Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991

6 Popular Culture Review There is another narrative line in the book, and it concerns the showdown scene and MacLean's death. According to what I call the kaleidoscope plot (glittering fragments of ideas are rotated in a drum, producing a different effect at every turn of events—just what the Russian Formalists would have appreciated), the following are essential story elements. MacLean is in a Kansas City hotel, for some reason, and the desk clerk, Wendell, hands him a telegram: MACLEAN MARSHALL MAIN STREET TWILIGHT SUNDAY BE THERE BE READY. He mounts his horse and rides off to the town. Marshall’s main street is all but deserted. Tethering his horse, MacLean awaits the meeting. A movement at the end of the street catches his attention. He whirls around and lets the moving object (a dog) have it with both of his revolvers. A mysterious stranger, hidden behind an upstairs hotel window, has been waiting for this moment, and shoots MacLean down. This takes place before the mid-point of the story. But throughout the book we are reminded that the MacLean saga, with its autonomous segments, is filled with gaps through which MacLean disappears on occasion. Since Berkeley has not filled in these intervals, MacLean is not obliged to do anything specific, and thus he can find out what is really going on around him; hence his feeling that the gaps are the best and most interesting times of his life. This is important to Bill at the end of the story, because he becomes MacLean, having steeped himself so deeply in the MacLean saga that he know MacLean better than anyone else in the world. And Bill wonders, as he takes MacLean's place and rides off to Marshall on that fateful Sunday, noticing that the sun is going down—will he know what to do with those gaps? The MacLean telegram about the deadly rendezvous (that Bill had found at MacLean's campsite) "waves like a flag from [his] back pocket" (Greenberg, pp. 9,17-18, 20, 54-56, 113, 136). Is he then, like MacLean, to die a provisional death? What to make of this defamiliarized cowboy story about an improbable series of cowboy novels? Throughout the book every body's view of MacLean (even the reader's) is too subjective for the real MacLean to be understood. Hence MacLean’s complaints, his both hating and loving horses, his "living" in the unfilled gaps of fictional time, his (in effect) rising from the dead, and later flying to Chicago (in Bill’s dream). MacLean naturally comprehends his own life story better than Berkeley ever could—Berkeley with his bad eyesight and

Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 14