Books: Don Coyote

SCANDALOUS JOHN by Richard Gardner. 226 pages. Doubleday. $3.95.

“Yahoo!” the wing-mustached old saddle tramp yelled, reining up in the startled dude resort of Warbag, Colo. “I’m Scandalous John McCanless, and I’ve got the prettiest daughter, the fastest horse, and the ugliest partner in the district, and I’m a ring-tailed screamer lookin’ for a fight!”

Women clutched children to their skirts and men edged for cover, for all knew that Scandalous John was the meatiest waddie ever to ride out of the West—the 1960s West of tail-finned Cadillacs and fat farm subsidies, that is. Unhappily, his neighbors back home in New Mexico considered McCanless as loco as a headless road runner. He has embarked on history’s last Long Trail Drive, across macadam highways and through skyscraper-canyoned cities at the head of his herd—which consists of one aged cow with a plastic window in her side.

“You’ve Got to Cut Fence.” The grandson of a pioneer, Scandalous John was once a gifted college veterinary professor; after years of research he had succeeded in keeping a cow alive with a four-stomach picture window. But McCanless’ impersonal superiors didn’t care enough to look through it. Then John’s wife died. Then he lost his teaching chair after he took to packing a Colt .44 to class. He fell behind on the mortgage on the family ranch.

Over a bottle of sour mash with Houseboy Paco, McCanless succumbs to a vision. That ventilated cow out in the barn, Old Blue—she is actually a vast, milling herd of white-faced steers. Like a latter-day Don Quixote, McCanless lays out his inspired plan to Paco: “We grass-fatten the herd on the trail, and then we sell it at top market. And when it’s all over . . . we’ll buy each of us a scarlet sweetheart and honky-tonk our tails off.”

Soon Scandalous John and Paco, mounted on two broken-down nags, are relentlessly driving Old Blue up the Chisum Trail toward the distant stock yards. For weeks through sun, sand and storm, they plod onward, encountering temptation and incomprehension. Nearly everybody along the way tries to persuade John to desist. As for the neatly laid-out fences that block their path, he blithely cuts them. “If you want to get some place in this world,” he says, “you’ve got to cut fence now and again . . . The extent of a man’s fences is the extent of his fears, and there’s only two kinds of people in this world, the living and the afraid.”

No Monkey’s Man. On and on John babbles in some of the earthiest colloquialisms ever to come out of Goldwater country. On justice: “Jesus Christ in the Jimson weed, damned if they don’t expect the law to protect them from themselves—from confidence games, whorehouses, intoxicating liquor after Saturday midnight . . . and their own walking shadows.” On sex: “A man ought to have two women, one for bed and one to see the Haviland china don’t get chipped.” On finance: “It ain’t natural for money to breed . . . You get too much of it to interbreeding on Wall Street and you foul up the strain. You end up with more banks than you have carpenter shops and half the world an insurance company standing between the other half and God.”

Caught en route in a traffic jam, Scandalous John takes on a “hideously grinning” Buick with his bowie knife, and from then on things get worse. Author Gardner, 31, who lives on an island off Spain’s Costa Brava, explains that his inspiration for this first novel was the question: “What would the American knight-errant be like and what would be his fate?” His answers seem to be Scandalous John’s repeated cry, “I’m my own man,” and his bloody end on a city sidewalk in a confrontation with an uncomprehending guardian of the sanitary code. It’s probably just as well, in view of an alternative offered the hero along the way: a job developing a chimpanzee with a window in its stomach for use in aspirin commercials.