New Yorker Story Review: The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934

TheTree Line, Kansas, 1934 could be the location heading in a report.  And in fact the story is narrated by Lee, a retired FBI agent who has probably written hundreds of reports for the Bureau over his long career.   Lee is sitting around at his house on a lake “tweezing apart past scenarios that had ended up with (him) alive and others dead.” He is specifically looking back on a 5 day stake out in Kansas.  It was during the time when the FBI was making a name for itself catching criminals like Pretty Boy Floyd and Dillinger.  Even in 1934, Lee is a “hard-bitten” veteran of the FBI.  He and his inexperienced, know-it-all partner, Barnes, are waiting in the tree line on a farm.  The farm is the known hideout for Carson, a dangerous bank robber.  Barnes thinks they are wasting their time hanging out at place that Carson knows they know about.  And he tells Lee at every opportunity.  Lee, a man of few words does not scold him or tell him to shut up, although in hindsight he wishes he had.  He may have saved his life. 

The main body of the essay is structured like a report.  Lee numbers off the reasons why he should have known that day was going to go horribly wrong.  How his gut was trying to warn him.  Some of the reasons include everything from the movement of the sun, the look of the road, his partners impatient outbursts, and the wind: “Any experienced lawman knew that the wind rising like that had to mean something.”  And sure enough his gut is right.

But this story is not about the arrival of Carson at the farm, in fact, disappointingly, the shoot out with Carson and his thugs is only mentioned in the last line of the story.   This story is about perception.  Lee reflects on the perception of time after a long stake out: “surveillance compressed time, tightening it in—days of inaction punctuated only by occasional shit breaks, piss breaks, smoke breaks and drink breaks, food breaks and stretch breaks interrupted only by small, inconsequential peripheral actions observed.”  This “compressed” perception of time during long periods of doing nothing, can affect you.  Your body and mind can fail you when they are suddenly called into action.

 This story is also about our perception of events that occurred long ago and how time can skew those events.  Did Lee really have a gut feeling that told him there was going to be trouble that day?  Or, looking back, has he just imagined this gut feeling where there was actually nothing but boredom?  Was this imagined gut feeling a product of his guilt for inaction in a time of crisis?  For an experienced law man like himself that sort of failure must be hard to live with.  So he takes the tiniest of details from his five days at the farm and compiles them into a “gut feeling” that he failed to act on.  Perhaps, in a law man’s mind, having a gut feeling that you were slow to act on is better than having no inkling of trouble at all.

The best part of this story was how well the author, David Means, got inside the head of a retired FBI agent.  The kinds of experiences and details that the author put into the story made me believe that Means had been a law enforcement officer.  At the very least he has done significant research into the history of law enforcement in the US.

I also appreciated how Means crafted his story about the details of a stake out that don’t make it into the genre novels or Hollywood movies about this time in American history.  A normal story about this event would include some details about the stake out, but just as a way to build anticipation for the climax: the violent shoot out.  Means does the opposite.  He builds the entire story around the monotonous details of a five day stake out, and excludes the action at the end.  It is a unique yet somewhat anticlimactic take on the 1930’s crime story.

Below is a shootout from a movie about Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd from the 70's, in case you, like me, were craving some pure old fashioned unadulterated action after reading David Means short story.

Soupy out.