True grit

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This article was published 06/08/2022 (1391 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ontario novelist and poet Michael Blouin, a two-time winner of the ReLit Award for fiction published by Canadian independent presses, takes readers down a path blazed by Canadian poets Michael Ondaatje and bpNichol more than 50 years ago by reimagining the life of the ultimate outlaw of the American West.

In Blouin’s imaginative resurrection of the young gunman, Billy was not killed at age 21 by a nighttime bullet from lawman Pat Garrett. Blouin, in his fifth novel, drops his readers into the life of an older Billy as his older brother Joseph is leading him to refuge in Canada. But, of course, things don’t go as planned.

As Billy puts it in his first-person narrative: “This life is all just a ride on a horse that does not know where it is going.”

The brothers’ escape to Canada is delayed when they come upon a father-daughter duo — the Wings — who are searching for an older daughter kidnapped by a pair of roving serial killers. Needless to say, guns come into play and there’s sudden and deadly violence in the novel.

But this is much more than a western rescue tale. The attraction of I Am Billy the Kid is the narrative voice Blouin has created for his protagonist: wise, sardonic, reflective, self-educated, speaking with a kind of formal diction that is reminiscent of Mattie Ross in Charles Portis’s True Grit. It’s also at times darkly surreal, with characters wandering through the desert (like the burlap-bag-wearing Mr. Wing) and the murderous kidnappers who like to hang their victims from trees.

Blouin isn’t afraid to travel into some dark terrain, but despite that, it’s a surprisingly funny book.

Here’s Billy’s advice to his western contemporaries: “My father was right; it is best to carry a hat, and usually on your head. With a hat on your head there’s just more for people to shoot at that isn’t you.”

At times the comic bickering between Billy and Joseph has the feel of a vaudeville show, or Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or, given the genre, the interactions between Eli and Charlie in Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers. Here’s the discussion that follows after Joseph suggests that Billy could just shoot a suspicious-looking stranger:

“‘Look, just because I shoot people doesn’t mean I just shoot people.’

“‘That does not make any sense.’

“‘You head out on the trail with a cook, you gonna make him cook every meal for you?’

“‘Why not? We’d eat better than if I did it myself.’

“‘Well, maybe he don’t want to cook.’

“‘What’s he a cook for?’”

Blouin’s Billy acknowledges that killing is his particular skill. Usually, he notes, gunmen don’t offer society a useful and practical skill, though in the case of the two serial killers “the killing of these men will be like the making of a fine set of shoes and then donating them to someone who has none.”

For all his bluntness, he can be a sensitive and even romantic soul, burned by lost love, protective of the beautiful and cantankerous young Turner Wing and aware of his shortcomings.

“Women save the world and then we just go ahead and mess it on up again. They are like animal trainers following us around with shovels.”

The Billy of legend is said to have carved a notch into his pistol for each man he killed. Blouin’s Billy, who would consider that a waste of time that only a damn-fool writer could come up with, should give the author the chance to carve some notches on his pen this fall during Canada’s literary awards season. His aim is dead on target.

Bob Armstrong was co-winner of the 2022 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction for his novel Prodigies, which featured a character inspired by Billy the Kid.