, of our two
meditations in this story. Flannery would say that any good character
resists summary. We never meet Billy, but nine characters each summarize
him and each differently. So, do we have an identity crisis here? A
crisis of the self? Is Everett telling us that people are
unknowable? Or that their descriptions are inexpressible?
Billy shows up twice at Oliver’s
ranch. There is evidence. He is around, yet we never see him.
Oliver never meets him.
The point is that none of those nine
opinions is flattering. Some of them sound like they would kill Billy if
they had the chance, and maybe a chance to get away with it. I have some
ideas about this. Permit me.
Drama is the Greek word for “deeds.”
In Finding Billy we don’t have many deeds. In
their place, we have meditations, and so the story line is not an arc. It
becomes a chain of incidents, at the end of which Billy White Feather is never found. Yet the title continually reminds us that we do find him.
I wonder if Everett worried over his
ending. Maybe it came out pure and true in a single exhalation of the
unconscious. I am not saying his ending is wrong. I am saying that
I can imagine other endings. Some of them would complete the arc of the
story line.
The neat thing is that maybe a lot of
different endings would work. So, what does that say about a story that
is so facile? It might be saying something good about it, something very
special. The ancient Greeks had many versions of their fables.
At the end of the story, “a woman”
tells Oliver, “Fuck you,” and slams the door. Then a five sentence coda,
then oblivion.
We never find Billy White
Feather. Nonetheless, we find much else. Some of it we know,
without knowing how we know. And some of what we know has no name.
The reader must become a mystic. The reader must find the theme and
provide an end.
This is an example of “creative
ambiguity.” This is an instance of where the reader does the work, if he
wishes, if he can. The ineffable is a difficult subject for an impatient
mystic.
Sometimes an idea is like a baby
bird. If the author holds it in his hands, it flies away. Some
ideas resist becoming concrete. Maybe motivation helps.
We have an ending, but not an
end. In place of the story’s end, we have a meditation. You expect
a meditation with a poem. You expect a story to have an end.
Everett cannot (or will not) come out
and say it. He has to make you come out and say it. The end is up
to you. Everett provides us an ellipsis (a workplace for us to finish
it). Americans are impatient mystics. I'd rather not wait for Wakan Tanka
to appear to me at the end of a buffalo dance. I’d have to change my life
so I could read my stories.
There might be an end if the main
character had a motive equal to his actions. Oliver drives into the next
state trying to find Billy White Feather. He has every reason not to
go. Everett’s problem is that Oliver has no good reason to make the
trip. Everett is messing with my willing suspension of disbelief.
I’d like to see Oliver assume that
someone had murdered Billy. I’d like this to be a part of the finishing
coda, just after the door slams in his face. Everett has taken pains to
show nine characters with opinions of Billy ranging from dislike to
hatred. There would be no shortage of suspects. All we need is nine
more sentences, earlier in the story—each a little different, yet each
foreshadowing menace. This provides a motive for Oliver’s obsession with
finding Billy White Feather.
We don’t have to have blood
stains—just complete the story’s arc. Maybe Billy has tricked Oliver into
driving far away so that he can appear at his ranch at the end (when Loren is
alone, a la Hitchcock). Maybe Oliver can complete the arc by unwittingly bringing
a message to the story’s final place and final character.
I’d like to think that Everett wrote
it with a murder. I’d like to think that the Virginia Quarterly Review
(God bless ‘em) turned up their nose and said, “We don’t do murders around
here. Perhaps you should turn this in to Ellery Queen, Mr.
Everett.” I’d like to think that Everett is a practical man and said,
“Fine, fine. I’ll revise and send it back in tonight.” Everett
wants to thrive. The vet was right. Life persists like that.
I wonder if Oliver is Everett's alter
ego. Percival and Oliver each have three syllables. Hiram
Shakespeare addresses Oliver as brown man. Maybe one of Everett's
great-granddads was a Buffalo Soldier, or maybe Everett wishes he had been.
That would be very cool. Even just wishing it is cool.
Oh, before I leave you. Did you
know that a “white feather” is a conventional symbol in Europe? Was I
supposed to be meditating on this during the read? All things considered,
it remains a remarkable story and any problems with it might be mine as a
reader. Perhaps I am just an oaf. There are many of us.
Barbarians are not at the gate, only oafs. Can we have a place at Mr.
Everett’s table, too? We want to thrive, too.
Offered
by the booktender of the Good Story Saloon (August 18, 2013)
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