The Critical Reception of Walk Me to the Distance

Percival Everett’s fiction has garnered him numerous literary accolades and an ever-increasing readership over the span of his forty-year career. Like other Black writers of his generation—Ishmael Reed, Clarence Major, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman—Everett, who was born in 1956 in Fort Gordon, Georgia, was profoundly impacted by the modern civil rights era (1954–1968). While some contemporary scholars cite this era as the quintessential line of demarcation between writers associated with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s and “post-soul” writers of the 1980s and ’90s, I argue that they fail to consider the significance of the Vietnam War (1955–1975) in shaping Everett and other writers of his generation.⁶ As much as critics have attempted to demarcate various political and literary movements since the 1960, Everett’s novel Walk Me to the Distance, one of several of his novels set in the American West, engages with the Vietnam War as a frame to examine mythologies of the American West and its connection to America’s long history of legitimated acts of Frontier justice.

Of the few literary critics who have engaged with the novel, French scholar Claude Julien has published two important essays on Walk Me to the Distance, “From Walk Me to the Distance to Wounded, or The Undesirable Appropriation of Frontier Justice” (2010) and “The Real and the Unreal, or the Endogenous and the Exogenous: The Case of Walk Me to the Distance” (2013).⁷ Both essays examine the theme of violence in Everett’s novels Walk Me to the Distance and Wounded (2005). Rightly claiming that violence is a central theme in all of Everett’s work, Julian declares that “each is haunted by violence under several guises” (“The Real and the Unreal” 243). In “The Real and the Unreal,” Julien regards both novels in terms of fictional world-building in which “two contending forces come into play: ‘exogenous representations’ (‘the real world’) and ‘endogenous mental contents’ (the unreal world, the world of the writerly and readerly imagination and expectations)” (244). Both exogenous and endogenous representations, according to Julien and other French scholars he cites (Jean-Marie Schaeffer and Gilles Deleuze), are critical to the construction of literary creations, which may or may not be mimetic representations of the real world (244).

While Julien’s “The Real and the Unreal” is a fascinating examination of Walk Me to the Distance and Wounded, like many other Everett scholars, Julian’s analyses primarily eschew “social considerations” (245) in the discussion of violence in the texts. Moreover, although his essays map “Frontier justice” in Walk Me to the Distance and Wounded and list examples of exogenous violence in Everett’s oeuvre “against others, against animals, against oneself” (245), “The Real and the Unreal” doesn’t address Frontier violence and its metaphorical connections in Walk Me to the Vietnam War and other real-world historical events of the 1960s and 70s that inform the novel’s plot. Nor do either of Julien’s provocative essays discuss the profoundly negative effects that these historical events have on David Larsen’s psychological trajectory, particularly his consistent turn to violence, which culminates in his use of Frontier justice to mete out punishment for the rape and near-murder of his “adopted” Vietnamese daughter, Butch. Further, Julien suggests that Everett’s work is largely ambivalent about the sociopolitical realities of (Black) American life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and that his fiction is “not in the protest novel tradition” because, according to Julien, regardless of his characters’ race, Everett critiques the ills of society as a whole: its failure “to live up to decent standards of tolerance, justice, and understanding” (“From Walk Me to the Distance to Wounded” 201). Yet, (Black) protest fiction, as Everett demonstrates in Walk Me to the Distance and other novels, need not center on issues confined to the so-called Black experience. For example, why shouldn’t Everett’s novel The Water Cure (2007) be considered in the tradition of (Black) protest fiction? One could certainly argue that even though the novel’s protagonist, Ishmael Kidder, is African American that his race is subsidiary to the book’s sociopolitical concerns. More so, the novel can be read as a critique of Kidder and America’s use of legitimated violence and Frontier justice in the interrogation and torture of “enemies of the state” during the height of American’s global war on terror. However, this is also a sociopolitical issue that concerned many Black Americans during the George W. Bush Administration. Similarly, I argue, Walk Me to the Distance, despite its apparent “racelessness” (David Larsen and most of the other characters’ race remains unidentified in the novel), is a socially conscious (Black) protest novel that points to the insidiousness of legitimated violence committed by “concerned” (white) citizens and law enforcement as modern day instances of Frontier justice, as Claude Julien has argued, in America’s “national culture of violence” (“From Walk Me to Wounded” 207).

