THE BULLET SWALLOWER, La Frontera's reckoning on the page

THE BULLET SWALLOWER
ELIZABETH GONZALEZ JAMES
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzling magical realism western in the vein of Cormac McCarthy meets Gabriel García Márquez, The Bullet Swallower follows a Mexican bandido as he sets off for Texas to save his family, only to encounter a mysterious figure who has come, finally, to collect a cosmic debt generations in the making.

In 1895, Antonio Sonoro is the latest in a long line of ruthless men. He’s good with his gun and is drawn to trouble but he’s also out of money and out of options. A drought has ravaged the town of Dorado, Mexico, where he lives with his wife and children, and so when he hears about a train laden with gold and other treasures, he sets off for Houston to rob it—with his younger brother Hugo in tow. But when the heist goes awry and Hugo is killed by the Texas Rangers, Antonio finds himself launched into a quest for revenge that endangers not only his life and his family, but his eternal soul.

In 1964, Jaime Sonoro is Mexico’s most renowned actor and singer. But his comfortable life is disrupted when he discovers a book that purports to tell the entire history of his family beginning with Cain and Abel. In its ancient pages, Jaime learns about the multitude of horrific crimes committed by his ancestors. And when the same mysterious figure from Antonio’s timeline shows up in Mexico City, Jaime realizes that he may be the one who has to pay for his ancestors’ crimes, unless he can discover the true story of his grandfather Antonio, the legendary bandido El Tragabalas, The Bullet Swallower.

A family saga that’s epic in scope and magical in its blood, and based loosely on the author’s own great-grandfather, The Bullet Swallower tackles border politics, intergenerational trauma, and the legacies of racism and colonialism in a lush setting and stunning prose that asks who pays for the sins of our ancestors, and whether it is possible to be better than our forebears.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Inherent in any story set in the western part of the US is racism, is settler colonialism is the trauma of violence...institutionalized all the way to interpersonal. "The past is not so far away as you might think. Nor the future, for that matter. No man lives free from history." This is the beating heart of the story, in fact of the entire setting in real world terms. No one is free from history.

Jaime, in his reckoning with that aperçu's truth, receives...non-corporeal, I guess...divine, malign, either, probably both, but certainly not of consensus reality assistance from the aptly named Remedios. He's made privy to the, well, Akashic records of his family's deeds. I can only imagine the horrible burden of knowing the inalterable and undeniable facts of your very roots in reality.

Are we in fact our relatives' keepers after all? Is that the myth of Cain and Abel's longevity explained? I know Jaime believes the information he now has is true but he does not question what truth it tells. If an entity asserted I was responsible for balancing the scales of an entire lineage, I'd want to see some ID proving the authority of this assertion.

Jaime not being so suspicious and mistrustful, off we go into the blood-soaked deeds and violent cruelties of the past. It's an open question if this results in a better book than a "straight" magical-realist tale, as these limit their violences more than this full-throated shout of rage does.

When it comes to the acceptance of personal accountability for actions rendered unchangeable by time's passage I'm of two minds. We unquestionably live within the blast radius of our predecessors' decisions, actions, inactions. It is not logical to deny this fact. What do we owe the present for the actions of the past? Not nothing, that's absurd and greedy because it's only ever applied to the beneficiaries while the descendants of those who suffered and lost bear the consequences forever. Where is a reasonable balance point?

Jaime's resolution is the source of my missing star. In the final chapter there is a revelation that emphasizes the magical realism throughout the story was baked in from giddy-up to whoa. It vitiates the journey Jaime has been on from my point of view, but it is very much of a piece with the spooky frame we're looking at the picture within.

Solidly four stars, transported me to my kidhood in Mercedes, Texas, and will transport you, too. Needing to be somewhere your family is not for the Yuletide celebrations? Here's a book that's set in a uniquely characterful corner of the US that has a lot to answer for historically. What could be more apt for reading in family-togetherness time?

RED SKY MORNING: The Epic True Story of Texas Ranger Company F, the kind of focused-on-a-story history that fascinates my Texas-rooted self

RED SKY MORNING: The Epic True Story of Texas Ranger Company F
JOE PAPPALARDO
St. Martin's Press
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The explosive and bloody true history of Texas Rangers Company F, made up of hard men who risked their lives to bring justice to a lawless frontier.

Between 1886 and 1888, Sergeant James Brooks, of Texas Ranger Company F, was engaged in three fatal gunfights, endured disfiguring bullet wounds, engaged in countless manhunts, was convicted of second-degree murder, and rattled Washington, D.C. with a request for a pardon from the US president. His story anchors the tale of Joe Pappalardo's Red Sky Morning, an epic saga of lawmen and criminals set in Texas during the waning years of the “Old West.”

