25 pages • 50 minutes read
55 Miles to the Gas Pump
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Character Analysis
Rancher Croom
The story’s first paragraph focuses on Rancher Croom and contains a wealth of details that shed light on his character. With his “handmade boots and filthy hat” (Paragraph 1), Croom appears to live a hardscrabble life that he compensates for with frenetic physicality. He is quick-footed, whether dancing or running “down the cellar stairs to a rack of bottles of his own strange beer” (Paragraph 1). He drinks to excess, he races around on his horse, and one night, he steps over a cliff. Even that does not immediately subdue his vitality, as everything from his arms to his clothing is in motion as he dies. In fact, it is not wholly clear that he does die, as the first paragraph ends with a description of Croom “ris[ing] again to the top of the cliff like a cork in a bucket of milk” (Paragraph 1)—whether literally or figuratively is unclear.
The story’s second paragraph reveals more about Rancher Croom: He was a serial murderer of women for many years, judging by the decayed state of the bodies Mrs. Croom discovers in their attic. He channeled his explosive energies not only into dancing, drinking, and riding his horse but also into murder and (implied) rape. This fact prompts further reflection on Croom’s “roar” as he steps over the edge of the cliff—i.e., whether it is a cry of rage, remorse, horror at what he has done, or horror at a world where one can commit such crimes, over and over, with no repercussions. The story encourages rumination on such questions, particularly The Dangerous Effects of Isolation on the human mind.
Mrs. Croom
In the second paragraph, the narrative voice adopts the perspective of Mrs. Croom, who matches her husband for tenacity. The parallelism of the paragraphs’ opening words—“Rancher Croom in handmade boots and filthy hat,” “Mrs. Croom on the roof with a saw cutting a hole into the attic”—indicates a connection between them despite, or perhaps because of, the gruesome goings-on in their home. Mrs. Croom saws, chisels, and hammers at the roof, sweating as she peels back a “ragged slab peak” to look in and finally satisfy her curiosity as to what Croom has been hiding all these years (Paragraph 2). Her reaction to seeing the bodies suggests a woman inured to horrific sights, or to her husband’s violence, or to the brutalization of women in her sociocultural milieu: “just as she thought: the corpses of Mr. Croom’s paramours” (Paragraph 2).
Mrs. Croom’s frank assessment of the situation indicates a matter-of-factness likely acquired from years of hard living with no room for sentimentality. That she considers the dead women Croom’s lovers also speaks to her internalized misogyny. Rather than empathize with the women, she considers them rivals. Assessing the battered, decayed condition of their bodies, she shows a keen eye for detail but no compassion. Moreover, she had her suspicions, even reading reports of missing women in the paper, but neglected to alert the authorities. On the other hand, it is possible that she too was physically or sexually brutalized by Croom; it’s hard to imagine that she didn’t at least fear him, having guessed his proclivities (that she was not an outright accomplice seems clear from the fact that her husband barred her from the attic). In a remote area with few social or legal recourses, she would have had to remain focused on what she needed to do to survive.
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