As Claude Julien and other Everett scholars have noted, violence is a consistent theme in all of Everett’s fiction; however, very few have examined war as an important sociopolitical concern for Everett and a critical backdrop in many of his novels. For instance, God’s Country (1994) references the American Civil War, The Water Cure (2007) stingingly critiques the George W. Bush Administration’s abuses of military power during the war on terror, and So Much Blue (2017) harkens back to America’s misguided intervention in the Salvadorian Civil War of the 1980s. Notably, African American writers from Phillis Wheatley to Colson Whitehead, and even those as wildly innovative as Percival Everett, have always addressed sociopolitical and sociohistorical concerns in their work. As leftist African American writer Anne Petry once put it, “Many a socially conscious novelists is simply a man or a woman with a conscious” (qtd. in Griffin 148). If not exactly the kind of militant activist that Black Arts creatives such as Amiri Baraka and others called for in the 1960s and 70s, Everett is certainly a socially conscious writer. My point here is that as much as many critics, and even Everett himself, have downplayed overtly political concerns in his work, choosing to focus on, as Margaret Russett identifies, his “demanding style and recondite subject matter” (359), Everett consistently wrestles with real-world sociohistorical and sociopolitical events, including issues around the construction and realities of race. Everett’s fiction, though highly experimental, brilliantly satirical, and heavily parodic, does what Linda Hutcheon and others have noted about much of contemporary fiction: it astutely interrogates “cultural forms of representation” in which “all art is ideologically grounded” [and] “cannot avoid involvement with social and political relations as apparatuses” (3). Across his oeuvre, Everett suggests that the evasion of history and politics in works of fiction is neither possible nor even desirable.⁸

As a new arrival in the small enclave of Slut’s Hole, Wyoming, David Larsen feels like a stranger in a strange land, not only because he is originally from the American South, but also because he is recently returned from combat in Vietnam.⁹ Initially, he finds himself adrift on the outskirts of the sleepy town, literally in the desert wilderness, when he accidentally shoots a hole through the radiator of his Dodge instead of the jackrabbit for which he was aiming. Everett presents this initial scene of violence in the novel as innocuously humorous: a parody of the Western gunslinger. Yet this scene also provides an early glimpse of David’s violent impulses that manifest in several key scenes later in the novel. As he drives through western territory with his “.45 in his lap” (WMD 4):¹⁰

The game he played went one bullet per jackrabbit as he spotted them along the roadside. He hit only one, knicked its ear, hardly disturbed its stride. Then one of the tall, slender hares leaped across the highway in front of the car. He fired over the hood of the Dart, missed the rabbit, but got his engine. The bullet passed through the radiator. He studied the wound, the afternoon sun hitting the back of his neck. (WMD 4)¹¹

