"Do you think our life journey is vertical or horizontal?" a character asks in one of these stories, alluding to the work of another writer of New Orleans, Walker Percy, and his idea of the "vertical" search for transcendent meaning vs. the "horizontal" search for meaning in the world.

Aside from a few futuristic ventures into an underworld of "vegetable entities, mineral principalities, and mystic dominions," these stories mostly opt for the horizontal, moving characters on foot and by train, running and flying, toward an uncertain destination. "Where was I going?" one of them asks. "I had to keep walking to find out."

"It's time and past time to go," another observes, "to bang on the world and make it glow like struck prongs on a tuning fork. Give it all up and run." Alan Davis, a New Orleans native who teaches in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Moorhead, in seemingly straightforward language somehow manages to capture the earthy life of the Midwest and moister salty wonders of the "city of our dreams and nightmares, city of Lent and Mardi Gras, of discipline and dissipation."

People hop trains, move to Cuba, covet BB guns, go to jail, flee a sick girl named Lucy (by turns a friend, a daughter, a protagonist), teach English (and take a lover) in an Eastern European country, all to a soundtrack of Dylan, the Byrds, Paul Simon and John Lennon. And in the end, "I made it," one of them declares. "That was the thing."

"It was the world. I was in it."