would ever buy. He’d raided a hundred places just like it in Arcadia and Pacoima and San Pedro, and he knew that the two behind the counter had residence permits but the twenty in the basement didn’t and he knew too that they had to be bringing in more than fish sauce to survive, but that was somebody else’s problem. “I’m looking for Lewis Turco,” he said.
Nothing. No reaction. He might just as well have been talking to himself, humming, singing, gargling, he might as well have been a dog or a monkey. The couple behind the counter—a man and a woman, he saw now— didn’t flinch. They were holding their breath, controlling their heartbeat—their eyes didn’t even blink. “Lewis Turco,” he repeated, lingering over the syllables, “I-look-for-Lew-is-Tur-co.”
“Yo,” said a voice behind him, and a man in fatigues stepped out from behind the bead curtain at the back of the store. He was short—five-five or so, Abercorn guessed—and he wore a noncommital expression. His shoulders were too wide for his height and he had a weight lifter’s build, strong in the chest and upper arms. He wore a beard and his long flat greasy blond hair was tied back with a leather thong. “Abercorn, right?” he said.
Detlef Abercorn was six-five, he wore his hair short, and at thirty-four he preserved the same lanky narrow- hipped build he’d grown into as the pitching ace of his high-school baseball team in Thousand Oaks, California. “Yes,” he said, smiling, “and you’re Lewis Turco.”
Turco wasn’t smiling. He sauntered up the aisle like a cowboy, each stride too long, too wide, sauntered as if he were sprinting up the side of a hill in slow motion, and then he halted abruptly at the counter, wheeled on the wooden couple and said something in a burst of what Abercorn took to be Vietnamese. They came to sudden life, as if they were wired, and the man ducked behind the counter to produce a tightly bound and visibly swollen Army- issue backpack, from the frame of which dangled an entrenching tool, a baton, a pair of handcuffs and several esoteric-looking devices Abercorn didn’t recognize, while the woman handed over a cellophane package that appeared to contain some sort of foodstuff—dried meat or roots or something.
Just to hear himself, Abercorn said, “It’s a bitch, huh?”—meaning the rain, Georgia, the INS and the rat- crazy, house-burning, Japanese son of a bitch holed up with the slugs and centipedes on funky, dripping, hopeless Tupelo Island.
Turco didn’t respond. He’d shouldered the pack and taken the parcel of food from the woman, and now he was studying Abercorn with a cagey look. “Jesus,” he said finally, “what happened to you, man—napalm, car wreck or what? Don’t tell me you were born with that?”
Abercorn stiffened. He’d heard it all his life and all his life he’d been touchy about it—who wouldn’t be? He was a good-looking guy, good bone structure, strong nose and chin, hair as thick as a teenager’s. But he knew what Turco meant, knew what he’d had the bad grace to bring up—most people, anybody with any sensitivity, anyway, would have left it alone. What Turco was referring to were the white patches on his face and hands—a lot of people thought it was scar tissue or eczema or something, but it wasn’t. There was nothing wrong with him, nothing at all, just that he had less pigment than normal, less melanin in his skin and hair. He’d been born an albino. Or part albino. His coloring was fair to begin with, but the albinism—or vitiligo, as the doctors called it—manifested itself in dead-white patches that mottled his entire body—even his hair. He’d been able to dye his hair, of course, but there was nothing he could do about his skin. And even that wouldn’t have been so bad, but for his face. He’d got used to it now, but as a kid it used to drive him crazy—he looked as if he’d been splashed with paint. A rough oval, two inches across, framed his right eye and six paper-white blotches dribbled across his jaw, bleached the bridge of his nose and made his left ear glow in the dark. And his eyes, his eyes weren’t blue or gray or green or brown: they were pink, like the eyes of a white rat or a guinea pig. “Beagle Boy,” they called him in elementary school, and later, when he got taller and stronger and knocked them down with his big-league curveball, they called him “Whitey.” But now he was an adult, and no one, ever, called him anything but Detlef.
He felt the eyes of the Vietnamese on him and the blood rose to his face. “What’s it to you,” he said, holding Turco’s eyes, “I’m part albino, okay?”
