55 Miles to the Gas Pump

by

Annie Proulx

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Rancher Croom Character Analysis

Rancher Croom is Mrs. Croom’s husband, a cattleman on a rural Wyoming farm who is described initially as a “warm-handed, quick-foot dancer” who brews his own beer. However, this pleasant, unassuming description is at odds with both his violent suicide—a leap from a nearby cliff—and the revelation that he is a serial killer of women who stores corpses in his attic and uses them sexually. He is powerful, brutal, and almost animal in certain moments—“parting the air with his last roar” when he jumps from the cliff—but, although the reader learns little about his inner life, his suicide suggests a more complex emotional experience than is apparent from Proulx’s description. In Proulx’s loose retelling of the “Bluebeard” folktale, he is the Bluebeard figure, killing women without reason, forbidding his wife to enter the room full of bodies, and ultimately suffering a deadly fate.

Rancher Croom Quotes in 55 Miles to the Gas Pump

The 55 Miles to the Gas Pump quotes below are all either spoken by Rancher Croom or refer to Rancher Croom. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Isolation and Rural Life Theme Icon
).
55 Miles to the Gas Pump Quotes

Rancher Croom in handmade boots and filthy hat, that walleyed cattleman, stray hairs like the curling fiddle string ends, that warm-handed, quick-foot dancer on splintery boards or down the cellar stairs to a rack of bottles of his own strange beer, yeasty, cloudy, bursting out in garlands of foam…

Related Characters: Rancher Croom
Page Number: 251
Explanation and Analysis:

… then steps out, parting the air with his last roar, sleeves surging up, windmill arms, jeans riding over boot tops, but before he hits he rises again to the top of the cliff like a cork in a bucket of milk.

Related Characters: Rancher Croom
Page Number: 251
Explanation and Analysis:

Mrs. Croom on the roof with a saw cutting a hole into the attic where she has not been for twelve years thanks to old Croom’s padlocks and warnings, whets to her desire …

Related Characters: Rancher Croom, Mrs. Croom
Page Number: 251
Explanation and Analysis:

… she can see inside: just as she thought: the corpses of Mr. Croom’s paramours – she recognizes them from their photographs in the paper: MISSING WOMAN …

Related Characters: Rancher Croom, Mrs. Croom
Related Symbols: Newspaper
Page Number: 251
Explanation and Analysis:

…some desiccated as jerky and much the same color, some moldy from lying beneath roof leaks, and, all of them used hard, covered with tarry handprints, the marks of boot heels, some bright blue with remnants of paint used on the shutters years ago, one wrapped in newspaper nipple to knee.

Related Characters: Rancher Croom, Mrs. Croom
Related Symbols: Newspaper
Page Number: 252
Explanation and Analysis:
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Rancher Croom Quotes in 55 Miles to the Gas Pump

The 55 Miles to the Gas Pump quotes below are all either spoken by Rancher Croom or refer to Rancher Croom. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Isolation and Rural Life Theme Icon
).
55 Miles to the Gas Pump Quotes

Rancher Croom in handmade boots and filthy hat, that walleyed cattleman, stray hairs like the curling fiddle string ends, that warm-handed, quick-foot dancer on splintery boards or down the cellar stairs to a rack of bottles of his own strange beer, yeasty, cloudy, bursting out in garlands of foam…

Related Characters: Rancher Croom
Page Number: 251
Explanation and Analysis:

… then steps out, parting the air with his last roar, sleeves surging up, windmill arms, jeans riding over boot tops, but before he hits he rises again to the top of the cliff like a cork in a bucket of milk.

Related Characters: Rancher Croom
Page Number: 251
Explanation and Analysis:

Mrs. Croom on the roof with a saw cutting a hole into the attic where she has not been for twelve years thanks to old Croom’s padlocks and warnings, whets to her desire …

Related Characters: Rancher Croom, Mrs. Croom
Page Number: 251
Explanation and Analysis:

… she can see inside: just as she thought: the corpses of Mr. Croom’s paramours – she recognizes them from their photographs in the paper: MISSING WOMAN …

Related Characters: Rancher Croom, Mrs. Croom
Related Symbols: Newspaper
Page Number: 251
Explanation and Analysis:

…some desiccated as jerky and much the same color, some moldy from lying beneath roof leaks, and, all of them used hard, covered with tarry handprints, the marks of boot heels, some bright blue with remnants of paint used on the shutters years ago, one wrapped in newspaper nipple to knee.

Related Characters: Rancher Croom, Mrs. Croom
Related Symbols: Newspaper
Page Number: 252
Explanation and Analysis: