God's Country by Percival Everett

"How did you become a tracker?" I asked. It was afternoon now, and our pace had slowed just a little. I was riding even with Bubba and the boy.

"How's a man become anything?"

"What kind of fool answer is that?"

He didn't say anything.

Then Jake asked him, "How did you come to be one, Bubba?"

"People was always trackin' me and they was always catchin' me, too. So I just started to watchin' 'em. Soon, they was catchin' me 'cause I was too busy watchin' 'em to keep runnin'."

Curt Marder comes home one day to find a group of outlaws burning down his house, killing his dog, and making off with his wife Sadie before running off. To find them he enlists the services of Bubba, an infamous tracker, but being in Bubba's debt makes Curt uneasy, because Curt is white and Bubba is black. ("It's 1871," Curt quips familiarly, "ain't you people ever gonna forget about that slavery stuff?") Nevertheless, the pair set off into the Wild West together along with a young girl, disguised as a boy, whose family was killed by the same marauders.

God's Country is, superficially, a Western: it's got saloons, whorehouses, trading posts, and long stretches of canyon and arroyo through which Curt, Bubba, and the girl Jake move. But at heart it's really a broad comedy, taking its cues more from Blazing Saddles than Lonesome Dove. (And I do mean broad: there's a character in this book named Colonel Rip Phardt.) Curt is an asshole and a cheat, but he's also a Mel Brooks-style schlemiel who gets into one comic scrape after another, usually barely escaping.

To me, God's Country felt fatally over-plotted; in 200 pages it manages to split the three travelers up a dozen times and sends Curt ping-ponging back and forth from town to the desert and back again. One second he's been buried up to his neck by hooligans, the next he's spying on General Custer dressed up in ladies' underwear at the bordello. The novel is aggressively fun, but something of its larger arc, if there even is one, gets quickly lost.

Through all of it, Bubba himself stands apart from the comedy as an avatar of grief and wisdom. In the passage above he makes it clear that his tracking ability comes from life as a runaway slave, and his simple dream--to own land here in the west--is promised to him by Marder, who has neither the intention nor the capability to deliver. The American West, for once, is a place of racial and cultural collision, not just between white and black but Native Americans and Jews. Perhaps the best thing about God's Country is that it rejects the mythos of the West as a place waiting to be tamed by white settlers, identifying it instead as a landscape being violently refashioned by people like Curt at the expense of people like Bubba and the Natives he considers allies.

In the hands of a white writer, you might expect this to be a novel about Curt's racial awakening; eventually, you think, he'll recognize Bubba's essential humanity, like Huck Finn. But one of the most interesting things about God's Country is that it's not interested in white growth at all. Curt ends the novel--spoiler alert--as he begins it, unable or unwilling to recognize anyone's humanity but his own, and in fact he clearly becomes even worse: realizing that he's inextricably indebted to Bubba, he decides he has no choice but to murder him. He shoots Bubba several times, but whether because Bubba's wearing a vest or for more symbolic-mystical reasons, Bubba rides on, delivering the novel's final assertion of dignity in the face of inhumanity:

"I'm goin' out there to make a life for myself somewhere. You done cheated me, lied to me, and killed my brothers. I ain't got enough interest in you to kill you. But I'm goin' down there, like I said. And you or somebody what looks like you or thinks like you or is you will find me and you'll burn me out, shoot me or maybe lynch me. But you know something? You cain't kill me."

I watched him ride away.