Posted Wednesday morning, July 15, 2020.
Detail from an illustration by Hokyoung Kim for “The Killing of a Colorado Rancher”, a story by Rachel Monroe in the April 2020 issue of the Atlantic.
Our families are supposed to be the people who know us best, but that often isn’t the case. Sometimes the hardest people to see clearly are the ones we’re closest to.
After the discovery of Jake’s body, and the multiple and confusing confessions from his family members, what seemed to upset his friends most was how they mischaracterized Jake. According to Deb, her son was a drug addict and a drunk, a violent MMA fighter, someone who physically assaulted her and threatened to kill his sister and her family. According to Steph, Jake was a worthless waste of space, lazy and useless. No wonder Jake clung so strongly to his friends. His chosen family was perfectly aware of his flaws—his stubbornness, his arrogance—but equally attuned to his loyalty, generosity, and dedication…
---from “The Killing of a Colorado Rancher” by Rachel Monroe.
Couple years ago, in August of 2018, the week after Pop Mannion's funeral, I was looking at a stack of books I’d inherited from Pop. It stood nearly waist high and included "The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov", "The Complete Short Stories"" by Muriel Spark, several collections of stories by John Updike, several more by Stephen Millhauser, and one each by T.C. Boyle and Julian Barnes,.
After studying them perplexedly and with indecision, trying to think if I would keep all of them and where would I put the ones I kept, what would I have to clear from the bookshelf to make space for them, what would I do with the books I took down, and, most pressingly, when would I have time to read any of the new ones? After brooding for a minute, I reflexively reached for the book on the top of the stack, the Nabokov and opened to the table of contents, seeing if a story title caught my eye. As I did, I said to myself, “Self,” I said, “here’s the deal. What I’m going to do is read a story a day, from one book or another, every morning, and when I’ve gone through them all, I'll go back and do it again. I figure it will take me at least a year, and we’ll see where that gets us when we get there.”
The self I was talking to and making the deal with was my forty-year-old self. That’s the self who, finally discouraged by rejection notices, broken-heartedly gave up writing fiction and with that reading any fiction he wasn’t paid to review. The deal for the moment was only for me to read that one story a day, but implicit was that doing so might lead to me, my present self, might try my hand at writing short stories, picking up where he’d left off. I had his notebooks and a goodly number of unfinished drafts of stories he’d started, and this, I fantasized, might be a way for him to get back to doing something he’d loved. So I started to read the first story in the Nobokov collection right then and there.
I have to admit, in the two years since, I’ve been less than diligent about keeping to the terms of our deal. My forty year old self has grounds to sue. But I have been reading short stories, for my own pleasure as well as his. Not that many. Certainly not one a day or even every other day. Averaged out, it’s been at most one every couple of weeks. (I’ve also been secretly writing short stories. My own too. Not revisions of his left-overs.) And not all the ones I’ve read---in fact just a handful of them---have been ones in that set of books. Our deal didn’t specify they all needed to be. At any rate, I just finished one this morning. It wasn’t in a book. It was in a magazine---the Atlantic. A very good one by a writer I hadn’t read before. Rachel Monroe. It’s called “The Killing of a Colorado Rancher”, and it reminded me of stories by Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Annie Proulx, and T.C. Boyle. The difference between Monroe’s story and theirs is that theirs are fictions. Hers is journalism and all facts.
A thing I’ve come to believe over time is that journalists can tell better stories than most fiction writers and fiction writers can tell stories that contain more truth than even some of the best journalism. To put it simply, both fiction writers and non-fiction writers are in the same line of work, describing and explaining the condition and problems of being a human being living among other human beings, and that what they write both count as literature. Hardly an original insight, but it was a salutary one for me, and I wish I’d come to it before I went to Iowa for my MFA.
At any rate, I think Monroe’s story counts as a short story and a good one. But see what you think. Here’s the opening to get you started:
It was weird that no one had heard from Jake Millison in a few days.
Maybe someone who didn’t know him, an outsider to Gunnison, a small Colorado town on the western slope of the Rockies, might assume he was flaky or unreliable. At 29, Jake still lived with his mom and spent most nights at the local dive bar, the Alamo. But Jake’s friends knew he was deliberate, a creature of routine. If you had plans to go to the movies on Saturday, he’d text you on Wednesday: What time should I pick you up? And then again on Thursday and Friday just to confirm. On a motorcycle trip to California, Jake was the one who brought tarps and first-aid kits. He definitely wasn’t the fall-off-the-face-of-the-Earth type.
Jake had spent most of his life on the 7-11 Ranch, his family’s property just outside Gunnison. He’d drive into town most evenings, work out at the gym, then stop by the Alamo. He always sat at the same table and always ordered the same drink: a Coke, because anything stronger made him nervous. His friends, a close-knit group of half a dozen guys, would show up after their shifts at the mechanic shop or the lumberyard. They’d shoot pool for a couple of hours, then Jake would head home to the ranch. “Everything was like clockwork with him,” his friend Antranik Ajarian told me.
On Wednesday, May 20, 2015—five days since anyone had heard from Jake—his friends Nate Lopez and Randy Martinez drove out to the 7-11 Ranch. They turned into the driveway, then drove past the barn decorated with the antlers of deer, elk, and moose, testaments to the property’s glory days as a hunting camp. They didn’t see Jake, although they did spy his truck, his motorcycles, and his dog, Elmo.
In the horse corral, they spotted Jake’s mother, Deb, a wiry woman whose frail frame belied her stubborn strength. Deb told Lopez and Martinez that Jake had gone to Reno, Nevada, to train at a mixed-martial-arts gym; he wasn’t responding to their texts because he’d dropped his phone in an irrigation ditch and left it behind to dry out in a bag of rice. Her explanation was logical enough. But the more they thought about it, the more it didn’t sit right with them…
To read Monroe’s whole story, follow the link to “The Killing of a Colorado Rancher” at the Atlantic.
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