Mayo begins his new collection with a brief tale and utterance made by an elephant trainer at a zoo: "It's said," Beasley says, "an elephant won't pass by a dead elephant without casting a branch or some dust on the body. A kind of homage, I suppose." In a variety of ways, the twelve stories that follow are tributes to characters who find themselves on the fringes, at the sides of roads. In "When the Moon Was Ours for the Taking,"...