FICTION

STREET by Jack Cady (St. Martin’s: $19.95; 212 pp.) Jack Cady knows his neighborhood, give him that, and a mean, grubby cloaca it is. A former truck driver and tree surgeon (now a college teacher), Cady lived in his car while researching “Street.” Dressed as a semi-bum, he prowled downtown Seattle by night, “watching how people moved, and where.” He’s got the terrain taped: teeny-bopper whores, men who “look like a tired pile of rags,” street preachers, Salvation Army bands, strip joints and their solicitors, “sharkskin dudes with sharkskin eyes who yell, ‘Home of the E-Cup,’ ” all illumined by “headlights spreading bright layers of glisten beneath colored signs of bars.” He’s learned the rules of the road, too: (1) “Keep moving”; (2) “Stay with the crowd . . . become isolated and you’re a target.” He sets a scene, Cady does, so real you feel the need of a shower. Unfortunately, setting a scene is not the same as telling a story. This one wanders, asking us to believe, among other improbabilities, in a serial killer of young women whose gender is cloudy: Is it a man or a woman; all of these, some of these, none of these? Or is it just a “demon”? Tracking the ghoul--one of their little buddies is a victim--is a quintet of many-splendored but murky drop-outs who squat in a de-sanctified cathedral. There’s Silk, a self-defrocked nun with breasts like “sacred chalices” (they “fall with the grace of poured water”). There’s Symptomatic Nerve Gas, a Korean War vet named for the phrase he shouts, over and over, on street corners. (“People mistake him for a nut,” Cady chides. Wonder why.) There’s Elgin, “misplaced in time,” a poet with “a mighty voice in a tiny body.” There’s Hal, “an English gentleman of a time before England had gentlemen,” who carries a sword and speaks Prince Valiant: “If we wind our skein with passion the untoward may happen; I fear mischance.” Finally there’s the narrator, gone gaga with guilt: The killer is a conspicuous consumer; the narrator has been an actor in TV commercials, debasing the sacred art of acting to sell goods. Oh, the shame! The responsibility! We pause now. . . .