Safe With Her in the Darkness : EASTER WEEKEND <i> by David Bottoms (Houghton Mifflin: $17.95; 198 pp.; 0-395-51528-9) </i>

In 1979, Robert Penn Warren judged the Walt Whitman Award for the Academy of American Poets and declared David Bottoms that year’s winner for his collection of poems, “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump.” “In Bottoms’ vision the actual world is not transformed but illuminated,” Warren said, “and in his language the tang of actuality whets his compelling rhythms.” Fitting words to describe Bottoms’ poetry, and they can be used to describe his fiction as well.

In the opening chapter of “Easter Weekend,” we are introduced to ex-boxer Connie Holtzclaw as he sits in an abandoned lodge in Macon, Ga., with a naked college-aged boy who is chained to a radiator across the room. The walls are pock-marked and drab. They depress Connie more than his Airstream trailer. But just as soon as he and his brother Carl collect the ransom money for the kid, Connie plans to put the trailer and its dreary walls behind him.

Carl, a handsome bully, is 10 years older than Connie. Clearly, the kidnaping was his idea, and he has convinced his younger brother to help him. Carl’s financial worries include an $8,000 debt to local mobster Tommy Wilcox, but he also has a penchant for what he considers good clothes, fine wine and high living.

Connie’s hunger is less flashy. He pines for a secure future with his girlfriend Rita Estes, a waitress at the Waffle House who aspires to be a professional painter.

“For a year or so he’d thought he could do that by letting guys punch him in the ribs and the face, but he was wrong about that. . . . Fighting was nowhere. Rita hated it. And once he figured that out, he hated it too. If it wasn’t the way to Rita, why take all the hurt? Now here was a chance, crazy as it was, a chance that might give them a real start.”

But Rita has slept on occasion with an accomplished painter named Charles Maddox, a man in his 50s who, Connie is convinced, is using her, getting her hopes up about an artistic talent that Connie does not really believe she possesses in the first place.

In the midst of all this human longing, we are introduced to Pop Ledford, a homeless old man whose three chapters in the book are a portrait of acceptance of his lot in life. He lives in a forgotten above-ground grave behind a magnolia thicket in Rose Hill Cemetery, not far from the river and the railroad tracks where other “hobos” camp.

But Pop keeps largely to himself, scavenging for food in the Dumpsters of local restaurants, or else lifting cassette tapes out of parked cars and pawning them for 50 cents apiece. Of his meager possessions, he owns a Walkman tape player on which he plays only gospel recordings. Pop’s memory is largely gone, but when he listens to this music he sees again a red-haired woman in front of a church pulpit.

“He liked watching her hand flutter like a white moth over the page of the hymnal, rising, zagging, falling. It was writing some kind of message on the air, words you could see being written but couldn’t read. It spelled something invisible that touched the eyes of the congregation, lit up their faces, and came out of their mouths as song.”

Bottoms paints a gentle picture here. When Connie is out on a break from kidnap guard duty, he spies the old man in a Dumpster outside the Waffle House and offers to buy him supper. We see a gentle side of Connie as he gives Pop a brand-new button-down shirt that belongs to Carl so the street-filthy old man will be allowed into the restaurant.

There is an instant rapport between Connie and the old man. Over hamburgers, fries and coffee, we learn that Connie is on parole for a theft conviction; his parents were killed in a Montana car accident that occurred with his hard-drinking father behind the wheel; his brother Carl--mean as he is--raised him, even moving to Georgia so that Connie would not be put into a foster home. When, in some of this novel’s last calm moments, the old man talks of cruelties he has encountered, as well as kindnesses like Connie’s, one of the novel’s essential truths is revealed:

“ ‘Some people are all right,’ Connie said.

“ ‘Sometimes they are, sometimes they ain’t. It’s a mix. I seen a bunch of ‘em, and it’s a real mix.’ The old man drank the last of his coffee and wiped his beard. ‘And that’s the problem, ain’t it?’ ”

Devil and saint, dark and light, the faithful and the faithless. As this story’s action accelerates, he examines this dual nature of ours with gentle and controlled, yet compelling, poetic vision.

“Easter Weekend’s” epigraph is a line from Walt Whitman:

“Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave, let him know he has enough.”

But there is a passage from one of Bottoms’ own poems, “Coasting Toward Midnight at the Southeastern Fair,” that would serve his novel equally well:

“We all want to break our orbits,

float like a satellite gone wild in space,

run the risk of disintegration.

We all want to take our lives into our

own hands,

and hurl them out among the stars.

This is certainly the risk the Holtzclaw brothers are taking. And because of the author’s willingness to go deep with thematic detail, there is not a single one-dimensional character in this story, including Tommy Wilcox’s goons. All are utterly believable. But it is the portrayal of Connie--fighter, ex-convict, petty thief, jealous lover and now kidnaper--that is so impressive. Not only do we find ourselves rooting for him, but liking him too, wishing him all the best and wincing at his mistakes in judgment. Rita tells him, “You never think two goddamn steps ahead,” and she’s right. It is this same lack of forethought that leads dangerous Tommy Wilcox to Carl.

With the mob now actively involved in the kidnaping to insure Carl’s debt payment comes through, the reader is catapulted into a high-stakes, life-or-death drama that is firmly grounded in vivid detail.

“The darkness threw a chill into Connie that raised the hair on his arms and sent a quiver into his groin. This was all the bad darkness of the past, the suffocating dark of his mother’s closet, Carl’s laugh coming through the door, then fading off for hours. This was that darkness and many others, and with them the hot concrete dark of the county jail, the constant stench of urine, the sick fear. It started to come back to him now, that sick panic, but he fought it with another darkness, a good darkness, the kind he and Rita crawled into together. He thought of the way it closed out the rest of the world so that there was only two of them, together and totally alone. That was a darkness he liked a lot, and they’d have a lot of that in Montana, the good darkness that closed out everything else. And every good darkness would break into a good light, into open land running to clear rivers and big mountains, into wide sky.”

Bottoms does not take the safe or easy route. This dance between light and dark, hope and glory, the risking of death for new life, all takes place in a literal time of rising from the dead: Easter Sunday. It is to Bottoms’ credit that this fact never hits the reader over the head. We are as deeply involved in the weekend’s crucial events as Connie himself. There is little time to notice or reflect upon such cosmic symmetry, and when we do, it only adds poignancy to the mysterious shadings of the human soul explored here.

This is a profoundly successful novel. Its unflinching gaze into one hungry heart from America’s underclass leaves us blinking not only in the new light of understanding but also in the familiar light of self-recognition.

There are few writers who can fairly call themselves poet/novelists; the late Robert Penn Warren could, as can Jim Harrison, Denis Johnson and James Dickey. There are others, but not many.

With the appearance of David Bottoms’ “Easter Weekend,” his name on this short and exclusive roster is assured.