We knew from the start that Barnstormers was going to be a tragedy of sorts. This is a story, after all, set in the time of G-Men shootouts, not long before the notorious ending of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Chestnut by posse. These were shooting times (not that America has ever escaped shooting) when the public zeal for justice was only outmatched by people’s cheering for the anarchic underdog. Hell, the last page of the first issue of Barnstormers promises the deaths, not only of its protagonists but of the robber barons pursuing them.
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What the first issue has not presaged is that very sense of underdog support. With a body count made only of wealthy opportunists behind Tillie and Bix, the fly-for-hire spitfires of the Florida air show can’t help feel anything but camaraderie; even if it isn’t trying to be, Barnstormers is as much a book about class warfare as it is a story about running from the law.
The cool, calm trick the book plays is along the same line as that pulled in No Country for Old Men, supplanting the criminal protagonists with the lone hero whom the book has always, truly, been about: our old, tired lawman. As with No Country, the audience isn’t even given the satisfaction of seeing the outlaws end; it happens off panel, off camera, as if to hammer home that the ends of well-meaning criminals aren’t so important.
What matters is the story remaining, the survival tale of a law disgusted with its own workings and failure to resolve things in any way but with blood. Throughout the book, we’ve felt ex-Pinkerton Zeke West dragging his feet. This last manhunt of his career is a resentment, an obligation he does not agree with. He is a tired Lefors, one savvier of the power of retributive myth than he is to make his final collar.
That neat, powerful twist allows the reader to believe a better ending than might be probable, as in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: it offers Bix and Tillie a potentially happy ending but it does not guarantee it. Like any American Dream, it is more fiction than reality. In a country more concerned with the loss of wealth than the loss of life, Barnstormers can only suggest a happy ending despite declaring itself a tragedy.
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