Mister, most stories about people are sad. The ones about animals sometimes turn out all right, but not them about people,' muses a character in master storyteller Paul Ruffin's yarn of obsession and quest 'In Search of the Tightrope Walker.' Raging against this fated sadness-and often against a deadening and inescapable status quo-the characters in Ruffin's newest collection, Jesus in the Mist, populate an imaginative vision of the hardscrabble Deep South where history, culture, and expectatio