East is East

staying with the cover of the trees, he gained the top of the slope and found his retreat cut off by the high rough plane of a stucco wall, an American wall, big but shoddy, the surface peeling in great skinlike patches. It must have been ten feet high, at least. He flattened himself to the abrasive surface, trying to catch his breath, the pandemonium of the neighborhood beating in his ears till it drowned out the distant roar of the surf. He felt naked. Vulnerable. Lost. There was nothing for it but to scale the wall and hope for the best.

It was a small matter. He scaled the wall. Dropping down on the far side, he found himself in a garden: luxurious, overgrown, deserted. There was a pool, and a cabana. In the distance: shouts, barking, the wail of sirens. Slyly, silently, with the stealthy sure athletic tread of the samurai, he crossed the flagstone border of the pool, eased open the door of the cabana, and hid himself in the slatted darkness within.

Later—much later—when the night was a presence and there was no sound but the susurrus of the crickets from beyond the walls and a drowsy hum from the house that commanded the yard, the garden, the pool and cabana, Hiro emerged. Noiselessly—not a ripple escaped him—he bathed himself in the pool, washing away the evidence of his flight, the grass stains, the smudges of dirt and grease. Then he sat in the dark till he was dry, the beat of his heart steady and slow. Carefully, fastidiously, as if it were a ritual, he pulled on the shorts, slipped the sweatshirt over his head, eased into the socks and leather hightops: he was in no hurry. He had a plan. A simple plan. A plan that began and ended with the cabin in the woods and his white-legged secretary. He saw her again— for the hundredth time—as she was that night in the boat, supine and unclothed, and he saw her at her desk, swiveling toward him, offering food and shelter. And then he pushed himself up, found the gate at the side of the house and stalked silently across the lawn. In the next moment, he smelled the tar and felt the hard flat surface of the road beneath his feet.

On an impulse, he bent to touch it. It was still warm.

Still at Large

There was no question about it now: he was going to stay there with her, under her protection, and he was going to stay indefinitely. Or at least until things cooled down. He’d got himself into some trouble on the other end of the island, at Tupelo Shores Estates, and the locals were in an uproar again. The day after he’d come back to her there was a story on page 6 of the Savannah paper—not much on detail, really, but they hadn’t forgotten him: TUPELO ALIEN STILL AT LARGE, the headline read—and a buzz of apocalyptic gossip went round the island. Two days later, the Tupelo Island Breeze devoted its entire front page to him.

Ruth might have missed the Breeze story altogether, but for Sandy De Haven. She’d spent the day with her exotic refugee—she hammering away at “Of Tears and the Tide,” he amusing himself with a paperback in Japanese hieroglyphs he’d produced from god knew where—and she’d come in just at the tail end of the cocktail hour. Sandy was behind the bar in the front parlor, mixing drinks. Bob the poet and Ina Soderbord were no longer a thing—Bob’s wife had come down for the weekend, and that was the end of that—and so Ina, white eyebrows fading into white bangs like a mirage, sat at the bar mooning over Sandy. Most of the others had already moved into the dining room, and for this small mercy Ruth was thankful: at least she’d be spared Jane Shine and that sickening little silvery laugh of hers.

“La D.,” Sandy said, “what’s the poop?” He was already reaching for the vodka, the glass, the glistening bucket of ice.

“Nothing much,” Ruth said with a shrug, “—working, that’s about it.” What was she going to say—that she was harboring a fugitive from justice? She smiled at Ina. Ina smiled back.

“Straight, with a twist, right?”

Ruth nodded, and Sandy handed her the drink. The windows were full of golden light, and for a time, she merely stood there, caught up in the richness of the moment. Saxby was off somewhere with his nets and traps and hip waders, but she’d see him before the night was out—he’d promised her—and Hiro was back at the cabin, lying low. Waiting for her. Depending on her. For the first time in days she felt good, felt like her old self. But then the chatter began to drift in from the dining room and she had to concentrate hard to filter out Jane Shine’s maddening titter. When she lifted the glass to her lips, the vodka had turned sour on her. The moment was gone.

