How I Came West, and Why I Stayed: Stories

In 13 stories, Baker delights in placing ordinary, plain-speaking characters in extraordinary circumstances. The bounty hunter of the title story tracks cheerleaders in the mountains of Montana: ``What the manatee is to the naturalist in the mangrove swamp, what the race car is to the Hoosier, what the tornado is to the Kansan--that is what the cheerleader is to the Montanan. Cheerleaders are Possibility, they are Chance, they are Fate; they are beauty, and grace, and poetry.'' In other pieces, a white, Southern six-year-old describes her new classmates: black, Siamese twins joined at the heart; and on the eve of her death, ``the world's foremost authority on the lesser flamingo'' spends a last moment observing her beloved birds as they honk, express affection and boredom, spread their wings, scream, preen and groom. A child of white explorers/hunters in the Arctic, who lives in total isolation, recounts how she ate her parents' corpses after they died of starvation (``I never loved them more than when I carved the most nutritious portions . . . from their still-warm flesh''); and a scientist tries on makeup and imagines himself as a woman when a friend announces that he's changing his sex. Amusing and spirited, if underdeveloped, this debut shows promise. (June)