FICTION

THE ROAD TO BOBBY JOE by Louis Berney (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $24.95; 154 pp.) . Louis Berney knows how to begin a story. Just a couple of paragraphs, and we’re right beside a Laotian busboy being incited to violence in a New Orleans restaurant. Or a girl chattering to keep her father awake as he drives nonstop from Oklahoma to California in 1940 in search of work. Or an elderly white man confronting suspicious blacks in the park where he played as a boy. Or a former Washington Post reporter, numbed by divorce, scouring Europe for weird stories--chickens’ heads exploding in a heat wave and a 300-pound opera singer threatening to leap to her death from a tower--for his new employer, a supermarket tabloid.

The endings are a different matter. In about half of these 12 stories, Berney pulls his punch, dissipating some of the force he has built up through good dialogue, insight into his characters and a talent for describing places as various as a prison waiting room, a topless bar and a pet store remodeled into an indoor jungle. In some of the remaining stories, on the other hand, the endings are nailed down a little too emphatically.

Berney’s touch is surest in “One Hundred Foreskins,” the story of a part-Indian slaughterhouse worker in Oklahoma City who falls in love with the daughter of a wealthy white man who recruits him to play baseball. The youth works exhausting extra shifts to earn money to marry her; the bigoted father frustrates his every effort. The time, again, is the 1940s; the mythic form recalls some of William Humphrey’s Texas stories, such as “The Last of the Caddoes” and “A Job of the Plains,” and the final tragedy seems both startling and inevitable.