East is East

by Boyle T Coraghessan

  “Listen,” Gobi said, handing him the room key as his voice deepened into the whiskey-cracked gruffness of the cracker and the pioneer, “y’all take care now, hear?”

  Saxby didn’t bother with the room. He pocketed the key, parked the Mercedes in the slot reserved for number 12, and started up the street for Roy’s house. He could barely fight down his euphoria. He felt connected to everything, holy, Whitmanesque, a man on the verge of a special communion with the mysteries of nature and the whiteness of the fish. The night conspired with him. It was perfect, so still and warm and peaceful the sky could have been a velvet glove cupped over the town, and he smelled honeysuckle and jasmine and heard the distant curt bark of a dog and thrilled deep within him to the sizzling pulse of tree frogs and crickets. Porch lights glowed against the suffocation of the night. The streets were deserted. Ciceroville was a dry town in a dry county, and all its population of 3,237 was already settled in for the evening, gathered round the tube with Coke and lemonade and cans of beer that sweated in their hands like contraband.

  Roy was waiting for him on the porch. Saxby loped up the walk, his heart banging, and there he was, in the porch swing, his daughter Ally and a picture book in his lap. “Evenin’, Sax,” Roy drawled.

  “Roy.” Saxby was so excited he couldn’t elaborate on the greeting, the punch of the syllable about all he could manage.

  “Saxby, Saxby, Saxby!” Ally squealed, and in the next instant she was down off the porch and whirling in his arms. Roy was still in the porch swing, watching him, a grin on his face. The light over his head fluttered with moths.

  “So you got them,” Saxby said finally, while Ally giggled and clawed at his arms and he fought to maintain his balance and keep her trusting head and frail arms away from the banister.

  Roy nodded. He was thirty-one years old, his forehead sloped back from a face that was primarily nose and he wore his white-blond hair slicked back and drawn up in a ponytail. He worked for the National Park Service and he was second in command at the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. It was he who had arranged for Saxby’s special collecting permit—the least a former fraternity brother could do, as he rather dryly put it. “You want to go on inside and have a look at the fish,” he asked, “or you want to sit out here and listen to the rest of Green Eggs and Ham?”

  “Give me a break, Roy,” Saxby said, but he’d already set Ally down like a package he didn’t want to forget and started up the steps. “Where are they—in the house or one of the tanks in the garage?”

  Roy had risen to his feet. “Well, if you really want to see them,” he said, “—but are you sure you don’t want to watch the Braves game first? It’s a twi-night doubleheader.”

  Saxby let him have his fun, but when Roy lightly bounced down the steps and ambled round the corner of the house, he was right on his heels. He saw that they were heading for the garage, a slouching two-story affair detached from the house and desperately in need of paint, putty, nails, lumber, floor joists, weight-bearing beams and four or five hundred roofing shingles. They passed Roy’s pickup and his wife’s Honda in the dirt drive, moribund leaves crunching underfoot, the dirt-smeared windows ahead of them glowing with a soft seductive light.

  There was no room for the cars in the garage, which housed Roy’s bone and taxidermy collections, his traps and tools and cages and an aggregation of household refuse that would make the careers of any twenty future archaeologists: collapsed card tables and staved-in chairs, rolls of stained wallpaper and carpet remnants, cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling and spilling over with dismembered dolls, broken crockery, faded magazines and rusted Ginzu knives, rack upon rack of paint cans, empty wine bottles and jars of paint thinner, embalming fluid and formalin. In the midst of it all, Roy always kept a few mesh cages rattling with snakes and turtles and opossums, and half a dozen ancient slate-bottomed aquariums bubbling away under jury-rigged lights. If he found something interesting in the swamp, he brought it home with him.

  Now, with Ally sailing on ahead of them and chanting “Saxby’s fish, I wish, I wish” in a nasal singsong, they entered this cramped but hallowed space. The first thing to catch Saxby’s eye was a stuffed armadillo perched atop a coat tree, and then the mounted paw of a bobcat that had left it behind in a trap, something in a cage with black glittering eyes, and finally the aquariums, dimly lit and yet glowing like treasure from across the room. He was breathing hard—practically panting—as he waded through the slurry of refuse underfoot and made his way to the shining glass pane in front of which Ally had stationed herself. Crouching down to peer expectantly through the thick curtain of algae, he saw … a rippled snout and two dead saurian eyes peering back at him. Ally’s laugh was shrill as a fire alarm. “Tricked you!” she screeched.

