Bad boys and black sheep

In this multicultural collection of ten new stories, Robert Franklin Gish ranges through settings as diverse as the contemporary California coast and the ghost-haunted hills of Oklahoma Indian Territory, exploring the complex intersections between myth and personal choice, intentional mischief and fate-driven misadventure. His "bad boys" and "black sheep" are men of all ages and backgrounds - Indian, Hispanic, African-American, Anglo - who come to a crucial moment of existence when they must confront the consequences of their past. In "Namesakes," the impoverished Oklahoma farm family awaits a visit from the notorious James Gang, with whom the dying father once rode and from whom he hopes against all hope for money that will save his desperate family. The black high school teacher in "Nueva Entrada" comes to Albuquerque to escape Midwestern racism and his own cocaine addiction. But - like another black man in New Mexico, the sixteenth-century Spanish explorer Esteban - he discovers that his seemingly simple neighbors are more than they seem and that cunning comes in many guises. In "Truth or Consequences," a professor finds respite from the responsibilities of his career and his wife's chronic illness in a secret hideaway in a small New Mexico town, where he goes fishing and enjoys an illicit affair with a charming Hispanic woman, until fate confronts him with the consequences of his careful, self-centered plan. And in "Code Three" two young men, one a college dropout and the other a famous movie star, race toward their shared destiny in California's ever-shifting Earthquake Country.