David’s aim is not to kill jackrabbits for sustenance and survival as homesteaders might have done during Frontier days; instead, for him, taking leisurely pot-shots at jackrabbits from the comfort of his car is merely a game to relieve his increasing boredom. As scholar Sonja Schillings informs us, generally, legal scholars consider legitimated violence to be defensive acts usually in the protection of a community, and that established notions of “legitimate violence against nonhumans” (2) applied to hunters who killed animals for food or protection. Neither of these scenarios apply to David Larsen’s violent actions against the harmless jackrabbits.¹² Moreover, although comical and highly parodic, this scene marking David’s sojourn into the Frontier also echoes earlier American settlers’ attitudes towards “Indian Country.”¹³ In The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890, Richard Slotkin presents what he calls “the hunter myth” (64) to describe early Frontier settlers’ relationship to western territory. He explains that American frontiersmen were men who chose to emigrate into “the wilderness willingly … [and] beyond the boundaries of [civilized Eastern] society” (64). Like Twain’s Huck Finn, David, too, seems to disdain the “civilization” and the progressive sociopolitics of the Eastern Establishment. In awe of Wyoming’s stark but beautiful landscape, after a few weeks, he concludes, “He’d found a home. He liked the people and he loved the terrain” (WMD 37). Although in large measure parodic, David’s character fits Slotkin’s description of “the [frontier] hunter-hero” as a man who is “an individualist” and who represents, to the establishment, “social outcasts, rebels or renegades” (The Fatal Environment 64). Literary scholar Christine Bold concurs in remarking that the Western genre transformed in the contemporary era, “as modern corporatism” arose seemingly “erasing traditional values” and that “popular fiction came to emphasize the elegiac qualities of a West” that prized “individualism [that had] been destroyed by powerful social forces of modern life” (xii). David’s antipathy towards his sister, an antiwar protester and Vietnam veteran’s advocate living in Savannah, Georgia, encompasses his disdain for the country’s sociopolitical turmoil and its transformation of “America values” that he associates with the Eastern Establishment.

After “killing” his car, David later learns it will take “two weeks” until a replacement radiator arrives (WMD 5). Until his car is repaired, he is stuck in Slut’s Hole. Although dejected, he is immensely curious about the town’s provocative name and its history. Mitch, the service station attendant, humorously tells him the town’s name was established long ago by “‘cowboys … because everybody comes here and then they leave. That’s the story anyway,’ Mitch says, because ‘the name ain’t never been changed,’” insinuating the town’s historical relationship with the Wild West and its infamous brothels (WMD 5).¹⁴ In fact, David is no stranger to having sex with prostitutes during his tour of duty in Vietnam and when he returns home to the States. After an awkward date and uninspired sex with Sarah Newman, an advocate for Native Americans who chides David for having volunteered to enter the service to “‘go fight,’” as Sarah puts it, “‘in that dreadful war’” (WMD 23):

He kept thinking that he had felt better, more satisfied, after his bout with the whore in Georgia. There may not have been passion in that bed, either, but at least he had been after his money’s worth, at least he had come.¹⁵ He remembers how he had enjoyed holding a woman with some flesh on her bones, so unlike the skeletal whores he had been with in Nam. (WMD 27).

In considering David and Sarah’s argument about the ethics and morality of the Vietnam War, Mitch’s crude joke about the origin of the name of Slut’s Hole’s supplements a history of sexist and misogynist discourses that have helped to define American manhood and masculinity in the popular imagination via perpetuated myths about the American West. Mitch’s joke symbolizes the Frontier mindset of (white) masculine power as an antidote to the feminization of American masculinity after the country’s defeat in Vietnam. The town’s name reduces women purely to sexual objects (their genitalia) and nothing more. In the wake of the Women’s Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s, the town’s name signifies upon real and imagined ways women were viewed during the settlement of the American West. Moreover, inherent in Mitch’s explanation of the town’s name is an ironic commentary upon the sexist and misogynistic way the men of Slut’s Hole (and American society at large) in the twentieth (and indeed twenty-first) century continue to view women. Further, it is a commentary on the existential threat that many men believed the Women’s Rights Movement presented, as James J. Donahue has remarked in Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in Post-Sixties American Historical Romance, to the “hegemonic masculinity that came out of the 1960s” (34), as women found themselves on the frontlines of the civil rights struggle, the anti-war protests, and the demand for gender equality.¹⁶

Yet, Everett’s depiction of toxic masculinity and patriarchy in Walk Me is not so clear-cut in David’s case. During his evening out with Howard, May, and Sarah, in the middle of their argument, a violent altercation occurs between “a man [who] had come in and found his wife at the bar surrounded by miners” (WMD 25). The woman refuses to leave the bar with her husband, and as his threats escalate, she runs off screaming. Gun in tow, he wounds her “in the shoulder [and] fired five more shots before anyone reacted” (WMD 25). What Everett presents here is a classic trope found in many Western genres, the barfight and its requisite outlaw violence and Frontier justice: Quickly, “several miners covered and subdued him. They broke his hand and took the pistols. They kicked him in the face and ribs and punched him in the back of the head” (WMD 25). While Howard momentarily hangs back with the women, David comes to the rescue and prevents the men from killing the shooter. His “white hat” moment demonstrates not only his rugged individualism (he doesn’t participate in beating up the shooter) but also his sense of decency and care. While Howard administers rudimentary medical aid to the two women who were shot, one of whom later dies, David helps to save the other woman’s life.

While it may appear in this scene that David symbolizes law and order, later in the novel, in another bar fight, it is David who is directly involved in a violent altercation. He, along with a reluctant Howard, goes to Casper in search of a young prostitute, Olivia, with whom David seems to have fallen in love.¹⁷ He doesn’t like that she is a prostitute, and in a wildly romantic gesture, he hopes to convince her to give up her unwholesome ways. He doesn’t find Olivia at the Rodeo Tavern, where “[m]en cussed at the bar, reached for women, got their faces slapped and laughed” (WMD 65); instead, he finds a whole lot of trouble when he gives “a whore” (WMD 65) money for information on Olivia’s whereabouts. The woman takes his twenty dollars, but no information is forthcoming. When David demands that she return his money, she refuses. A full-fledged bar brawl ensues, during which he and Howard face off against a mob of miners (WMD 65). Subsequently, “[t] he faded out hooker ran over and clawed at David’s shirt, talking about her money. David hit her again. Howard grabbed his arm and … they ran down one block and around the corner. Simple” (WMD 67).

The narrator’s declaration that the two friends’ escape from the bar fight was “simple” is an understatement. The implications of the fight are far more complex; for as I want to suggest, David’s violent tendencies manifest once again in this scene. In fact, he later admits to Howard: ‘“You know I really enjoyed hitting that bitch’” (WMD 67), and he mirthfully contemplates the loss of his money: “The twenty dollars were gone. He laughed. The punches were worth it” (WMD 67). In terms of Frontier Mythology, David seems to revel in this act of violent lawlessness. That he takes pleasure in striking a woman, someone he views as a commodity rather than a human being, demonstrates that his behavior draws increasingly on tropes that we find in classic Westerns. Furthermore, social and gender differences greatly influence his desire to exert his virility, and I advance that they are at the heart of his inability to make deep personal connections with women other than Chloë Sixbury, his landlord.¹⁸ As Susan Jeffords theorizes about gender, the Vietnam War, and the shifting terrain of blame for America’s loss in the conflict, she concludes that eschewing the feminine in Vietnam War narratives “establish[es] a centralized masculine unity,” as society came to blame America’s loss of the war in Vietnam squarely on the shoulders of women and the qualities that men believed they exemplified: “deceptiveness, indecisiveness, and weakness” (147). Importantly, the bar fight further cements the masculine bond between David and Howard, another key trope in Western genres.

David is quickly enthralled by life on the New Frontier, but he is not able to completely escape the problems of the modern world. Even on an isolated ranch in Wyoming, he can’t escape the war. Like the male characters in the novel, Sixbury is also curious about David’s tour of duty in Vietnam, primarily because her deceased husband was a soldier “in the Second War,” and, as she surmises about David, “was with lots of women over there” (WMD 8). Thus, David reminds Sixbury of her late husband, whom she dearly misses, and soon comes to view him as the “normal” son she never had. Meanwhile, Sixbury’s intellectually disabled adult son, Patrick, begins to harbor feelings of jealousy towards David, a stranger whom he feels has insinuated himself into their lives.¹⁹ One morning during a torrential rainstorm, Sixbury asks him to accompany her and Patrick to a local livestock auction in the nearby town of Ross. She orders Patrick, who’s dressed in a yellow rain slicker, to ride in the open truck bed during the downpour. This is where David first witnesses Sixbury’s resentment towards her son. As far as she’s concerned, she later tells David, “I have no children” (WMD 12).