  “Next one over, Sax,” Roy coached. “To your right.”

  Saxby turned his head then and experienced his moment of grace: there they were. His albinos. Opercula heaving, fins waving, cold little lips blowing him kisses. They were a small miracle.

  He looked closer. None of them—there were eighteen in all—was longer than the cap of a Bic pen and most of them showed fin and tail damage from the attacks of their neighbors. Despite their size, they were an aggressive species, fiercely territorial and antisocial. Roy had provided a few twigs and stones for cover, but it was a halfhearted effort that didn’t begin to protect them from one another. What was he thinking? Didn’t he realize what they had here? Saxby felt the resentment rising in him, but he caught himself—there they were, albinos, pygmy sunfish as smooth and white as miniature bars of soap, and that was all that mattered.

  For a long while he squatted there in front of the tank, watching them hang in the water, circle the surface, rise and fall and make sudden savage runs at one another. They were white, all right, and it amazed him. He’d known that they would be—intellectually, that is—but the reality leaped out at him. He’d seen albino catfish, cichlids as pale and pink as cherry yogurt, blind cavefish bleached of color through eons of groping in the dark, but this was something else. This was a legendary whiteness, the whiteness of purity, of June brides, Christo’s running fence, the inner wrapping of the Hershey bar. He would breed them, that’s what he would do, breed them because they were unusual, rarities, freaks, because they were white as the sheets and hoods of the Ku Klux Klan, white as ice, heartless and cold and necessary.

  He looked up. Ally was gone. Roy hovered over him. “Can we get more?”

  Roy was smiling his quiet smile. He understood the sort of excitement that made the breath come quick in the presence of a certain butterfly or slug or a glistening pale little fingernail-sized fish. “We can sure try,” he said.

  The next morning the telephone roused saxby from dreams of the colorless depths. It rang once and he seized it as if it were prey, as if he’d been lying still there all night so as to lull the thing into giving itself away. “Yeah?” he gasped.

  It was Gobi. “Rise and shine, y’all,” he crooned in his Indo-cracker drawl. “It’s five-fifteen.”

  Ten minutes later Roy was out front with his pickup and a boat trailer. A long narrow flat-bottomed boat rested atop the trailer, the legend Pequod II stenciled on its bow, one of Roy’s little jokes. “Mornin’,” Roy said, laconic and slow-smiling, and he handed Saxby a Hardee’s bag and a Styrofoam cup of coffee, black.

  Saxby could have opened the trunk of the Mercedes right then and there—and he almost did, and he cursed himself afterward for resisting the impulse—but he decided not to bother. If he hauled out his waders and traps and the O2 and the rest of it and transferred them to the pickup, it would delay them a precious few minutes, and he was really stoked to get going. And anyway, he’d want his own car down there at the swamp if he did have to stay on a day or two. In the end, he took the coffee and the bag of fast food and shrugged. “Guess I’ll just follow you,” he said. “All right?”

  A low pale ghostly mist clung to the road all the way down to Fargo, and then, when they swun
g onto 177 to head into the swamp itself, the mist turned to drizzle. Saxby listened to the swish of the wet tires, watched the boat sway on the trailer ahead of him. He felt a deep sense of peace, of connection, of calm. Deer stood poised at the edge of the road, wading birds feinted and shook their great wings into flight. He was going to get everything he wanted: he knew it.

  The drizzle fell back into the mist, the mist thickened, and then they were there. He followed Roy through the parking lot out front of the tourist center and pulled up ahead of him on the narrow spit of land by the boat ramp. On one side of them was the dredged and widened pond in which the rental boats were kept, and on the other, the channel that led to Billy’s Lake and the infinite shifting maze of watery trails that snaked through the swamp beyond it. It was drizzling still and the sky hung low over the treetops in a dull metallic wash. The place was quiet but for the handful of fishermen loading their boats with a soft murmur of expectation, and the jays and catbirds that cursed one another intermittently from the trees. The water, peat-stained and tepid, was the color of fresh-brewed tea.

