Far West: Tom McGuane's short fiction

Tom McGuane's story The Driver in current New Yorker raises questions and hackles, which I believe is good - a story that truly comes to a conclusion but leaves you wondering and a bit puzzled or troubled is one of the strengths and beauties of the short form. Story gets off to a little bit of a weird start as we quickly, in one para, learn the history of a three + generations of an old Montana family, now into serious money and social snobbery thanks to the minerals and energy boom, with the third or youngest generation failing to live up to family name and tradition and expectations - and then we jump back to the boyhood of the child of the youngest generation, the one we know will sell the land a vanish - and we see him with his mother at a visit to the school principal, who recommends he be moved to "special education," at which the social-snob idiot mother bristles and mother and son storm out of the meeting. The mother, very oddly, drives off w/out her son and doesn't realize this until she's half-way home - pretty improbable, if you ask me, but still - stories are built on the odd and infrequent. The child starts to walk home, gets completely lost - again, a bit unlikely, but he is a troubled child with some kind of learning disability, so maybe his spatial relations are poor; a man - the driver of the title - picks him up and offers him a ride home and we sense trouble immediately. The child is to shy and inarticulate to tell the man where he lives, how to get him home - they drive around aimlessly for a bit, the driver gets frustrated by the lack of communication, orders the child out of the car, then changes him mind, child finds a gun in the glove, driver tells him to put it away, gets a little harsh - and then is stopped by a sheriff's roadblock and booked on a kidnapping charge. Yes, that is possible - but I do find it hard to believe that the man would drive around all over town with the kid - not try to get help from the police or some authority more quickly. We learn almost in an aside that the accused killed himself in prison - which could happen, wonder if he had some background that made him more likely to face conviction? - and we learn nothing more about the child - other than the glimpse forward from the first paragraph. So there seems to be a vacuum at the heart of the story: what happened to him? What happened to the family? Perhaps McGuane tells us in other stories (or chapters?) - but it's another strong installment in the opus he has built over many years about modern-day life in the Far West, far different from what we conventionally think of as Western fiction.