Alongside Brooks are the Rangers of Company F, who range from a pious teetotaler to a cowboy fleeing retribution for killing a man. They are all led by Captain William Scott, who cut his teeth as a freelance undercover informant but was facing the end of his Ranger career. Company F hunted criminals across Texas and beyond, killing them as needed, and were confident they could bring anyone to “Ranger justice.” But Brooks’ men met their match in the Conner family, East Texas master hunters and jailbreakers who were wanted for their part in a bloody family feud.

The full story of Company F’s showdown with the Conner family is finally being told, with long dead voices being heard for the first time. This truly hidden history paints the grim picture of neighbors and relatives becoming snitches and bounty hunters, and a company of Texas Rangers who waded into the conflict only to find themselves over their heads—and in the fight of their lives.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'll start by lauding what other readers have liked least about this book: It is a mosaic of multiple stories, and intentionally so. The design of a history that's focused on a story, not a biography, is to collate the fascinating pieces and ugly, disfiguring truths that make up the whole picture of the moment in question...it's meant to be taken in piece by piece, and assembled in one's mental theater as a whole image of The Defining Conflict.

To that end, we meet the main main, James Brooks, as he surveys Cotulla, Texas, on the day he joins the Texas Rangers in 1883. Author Pappalardo begins, then, at a beginning...but we're going to see other beginnings as we go along. We'll see the last of active Rangers Captain Brooks in Cotulla, too...and that's the kind of symmetry I appreciate in a story.

What happens between those two events, not hugely distant in time, is...a lot. A great deal more than one person's life generally holds, and a great deal less as well. Brooks, in his entire life of genuine service to the people of Texas, never shook a debilitating addiction to alcohol and an equally debilitating inability to form sustaining, intimate friendships with anyone. This included, as it is so sad to say, his own family. He was married to one woman his entire adult life. There is no record or indication in any recorded memory that he found any sense of companionship or happiness in their union, nor did she express any enduring or undying affection for her husband. His children were dutiful, and always played their role of help and sustenance for him, but again there is not any record of them feeling hero-worship for their truly outsized and outstanding father.

Brooks County, named for the Captain (as he always preferred to be referred to and addressed despite having the options of Representative or Judge), was a creation of the remarkable man's efforts to drag a thousand square miles of mesquite scrub and caliche and its few thousand residents out of the hands of a corrupt Democratic party machine in the early twentieth century. He was, at the time, a State Representative, and his life-long campaign of fair treatment for Spanish-speaking people and law-abiding souls of all skin colors and ethnicities made Brooks County and Falfurrias havens of good, equitable Democratic-party led government.

In the chapter dedicated to this end-of-life résumé of Brooks, there are résumés of his cohorts in Company F, all of whom were with the Captain during the main action of the book...the take-down of the Sabine County-based Conner crime family in the weird swampy Louisiana-like East Texas world. It was a long, tense fight on the logistical and legal levels, and Author Pappalardo doesn't stint on the practical details. There are a LOT of people in this story. There are a LOT of names that appear, then aren't mentioned for a while, then reappear with minimal fanfare. There is a Dramatis Personae that can be bookmarked or hyperlinked in your ereader, and I strongly suggest that any readers do that very thing. I found it hugely helpful and on occasion, to my utter lack of surprise, its completeness and thoroughgoing explanatory notes were interesting enough to make me want more books about this century-old vanished culture.

What I want from histories is a sense of the why of things. The what is great as a launchpad but I really treasure whys. In that arena, Author Pappalardo is a strong deliverer. I was never at a loss for reasons to pick up the book. I took it at a measured pace, a chapter a week and a section or two a day. I think this is the most likely technique to give the story its full room to expand and its details to slot into each others' proper settings. Since I am from Texas, I was prepared with some ideas of the roles of lawmen, and specifically the Texas Rangers, in the state's history. Since I am from that part of Texas, it was even more of a sense of homecoming, of learning my own family's cultural past. That added soupçon of personal connection is likely the source of the extra half-star I hung on the book.

It really is extra, as I can understand from others' responses to the read. Quite a few readers were unable to see the nature of the story being told and that is squarely on the author's shoulders. His stated aim is to answer this quote from one N.A. Jennings, a former Texas Ranger of that time and later an author in his own right:

"Near everyone has heard of the Texas Rangers, but how many know what the Rangers really are, or what are their duties? In a general way, everyone knows they are men who ride around on the Texas border, do a good deal of shooting, and now and then get killed or kill someone. But why they ride around, or why they do the shooting, is a question which might go begging for an answer for a long time without getting a correct one."

This expectation being set in the Introduction, I can see a history buff feeling let down. This isn't the book that answers that question. It doesn't seem to me to be particularly likely to, set up as it is to tell the story of a group of Rangers involved in one of the organization's formative operations. The personal focus falls most heavily, and in my opinion correctly so, on the Captain, James A. Brooks, and the people he led come in for bits and snatches of attention. But the light that shed on the Texas Rangers as a whole, while bright and revealing, does not get even partway to explaining the entire late-1800s period of the organization's existence that Author Pappalardo indicated it will.

