Fiction Chronicle.

THE PEOPLE WHO WATCHED HER PASS BY By Scott Bradfield. 146 pp. Two Dollar Radio. Paper, $14.50. Bradfield supplies a scant few orienting facts in the course of this challenging, original novel. At the start, a 3-year-old girl named Sal is kidnapped by the man who fixes her parents' water heater, then taken to live with him in a dingy bungalow near Los Angeles. From there it is a billowy adventure of a book, scarcely bound to the conventions of narrative, as Sal drifts through the world and meets an array of people with wildly varying motives, values and lifestyles. Nearly everybody wants something from this little girl in a ratty pink cotton dress. Some want to worship her. Others want to sexually abuse her. Still others, fueled by compassion or self-righteousness, yearn to protect her. Sal runs from all of them; when she does choose to stay with someone or other, it is because they do not want anything from her: ''The old man never told Sal what to do or think, so it wasn't like living with someone, or hiding behind somebody else's notion of who you were.'' In a book that supplies few answers, Bradfield's lavish eloquence is the presiding constant, and over time he allows brief, quenching glimpses of little Sal's character. Here, she flips through magazines in a laundromat where she is living: ''Most of the magazines contained glossy pictures of young ladies who looked the way Sal felt. Detached, slightly petulant, gloaming with fabric and conditioners, they stood in awkward poses, their heads cocked at odd angles to perceive a world beyond the one that kept perceiving them.'' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]