Noonday Arrows of Death : THE SHARPEST SIGHT, <i> By Louis Owens (University of Oklahoma Press: $19.95; 263 pp.)</i>

When the Vietnam war was on the Six O’Clock News and Walter Cronkite gave the nightly body count through clenched teeth, returning veterans were already trying to fit back into American life.

Attis McCurtin couldn’t do it, even though he was part Indian and his father, Hoey, tried to help with Chickasaw lore to clarify his identity. Attis knifed his girlfriend and ended up in the criminal ward of the local funny farm.

When he escapes, the authorities naturally thinkt his buddy, Mundo Morales, got him out. Mundo, the deputy sheriff, had played basketball with Attis and gone to ‘Nam with him--and had been his last visitor. But Mundo knows that if his crazy buddy escaped, he didn’t get far, because he has seen Attis’ body floating in the flooding Salinas River. Mundo wants to find Attis’ killer.

So far, the reader might think he is in Tony Hillerman territory, with a half-native cop and mysterious doings--in California, not New Mexico. But this novel, the first volume in the American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series (of which Gerald Vizenor is general editor), is more complex and more ambitious.

The story is complicated by vengeance on the part of the murdered girl’s father, who Mundo thinks instigated Attis’ death. Further complications include Hoey, who is also bent on revenge, hiding outside the father’s house with a loaded rifle. Also involved is the murdered man’s brother, who is sent to Mississippi to seek help from a medicine man uncle for Attis’ troubled spirit.

The story is told mostly from the point of view of Mundo, but includes those of other living characters and ghosts. Mundo follows one idea after another to solve the murder. The solution is not as important as the search. Mundo is an interesting protagonist--thoughtful, intelligent, searching--and the other male characters are well-drawn. These good ol’ boys enjoy beer, guns, hunting, cars and women, and are skillfully drawn, not generic. The women, even the elderly Chickasaw shaman, seem to exit only to dispense food and sex.

The metaphor of searching--for a body, for identity, for revenge, for understanding--gives the book more strength than a simple whodunit. Other images interact and reverberate through the story, as the Indian characters struggle to define and reclaim an identity that had been lost and distorted by the dominant culture.

Owens’ ambitious effort is revealed in the epigraph from Jonathan Edwards: “The arrows of death fly unseen in noon-day; the sharpest sight can’t discern them.” Even Mundo’s intelligent search cannot readily discern where the arrows of death originated.

The uncle and the Chickasaw witch act as a chorus, commenting on the action and moving the story along. The author reaches beyond the pure mystery genre by investigating the relationship of Anglo literature to Native America. Attis’ uncle comments that a white writer “was going to write all us people away.” The Chickasaw witch replies: “That’s what they’ve all been writing about for a long time. Even that boy in the novel I gave you, the one about the boy and the slave. Remember how the boy kept making up stories and they were always about death? They have a romance going with death, they love it, and they want Indians to die for them.”

The beauty of the writing and the power of the metaphors add to the book’s power. For example, when the brother finally finds Attis’ body: “In the middle of the clearing four small oaks had grown up together, their twisted trunks close and their branches woven into a single mass. Attis’ body lay cupped in the branches ten feet off the ground. . . . He began at once to climb the trees, bracing himself between the thin trunks and stemming upward until he could balance on the strong branches that held his brother like an outstretched hand. With his feet on parallel branches and his fingers gripping other branches, he worked his way out to the body.”

Despite the multitude of literary allusions as well as a confusing conclusion, “The Sharpest Sight” still works as a fine mystery. While it may not transcend the genre, it stands as an example of how thought-provoking as well as entertaining the genre can be.