Little Brother : BUFFALO NICKEL, <i> By Floyd Salas (Arte Publico Press: $19.95; 347 pp.)</i>

“Buffalo Nickel,” the autobiography of Oakland novelist Floyd Salas, may be one of the most remarkable memoirs of the decade, not least because the people who live the sort of life he’s seen seldom have the verbal skill to record it.

Salas was born in Colorado in 1930 to a working-class Spanish family. There were four children besides himself, and his father’s search for steady employment led them to move to Oakland when Floyd was still a little boy. His father was a tireless worker, and eventually became a successful restaurateur; his ailing mother was revered by all the children as a kind of saint, but she lacked the strength to keep close watch on her brood. As a result, the children--except for the oldest brother Eddie, who put himself through college--mostly raised themselves on the streets.

Floyd, the youngest boy, was powerfully drawn to his brother Al, nine years older. Al was one of those kids with too much energy for his own good. He couldn’t keep out of trouble, but his perennial hustling and grand-standing, combined with his good looks, generated an excitement that made him irresistible to both men and women. On top of which, Al could handle himself with his fists so well that he was virtually swept up into the career of professional boxer. The trouble with Al, though, was that he couldn’t really return all the love showered on him, especially the devotion of his adoring little brother Floyd. Always desperate to keep out of the clutches of the law, and later to raise enough money to feed his heroin habit, Al simply could not spare the time or energy to care for others as they cared for him.

Salas establishes the paradigm of his lifelong relationship with Al in a neat little vignette early in the book. One day at the gym, Al coaxes Floyd to fight another boy’s younger brother. It is one of those rituals that are supposed to prove the courage and manliness of a particular clan, but all little Floyd gets out of it is a broken nose. To make it up to him, Al gives him a Buffalo nickel, then rides Floyd home on the handlebars of his bicycle. But before they get into the house, with Floyd’s nose still dripping blood, Al asks him for the nickel back.

“Buffalo Nickel” is one of those books whose power is hard to suggest with just a brief quote. Its overwhelming impact comes from the accumulation of an immense amount of detail, composed of the sights and sounds and daily rhythms of underclass life in mid-century America. It is reminiscent of James Agee’s classic portrait of Alabama sharecroppers, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” in the way it makes you live moment to moment almost as if you are inside the skins of its illiterate, inarticulate characters.

Salas’ hard-hitting, no-frills style of prose is just what is called for here. As we watch Al sink further and further into the nether world of Oakland’s petty street crime and bunco rackets, it would be easy for Salas to lose the reader in the sordidness of his subject were he not also able to convey the intense weight of reality that pins these characters to their miserable fates. In the way he captures the grim inevitability of repeated failures, he conveys something more than the tongue-clicking pity that is usually reserved for such characters, and at times hits an authentic note of tragedy.

Salas succeeds in arousing our compassion for these characters by revealing, beneath their belligerent boasting and close-lipped swagger, a core of vulnerability. One such moving scene occurs when Floyd, unseen by Al, watches his brother getting ready to be released from the county courthouse: “He rubbed soap between his palms as he stood up against the iron bars. The jail office was a clean, pale green. Al had on his cabdriver’s uniform of olive-drabwool, short-waisted Eisenhower jacket and pants, very much like the army uniform he used to wear. I hoped he’d look up and see my face in the hall window. But he never looked over. He didn’t look at anybody. His face was stiff and silent, wounded, as if his pride was hurt, as if he was deeply angry about being bossed around. But he kept his anger down inside the jail, because he knew he was getting bailed out. I’d rarely seen him like that. Al wouldn’t take anything from anybody. I was afraid he’d lost his job, too.”

If Al’s life is an endless series of hassles that usually revolve around making money, Floyd’s dilemma is of a much more philosophical and moral nature. From the beginning, Floyd finds himself torn between wanting to emulate Al--in fact, he becomes quite a good semipro boxer himself--and trying to live up to the example of his “perfect” brother Eddy. Like Al, Eddy proved his courage by learning to fight with his hands, and like Al, Eddy served in the military during World War II. But Eddy went on to become a successful pharmacist in San Francisco, taking on a portly, genteel appearance, and bringing pride, not shame, to the family name.

It is Eddy’s influence that leads Floyd to go to college and to work diligently at the craft of writing. But Floyd always finds himself more drawn to Al’s world--the back rooms filled with pot-smoking con artists and incipient beatniks--than to Eddy’s world of bourgeois respectability. Floyd’s confusion is heightened when it turns out that Eddy is gay; it is an even worse blow when Floyd discovers Eddy’s body on the floor of his apartment, a suicide because he could no longer deal with the hypocrisy of pretending to be a model of American manhood.

The story grows increasingly dark. Al sires child after child, because each new mouth to feed also means an increment in his welfare check. Al then blows the additional money on more drugs, and it is left to his father and his brother Floyd to see that his family is not cast out on the street. Each time Floyd helps Al, Al betrays him yet again, at one point even managing to lose the apartment building their father has purchased for both their families. It hurts Floyd that Al “didn’t go all out for me like I did for him,” but nothing Al can do, even punching Floyd in the face, can make Floyd respond in anger. “Floyd wouldn’t hit his brother,” a mutual friend explains. “He’s a Biblical character.”

Perhaps the most painful part of the story--and it is a story that probably has been re-enacted a million times--is to watch Al’s children fall victim to the same drugs-and-crime lifestyle that has laid his own life and talents to waste. Three of his children commit suicide, and a fourth dies of infected heart valves from shooting dirty heroin. The wife of one of his dead sons and the boyfriend of his dead daughter also commit suicide. Later, after Al and his wife divorce, his new girlfriend commits suicide. Altogether Salas witnesses nine violent or untimely deaths among those close to him--which must be a record of some kind.

What redeems this story, in the end, is the passionately committed love Salas asserts throughout. Salas not only insists that we are our brothers’ keepers, but also that salvation, if it comes from any where, must come through the blood ties of family, the only ties that can weather the endless buffeting of poverty, cruelty and the struggle for survival that take their toll on so many in our society. It is also a book about fear and how it is overcome--a theme aptly developed in the many boxing scenes, which are the best since Nelson Algren won the title in that genre with “Never Come Morning.” Salas, however, has an edge that even Algren lacked, since he can write authentically from the boxer’s point of view. The book climaxes with the description of a boxing match between the two brothers that is simply stunning both for its power to engage the reader and for its gut-wrenching honesty.

“Buffalo Nickel” has flaws, to be sure. The cast of characters is so large that it is easy to get lost among them, and most are not nearly so well-developed as Al and Floyd. At times Salas is so close to his subject that his emotion grows shrill, and one senses that he still has grudges to settle.

Yet overall it is one of the best portraits ever painted of the flip side of the American dream. “Buffalo Nickel” is a thorough and thoughtful chronicle, not of those airy creatures of medialand, for whom things always turn out right, but of those for whom things mostly go wrong--which is to say, the majority of us. We can only hope that our own private disasters--mistakes and mischances and broken hearts--find as sympathetic and articulate an apologist as Floyd Salas.