A Surreal Trip into 1990s Oklahoma: Sangre Road by David Tromblay
In 1995, Kansas-based bounty hunter Moses “Moe” Kincaid travels across state lines into Oklahoma to apprehend a peckerwood named Eric Drumgoole, who has skipped out on a court date. Moe, a recent Desert Storm veteran who describes himself in the first-person narrative as a human battering ram, suspects the man has holed up in the town of Lawson. Drumgoole has questionable ties lurking among the orange Oklahoma dust, including a wife who stays married to him largely because that way “it’s a whole lot easier to pawn his shit.”
Moe is a shell-shocked man on a mission, but in this delirious story, the mission seems almost beside the point. Here and there, readers are treated to interludes relating to the skip-trace, including an encounter with bikers who really, really want to get to Drumgoole first (his court date arises out of the vehicular homicide of two of the bikers’ gang brothers) and the shady establishments Moe must visit in preparation for hauling his mark back to Kansas. But these moments are doled out a little at a time among the dominant story line of a stranger who, to his own surprise, begins to make this strange land a kind of home.
Early on, Moe strikes up an unexpected relationship with Elise, a server at a greasy-spoon diner in town. They bond over their shared smart-ass sense of humor and their Indigenous heritages (she’s Tonkawa, he’s Winnebago), and their playful repartee makes for some sharp and engaging dialogue:
“You’ve got my attention, cowboy.”
That got me to scrunch my mouth, twist my neck, force a smile, and say, “I am not a cowboy.”
“Indians make the best cowboys.”
“Is that so?” I answered.
“What,” she said. “You don’t like poetry?”
As the reader becomes acquainted with Moe, Elise, and her one-armed, cantankerous father, Tromblay paints a portrait of a specific place and a specific time. He grounds the story in details that are quintessentially the 1990s, from the car Moe drives (a Pontiac Sunbird--remember those?) to the obscene supply of pain meds a doctor gives him after his latest ass-whupping as though nothing could go wrong. The latter is a foreboding and surprisingly humorous moment, given what we now know about the opioid scourge a quarter-century later. There are also the racist cops who barely tolerate the Indigenous people inhabiting the town they’ve sworn to protect--though I feel certain one could make the case that this particular detail isn’t relegated just to the past. Still, the axiom that the specific renders a story universal has clear application here.
But there is also an undercurrent of the surreal that flows through the story, keeping one from getting too comfortable. The reader will encounter mad street-corner preachers, visit a church that meets outside in an alley, and be treated to an evening of midget wrestling (see again: 1990s). And there is the moment, toward the end, when two seemingly disconnected observations--one about constellations of stars, the other about buffalo and their nighttime habits--are the entryway into a scene both dreamlike and horrific. It’s a literary sleight of hand that’s startling in its efficacy, because the unexpected reveal strikes like a sledgehammer.
The novel concludes in a manner that assures the reader Moe’s long, strange trip is far from over. Indeed, at the back of the book, the publisher, Shotgun Honey, has gifted us a sample chapter from the second installment in the series, due out in 2022. That is cause for anticipation.
If one seeks a simple paint-by-numbers procedural in which the story’s only concern is (kind of) good guy chasing (arguably) worse guy, this is not the novel for you. But that is not, to my mind, a mark against the book. For those who appreciate crime fiction with muscular prose, three-dimensional characters, and an off-center aesthetic, one can hardly do better.