Turco stood his ground, smiling now, smiling up at him with the serenity of a man who’s never made a mistake in his life. He was taking his time. “Hey, no offense intended, man. It’s like I’ve seen a couple dudes over there that caught it, their own people dropping the shit on them—typical fuck-up—it’s like this jellied gasoline, right? Sticks to you like glue. But hey, if I’d known you were so sensitive about it—”
“I am not sensitive,” Abercorn said, but even as he said it his voice rose to give him away.
In the car, while the wipers beat uselessly at the smear of rain and they settled in for the seventy-minute drive down to Tupelo Island, Abercorn, not yet realizing that they’d have to wait three hours for the next ferry and that there were no motels on the island and never had been, began to soften a bit. He had to work with this guy, after all. And Turco was going to do all the grunt work while he, Abercorn, sat in the motel and coordinated things. “Listen,” he said after a while, the tinny strains of some moronic country song whining through the speakers, “this Japanese guy. I mean, in L.A. we never had to deal with the Japanese. What do you think?”
Turco was chewing a stick of whatever it was the woman had given him. It was black and hard and had a forbidding alien smell to it. “Piece of cake,” he said, chewing. “What you got to realize about the Nips is they’re the squarest people in the world, I mean the hokiest, bar none. Shit, even the paddy Burmese are downtown compared to the Japs. They’re all part of this big team, this like Eagle Scout thing where everybody fits in and works real hard and makes this perfect and totally unique society. Because they’re superior to everybody else, they’re purer—that’s what they think. Nobody but Japanese in Japan. You fuck up, you let the whole race down.”
Rain beat at the windshield. Turco gestured with the pungent black stick of whatever it was. “Even the far- out types, the rebels, the punks with the orange hair and the leather jackets—and there are precious few of them, believe me—even they can’t break the mold. You know how they get down, you know how they really thumb their nose at society and show what bad characters they are?”
Abercorn didn’t know.
“They all go down to Yoyogi Park in Tokyo on Saturday afternoon from one to three and turn up their boom boxes and dance. That’s it. They dance. All of them. Squarest people in the world.”
Abercorn digested this information a moment, wondering how it applied to the case at hand, the case that had put him in this car, in this storm, with this root-chewing ex-LURP beside him. The whole thing was a real shame. Ninety-nine percent of the illegals just came in and disappeared—they got a tourist visa and vanished, rode in underneath a bus, breezed in for a semester of college and wound up collecting Social Security. It was a joke. The borders were sieves, colanders, picket fences without the pickets. But when somebody came in and made a lot of noise and started raising hell with the people who bought new cars and registered to vote, red lights started flashing all the way on up the line to Washington, and that’s where the Detlef Abercorns came in. “So, uh, what do you think we ought to do?” he said. “The Nips—the Japanese, I mean—tend to be pretty fanatical too, don’t they?
“Yeah, I’ve been to the movies too. But the fact is, like I told you, they’re just plain square. You know how you catch this clown?”
Abercorn didn’t have a clue. But he figured if the barefoot crackers and their hound dogs couldn’t bring him in, they were in for a real ordeal. He thought of the soldier they’d found in a cave in the Philippines, still fighting World War II thirty years later. “No,” he said softly.
Turco gestured at the pack on the seat beside him. “You know what I got in there? A boom box. Sanyo. Biggest shitkicker you ever saw, puts out enough amps to kill every woodpecker out there stone dead in two minutes flat. I’ve got a couple disco tapes, Michael Jackson, Donna Summer, that kind of shit, you follow me? I’m going to track the fucker, no different than if this was 1966 in the la Drang Valley, cross a trail, any trail. Then I’m going to set this thing on a stump and crank it up.”
Was he kidding? Abercorn couldn’t tell.
Turco turned to him with a grin that showed off all his teeth, black now with the stuff he was eating. “Hey,” he said, reaching back to pat a conspicuous bulge in the pack, “I’m Br’er Fox and this here is my tarbaby.”
Queen Bee
Owen’s wake-up call—three sharp but reverential knocks accompanied by a gently insinuating whisper— startled her from a dreamless sleep.
