'So with the cluster of men gathered around him and the night wearing away to morning, Nathan slugged down shot after shot of whiskey and told Rosanna's story. 'That particular night the moon was out real bright and we decided that we'd go walking...' 'This was after you'd buggered the old whale, huh?' 'Jimmy, you shut up,' someone shot back. 'Get on with it, Nathan.' 'Well, we slipped put the back door and walked out to the tank by the windmill--you know where it's at--and set down awhile and watched the shadows of the blades turning in the dust.' 'This old boy's a poet.' 'Jimmy,' a voice said from the smoke of the table, 'you been told to shut up. Now if you don't want to find out how quick that beer bottle of yours can get from your asshole with teeth in it to the one that ain't got teeth, you better shut the one with teeth.' 'Well, Nathan continued, 'the next morning being Sunday and neither one of us having to get up early...'
- The Man Who Would Be God
Paul Ruffin's collection, The Man Who Would Be God, from Southern Methodist University Press is not for the faint of heart. These eleven stories, masquerading under the guise of a literary short story collection, pack guns, sex, and racism into powerful dramas that seem to stretch beyond the short number of pages. The fact that these tales also contain some staggeringly beautiful writing seems almost beyond the point at times. "The Beast Within," for example, is a story about a man and a woman whose marriage is on the rocks, travelling through the rough country of Texas on their way from Memphis to Houston. The first scene begins with Bob and Annie broken down on someone's doorstep:
'Is there anybody with you?' The voice was low and raspy, only vaguely female, like that of a woman hardened into her late years from loss and longing or abuse at the hands of a sorry man.
Familiar territory, perhaps, for anyone who's been reading short stories since Raymond Carver. Only in Mr. Ruffin's hands, things are different. This woman's got a gun and is prepared to use it. "Boy," she says, "if you two ain't on your knees time I count three, you are dead. You look at what's sticking through this door and you'll see it's the barrel of a .44 magnum."
Mr. Ruffin's territory is the backlands of the US, and most particularly the far-rural sections of East and West Texas. "East Texas reality as one character puts it, sites where "prehuman peoples...are still walking around, still banging their woman upside the head, still beating their kids, still, in short, at the dawn of civilization..." Difficult material to write about well, but Mr Ruffin succeeds in many cases where many writers might fail, might go for the easy epiphany, the inward turn of character, the simple ending. Instead, he follows his characters into dirt-filled windy country with an unrelenting eye, and depicts them in their moments of pain and glory from their eyes, or from the eyes of visitors forever marked by their travels into this country. Many readers may find this difficult to bear, particularly political climate. A man reflects back on the time that, as a boy, he shot an Indian and later pulled the bullet from the dead man's chest. A lawyer convinces a man who beats his wife to stop by pulling a gun on him and convincing the man he belongs to the mafia. A woman can only express her grief at a gravesite by mirroring "her own dark self," a black woman, who mourns on the other side. But despite this, these stories have a ring of truth to them. They document a way of life that still exists for many, and does so in language that at times crosses over into the country of sheer beauty:
"...he sat staring through the window that he left open, winter and summer, at the land that rolled off into the distance; over it slid isolated July clouds that traversed the West Texas sky but rarely did more than pass like the shadow of a man's hand over the stretches of small oaks, mesquite clumps, and scrubby pastures, with here and there a jackpump pecking away. It was yet a wild, unsavory land where few made more than a subsistance living--only the lucky and daring and rapacious, willing to reach not simply out, but down deep beneath the harsh landscape into the dark rich bowels of the earth, as he had."
Looked at as a whole, Mr. Ruffin certainly does some reaching down into darkness of his own for these stories. But what he comes up with in these pages is a clearly a portrait of a land dear to the author. Others who love that same land should not miss this easily-read collection.
Paul Ruffin teaches English at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, where he edits The Texas Review.