In Wyoming, broken lives

THE Wyoming rancher whose voice we hear in Percival Everett’s latest novel, “Wounded,” is one of those soft-spoken, self-contained, superbly competent men who seem to abound in books about the cowboy life.

John Hunt knows how to repair a broken PVC line, flush late-season rattlesnakes from a stack of hay bales, dose a horse with de-worming paste, hammer together a shelf in the tack room and put a wounded moose out of its misery with a Weatherby rifle.

Everett, an English professor at USC and author of 16 books, including “American Desert” and “Erasure,” conjures up Hunt in a few deft passages, and we see that he’s not quite so competent at coping with the loss of his wife, Susie. She was killed six years earlier when she was thrown from an unbroken Appaloosa, an accident for which he feels responsible. “I honestly think she was trying that horse so I would see her as brave.” Work is a kind of drug with which Hunt seeks to kill the pain of that loss.

“I missed my wife and I knew that wouldn’t go away,” he confesses. “I honestly didn’t want that feeling to pass.”

Hunt is suddenly drawn into a human drama after a gay college student is found in a remote canyon near his ranch -- “strung up like an elk with his throat slit,” said one local, and “stretched ... out like Christ,” according to another. The chief suspect is one of Hunt’s ranch hands, a young man named Wallace Castlebury. “Wallace wasn’t completely inept,” observes Hunt, “but he was as close as a man can get to it and still be alive.”

The murder abruptly turns “Wounded” into a hard-boiled mystery in an unlikely bucolic setting. The ugly incident injects an unaccustomed note of menace into the lives of men and women who are quite used to other kinds of predators. “Wolves ain’t nothing compared to a sick person,” says one of Hunt’s neighbors. And Hunt, who is recruited by the local sheriff to act as a go-between for the friendless suspect, refuses to be co-opted into championing Castlebury’s cause.

“I told myself, and therefore it was no doubt true, that I was not much impressed by Wallace Castlebury’s predicament,” he says. “By my reckoning, killing another person made someone a bad man.”

Hunt is an appealing figure, wholly suitable for this hybrid that Everett has so expertly fashioned out of the mystery and cowboy genres. He loves a good antelope steak or a bowl of elk stew, but out of concern for his health, he reluctantly samples some sausages made of processed soy protein. On principle, he refuses to set foot in the McDonald’s, the Wal-Mart or the church in town. He is known locally as the “black rancher,” but he insists that’s merely a matter of convenience and not racism.

“I supposed had I been extremely handsome,” he cracks, “I would have been the ‘good-looking, black rancher.’ ”

“Wounded,” in fact, is multicultural, in a mostly relaxed and endearing way. Hunt, for instance, is plagued by a stray mule that has wandered off the local Indian reservation and taken up residence on his ranch. When Hunt asks the owner to retrieve the animal, he declines. “You ever see an Indian riding a mule? Not even in the movies,” retorts Daniel White Buffalo. “It’s nice here, and why? No mule.”

We are always mindful of the investigation driving the plot, and the crime that provokes both racist and homophobic reactions in the Wyoming backwater where it takes place. Indeed, for a book that starts so rhapsodically -- and rewards the reader with so many moments of love and laughter -- “Wounded” is full of shocks and surprises. Significantly, some of the most unexpected plot twists are unrelated to the murder.

That’s why “Wounded,” as its title suggests, is as much about the healing of broken hearts as it is about solving a mystery. Hunt is drawn out of his self-imposed isolation, both physical and emotional, and forced to confront the awful crimes that human beings are capable of committing. Yet by the end of the story, he responds to to some of the exalted and exciting connections that human beings are capable of making. *