East is East

by T. C. Boyle

  It wasn’t as if he was planning to spend much time in the swimming pool anyway. His job was on the line here—his whole career. Forget the le Carré, the six-pack and the air-conditioned room alive only to the soothing flicker of the color TV; from here on out it was more like James M. Cain, a cup of piss-water doused with iodine, sweat, sunburn and aching joints. He’d had a call early that morning from Nathaniel Carteret Bluestone, the regional head in Atlanta. Real early. Six-thirty A.M. early. He was never at his best at 6:30 A.M., but he’d been out past two tramping all over the island with Turco and the sheriff and about six hundred yapping dogs on the lukewarm trail of Hiro Tanaka and when he picked up the phone he was so exhausted he could barely think.

  N. Carteret Bluestone had wanted to know why Special Agent Abercorn was bent on making a mockery of the INS. Had he seen the morning papers? No? Well, perhaps he’d find them instructive. The Nip—Japanese, Bluestone corrected himself—was front-page news all of a sudden. Abercorn tried to explain that the papers were a day late at Thanatopsis House, but Bluestone talked right over him, quoting the headlines in an acidic tone: “‘At Large 6 Weeks, In Jail 6 Hours’; ‘Score 1 for the Japanese, 0 for the INS’; ’Jailbreak on Tupelo Island: Alien Makes It Look Easy.’ ” And what was this about Lewis Turco attacking some woman and making wild—and litigious—accusations? It was a mighty sorry way to run an investigation, mighty sorry.

  Abercorn couldn’t argue with him there, except maybe to add that “sorry” was far too tame an adjective. He could have offered excuses—it was the sheriff’s people who’d let the suspect go; be hadn’t attacked anybody and couldn’t answer for Turco; everybody down here talked like Barney Fife and had an IQ to match—but he didn’t. All he said was, “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  Bluestone opined that his best seemed to fall short of the mark. Far short.

  “I’ll do my damnedest, sir,” Abercorn said.

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “You do that,” Bluestone said finally. “And this time, handcuff the suspect to your own goddamned wrist. And do me a favor—”

  “Yes?”

  “Swallow the key, will you, so it comes out with the rest of your shit.”

  News of the second call, the one from Roy Dotson, didn’t reach him till nearly four in the afternoon. And why not? Because he was out in the boondocks, sifting through the mudholes of Tupelo Island, as if anybody believed it would do any good. If they were looking for frogs they would have been in heaven. Or mosquitoes. The temperature was up around a hundred, the sun had ground to a halt directly overhead and he thought he was just about to die from the stink when one of Peagler’s deputies came sloshing toward them with the news that they were wasting their time. The suspect had fled the island. And where was he? In a sharecropper’s shack? Hitchhiking to Jacksonville? Digging his chopsticks into a plate of shaved beef and onions at a sukiyaki joint in downtown Atlanta? No. He was in a swamp, another swamp, a swamp that made this one look like a wading pool.

  And so here he was at the Tender Sproats Motel in Ciceroville, Georgia, Gateway to the Okefenokee Wilderness. It was seventhirty at night and the neon sign glowed against the darkening sky in a halfhearted imposture of civilization. Lewis Turco was asleep in the passenger seat, reeking like a sewage plant. Mud encrusted his boots, clung to his fatigues, caked his beard and hair. They’d had a falling-out over the Dershowitz incident and hadn’t spoken more than ten words to each other all day. The moment the bulletin came through on Tanaka, Turco had dropped his stick (he’d been beating the bushes, literally), and without a word turned and stomped back to the big house, where he flung his gear into the Datsun and settled into the passenger seat. By the time Abercorn got there he was unconscious.

  Abercorn pulled up to the motel office and shut down the wheezing engine. He figured he would check in, have a quick shower and a cup of coffee, coordinate with the local sheriff and interview Roy Dotson at his home. Then he would get a couple hours’ sleep and start the chase again in the morning. That was the plan. But he was tired, bone tired, and he didn’t smell too great himself.

  The man behind the counter was short and dark, with the narrow shoulders and fleshless limbs of a child. He had the gut of an adult though, and a well-fed one, and he wore a caste mark beneath the greasy bill of his feedstore cap. His glittering dark eyes went directly to Abercorn’s face—he’d burned out there in the swamp, he knew it, and the burn made the dead-white discolorations of his condition stand out more than ever. Suddenly he felt self-conscious. “I need a double,” he said.

