Do You Believe in Cabeza de Vaca?

``The future--somebody's got to reinvent it,'' sighs a character in one of these 10 collected stories about lives in varieties of disrepair. Swan ( Of Memory and Desire ) conjures up the personalities in ``The Old Hotel'' with succinctness (``He was a man of brief enthusiasms and quick discouragement'') as a drifting menage acts out a fated history. Although thematically unified by their characters' search for meaning and continuity, both historical and psychological, the stories are uneven. Two that demonstrate the author's ability to convey entangling emotions are ``Venus Rising,'' about a widower's attempt to make up for past indifference to his wife and ``In the Wilderness,'' depicting a 58-year-old rugged individualist's first experience of love. (Apr.)