Easy Driver

By R.Z. Sheppard

YELLOWFISH by John Keeble

Harper & Row; 310 pages; $11.95

Yellowfish is a searching novel of the contemporary Pacific Northwest that relies on an unchanging principle of the American adventure yarn: free, capable men enjoy bending the law, especially when they can keep moving at high speed. The book's title is slang for Chinese immigrants who illegally enter the U.S. Its hero, Wesley Erks, is heir to the frontier spirit, a man with "an eye used to sighting down a fence line and the barrel of a shotgun." But Erks is also a thoughtful man for whom yellowfish begin as a commodity to be hauled for pay and end as tragic figures on a par with the vanishing Tlingit and those galloping gourmets of the Donner Party.

History haunts Erks as "trails of blood, a web without geometry, a tangle of routes." His present is also lethal and complicated. He must drive four Chinese aliens over the Canadian border into Washington State, detour through Reno and deliver his human cargo in San Francisco. One of the Chinese is bleeding to death from a mysteriously inflicted knife wound. Another, by the name of Ginarn Taam, is being chased by the Triad, a sort of Oriental-American Mafia.

Taam's is a Godfather story with some new wrinkles: he was born in San Francisco where, during the 1960s, he owned a Marxist bookstore. The conservative Triad sends an arsonist who destroys the shop and also incinerates Taam's wife. Taam then kills the Triad torch and flees to Red China, where he becomes a respected party member. After seven years, his return to the U.S. is negotiated as part of a deal to sell a Reno casino to the Triad. They are not to be trusted.

Despite such intrigues and atmospheres, Yellowfish is no ordinary thriller with grand scenery and exotic characters. Novelist Keeble, 35, a teacher and rancher from Medical Lake, Wash., is out to evoke an entire region. His eastern Washington, "a country of high desert, sage brush, pine, rivers and basalt extrusion," is a palimpsest of Indian legend, the ragged footprints of pioneers and the restless ghosts of Joaquin Miller, Frank Norris and Jack London.

Erks' territory is also a modern land scape of bleak mining towns, rundown homesteads and rural junkyards. Keeble resonantly plays the present against the past, especially in descriptions of Erks' dangerous drive over the mountains and across deserts. There are intensely perceived set pieces: a dog battling a possum; a woman reassembling a carburetor with Zen-like grace; a Snopesian funeral in a field littered with rusty tractor parts and dominated by the sight and smell of a huge pig roasting on a spit.

Keeble's prose can get a bit steamy, especially when he intends to foreshadow ominous events. But once on the road, the author restores the tired abstractions of great Western space and silence with fresh feelings of motion and flight. Both animals and men are hunted in this hard though never heartless book. The prey die with fierce dignity and the predators do not gloat.

--R.Z. Sheppard

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