Border Trilogy 3 CITIES OF THE PLAIN - Cormac McCarthy

Written by Cormac McCarthy
Read by Frank Muller
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 128 Kbps

Cities of the Plain is the final volume of American novelist Cormac McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy”, published in 1998. The title is a reference to Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:29).

Plot summary
The story opens in 1952. John Grady Cole (the protagonist of All the Pretty Horses) and Billy Parham (the protagonist of The Crossing) work together on a cattle ranch south of Alamogordo, New Mexico, not far from the border cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico. The ranch’s owners are kind, but face an uncertain future in a dying industry. Recently devastated by drought, cattle ranches around El Paso are struggling and may be claimed by the Department of Defense, through eminent domain, to become military areas. Though the cowboys barely make a living, John Grady and Billy love life on the open range, and John Grady – as detailed in All the Pretty Horses – is a master at training horses. Billy is an excellent tracker.

During a visit to a brothel in Juárez, John Grady falls in love with a young, epileptic prostitute, Magdalena. The couple plans to marry and live in the U.S., and John Grady renovates an abandoned cabin, turning it into a home. But Magdalena’s brothel is run by Eduardo, a formidable adversary also in love with the young girl. Billy attempts to dissuade John Grady but feels obligated to help the couple.

On the day of the planned escape, Magdalena steals away from the brothel to meet John Grady at a crossing of the Rio Grande, but Eduardo becomes aware of the plan before Magdalena could succeed. Eduardo’s subordinate Tiburcio murders Magdalena by cutting her throat. After John Grady finds her body in the morgue, he faces Eduardo in a knife fight. Though John Grady kills Eduardo, he is mortally wounded in the fight. He survives long enough to contact Billy, who hurries to comfort John Grady before his death.

After John Grady’s death, a short epilogue—not unlike the conclusion of Blood Meridian (1985)—details, in a few pages, the next several decades of Billy’s life. After drifting across the Southwest for many years, working ranches and living in hotels, Billy, homeless, takes shelter beneath a highway underpass. There, he meets a mysterious man who tells him about a convoluted dream. Though the man denies it, Billy suspects he is Death. However, Billy survives the meeting with the man and finds shelter and a new life with a family who takes him in.

Digitally Enhanced in order to fix audio recording Speed/Pitch/Tone as much as possible so that the recording sounds like the late legend, Frank Muller himself. He had many variations on his voice depending on what he was reading, so I had to try and fix the recording to match the type he was using for that book, ie fast and upbeat or low and measured, (like the difference between his reading of John Grisham legal thrillers and Stephen King and cop thrillers with mafia voices and Silence of the Lambs or Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles) and the year, as he sounded different in the early 80s than he did in late 80s and 90s and 2000s. Many recordings out there have severe audio issues which stem from the digital source which likely stems from a bad cassette transfer, which I have endeavored to fix so that Frank can be heard as he actually was. Noise, Bass/Treble etc have also been tuned, along with Audio level being normalized to -3db top end max with a maximum boost of +2.5db for lower volume areas. Audio encode frequency is 44.1KHz at 128Kbps Stereo for best quality with no compression artifacts (unless source was low quality to begin with and noise couldnt be completely removed). Many of these were very bad and I have done the best I can over 12 years working on these to restore them once I discovered Frank Muller in 2010, 2 years after he passed away. Long Live THE LEGEND