Her unmotherly behavior towards her son dehumanizes him and makes him feel even more bitter towards David. Shortly after arriving at the livestock auction, a group of bullies attack Patrick, call him an “idiot” and trip him so that he falls in the dirt scattered with “livestock shit” (WMD 11). Although older and much stronger than the bullies, Patrick does not fight back but tries to walk away; yet once again, they knock him to the ground. However, like a hero out of a classic Western, David intervenes, “stepping between Patrick and the kid and knocking some of the shit off Patrick’s slicker” (WMD 11). His calm but menacing demeanor is enough to turn the bullies away, and it is illustrative of his Frontier temerity, dominance, and virility. Patrick’s timidity against the bullies suggests that this was not his first confrontation with them, and it undermines any remaining notions about his masculinity stereotypically associated with Frontier machismo.²⁰ That Patrick dons a yellow slicker is symbolically significant to our understanding of his otherness, his “feminization,” in conjunction with his mental disability. Today, as in the Old West, being called “yellow” is an epithet used to deride a man’s virility.²¹ Because he does not occupy a position of authority, unlike David, his victimization frames him within a stereotypical “feminine position” of submissiveness outside of heterosexual masculinity and tropes associated with Frontier Mythology.²² David’s heroic rescue of him and his insinuation into their lives, however, has a galling effect on Patrick. He sees David as a rival and as a threat to his ambivalent position as paterfamilias on the Sixbury homestead. Indeed, as the narrative progresses, the novel’s satirical tone dramatically shifts and events take a much more sinister turn.

In Gunfighter Nation, Richard Slotkin maps American society’s interest in Western genres and Frontier Mythology at the beginning of the Cold War, a fascination which was to surge in the Vietnam War era. “The failure of the war in Vietnam,” writes Slotkin, “provided a frame in which alternative approaches to the political and ideological problems of the Cold War era could be imaginatively entertained” (347). One of the political and ideological problems that Everett queries in Walk Me is the apparent dissolution of the nuclear family during the Vietnam era due to feminist demands and, as Robin Wiegman asserts in American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender, “its political commitment to patriarchal disruptions” (167). Traditional family configurations are fractured in the novel. David is twenty-six years old and unmarried, and he is alienated from his only sibling, Jill, who is adamantly against the war and his voluntary participation in it. However, the arrival of Butch, a young, orphaned Vietnamese girl, into their lives gives David and Sixbury a new sense of purpose. Their ad-hoc family, a recurrent motif in Everett’s fiction beginning with Suder, becomes a kind of parodic analogue to the all-American nuclear family.²³ David and Sixbury become the child’s primary caretakers while Patrick is pushed further outside of familial and communal bonds. As tension between the two men intensifies, twice in the novel David ominously awakens in the night, fearing, “Something awful would happen” (WMD 27, 47) to disrupt his new-found contentment.

Butch’s arrival on the ranch instigates a series of violent incidents that both undermine and reinscribe classical tropes in American Westerns and Frontier Mythologies within the frame of the war in Vietnam.²⁴ David now has the family for which he has apparently longed. His happiness, however, is short-lived. Years of anger and frustration loosens Patrick’s murderous rage, and he absconds with Butch, taking her further into the wilderness to an abandoned, remote cabin near an “old sheep camp” (WMD 120) where he subsequently rapes the little girl and attempts to murder her. In classic cowboy fashion, David gathers a posse of armed men to search for the child. The very formation of a posse indexes Old West Frontier justice in the twentieth century but additionally generates another instance of male bonding in the novel.

