o, a bit grizzled from long gestation, here is the Jack Dann road ode at last, worth the wait. Australians saw Counting Coup last year, under the title Bad Medicine; but the book has been edging down the birth canal for a lot longer than that, maybe a decade or more. This is not necessarily a problem. Counting Coup is a book set and written in the same century, the 20th. It is a time traveler, a tale of lives becoming significant within the frame of an era which still permitted that sort of tale about America, an end story.
Just exactly when, however, the road ode of Charlie Sarris and John Stone actually occurs, we are not actually told, though internal evidence suggests that the two men at the end of their tether must have lit out somewhere between (say) 1975 and (maybe) 1995. Charlie is 66 and is a war vet—so the unnamed war he's a veteran of could be either World War II or the Korean War, probably the latter; 1970s indicators like bellbottom trousers and intact elm groves happily cohabit with signs that it's all happening a couple of decades later, like the 1992 cop car Charlie and John steal; and, gradually coming into focus through the mists of time, the various interstates the men take are never identified as such until very close to the end of the book.
So. It is October, in Johnson City, a hardscrabble ex-industrial town along the Pennsylvania border in New York State, just west of Binghamton. (The Binghamton campus of the State University of New York,
not mentioned in Counting Coup, is in Johnson City.) Charlie Sarris has been chewing up his mediocre life. He is a glorified janitor in a building which was once the law offices of Nathan Isaacs, who has retired to Florida. He has emphysema. He has a wife 22 years younger than he is, and children by her, who need everything teen-age children need. He goes on binges. He resents everything and everybody. He remembers his young manhood, with a poisonous nostalgia for the women he screwed, the liquor he drank, etc. He is a loudmouth and a boor. Walter Matthau could have played him in the movie (too late now, Walter Matthau is dead).
The odd thing about Counting Coup is that Walter Matthau could have also played John Stone, the drunken Indian medicine man and/or savant who temporarily occupies one of the rotten little rooms for which Charlie janitors. If there is an underlying difficulty to the book, it may be precisely that: that its two protagonists are all too similar; that they're not an Odd Couple, and Dann can't play them off each other. John is almost as much of a blowhard as Charlie, and he's a bad drunk, though he distinguishes himself from Charlie by attempting to elevate his "shenanigans" into a kind of holy fool/berserker/bad twin Indian behavior called heyoka. Eventually Charlie goes heyoka too, so that distinction is lost. But John Stone does differ in one significant fashion: he does magic.
Over the course of a few days, everything goes sour in Johnson City, including a vision-quest session with local Indians, designed to send a young man on a vision quest, and which Charlie attends; unfortunately, an enemy of John's lays a kind of geas upon him, which infects Charlie as well. The two men become, as it were, more intensely the bad parts of their lives and personalities, and seem to be losing any sense of having lived human lives worth recounting. Charlie's laws—bits of bull sagacity about life happening in threes; life always charging double for any happiness; success in life being attainable only once, and if you lose you've lost for good—seem to start to bite.
The importance of being American
But the book has just begun. It is a road ode. The two men light out in a stolen car. First they go west, but double back away from any genuinely mythical territories out there, and head south instead. They reach Maryland, after several hair-raising escapades-gone-sour, where they are taken in by John's enemy's wife. Charlie sleeps with a young white wannabe, and the book comes intensely to life, for the sex they have, which is beautifully recounted, is of epiphanic intensity.
If this is what the title is all about—John defines counting coup as touching "the enemy with a coup stick, and that was like killing him, even though you didn't"—then counting coup is not simply an adolescent game of dare but an attempt to act yourself into something like reality, into the real story of things. Counting coup is the magic of being where you are. Nothing is the same after.
The two men continue south, because their enemies (Isaacs and the other medicine man) live in Florida, and both Charlie and John must lift the curses that are souring their old age. But the tone has changed, and despite a certain diminution of the thrill of being on the road as the obliteratingly invariant I-95 carries the two men numbly down the coast, and despite a losable prank with a Cessna, we begin to enter an end story where the land and the lives, the magic and the drunkenness, become one thing: would it be altogether too nostalgic to call that one thing being American?
It is hard to say. It is possible that Jack Dann thought he was writing a romp, all's well that ends well. It is, however, far more likely that he intended Counting Coup to work as something of a song of triumph, for his two protagonists, the janitor and the magus, who began the book as victims of late 20th-century American life, end as sayers of America. One of them may be dead by this point, but his spirit has literal wings.
This is dangerous territory, and not all the pitfalls are dodged. There are cod-Whitman touches throughout in the book, deafening shouts of delicacy; and Dann has a habit of signaling his readers (you can almost see him waving) when he wants us to notice a good bit. In the end, however, it is impossible to resist the old buzzards and the story they live, the America they become, the pulse they touch, the coup they count, way back then, before time shut the road in our faces. Goodbye, guys. It
was good.
