The stories in Scavengers are about people fighting to gain or hold onto some good. For the six-year-old heroine of "Dixie Lee" it is innocence, threatened by her kidnapper. Gilda, the young English teacher of "Scavengers," disappointed in love, wants a baby by artificial insemination. Middleton, the bumbling and incorrigible romantic of "Following Keats," seeks love in Italy. In "Fish or Fowl" Isabel Larkin, lost...