Fiction review: Crossers

FICTION
The past has a way of clinging to troubled and haunted souls, and Gil Castle, the scarred protagonist of Philip Caputo's smart new thriller, "Crossers," wears it, Caputo writes, "like a second skin." It disturbs him that others don't. He lost his wife in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an event that commentaries claimed had changed the world forever. But it hasn't.

"It was important in America to move on, to avoid living in the past," Caputo writes. "That, Castle supposed, made him somewhat un-American."

At his adult daughters' insistence, Castle, a 56-year-old financial consultant on Wall Street, attends individual and group-therapy sessions, but it hasn't assuaged his suffering more than a year after the attacks. He still feels lonely, and he angrily rejects the therapist's hope that he consider acceptance his ultimate goal.

"Why should he accept the senseless murder of his wife by a gang of homicidal zealots?" he asks himself.

Finally, still haunted by memories of his wife, Castle quits his job and sells the comfortable house he and his wife had owned in Connecticut, along with most of their possessions. Then he drives out West with his dog as his only companion.

His destination: a cabin on his cousin's cattle ranch in Arizona, near the Mexican border.

The cabin is isolated, and Castle soon falls into a comfortable pattern of hunting and reading. His literary subjects are appropriately austere and instructive. Among them is Seneca, the Roman stoic philosopher, whose Latin prose Castle struggles to translate.

One passage that Castle gives up translating offers sage advice: "That correctness of character which you have maintained all your life, you will exhibit in this matter also; for there is such a thing as moderation even in grieving."

But Castle can't live entirely in the past, whether it's near or distant. The world has a way of pulling us back into the present, he learns one morning when he stumbles onto a Mexican border crosser lying hidden in a thicket. Castle, who doesn't speak Spanish, takes the man to his cousin's ranch house, where they soon discover he is harboring a dangerous secret.

The crosser had hoped to slip across the U.S. border and find work at a meatpacking factory in Kansas. But the plan went awry, and he and two other men found them selves carrying bales of marijuana into Arizona. When they reached the ranch of Castle's cousin, somebody -- a drug smuggler? a corrupt cop? -- killed the two men with whom the border crosser was traveling and stole the marijuana.

Now, with a murderer on the loose and a steep rise in the number of border crossers slipping through the ranch property, Castle has to ask himself tough questions. How many moral boundaries is he willing to cross? Would he kill a person to save his own life?

In answering those questions, Caputo builds brilliantly on the mythos of violence in the American West. A century ago, Castle's cousin points out, their grandfather would have dealt harshly with a man who killed two people on his property.

Today's West isn't "a Wild West that had never died but a West that had been tamed and then reverted to a new and more toxic wildness," Caputo writes.

In the new, toxic West, the drug lords have the upper hand, and ranch owners -- or their guests -- don't assert dominance over them lightly. Regardless of who instigates it, though, Caputo suggests, violence springs eternal.

Heady stuff, granted. But Caputo balances his thematic interests with strong action scenes and well-drawn characters, placing "Crossers" among the fall season's best fiction.

Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at http://www.thewag.net.