Jackson Free Press

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — When Jamil, a Muslim terrorist in a Jackson, Miss., sleeper cell, researches a target for a surprise attack, he goes to the library and is inspired to turn his eyes westward.

"In a volume with an unusual question for a title, "Saving Louisiana?" he was relishing a chapter that dramatized the failure of the levee system, one single lock and dam on the Mississippi River. Such mayhem unleashed, New Orleans gone, its harbor destroyed, boozy, infidel Cajuns swirling in fury, clinging to smashed mobile homes and jet skis. The lives lost, the dollars consumed numbered as stars above the Hindu Kush."

Jamil is just one of the characters in this collection of often quirky, dozen stories from Steve Yates, a Missouri native who now is assistant director/marketing director at the University Press of Mississippi.

How quirky?

The story featuring Jamil is titled, "The Green Tomato Marquesa's Night of a Thousand and One Triumphs." In it, the wayward Pakistani Jamil loses his focus when he meets a plump librarian who is a follower of the "Green Tomato Marquesa," who is a columnist with a female fan club very like the Pulpwood Queens or the YaYa Sisterhood. When Jamil's handlers send another terrorist to get him back on the righteous path, all sorts of cross-cultural misunderstandings ensue.

Quirky does not mean bad, not at all.

This collection was awarded the Juniper Prize for Fiction by the UMass Press. Yates might plead victim of location: the stories are set in the Missouri Ozarks, in Mississippi and in Louisiana, and quirky is in the water in these places. It's better to have some issues, some romantic issues, some sexual issues.

In "Hunter, Seeker," a police detective accesses his childhood memories to help him track down

"Ether Eddie," a perverse breaker-and-enterer who is a voyeur and uses ether to knock out his teenage victims, always girls. "Eddie" never touches his victims, just watches them until they are almost awake again, then slips away. The detective remembers a game he played as a child growing up in the Springfield, Mo., neighborhood where the assaults occurred — hunter, seeker. "Eddie" is going to some of the same spots the detective remembers, getting into the houses using the same secret entrances. Could it be? .

One of the more memorable stories, not just for plot but for clear and elegant writing, is also one of the less quirky. Instead, it's a bit kinky.

In "The Fencing Lady," a handsome young highway department employee and engineer named Dale is charged with overseeing work, supplies and equipment on a Missouri project after "the prime contractor had gone bankrupt, taken everything and everyone to court, won, then returned to complete the job."

When Patty Pincher, "the sole person in charge of fencing," shows up, Dale must monitor her work and keep account of her use of materials, including fence posts.

At first, Patty doesn't seem like Dale's type.

"A large woman stood at the tree line. She wore a white button-down blouse with the sleeves torn off. The woman raised a double-handled post digger and crammed the twin scoops into a hole at her feet. Tan muck dribbled from the scoops as she pulled them from the hole. Her red-speckled arms were wide and muscular. She planted the digger in the hole and stared at Dale. Two half-moons of sweat circled under her breasts. Her straw yellow hair hung straight around a tanned face."

When Dale does Patty a favor, she pays him back with sex. Pretty soon Dale finds himself tangled up in an unlikely relationship. He knows there's something wrong happening, but he figures he's too smart and well-educated to be tricked by the likes of Patty. He learns his lesson in a Flannery O'Connor-like denouement.

Kinky is fine, and in Yates' hands, so is quirky. Besides, who wants to read about an accountant whose big excitement is finding an errant entry in an accounts receivable ledger.

Something like that is just what happens in the New Orleans-set "Forgery," where a graphic designer and his boss at an adult toy marketing firm on St. Charles Avenue discover that the company they work for has changed owners without their knowledge. "No one sells out from under me. Without even the decency to say so," the boss, Carla, says.

"What do you plan to do?"

"Let's just say you're not riding the streetcar home anymore."

This is a collection aimed at adults who pay attention when they read. Don't expect Yates to spoon-feed you anything. Reader participation is required here. Do it and you'll be rewarded.