A Madness Under the Skin : JUMPING SHIP <i> By Kelvin Christopher James</i> , <i> (Villard: $19.00; 227 pp.) </i>

The best of these stories by the Trinidadian Kelvin Christopher James are irresistible in the hungers they portray. Irresistible not just because the hungers are so powerful but also because they know so exactly what they need.

There is a little boy avid to prevail over his bigger brother; an adolescent in a tropical storm of sexual desire; and a forest recluse bound to revenge himself upon a squatter woman who has rebuffed him. For the besotted Adams in James’ Eden, temptation is no temperate-zone apple, but a guava aglow in its instant of ripeness and demanding to be consumed then and there.

Five of the 15 stories in “Jumping Ship” are set in rural Trinidad; the others mostly take place in New York. Some of the New York stories are very good, but at this point, the antic and incandescent voice of this novice writer shows best on the island where he grew up.

James’ subject, in most of the stories, is the young male; specifically, the young Caribbean male. The blood rises in him uncontainably; he is violent, bull-headed, naive, led and misled by longing, and defeated. In New York, defeat tends to come at the hands of the cold and complex city; in the Trinidad stories, the vanquisher is usually a woman. Woman appears variously as temptress, matriarch and wielder of voodoo mysteries. Ultimately, all these are the same; what seems like enchantment to the blood-blinded male is a essentially the woman’s wide-rooted grounding in the tangible world.

In all this, James has found a sweet comedy that modulates the shock with which he plunges us into the desperate passions of his protagonists. He knows, for each age of man, just where that desperation lodges.

In “Littleness” it is an 8-year-old’s choking need to get the best of his older brother. Nothing much happens one morning when their mother is away at church and they are alone; yet it is an entire history of oppression and revolt. Nipi has been waiting for days for an orange to ripen on the tree in their garden; he sees a bird flutter toward it and steals his older brother’s favorite marble to shoot at it with his sling. Diram, the brother, harangues him and takes the orange; Nipi goes for him and is punched down. He sneaks back, spits on the orange, and gets chased, dissolving in tears and hiccups. More than anything, a younger brother longs for power. “He went on his way wondering which pointlessness God had invented first, hiccups or being little.”

For an adolescent boy in the tropic heat that James all but personifies as a goading tormentor, desperation is sex. Gerrad is in a state of barely subcutaneous madness eased only by furtive manual relief. In this brilliant story--marred only by an exaggeratedly grotesque ending--Gerrad zigzags around town in diligent pursuit of unbearable temptation. Or, as James writes:

“On the spur of the moment, he’d alter any program for routes female in potential. Alert as a stare, he prowled about clothing stores with their suggestive mannequins and piles of slinky underthings, and bookstores with racks of revealing women’s magazines, and the jumping upper seats at stadiums, and women’s wash-day clotheslines. Wherever there was a chance for a feminine charge, Gerrad tried being there.”

James uses the ajar rhythm and tilted-up phrases of Caribbean English to suggest character and circumstance, as music can do in a film. In “Open Conflict,” Strong-Boy, a young man torn between his sexy girlfriend and a mysteriously powerful market-woman--wakes up early. “Outside, the air was shrilling with the first calls of early birds and croaking roosters claiming day’d be cleaning soon.”

In “Circle of Shade,” the brute-like yet vulnerable forest hunter has taken a buccan (ham) as a courting token to a woman who farms a clearing. The woman, who also wields odd powers, has her son empty a chamber pot over suitor and ham. “Sonny boy,” the bushman rages, “tell yuh mother I jus’ want friendship. Is all.” His fury turns plaintive, his fierceness loses force. “The buccan was a kitchen present. Is too much pride to foul good food so. All you shouldn’t do ting so.”

The New York stories, for the most part, are gritty accounts of drug runners, robbers and others living on the edge. In one, a holdup man hands his loot to a woman who steps out of a phone booth just as the police close in. Another of James’ mysteriously empowered women, she will keep it for him till he gets out of jail.

In another story, a half-dozen assorted toughs hold up a vest-pocket park on Manhattan’s East Side, relieving the well-heeled loungers of wallets and jewelry, and courteously returning a necklace to a young woman whose escort claims it to be an heirloom.

The best of the Manhattan stories is a beautifully detailed and desolate account of a young man who makes his way up in a street drug gang. The tensions, routines, bits of warmth here and there, and murderous duties are told with such naturalness that the horrific climax--a teen-age runner is executed just outside his school--has the momentary quality of a hallucination. Only a sentimental contrivance at the end tends to mar the story.

A number of the New York pieces have a contrived feeling to them, relying on some single oddity or snap ending. At this stage, it is James’ voice and the scenes he evokes that mark his talent. His stories are not yet as good as his telling of them; but in the splendid Trinidad sequence and in one or two others the telling is everything, and much more than enough.