Draw A Hard Line, by Michael Jimerson

A tale of a Texas hero who teeters atop a ridge between tragedy and redemption.

Is enough enough? Or is any too much? Ya basta! EJ Kane, the hero in Draw A Hard Line frequently tries to answer the question as he rides a rollercoaster plot (as opposed to his daughter’s horse, Sunshine) during which he must solve the murder of a teenage girl, survive a harrowing skirmish with an Aryan gang, and deal with a relapse into drug addiction by his pregnant daughter. EJ’s character brings new meaning to description “tortured soul,” as he gallops through the novel’s pages as a modern day Texas Don Quixote. His adversity is both physical and mental, from a constantly buckling arthritic knee to enduring a reoccurring guilt associated with the death of his son and the blame cast upon him by his divorced wife. And EJ never makes a good first impression. When he shows up to rescue a woman chained to a bomb, she refers to him as “a geriatric cowboy with attention deficit disorder.”

Not to disparage his excellent, fast paced plot in Draw A Hard Line, Jimerson’s greater talent resides in his complex characters. They provide the narrative with a solid foundation, giving meaning to the lives affected by the story line. There are many of those characters: an ex-wife, a drug addled daughter, an old employer with Alzheimer’s, a mentor, a protégée, a movie star, and even a high school friend turned nemesis. All of these characters have lives outside the story’s action, lives deep with suffering and joy, as well as confusion and redemption. Jimerson achieves a remarkable feat by including these tangential storylines without interfering in the slightest way with the novel’s narrative drive.

One character in the story has no complexity. That is G.H. Burton, a villain so evil that no character dimension could possibly exist in him. Jimerson uses Burton’s malevolence brilliantly to set in stark relief the depth of the other characters who interact with him. On several occasions Burton tests EJ’s sense of right and wrong. Early on, while complex images spring through EJ’s mind about his son Konnor’s death, and Rebecca’s blame of EJ for it, EJ comes across Burton in a back hallway. Burton’s language and attitude tempt EJ to kill him, something that might absolve him for the role that Rebecca thinks EJ played in Konnor’s death. EJ’s experience is that, “This time, he wouldn’t fail Rebecca. His legs seemed rubbery, yet he rose and kept moving, wishing to put emotion behind him like a foul stench he could walk past.” And then, much later, after Burton has murdered Sheriff B.B., EJ is tempted again while holding his gun to Burton’s head, thinking, “The man’s existence made a cruel joke of everything good and right in the world. The mere act of G.H. Burton drawing air disproved any favorable view of human nature. Evil, like what consumed Burton, lived within the confines of humanity, filling their souls with a vile cruelty.” But EJ’s memory of what he told his son just before he was deployed as a marine, helps EJ not to pull the trigger. He’d said, “Remember who you are.” Draw A Hard Line is full of scenes just like these small explorations of the provocations morality must face in a person’s life. EJ’s expression of his take on these challenges is beautifully set forth by Jimerson as, “In one day, he had been drugged, abducted, made to stand in gallows for hours. Also, the truths underlying his life had been challenged. Challenged by a man he couldn’t trust. B.B. had fabricated falsehoods all their lives, and yet the new piece ordered the puzzle. However, the more it came into focus, the more the whole thing presented a greater enigma than ever.”

Assigning a genre to Draw A Hard Line would be a futile exercise. Yes, the story is thrilling. And the novel is also a mystery. But those are hollow categories for a narrative that drives its characters through an expertly depicted percipience that arises when doing the right thing spills into the real world. In EJ’s words, “Evil knows no limits, forcing hard men, lawmen and women to hold fast. Not knowing if the threat is behind or in front of us, nor all the sources and extent of inequity and depravity in the world, we have to draw a hard line, prepared to fight ahead or behind us.” Page after page, Jimerson writes this kind of beautiful prose. And page after page his protagonist teeters atop a ridge between tragedy and redemption. One should expect no less from an honorable Texas man.