Books: Drug traffic jam

By John Ziebell

Meet Uriah Walkinghorse, protagonist of Rick DeMarinis' eighth novel--lover, drinker, cheerful underachiever. Long past his days as a competitive bodybuilder, Uriah quit his day job as a crane operator to avoid sending a third of his salary to his wife, who ran off with a rookie NASCAR driver. At 42, Uri has a subsistence-level career as the resident manager of a seedy apartment complex, unplugging toilets and chasing away paint huffers for free rent and margarita money.

In a moment of alcohol-influenced bad judgment at his local bar, the Dangling Modifier, Uri befriends Jerry and Mona Farnsworth, a seemingly benign yuppie couple who run a dominatrix studio from their exclusive home. Uri is providing talent for one of Mona's acts when the client, El Paso's most prominent banker, cashes in. A wealthy heart case dropping dead in a whore's shower is the last predictable thing that happens in this book. Soon Uri is involved not only with the dead banker's wife, but with a unique and marvelously unlikable cast of narcotics traffickers and henchmen. It doesn't take our hero long to determine that he has somehow incurred the wrath of the narcos, and it's only a chaotic chain of coincidence--or a miracle, depending on one's belief system--that saves him from a shallow grave in the Mexican desert.

There are some informative riffs here on the most lucrative of border businesses, which is not muling but money laundering. It's this upscale end of the trade that Uri finds himself at cross purposes with. Drug lords are rich, of course, and the rich are different from the rest of us--they not only have more money, but all the perks that come with it, such as the freedom to behave badly with impunity.

"You're an expendable kind of guy. You have no value," a crooked financier named Trebeaux tells Uri when explaining why he was set up. "It's not a philosophy. It's a description of reality."

DeMarinis' villains, from muscle through management to Amazon hitwoman Clara Howler, share a gleeful malevolence that makes them almost spring off the page. They're so morally blemished that it's hard to tell the bad from the really bad among them, but one thing is for sure: Nobody's innocent, and in this world a strong self-defense plea does credible duty as virtue.

This isn't just a crime novel, though crime sets the narrative pace. There's a love story as well, sympathetic and dysfunctional, involving Uri and Jillian, the banker's widow--who also may have been the banker's murderer. And Uri has family concerns. He's one of five racially diverse and abandoned siblings, ranging from a sister who can't quit cigarettes to a brother who can't quit heroin. Their adopted father, Sam, won't let doctors remove a brain tumor for fear he won't be able to see Jesus anymore. Mom is about to reach meltdown, and Uri seems to be the only one who can connect all the familial dots.

I don't want a discussion of story to slight DeMarinis in any way. After nearly 30 years in the business he remains a writer's writer, a generous and darkly funny voice, his love of language undiminished and his commitment to craft unimpeachable. Sky Full of Sand manages to tell a good story and show off at the same time, and a book that smart is its own reward.