There’s some sort of paradox in this new novel’s notion of a group
of Navajos—a people famously averse to trucking with the
dead—playing “death metal” rock music. As there is in the title’s
contradictory, punning notion of “living decay.”

To those notions, add images of Indian toddlers with water-spout
ponytails, skillet-wielding drunken cattle-rustlers, glorious Monument
Valley sunrises and head-bangers in mosh pits, and you have a sense of
the stew of contemporary reservation life that Warren Perkins serves up
in his affecting new novel.

Putrefaction Live opens with James Claw, 24 and fed up with
his girlfriend and his dead-end job, fleeing Flagstaff to regroup at
his family’s ranch near Ganado on the Navajo reservation. Son of an
Anglo father and Navajo mother, James spent his childhood on the
reservation, but he harbors conflicted feelings about the place. On one
hand, the ranch and geography offer a timelessness and freshness that
could help blow out the bar-scene smoke and attitude he’d acquired in
Flagstaff. On the other, the reservation and town carry memories of
childhood rejection (for being half white) and of the murder of a close
friend.

James has few driving ambitions, but he aspires to one thing:
assembling a band to play rock music. To that end, he goes to town to
visit old his high school and music buddy Nolan, where he runs into
Angie, whom he’d known since elementary school. Now married and the
mother of two, Angie is still attractive. Her husband is off in the
military, so Angie—along with Nolan—becomes James’ social
set, and part of Perkins’ action.

This novel, by Flagstaff physician Warren Perkins, might suffer a
few digs in a fiction-writing workshop, but its appeals well outweigh
its deficiencies.

For one thing, what Perkins creates feels authentic. He paints
Navajo culture with respect, affection and humor, but he doesn’t
airbrush it. Sprinkling the text with Navajo words and phrases, he
includes conventions of social interaction. (Custom would dictate that
James call Angie “auntie”; she, him, “son.”) Perkins observes wryly
that the grounds around a liquor store near Gallup is called “Navajo
Beach,” for the number of passed-out folks who could be found
there.

He also creates a convincing sense of a musician, with knowledgeable
descriptions of chord progressions, thematic development and “sleep
composing.”

A major theme in the novel is the idea of the colonization of native
lands, but Perkins pulls off “political” without polemics. After a
short, unsuccessful venture in the booze- and drug-distribution field,
for example, James takes a job with the U.S. National Park Service,
leading tours at the historic Hubbell Trading Post. He initially
delivers the government-issue view of history, but as tourists’
questions get more far-fetched (how closely related are Navajos to
Chinese?), and misconceptions more outrageous (according to the Book of
Mormon, Navajos were a tribe kicked out of Israel), James begins doing
a little research—and maturing—on his own.

Perkins’ plot development is a little sketchier.

The primary plotline is driven by James’ struggle to find meaning
and love in life, and follows a natural path. But Perkins also
introduces side- or subplots to which he is not always as faithful. In
one chapter, Nolan, who’s been exhibiting increasingly self-destructive
behavior, disappears after an alcohol-fueled concert frenzy in Phoenix.
The next chapter changes scene, and we never return to the Phoenix
action. Nolan just shows up again later. Likewise, what should have
been the climactic moment of the novel is told in
flashback—after we know the outcome of the suspenseful
scene.

That said, the foray into the world of James, Angie, Nolan, their
collection of Navajo toddlers and Max, James’ cowboy Indian cousin, is
well worth the read. Perkins’ Four Corners descriptions are vivid; his
narrator’s voice is inviting; his cultural insights are rich; and he’s
painted a character we care about in the nonsmiling, black-T-shirted,
horn-sign-throwing death-metal musician who can round up cows and quote
Thomas Jefferson on keeping the Indians’ history away from the
Indians.

Oh, and then there’s the final paradox of the image of this Navajo
death-metal musician heading off to his day job in his U.S. National
Park Service uniform with its Smokey Bear hat.

But James weighs in on that for us. Checking himself out in a Park
Service mirror, he says, “I see by your outfit that you are an
asshole.”

Gotta love him.

This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2009.