Wrapped In White Linen

By John Skow

TITLE: STREETS OF LAREDO

AUTHOR: LARRY MCMURTRY

PUBLISHER: SIMON & SCHUSTER 589 PAGES; $25

THE BOTTOM LINE: The winding down of a grand American legend offers a vision of dust and death through a golden haze.

The never-fail first-line test worked just right for Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove (1985), one of the half-dozen or so best novels ever to come out of the American West. Here's how McMurtry started off: "When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake . . ." You can't stop reading there. ". . . not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over. The sow had it by the neck, and the shoat had the tail. 'You pigs git,' Augustus said, kicking the shoat. 'Head on down to the creek if you want to eat that snake.' It was the porch he begrudged them, not the snake."

Without any fuss, that established the here and now of the done and gone, which happened to be the last years of the cattle drives. Now it's, oh, 15 years later, maybe 20. Here's the start of the sequel, Streets of Laredo: " 'Most train robbers ain't smart, which is a lucky thing for the railroads,' Call said. 'Five smart train robbers could bust every railroad in this country.' 'This young Mexican is smart,' Brookshire said, but before he could elaborate, the wind lifted his hat right off his head."

The man can't keep his hat on? Right away you know he's an Easterner, just as you understand that Call knows what he is talking about. Call is Captain * W.F. Call, onetime Texas Ranger, like Augustus McCrae, his partner in their Hat Creek outfit until McCrae died of stubbornness. Captain Call, getting old but tough as a boot, is a bounty hunter now. He still acts like a Ranger officer, however, and when the assignment comes to deal with the train robber Joey Garza, he wires Pea Eye, another old Ranger. He just assumes that Pea Eye will show up as if he were still under orders.

But Pea Eye is middle-aged now, with five kids and a wife. He can't say no to the Captain, but love and good sense tie him to his family. In a jumbled kind of way, he manages to honor both obligations, and everyone heads toward the Mexican border and the winding down of McMurtry's beguiling legend. The author's minor characters are sketched with a fine, loose skill; there's an old Indian tracker named Famous Shoes, and a white man who has spent his life roaming the Southwest with a pack of dogs, killing off the region's bears.

A second villain appears from over another horizon -- that of the future, perhaps. He is Mox Mox, not so much a Western badman as a modern serial killer who likes to burn people. And Garza, the bank robber, is shown to be as shrewd and ruthless as Call in his prime, and much quicker. Ranger or not, Call is really too old for this kind of thing.

McMurtry, a valuable, observant writer in his other fiction, is a couple of sizes better than that here. A muzzy golden haze -- perhaps just sunset through the dust thrown up by the hooves of horses and cattle -- surrounds the two books. This is not just legend mongering, although the author mongers better than most. The second novel is the lesser; no more, really, than a respectful conclusion. But in Streets of Laredo, as in Lonesome Dove, McMurtry plays fair. Evil is evil, death is death. Gone is gone. And though it is far more frightening, he manages to look old age in the eye.