  “Y’all mean a twin?” the little man drawled.

  “Double,” Abercorn said. “Two beds. One for me and one for—for him.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the car, where Turco’s head and upthrust beard could just be made out over the dashboard.

  The little man broke into a grin that showed off the bright red stubble of his teeth. He ducked down to spit something into a wastebasket under the counter, and then bounced back up again. “A twee-in, like Ah said. For a minute there—y’all ain’t from around Clinch County, am Ah correct in that assumption?”

  Abercorn could feel the weariness settling into him like a drug, like the tingle of a good double shot of tequila on an empty stomach. Japanese. He should have stayed in Eagle Rock, busting Mexicans. “Savannah,” he managed. “L.A. originally.”

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” The little man was nodding his head vigorously. “Ah coulda sworn it. Thought you was a Yankee—and for a minute there maybe a little, you know, funny. Wantin’ a double for two grown men …”

  Abercorn was dragging, worn thin, but a tiny knot of inspiration flared in his brain. “Punjabi, right?” he said.

  The little man beamed. “Chandigarh.”

  “A twin. I need a twin.”

  “Good,” the little man said, beaming still, beaming till he could have lit the room all by himself. “We take all kinds here.”

  Turco was in a communicative mood the following morning, chattering on about the suspect as if they’d grown up together, as if they’d shared a bed in the orphanage and married sisters. “He’s a cagey one, this Nip—a whole lot cagier than we give him credit for, that’s for sure. He got this bitch to feed him—two bitches, if you count the old lady—and then he has the balls to bust out of jail and make for the last place on earth we’d expect to find him.” He paused reflectively and scratched at his newly washed beard. “Still, they don’t take to nature, the Nips—they’re a city people, subways and pigeons and that kind of thing—and ultimately he’s going to defeat himself, I’m about three-quarters sure of that.”

  They were in the Datsun, heading into the swamp. It had rained the night before and the road was slick, but the sun was up already and burning it off in a dreamy drifting haze. Abercorn had gotten about four hours of fitful sleep, while Turco, who’d strung a hammock over the second bed, had snored blissfully through the small hours of the morning and well into the dawn. They’d passed on breakfast, nothing open that early but Hardee’s and a truck stop so full of potbellied crackers Abercorn couldn’t handle it and ordered a coffee to go. It was no loss to Turco, who seemed to have an infinite supply of roots and jerky tucked away in the folds of his rucksack. At the moment, he had a plastic bag of what looked to be dried guppies in his lap. From time to time he’d dip a hand into the bag and crunch them up like popcorn.

  “And if you’re thinking disco and designer shirts, it ain’t going to work on this character,” Turco added, as if the ghetto blaster and Guess? jeans had been Abercorn’s idea in the first place. “No: we’re going to have to get a lot more devious than that.” He scratched his beard and a gentle drift of flaked guppy settled in his lap.

  Abercorn looked away. Ever since the interview with Roy Dot-son, something had been troubling him. It was the question of Saxby. He liked Saxby, he did. And he didn’t think Saxby would consciously aid and abet a criminal—and an IAADA, at that—but it did look pretty bad. Ruth was cap
able of anything—he knew that from personal experience—and she could have put him up to it. Easily. “What do you think of Saxby, Lewis—I mean as far as his involvement in this thing?”

  Turco turned to give him a look. “Who?”

  “Saxby. You know, Ruth’s—I mean, Dershowitz’s—uh—”

  “Oh, him. Yeah. He’s guilty. As guilty as she is. What do you think, it’s just a coincidence that he brings this Nip out here and lets him go like Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch? Are you kidding me? The guy’s as guilty as Charlie Manson, Adolf Hitler—and if he’s not, then what’s he doing camping out in the middle of the Okefenokee Swamp?” He dug into the bag of flaked fish. “The whole thing stinks if you ask me.”