This is what Susan Jeffords refers to as “remasculinization” in the Vietnam era in which “the groundwork for regenerating masculinity [at that time] is the mythos of masculine bonding” as a “‘separate world’… depending on the exclusion of women and the feminine” (Remasculinization 168). These men are self-fashioned representatives and defenders of the community and by extension “the American way of life.” They come to believe that their subsequent murder of Patrick is an ethical and moral response to violations against the community as a whole. They are a band of brothers in the service of (New) Frontier justice. What’s more, as Jeffords concludes, male bonding in Vietnam War narratives “collectivity fulfills… structural [patriarchy] in Vietnam representation” and “a denial of difference amongst soldiers” (Remasculinization 59) regardless of extrinsic factors such as race and class, and they do so by eschewing the feminine. As such, symbolically, Patrick’s relegation to the wilderness, outside of civilization, marks him further as (feminized) other.

The lynch party’s search for Patrick is a metaphorical script Everett adroitly uses to merge tropes inherent in Western genres with those associated with Vietnam War discourses. The men’s search-and-rescue mission for Butch is just as much a search-and destroy-mission to eliminate Patrick, who, like the guerilla tactics used by the Viet Cong to evade American troops, goes underground.²⁵ When the posse finds and subdues Patrick, they discover that he has brutally raped and attempted to murder Butch. In this disturbing scene, Everett enmeshes acts of violence that mark both outlaw (sexual) transgressions often associated with the settlement of the American West and some American troops’ outlaw (sexual) transgressions against Vietnamese women during the Vietnam War.²⁶

However, despite Patrick’s reprehensible actions, Everett problematizes how we might think about the lynch party mission of justice, which, like their quarry operates outside of the law within the framework of what they believe to be legitimated violence. In Enemies of All Humankind: Fictions of Legitimate Violence (2017), Sonja Schillings’ analysis of important legal concepts such as “hosti humani genris (the enemy of all humankind)” (3), legal fictions, and legitimated violence provides suggestive ways for analyzing violence in Walk Me. She writes that the concept of hosti humani genris is “a special kind of legal fiction [in which] the law adapts to contexts it had not previously considered when unprecedented conflicts arise” (3). She further adds that legitimated violence is most often viewed as “defensive” violence imposed to protect a “community” or “something [else] worthy of protection” (2). She declares:

An act of legitimate violence does not begin but ends conflict; it simply reacts to a violent attack that transgresses a boundary, puts a stop to the attack, and thus protects the boundary and everything ‘“behind’” it … legitimate violence tends to refer to overarching values rather than to concrete interests. (2)

Thus, considering Schillings’ definition, David’s earlier admission of sexual violence against a Vietnamese prostitute during the war can’t clearly be deemed legitimated violence. Unlike his violent altercation with the prostitute at the Rodeo Tavern in Cheyenne, the Vietnamese prostitute (seemingly) poses no threat to David. Rather, his vicious sexual encounter with her appears to have been triggered by his fear of previously having almost been killed in combat by the Viet Cong. David’s sexual dominance over her is both an act of revenge and is also illustrative of what Susan Jeffords defines as “remasculinization”—“a revival of the images, abilities, and evaluations of men and masculinity” in Vietnam War narratives (xii). Moreover, I argue, the prostitute, who goes unnamed, also serves as a synecdoche for “the enemy,” the Viet Cong, who for David constitutes the “hosti humani genris (the enemy of all humankind)” (Schillings 3). He takes out his frustration and rage upon her body, just as Patrick takes out his frustration and rage upon Butch. Importantly, though, Schillings further claims that legal fictions and their intended legitimated violence are often put in place “to bridge the gap between the familiar and the unfamiliar” (3) until laws can be effectuated to cover unprecedented situations. However, Walk Me to the Distance complicates, at least in part, these theories regarding legal fictions because Patrick’s lynching takes place in the twentieth century, the Vietnam era, long after the establishment of laws to deal with his criminal behavior. Having been enthralled by Frontier Mythology, David and the rest of his posse ignore legal avenues for bringing Patrick to justice. Once they capture him, they lynch him with very little thought and hide the body. Thus, they embrace Frontier Mythologies of what Slotkin calls a “fantasy-West” (Gunfighter Nation 215) in which vigilantism is sanctioned under the guise of protecting the community.