“You see this?” Sandy asked, easing a copy of the Breeze across the bar. She looked at it a moment before she saw it, and then she set the vodka down, ALIEN INVASION! the headline screamed in 24-point type, and beneath it there was a grainy picture of Hiro, looking sheepishly out from the page. Just under his chin, like some sort of growth, was a card bearing a series of mysterious ideographs and a seven- digit number. He looked lost and hopeless, and if she hadn’t known better, she would have guessed he was about twelve years old.

“Pretty desperate-looking character, huh?” Sandy said with a grin.

Ruth didn’t answer. She was scanning the columns of print, the boxed stories that set off the eyewitness accounts of Hiro’s rampage through the grottoes and flowerbeds of Tupelo Shores Estates. There was an interview with the woman who’d unwittingly harbored him; a statement from the next-door neighbor who claimed the fugitive had terrorized her by running unannounced through her yard; an account of the death, due to cardiac arrest, of one Olmstead White, who was overcome while confronting the suspect who’d attacked him in his home three weeks earlier.

“This Japanese guy’s really up shit creek, huh?” Sandy was grinning still. He leaned across the bar, gazing up at Ruth from beneath the dangle of his bleached locks. This was high comedy.

Ina sipped white wine with an ice cube in it. Her voice was breathy and small, considering the size of her frame. “I wish they’d just leave the poor man alone—I mean, just look at him”—and she bent forward to tap the paper with one lacquered nail—“does he look dangerous to you?”

Ruth was reading about Sheriff Peagler and how he’d vowed to put an end to this lawlessness one way or another—the fugitive wasn’t even an American citizen, didn’t even belong in this country—and no, he wouldn’t rule out shooting the expletive-deleted on sight.

“Get these hog farmers stirred up …” Ina trailed off.

“Uh-huh, that’s what I mean,” Sandy said, “it’s going to be like something out of The Chase.” He paused to sip at his screwdriver. “You know that movie? Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford?”

Ruth looked up at him for the first time. “Yeah,” she said, “I mean no. Listen, you mind if I take this, the paper, I mean?”

Ruth skipped dinner that night. She paid a quick visit to the kitchen, where Rico was scurrying around under the supervision of the head chef (Armand de Bouchette, the man who’d made Thanatopsis preeminent among artists’ colonies—so far as cuisine was concerned, at any rate), and she filled a pair of insulated lunch buckets with pompano en papillote, articbauts au beurre noir, steamed baby eggplant, French bread and potatoes in their own essence. “A romantic evening for two, eh?” De Bouchette was standing over her, the toque cocked back on his head, eyebrows lifted in amusement. He was in his late fifties, on the run from a string of bad marriages, a man who liked to sip cognac and spread his hand casually across the buttocks of the female colonists. “You and Saxbee? Or have you maybe been up to something you don’t tell us about?”

Ruth kept her head down, busy with the lunch buckets. “Working late, that’s all, Armand. Sax is going to join me later—if he gets back in time. Real romantic.” Then she turned her full-force smile on him, slipped a bottle of wine from the rack above the counter, and left him groping after her retreating flank.

It was nearly seven when she got back to the cabin. The sun was sinking. A breeze drifted in off the ocean. Everything was still. Hiro wouldn’t be expecting her till morning, and as she approached the clearing, she wondered how to announce her presence without startling him. She thought of calling out to him from a safe distance—“Hiro, I’m back!” or “It’s me, Ruth!”—but if anyone were within earshot, the consequences could be fatal. On the other hand, if she didn’t warn him somehow, the minute her foot touched the steps he’d shoot through the roof like a Saturn rocket. She was halfway across the clearing when she hit on a solution—she would start singing, burst into song, and if anyone heard her they would think she was drunk or jubilant or crazed—it was all the same to her. And so, cradling the newspaper and the thermal containers to her chest, she strode across the clearing, singing in a high pure glee-club soprano, belting out the first thing that came into her head: “Oh, where have you been, Billy Boy,