  They’d passed the sign welcoming them to Stephen C. Foster State Park several miles back and yet there was no indication that anyone except a construction crew had ever been here before them. The road cut a straight and undeviating line through the wet and the green, a green so absolute that Abercorn had to glance up periodically at the sky to be sure what planet he was on. He supposed some people found this beautiful or inspiring or whatever, but to him it was just one more pain in the ass—they could make a parking lot out of the goddamned place as far as he was concerned. He couldn’t stop thinking about Saxby and how embarrassing it was going to be to have to put the cuffs on him, if it came to that. And beyond Saxby, he was thinking of the Nip—and yes, he’d call a Nip a Nip and INS etiquette be damned—and wondering if he was going to spend the rest of his life getting sunburned three different colors and having his ears chewed off by mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds. (And that rankled him too—why the ears, of all places? His own ears, never exactly small by any measure, were swollen to twice their normal size and looked like slabs of salami stuck to the side of his head.) He drove on, trying not to look at himself in the rearview mirror.

  Finally, buildings began to appear—long low wooden structures, a museum, a tourist center—and then he was pulling into a dirt lot behind a phalanx of police cars, two fire trucks and an ambulance. The lot was jammed with campers and pickups and there were people everywhere, though it was early, very early, so early it should have been the shank of the night still. People milled around the boats, peeked in the windows of the police cars, twirled binoculars round their necks, breakfasted out of picnic baskets, lifted brown paper bags to their lips. Bare-legged kids tore across the macadam, trying to lift kites into the lifeless air, an old man was watching TV in the back of a jeep and a woman with big meaty arms and breasts backed away from a battered Ford with a birdcage and set it down in the middle of the lot. It was crazy. It was like the Fourth of July or the beginning of a music festival, only worse. Abercorn felt his stomach sink.

  “Lewis, you don’t think all these people—?” he began, but the idea of it, the fear of it, locked the words in his throat and he couldn’t go on. These people weren’t just happy campers and holiday makers gathered here inadvertently at 7 A.M. on a weekday morning. No. They were gathered here as they gathered at the site of any disaster, patient as vultures. They were waiting for bloodshed, violence, criminality and despair, waiting for excess and humiliation, for the formula that would unlock the tedium of their lives. “But how in Christ’s name did they know? We just found out about the Nip—I mean, the Japanese—I mean, the Nip—ourselves. Am I right?”

  Turco didn’t answer, but he looked grim.

  The moment Abercorn swung open the door a group of people detached themselves from the crowd and converged on him. He’d noticed them out of the corner of his eye as he maneuvered into the parking space—they were too well dressed for tourists and they seemed nervous, edgy, as if they were about to break into a trot, and what was that, a camera?—but now everything came clear: the press. They were on him before he could unfold himself from the car and there was his face, swollen ears and all, staring back at him in three angry colors from the dark eye of the TV camera.

  “Mr. Abercorn!”—his name, they knew his name—“Mr. Abercorn!”

  A woman with a plastic face and frozen hair had squared off in front of him like a wrestler. She looked familiar, looked like someone he’d seen on television, back in the days when he had an apartment, an office, when he was a member of society with a dull nine-to-five job like everyone else. TV, he thought, hey, I’m going to be on TV, and felt a little jolt of excitement despite himself. But then he understood that N. Carteret Bluestone was sure to see him there and he felt his stomach clench round the pool of cheap diner coffee that churned there, deep down, eating at him like battery acid.

  What had begun as a little story, a six-line thing on page 28 of the Savannah Star, something to fill the odd space left over after they printed up the specials on boneless chicken and toilet paper, was now a big story, a TV story. He should have seen it coming. This was a real potboiler, after all, full of sex, violence, miscegenation, hair-raising escapes, swamps teeming with snakes and alligators, rumors of official incompetence and collusion on the part of a bunch of suspect writers and artists. Christ, it could be a soap opera, a miniseries. As the Swamp Turns. From Here to Okefenokee. Jap Hunter.

  The woman with the plastic face wanted to know why it had taken the INS better than six weeks to capture this fugitive—and what about allegations of incompetence? She furrowed her brow in an investigatory frown, as if it hurt her to put such hard questions. Before Abercorn could frame an answer, a fiftyish man with a savage nose and forearms bristling with white hair poked a microphone at him and asked what the problem was with the security at the Tupelo Island prison facility—was somebody napping on the job? And if so, who?