But what the book actually does is, to my way of thinking at least, as valuable or even more so. It traces the roots and the branches of a conflict between the law-and-order forces of state power and the flouters of same whose actions and influence were seriously detrimental to the community as a whole's ability to live their lives free from fear and danger. There are people worse than police today, there were in the 1880s, and the worst is when those terrible actors turn the police into their henchmen. Along come the Texas Rangers of Company F to reset the expectations of the community for law enforcement...and they do.

For the better.

It might not be what we think of in terms of law enforcement's role today, after Rodney King's beating and George Floyd's and Ahmaud Arbery's murders at their hands; but it is true, it happened, and it's worth considering that if it seemed impossible to the people of Sabine County in 1885, and it wasn't, that it isn't impossible today either.

That deserves my attention, and my praise.

THE LONG SHADOW OF SMALL GHOSTS, an incredible story of failure and murder

THE LONG SHADOW OF SMALL GHOSTS: Murder and Memory in an American City
LAURA TILLMAN
Scribner
$12.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In Cold Blood meets Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family: A harrowing, profoundly personal investigation of the causes, effects, and communal toll of a deeply troubling crime—the brutal murder of three young children by their parents in the border city of Brownsville, Texas.

On March 11, 2003, in Brownsville, Texas—one of America’s poorest cities—John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho murdered their three young children. The apartment building in which the brutal crimes took place was already rundown, and in their aftermath a consensus developed in the community that it should be destroyed. It was a place, neighbors felt, that was plagued by spiritual cancer.

In 2008, journalist Laura Tillman covered the story for The Brownsville Herald. The questions it raised haunted her, particularly one asked by the sole member of the city’s Heritage Council to oppose demolition: is there any such thing as an evil building? Her investigation took her far beyond that question, revealing the nature of the toll that the crime exacted on a city already wracked with poverty. It sprawled into a six-year inquiry into the larger significance of such acts, ones so difficult to imagine or explain that their perpetrators are often dismissed as monsters alien to humanity.

With meticulous attention and stunning compassion, Tillman surveyed those surrounding the crimes, speaking with the lawyers who tried the case, the family’s neighbors and relatives and teachers, even one of the murderers: John Allen Rubio himself, whom she corresponded with for years and ultimately met in person. The result is a brilliant exploration of some of our age’s most important social issues, from poverty to mental illness to the death penalty, and a beautiful, profound meditation on the truly human forces that drive them. It is disturbing, insightful, and mesmerizing in equal measure.

***I RECEIVED THIS REVIEW COPY FROM SCRIBNER AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.***

My Review: There is absolutely nothing easy about this book, not the story, not the agonized survivors, not the innocent dead children, nothing. I read In Cold Blood many years ago, and was very deeply affected by the story. The amazing writing, the very best thing Truman Capote ever made, seems suspiciously good...like Harper Lee, his cousin and collaborator, was a very very significant part of its creation. Laura Tillman touches me in many of the same places that In Cold Blood did, but she had no Harper Lee to wave the magic wand of genius over the text.

The genesis of the book came when Tillman began her journalism career at The Brownsville Herald, the big English-language newspaper of the Rio Grande Valley. A murder such as the Rubio case doesn't happen that often in the rinky-dink precincts of that rathole. (I spent formative years forty or so miles away in Mercedes, Texas, a horrible little wide spot in the road that exemplifies what city people never see and avoid even hearing about if they can help it.) Tillman describes her fascination thus:

The Rubio story was also especially affecting because it concerned small children. It grabbed hold of the reporters during these newsroom conversations, the revelation of each detail making the case suddenly raw, fresh, intense. A father and a mother killing three young children—three babies!—with the crude weapon of kitchen knives. The bodies in trash bags, the heads in buckets of water, washed clean of blood. For not one but both parents to be involved in such a horror was stunning and inexplicable.

Nothing is inexplicable. We might not like the explanation. We might reject the explanation in disgust, horror, terror. But an explanation there always, always is.

A mentally ill, psychologically abused, sexually pimped out by his mother, young man of good looks and no significant intellectual capabilities, gets hooked on drugs...self-medicating, in my opinion...finds and clings to a balsa-wood raft in the form of a pretty, even less intelligent girl-child who was being abused by a variety of men in her life. Hey presto! Children arrive, work doesn't, help ain't, and huffing paint is the only road to some tiny moment of pleasure. A lifetime of psychological disturbances, seeing people not visible to others, obsessions and violence, just don't merit institutional help. Especially in a place like Texas, where Medicaid is out of reach to anyone not licking the asphalt in the hospital parking lot to avoid starvation. It is disgusting what is NOT done with the Federal dollars sent to help the citizens of the state.

