NOPALITO, TEXAS: Stories
by David Meischen
University of New Mexico Press. 234 pages, $19.95
ISSUED AS PART of the Lynn and Lynda Miller Southwest Fiction Series, Nopalito, Texas is the kind of book that rarely garners much attention, but should. Its linked stories create a fictional world more bustling than that of most novels, and its characters, both gay and straight, are more authentic and more sympathetic. While not a work of “gay fiction” as such, the book is populated by several gay characters who play key roles in the town’s makeup. The stories begin with Evelyn Smith in the mid-1950s and end with the same character over forty years later. Through her eyes, and those of other family members and friends connected to her, we experience the hidden life of the town.
Writes Meischen: “Nopalito is a fictional town, but I can tell you where it is on a map.” He then proceeds to pinpoint it precisely in an area of Southeast Texas. It’s the kind of town where people ardently wish for and desire change, and sometimes—in rare moments—experience it. Mostly, however, those times are like “a comma shifting in the middle of a closed book. The briefest flutter, almost imperceptible, then nothing.” Though this may sound bleak, the stories are full of lovely, beautifully rendered moments, such as a teenager named Jimmy Don, standing unobserved in the shadows outside his house, watching his little brother Michael try on his mother’s yellow dress. Significantly, perhaps because of his own recent harrowing experience with a girlfriend’s abortion, he remains quiet about it.
The dialogue in the stories is admirably terse, and as unforgiving as the terrain. Thus it is somewhat remarkable, for such a hardscrabble town, that it’s a place you come to love as the book moves along. Indeed, the book reads a little like a cross between any of the short story collections in Alice Munro’s œuvre and Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show. As with Munro’s stories, secrets are everywhere. As one character (Albert) reflects: “Live very long in a small town and sooner or later you surprised most folks with their pants down around their ankles.”
One character who literally gets caught in the act with another boy is Grady, someone whose fate haunts the lives of many of the characters, especially as he later disappears with very little trace. Emerging as a young gay man in the mid-1960s, Grady is trying naïvely to forge his own path; sadly, it is not a happy one. This attempt is in direct contrast to the town’s one unequivocally “out” character, Albert, a man who lives with his mother above the town’s liquor store. Older and visibly effeminate, Albert frequently reminisces about an affair he had much earlier in life with a French man, for whom he still pines. That the town grudgingly accepts Albert says a lot for his pluck. Indeed, the end of one story finds him literally facing down an angry bull in a field as he metaphorically deals with the town’s disdain for him.
Other characters appear and reappear, and come full circle as well. In a story called “This Business of Not Forgetting,” the hard-hearted mother of the missing gay boy, Grady, says at one point years after her son’s disappearance (for which her husband bears some indirect responsibility): “I have learned something. … You can love somebody and not be able to forgive him for a hurt you can’t get over. That shouldn’t be possible, but it is.”
As it probably goes without saying, Nopalito is a town that proves very difficult for anyone to find their way out of. As one character, Candace, says: “One minute I had my escape planned, the next minute I was pregnant.” She is stranded in a town she doesn’t like with a husband she doesn’t love and a child she hadn’t wanted. Later in life, facing the harsh reality of a mastectomy, she reflects wistfully that her breasts had “always been my ticket out”—and now she will be losing them. Still, Meischen doesn’t render her situation entirely bleak. Listless and directionless after the surgery, “Candace could feel a buoyancy in [her husband]she didn’t share. Hope, she would have called what lifted him. She didn’t have the strength, but she was grateful for the foothold he offered.”
What Meischen offers in Nopalito, Texas is his own foothold on a path to hope and understanding. It is an impressive accomplishment, achieved through the creation of several indelible characters. _______________________________________________________
Dale Boyer is the author of Thornton Stories, among other works.