  Saxby stood at the door of the Mercedes and watched Roy back the trailer down the ramp. When the trailer was in the water, Roy cut the engine, pulled the parking brake and got out to release the boat, while Saxby ambled to the rear of the Mercedes to fetch his gear. He wouldn’t need the oxygen and plastic bags till he headed home with what he hoped would be the nucleus of his breeding stock, but he was thinking of his waders, minnow traps and dip net, as well as the little thirty-foot seine that might just come in handy in a relatively clear patch of water. He hadn’t opened the trunk since he’d hastily loaded it some twelve or thirteen hours earlier, but as he fit the key into the lock he could visualize its contents, already leaping ahead to picture them stowed away in the bottom of Roy’s boat and the boat itself gliding off under the sure silent stroke of their paddles. The lock accepted the key. The key turned in the lock.

  It was the sort of thing that happens every day.

  A Jungle

  What had happened to her? what was wrong with her? where was the visionary who woke up rigid, forsaking breakfast to stride boldly through the dripping forest to the nunnery of the studio, the cross of her art? Ruth didn’t know. All she knew was that she felt as drained of energy as when she’d contracted mono as a teenager. She had a headache—it seemed as if she’d had a headache for days, weeks, the better part of her life—and her limbs felt tentative, as if they weren’t really attached. Maybe she was coming down with something, maybe that was it.

  It was dawn, just, the light pale and listless, and she made a groggy but furtive dash for the bathroom down the hall—thank god no one was stirring yet—and then slipped back to her room and fell into the bed as if her legs had been shot out from under her. Thirty seconds more and she would have been gone, pulled back down into the vestibule of sleep, but then the phone rang deep in the bowels of the house and consciousness took hold of her. The sound was faint, distant, the buzz of an insect on the far side of the room—but she knew it was ringing for her. She knew it. Very faintly, and again at an incalculable distance, she heard footsteps—Owen’s footsteps—crossing the downstairs hallway to the phone in the foyer. She fought to keep her eyes closed, to shake it off, but the phone was ringing and she knew it was ringing for her.

  Three times it rang, four, and then it choked off in the middle of the fifth ring. She couldn’t begin to hear the murmur of Owen’s voice, but she imagined it, and she listened as the footsteps started up again, as the dull stealthy tread of them recrossed the foyer, mounted the stairs and started down the upper hallway. She sat up. It was her father, she was sure of it. The doctor had warned him—the stress of the courtroom, the late nights, the obsessive tennis and racquetball, the cigarettes, martinis, New York steaks. Her father! Grief flooded her. She saw his face as clearly as if he were standing there beside her, the glint of his wire-frame glasses, the splash of gray in his beard, the look of the menscb, the lawgiver, the man of wisdom and peace … there would be a funeral, of course, and that would mean she’d have to leave Thanatopsis for a week, maybe longer. Black crepe. She’d look good in that, slim through the hips, and her tan would glow … but her father, it was her father, her daddy, and now she was naked to the world—

  The footsteps halted outside her door, and then came Owen’s knock and his subdued rasp—no language games, no chirp of humor: “Ruth, it’s for you. Long-distance.”

  She knew it, she knew it.

  “It’s Saxby.”

  Saxby? Suddenly the picture clouded over. Her father was all right, he was okay, as healthy as the Surgeon General himself and sleeping peacefully at one of the better addresses in Santa Monica. But it was—six o’clock? What could Saxby want at six o’clock? Her heart gave a little skip of fear—was he hurt? But no. Why would he be calling if he was hurt—it would be the police or the hospital, wouldn’t it? And then she thought of his fish. If he was dragging her out of bed because of some damned little loopy-eyed fish—

  “Ruth, wake up. Telephone.”

  She caught herself. “Yes, yes, I’m awake. Tell him I’ll be right there.”

  The footsteps retreated. She bent to shuffle through the mess on the floor. She was looking for her terry-cloth robe, and her cigarettes, and maybe something to wrap round her hair in case anyone was up. She found the robe—she’d borrowed it from a hotel in Las Vegas on her way out from California, and there was a rich reddish stain over the left breast where she’d upended a glass of cranberry juice on it—and she came up with the cigarettes too, but no lighter and no scarf. She caught a glimpse of herself in the bureau mirror—sunken eyes, too much nose, a frenzy of fractured little lines tugging at her mouth—and then she ducked out the door, cradling her cigarettes, and found herself staring into the huge startled gypsy eyes of Jane Shine.