At the moment of John Rubio's massive psychotic break, this is what he reports believing:

According to John, something told him that killing the children was imperative, that he was engaged in a battle of good and evil, and he was on the side of good. He said that he had long seen himself as exceptional, chosen by God for some purpose, and had dreams where he battled demons. Where those thoughts and the message to kill his children came from is debatable, but John said he believed at the time that it was divinely sent. Regardless of whether the culpable influence was psychosis or a spiritual force, there was no contradicting intervention at the final moment.

The source of Tillman's meditation is the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Bible. It is one of the more appalling, disgusting passages in a book chock-a-block with horrible bar bets (eg, Job's trials set on him by God to win a wager with Lucifer) and reprehensible narcissistic tantrums (eg, destroying the whole of the world in a flood because his itty fee-fees was hurted by...what, I can't remember, something like impiety?). John's religious mania had been life long, and somehow no one anywhere connected to this case sees or says they see the central and vile role that this God person and the stories told to impressionable children about him played in this nightmare crime.

A friend of Angela and John's explains the bitter, scalding, bone-rattling terror of desperation.

"But when a difficult time comes and nobody helps you, no one listens to you, they leave you alone...I don't know how to explain it...You go to your neighbor's house and ask if they could lend you three dollars to eat and they say they don't have it. You go to another [neighbor] and they don't have it, no one has it. You're frustrated and you have hungry children. And you kill them. That's how people think."

You cannot know the power of desperation, Felix was saying, until you experience it in its raw form. Desperation can fuel acts that would otherwise be incomprehensible. And if you've never been filled with that kind of quaking, hysterical desperation, you simply cannot fathom the way it can make you behave.

Yep, been there. Try living at the complete legal, social mercy of a screaming emotional volcano, abusive in inventive and creative ways, who makes up to you with sex. And I was her son. I have been down there. I understand John's insanity from the inside, though blessedly I'm smart and almost incredibly tough so I survived. Just. John had none of my strengths, poor lad, and he cracked wide open. What he did can't be fathomed by the normal mind. The key words there are "normal mind." He didn't have, and never had, one of those. The State of Texas, in its rednecked viciousness, condemned this poor, broken, horrible person to die. To do what? To solve what? In order to serve what noble legal principle? We already know the Christians who argue for the death penalty are merely emulating their vile petty god, so can safely be discounted as moral forces.

Angela was represented by a court-appointed lawyer whose unique perspective on the central facts of Angela's participation in the murders probably served her in great stead:

In May of 2008, five years after John and Angela were arrested, Gamez said he saw demons for the first time. "I didn't imagine it." Gamez had suffered a heart attack that left him legally dead for several minutes, and in a coma for six days after that. "There is no rational, logical medical explanation, other than the grace of coming back and giving me a second chance." To him, the demons are not a vague vision, but a specific memory.

"They were compelling to take me to hell. They were reaching out. They wanted me but they couldn't get me. The grace of God wouldn't let them get me, but they let me know they're there."

Gamez believed he'd been enlightened to another dimension.

"There is an inner being, soul, within us and wants to live and wants everlasting life. And it fears the abomination of everlasting darkness. I really appreciate, when I crossed over, my ranches meant noting, my property meant nothing. I'm left with nothing. Nothing was important. You speak, not with your mouth, but your mind. You have no physical form. And I can prove it because I was dead. And all that spirit of yours wants is to reach that light I couldn't reach."

His voice commanded the empty room, rough and croaking, pushing past my attempts to ask questions during the long pauses between phrases.

"So I cannot say that what she saw wasn't real," Gamez said. "I don't make that judgment anymore—if she's crazy or sick or mentally retarded—no, I know they're there, and they make people do very bad things. Evil things. Demons' purpose in life is for us—to compel us to do bad things. There is no love with these creatures."

Gamez's experience, judge its merits how you may, very likely informed Angela's fate. She will be eligible for parole in 2045.

The fate of the children I cannot bring myself to recount.

In John's version of events, he decapitated the children because they seemed to rise and revive after being choked and stabbed.

That is really all you need to know.

Laura Tillman backs up at the end of the book:

The building drew me in, but the real pull was not the structure, it was the questions. I thought after all this time they would be resolved. Instead, I find myself more unmoored than when I started. Yet that doesn't bother me: resolution doesn't seem to be the purpose of questions like these. They open journeys, within and without, daring us after each step to go still further.

And here is where that fifth star, wavering in and out, went out for the last time. It seems to me a...bloodless...response to this journey through a layer of society that one can not see, still less live within for any length of time, and emerge unchanged in profound and irreparable ways.

Reading is resistance...even to the internal prettying-up and makeover that we call "denial."