  And then the voices rose in a clamor: How did he feel about working with the local authorities? What was the suspect eating out there? Did they expect to catch him soon? Was he dangerous? What about quicksand? Snakes? Alligators? What about Ruth Dershowitz?

  Abercorn found himself backed up against the car, feeling two feet taller than he already was, feeling naked and conspicuous, his face reddening like bratwurst on a rotisserie. There were too many of them and they were all jabbing at him at once. He’d never had to deal with the public before, never been asked a single question about a case, not even by telephone, not even the time the Hmong microwaved the chihuahua and the AKC compared them to Nazis at Auschwitz. His tongue thickened in his throat. He didn’t know what to say. And he might have stood there eternally, looking stupid in living color for N. Carteret Bluestone and half the rest of the world, if it hadn’t been for Turco. “No comment,” Turco snarled, slashing through the thicket of microphones with a homicidal leer and jerking him by the arm. And then they were moving, briskly, heading for the cover of the police cordon and the clutch of cleanshaven men in uniform gathered beyond it.

  Abercorn recognized the man at the center of the clutch: Sheriff Bull Tibbets of the Ciceroville Police Department. If Theron Peagler had been something of a surprise—college-educated, soft-spoken, intelligible—Sheriff Tibbets was just what he’d expected. He was a grim-looking fat man with a wad of tobacco bloating his cheek, a big-brimmed trooper’s hat shoved back on his head and a pair of mirror sunglasses masking eyes that were too small and dull to be fully human. He’d given Abercorn a look of undisguised contempt at the Ciceroville station the preceding night, and now he didn’t so much as turn his head as he and Turco joined the group. There seemed to be a debate going on, but Abercorn couldn’t catch much of what they were saying—the accent was pure hell down here, sounded like they were chewing on sweatsocks or something.

  “Gawl rawl, rabid rib,” the sheriff said.

  The man beside him—he was like a toy compared to the sheriff and as slippery, low-browed and loose-jointed as a Snopes—pressed the point. When he spoke, he sounded as if he were in great pain.

  There was a moment’s silence, and then the sheriff rolled his massive head back on his neck, exposing a spatter of angry red pustules just beneath his chin and flashing the heavens with the light reflecting off his sunglasses. “G
awl rawl,” he repeated himself, “rabid rib.”

  Turco folded his arms. He looked bored, looked impatient. In the distance, yet another bird, all legs and wings, swooped across the cremated sky. “What’s the deal?” Abercorn asked.

  Turco lowered his voice. “The squirrely guy wants to bring the dogs in, sheriff says no.” He gazed out over the landing, the weeds and muck and the mad growth of trees, narrowing his eyes as if he expected to spot the suspect sculling across the horizon. “Dogs are prohibited here,” he added by way of clarification. “Park regulations. Alligators go crazy for them, overturn canoes, jump right up out of the water to snatch them off the dock. It’s like catnip to a cat.”

  Abercorn was dumbfounded. Alligators! Jesus. The more he learned about this place, the more he longed for Hollywood Boulevard.

  They stood there another minute, listening to the sheriff and his men chew socks at one another, and then they were moving again, Turco leading, Abercorn following. “These guys are a bunch of cheesebags,” Turco pronounced, spitting the words over his shoulder. Abercorn couldn’t have agreed more, but wondered where exactly they were going and how it was going to help them capture, prosecute, imprison and deport Hiro Tanaka and get N. Carteret Bluestone off his back. And beyond that, how it was going to get him out of Crackerland and back to the mossy somnolent streets of Savannah and the attentions of girls like Ginger and Brenda who wanted only to sip juleps, eat oysters and fuck athletically on the rug in front of the air conditioner. Turco was leading him back toward the police cordon and the tourist center beyond it.

  “Where are we going, Lewis—what’s the plan?”

  Turco paused on the steps, for once eye-to-eye with him. “I say we get hold of one of these powerboats and go bust this Saxby clown. He’ll tell you where the Nip is, believe me.”

  Abercorn didn’t know if he actually wanted to bust Saxby—what charge were they talking here?—but having a conversation with him sounded like a good idea. And he really didn’t feature hanging around and dealing with the sheriff, who looked about as receptive as a guard dog. He shrugged and followed Turco up the steps and into the tourist facility, where six blondes of varying shades and ages stood expectantly behind a counter, each trying to outgrin the other.