Much like American soldiers who transgressed combat “norms” in Vietnam, the men in the posse are further bonded by the secret of their crime. And beyond the effect of male bonding, as Ersula J. Ore notes about the sociopolitical work that lynching enables, “[l]ynching was a call to communion, a performance of political affiliation akin to citizenship in the way that it distinguished those who belonged from those who did not” (21). Patrick’s otherness denies him fraternal belonging, citizenship, and, ultimately, humanity, which—except for Howard Dale, who objects and leaves before the murder—aids the men in justifying their actions. Rather than fear or remorse, David feel at peace with Patrick’s murder. With Patrick’s death, Sixbury amends her will, and David ostensibly replaces him as “rightful” paterfamilias and heir to Sixbury’s money and property. As Schillings argues in Enemies of All Humankind, the contestation between the paterfamilias and the invader, “who maliciously violates the bodies and destroys the lives of the innocent” (158) in a democratic state, determines the legitimacy of the paterfamilias’ position in society only through his agency in protecting his family from the enemy.

However, rather than read Patrick’s death simply in terms of his utter abnegation and defeat, one could also read his actions as an effective act of temporary agency, as he both reenforces and subverts the stereotype of the ineffectual, emasculated “retarded man” (WMD 127) through the very act of insurgency against the Slut’s Hole community. Regardless, soon word appears to have gotten around about Patrick’s death, and the entire community appears to support the posse’s actions by remaining silent. Joshua Lowe reassures David that the fact that he even considers the moral and ethical dimensions of Patrick’s murder indicates that he is indeed a “good man” (WMD 206). Further, during church service, the Lutheran minister’s sermon also seems to support the lynchers’ vigilantism as virtuous and morally justified:

“There are bad things,” he said, “and there are evil things in this world. But a bad thing need not be evil. A bad thing need not be wrong. Many a right action is unpleasant. God judges us as much by our intentions as by our deeds. Here, in this harsh environment, we must be men. Even our women must be men.” (WMD 136)

The minister’s observation that “even our women must be men” suggests that the severity of life the Frontier makes few allowances for what might be perceived as weakness, regardless of gender. His troubles seemingly over, for a while David can relax. Yet, Everett does not let him completely off the hook. His sense of closure is not complete even as the FBI ends its half-hearted investigation into Patrick’s disappearance, leaving him to wonder whether or when the case might be reopened. He also has to contend with the acute possibility of Sixbury’s death due to her ill-health or suicide. Moreover, there is the distinct possibility that state agencies will take more of an interest in David’s unsanctioned “adoption” of Butch. He wonders “[i]f Sixbury died, what would happen to the child? They’d take her from him” (WMD 198). Thus, Everett suggests that it will be a while before David can completely feel at ease in his new home.

“Life Upon This Earth is Warfare”

By the close of the novel, David has gone from being a lonesome drifter without a care for anyone else to a man who commits murder to exact revenge and ostensibly to protect his family and community. Nevertheless, Everett leaves David suspended on the Frontier of a largely mythic past and a very uncertain future. He thwarts and revises traditional tropes associated with Frontier Mythology, particularly Frontier violence, and other notions about the American West by creating metaphorical lines and sociopolitical significations that extend to David’s place in America as a Vietnam War veteran. The American West signifies for him a home—a geographical space—that enacts a newfound sense of self while forcing him to confront his and America’s notions of justice and “the American way of life” in the wake of an “unjust war,” US Cold-War empire-building, and sociopolitical upheavals at home. As is with almost all of Everett’s protagonists, at the end of Walk Me to the Distance, David’s existential dilemma on the American Frontier, just like the vexed afterlives of the Vietnam War, is never completely resolved.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.