  Jane was on her way to the bathroom. She was wearing an antique silk kimono over a white voile nightgown and her feet were prettily encased in a pair of pink satin mules. Her hair, ever so slightly mussed from sleep, was thicker, curlier and glossier than any mere mortal’s had a right to be. Her face, bereft of makeup, was perfect.

  Ruth was wearing a fifty-nine-cent pair of Taiwanese flipflops, the stolen robe was six sizes too big and practically stiff with filth, and her face, as she knew from her glancing appraisal in the bureau mirror, was the face of one of the walking dead. Sleepy, oblivious, off-guard, Ruth had stepped out of her room with a vague idea of the telephone, and there she was, Jane Shine, her greatest enemy, looking like some forties actress having breakfast in bed on the backlot of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

  Jane’s eyes narrowed. Her face was alert but impassive. She blinked twice, stepped round Ruth as if she were a minor nuisance, a small but annoying impediment to her majestic progress—a pile of luggage, a potted palm left out of place by the help—and floated on down the hall with a gentle swish of silk. Oh, the bitch, the bitch! Not a word, not an excuse me or beg pardon, not a good morning, hello, goodbye, drop dead, anything. Oh, the icy arrogant bitch!

  Ruth just stood there, immobilized, rigid with hate. She waited for the click of the bathroom door behind her, and then she started down the hallway, clenching her jaws so hard her teeth had begun to ache by the time she reached the phone at the foot of the stairs. “Sax?” she practically snarled into the receiver.

  His voice came right back at her. He was excited about something—fish, no doubt—and her mood, which was poisonous to begin with, took a turn for the worse. “Ruth,” he was saying, “listen, I’ve got to tell you this before anybody else does—”

  She cut him off. All he cared about was fish. Lewis Turco had hurt her, had taken her by the hair and hurt her, and all he cared about was fish. “He grabbed me by the hair, Sax, and he called me a bitch in front of everybody, called me a lying Jew bitch right out on the patio in front of everybody.” The phone gave it back to her—she could hear the outrage trembling in her voice, a slice of anger that fell away into hurt. “If
he thinks he’s going to get away with it, he’s crazy … I’ll sue him. I will. I’ll file a complaint… Sax,” she bleated, “oh, Sax.”

  There was a silence on the other end of the line. Saxby was confused, and when he was confused he got flustered. “What are you telling me, somebody pulled your hair?” And then he made a leap. “You mean the Japanese kid? Is that how he escaped?”

  “Japanese kid? I’m talking about Turco. Lewis Turco. The little Nazi jerk that tags around with Detlef. He went berserk out on the patio last night and he”—her voice broke—“he assaulted me. He went for Irving too, and Sandy. You should see the bruises on Sandy’s chest. He wouldn’t touch me if you were here, he wouldn’t dare, but—but—” She felt herself breaking down.

  “Ruth, stop it. Listen to me.”

  Saxby wouldn’t allow it, wouldn’t listen. He had something to tell her, something more important than the fact that some overdeveloped clod had beat up his girlfriend, some miraculous fish find, the news that would send shock waves through the world of overgrown adolescents who spent their entire lives watching fish fuck in little glass tanks. She was angry. “No, you listen. He attacked me, goddamn it—”

  “Ruth, the Japanese kid is here. Hiro. Hiro Tanaka. He’s here.”

  What was he saying? Ruth glanced up to see Owen dart round the corner for the kitchen. All the anger drained out of her. “Hiro? What do you mean? Where?”

  “Here. In the Okefenokee. I opened the trunk of the car and there he was, curled up like a snake. In the trunk, for Christ’s sake.”

  It was early yet and her head ached: it took her a moment to process the information. Saxby was gone, ferreting out his pygmy fish on the other side of the state. Hiro had escaped. The sky was above, the earth below. Gravity exerted its pull, there was magnetic attraction, the weak force. Fine. But Hiro in the trunk of Saxby’s car, Hiro in the Okefenokee Swamp? It was too much. It was a gag, a routine, Saxby was pulling her leg. Even now Abercorn and the sheriff and an army of yapping dogs and shotgun-toting crackers were combing the briar patches and cesspools of the island, and Hiro—the fugitive, the jailbreaker, the big soft kid with the pitiful eyes and overfed gut—was a hundred miles away. In a swamp. The swamp. The swamp to end all swamps. Poor Hiro. Poor Detlef. Poor Sax. But no, it couldn’t be: it was too perfect. “Are you sure?”