The Enormous Scope of Male Desperation: On Cameron MacKenzie's "River Weather"

Cameron MacKenzie | River Weather | Alternating Current | 2021 | 150 Pages

…I will be here when America is nothing but a place of ruins. That’s where I’m going, to a time when you will weigh your money instead of counting, to a time when I will rule, when all men will bow to us, to a time when I will be a God.

These words are spoken with excruciating deliberateness by Jesus Rojas (played by Augusto Aguilera), a young Mexican-American cartel boss, in Nicholas Winding Refn’s 2019 TV series, “Too Old to Die Young.” Rojas explains to his underlings that he wants more rape, more violence, “to turn this whole city into a theme park of pain.” Aguilera’s portrayal of Rojas—as he transforms from a pouting wannabe gangster into a deranged Übermensch, enactor of archetypal violence, before our eyes—reminded me of Cameron MacKenzie’s depiction of “Poncho” Villa in his first novel, The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career. In it, Villa says of himself, “I have never feared a man, nor could I, for no man could know me, for I am beyond men as men would be. I am a new man, newly made by my will, and none may touch me where I lie in my rectitude and strength.” Such characters, Rojas and Villa, move with elemental thrust, like forces of nature. 

I was curious to see how MacKenzie might apply that archetypal lens to 21st century America. River Weather, his new book of short stories, scratches that itch. MacKenzie presents us with a series of frustrated men: recently-divorced men, jobless men, addicted men. A carpenter, a wrestling coach, a veteran with PTSD. Ex-football stars whose best days are gone. Self-medicating fathers, worn to a nub by alcoholism and children and time. Men whose simmering anger is a threat to the people around them, but—significantly—who have not yet given up hope. 

These stories are set in the suburbs, but the ethos is primal, savage, precariously close to “a time when you will weigh your money instead of counting.” A child’s memory of a fire in the yard: “the flames reaching higher than our home and the black smoke reaching higher still like waves in an ocean that kept rising and not quite cresting.” Coyotes that “had taken to killing squirrels and mice and hanging bits of the carcasses on the fence” to tempt a blind old dog out to his death. An old woman who imagines that every house on her block is “a portal for energies malicious and untoward.” In particular, River Weather explores male rage: simmering under the everyday, at the edge of desperation. Elemental, close always. Each man struggling to remain civilized, tempted to abandon his better nature (you can almost hear the Weird Sisters nearby chanting, “Double, double, toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!”). Each man could burst into violence, like Rojas and Villa. But not yet. 

From the first story, “Scenarios,” in which a teenage boy considers how he might kill himself, River Weather troubles us, draws us into its net, announces that this will be serious business:

When I was in seventh grade or thereabouts I had a suicide scenario, the particulars of it representative of the age and time. My plan was, so I would tell friends after school by the bike path, to strap a large speaker to my chest connected to a walkman in my pocket, and jump out of a plane. On the way down as I tore through the clouds, I’d play “Fade to Black” from Metallica’s Ride the Lightning album.

The speaker’s friends argue with him about his choice of music. One suggests “to shoot yourself in the head before you hit the ground.” Nobody asks him why he wants to end his life, or if he’s perhaps kidding. For us readers, the conversation is somewhat absurd, and the boys’ brash voices spot-on, so that it’s hard to take the “suicide scenario” seriously. Yet by the end I feel disturbed. What has gone so wrong with the boy? Is he joking? Typical of MacKenzie, “Scenarios” ends abruptly, leaving complications deliciously unreconciled.

That melancholic feeling expands and expands until, by the end of River Weather, we have a sense of the enormous scope of male desperation. The great swath of humans with expectations unmet, on the verge of “going postal.” MacKenzie, in demonstrating this throttled rage, does not feel the need to impress with literary flourishes or cheap moves, but methodically stays with his characters, Raymond Carver-like, watching them, riveted by them, until through their tics they reveal themselves. 

In “Sit a Horse,” the speaker, Gabe, visits two old friends, Charlie and Simone. Gabe tells them he’s in recovery, but keeps doing lines of coke in the bathroom, so—as the story veers sideways—his authority as narrator disintegrates before our eyes. When Gabe first arrives, Simone is cooking pasta and Charlie, having fallen off the wagon, is drinking heavily in the study. Their three-year-old twin girls are away for the night. Gabe does coke in the bathroom, returns for dinner.

When Charlie came in he had the pistol in one hand and a bottle of Old Granddad in the other. He pulled his chair out with two fingers and set the bottle beside his plate and the pistol beside that. All the lights got lost down there in the gun, sucked in and held there by its shape.

Simone tries to keep the peace, eating dinner, ignoring the gun. Gabe attempts to lighten Charlie’s mood (“Have you thought about going to church?”) but Charlie keeps waving the gun at Gabe and at himself, joking desperately. Charlie, Simone explains, lost his job the week before.

A sound—“A sharp crack”—is heard from upstairs. Charlie places his gun on the table, and with the clarity of ritual he and Gabe walk upstairs: “I followed Charlie down the hallway, the plate of pasta held out in front of me... into the yellow room...” Charlie’s mother sits reading a book. They chat and she is ferocious. “He’s like his father,” she says of Charlie. “It’s a poison that gets passed down.”

When Charlie asks his mother if his father was also poison, her response helps us understand the book’s title, River Weather: “She closed her eyes and shook her head quickly, as if to clear it. The blanket fell back off her hip. ‘It’s this goddamned heat,’ she said. ‘It comes off the river all summer long and we just don’t get a break.’” The river is hot and relentless and impacts everyone. Another clue comes from the epigraph MacKenzie chose for the front matter, from John Smith, 1624: “and places where the waters had falne from the high mountains had left a tinctured spangled skurfe that made many bare places seeme as guilded.” The waters (viz. rivers) that have carried us from the past leave a “skurfe” (OED: “Any incrustation upon the surface of a body; rust, a scab”) which is also spangled and gilded. The dual inheritance of our ancestors: a golden scab.

As Amiri Baraka says, “Poems”—and stories, too, I’d say—“are bullshit unless they are teeth...” The teeth of MacKenzie’s River Weather is the elemental violence, or the threat of it, by white men who feel ignored. Each of the men in MacKenzie’s tales is fighting, and losing, a battle to keep his head above the river water. These are uncomfortable stories, told with familiar voices. Not voices to celebrate. Voices vying for power. Struggling, losing. Drowning.