WILD WARRIORS

By John Skow

Al Capp's long-gone hillbilly comic strip, Li'l Abner, wasn't elevated humor, but it was funny, and that's pretty much the case with Zeke and Ned (Simon & Schuster; 478 pages; $25), by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Advocates for Native American rights will be flummoxed to learn that, as the authors tell it, Cherokees endured the Trail of Tears to the Indian Territory only to end up in Capp's Dogpatch.

McMurtry and Ossana set their story in the Cherokee town of Tahlequah, but it's Dogpatch, all right. Early in the novel the two Cherokee heroes, the legendary gunfighter Ned Christie and his pal Zeke Proctor, are drinking in Zeke's smokehouse as Ned nerves himself to propose marriage to Zeke's daughter Jewel. Ned stands up too quickly and bumps into a freshly butchered pig. "The sight of Ned smacking himself with a slab of shoat struck Zeke as hilarious...Zeke's funny bone was easily tickled, and when he had downed a quart or two of whiskey, he found plenty to laugh about." Yee-haw.

Whites, who appear to be leftovers from McMurtry's Pulitzer-prizewinning novel, Lonesome Dove, are no less crude. The local Beck clan is ruled by an ancient maniac named White Sut, who keeps a sow bear on a chain and beats the animal daily with a fence post. One day the bear breaks the chain, pulls off White Sut's head, and leaves it in the middle of the main road. This is widely regarded as a good joke. So is a courtroom altercation (12 dead, including the judge) in which Zeke tries earnestly to kill another lowbrow Beck. "Why dammit, I thought I had Davie choked all the way dead," he says, amazed to see a man he had just spent 10 minutes strangling rise up and wander down the street. "Usually when a man's eyes roll back like that, he's thoroughly kilt.'" It may be quibbling to object that Zeke does not sound very Cherokee in this passage. No matter; if Noel Coward could have written such scenes, he might have made something of himself.

--By John Skow