Whoops and more whoops.
“Last one”—out of breath—“last one there’s a rotten egg!”
Hiro kept going, dog, women and tennis trio fading away in his wake, certain that at any moment the hue and cry would rise up to engulf him. The drive curved through the trees in front of him and a huge forsythia bush rose up to block the house from view. He saw a Toyota, an American car that looked like a Toyota, and a Mercedes—a big, royal blue Mercedes sedan—parked at the curb with its trunk open. And then, as the grass gave way to pavement under his feet and the shouts at his back subsided to a trickle of giggles and guffaws, something Ruth had said came back to him:
The rest was a whirl—deliberate, but a whirl nonetheless. There were more voices, men’s voices, and movement off to his left. It was now or never. Fighting the urge to run, he crossed the pavement in crisp, businesslike strides—movement behind the forsythia now, legs, shoes, a gabble of voices—and in one clean motion threw himself into the trunk of the Mercedes as if he were tumbling into bed. Things gouged and poked at him— fishing traps, a camp stove—but he didn’t have time to worry about it. He lifted his right hand from the depths of the trunk and took hold of the steel ribs of the lid, and then, as casually as if he were pulling the covers up over his head, he pulled it closed.
The Whiteness of the Fish
Son of a bitch. son of a fucking bitch. the humiliation level here was climbing like a rocket. What had it taken them, six weeks to catch this joker? Six weeks to nail one sorry slump-shouldered fat-assed Nip who looked like he was about twelve years old. And now, when it was all over, when he’d been hauled in, reamed out and locked up like a hamster in a cage, the yokels turn around and let him go. Yeah. Right. And now what, call out the National Guard?
Lewis Turco was angry. He was incensed. It was getting dark and things were looking grim. Nobody knew anything, least of all the half-wit deputy who’d opened up the door to take the prisoner to the ferry and discovered an empty cell. Oh, the cell had chairs in it, all right, stacked up under the window, and the window had a couple bars left in it too, but it was empty space, one hundred percent Nipless. And then he’d asked his buddy about that, but his buddy had been out back taking a leak and so they figured they’d better tell the sheriff, and now here they all were, running around like mental defectives, shouting in everybody’s face. Meanwhile, the light was nearly gone, the artistic types were milling around on the patio enjoying the show, the dogs were back over there in Niggertown and the sheriff looked like he’d just chewed off a piece of his own ass and swallowed it. And the Nip—the Nip was probably halfway to Hokkaido. The incompetence of these people. The shit and stupidity.
And these artists. Christ, they made him want to puke. Aberclown sucked up to them, especially the little Jew bitch who’d been hiding the guy all along—hiding him and then lying about it, just to jerk them off. Big joke. Ha, ha, ha. There she was now, right in the thick of it, cradling a drink and giving everybody that wide-eyed innocent look, pure as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, what would she know about it?
He would have found out. If Aberclown had only let him go, he would have found out a hundred and five percent of everything she ever knew, from her daddy’s ATM number to how many hairs she had on her twat—he’d been in on some cold interrogations, men and women both, VC as hard and silent as stones, and nobody knew how to put the fear into them like he did—but with her it wasn’t an interrogation, it was a tea party. He’d sat there for two sweaty stinking hours with Aberclown and the sheriff and it was all he could do to keep himself from taking her by the hair and jerking her head back till her throat opened up like a slow drain with a snake down it. Damn. But Aberclown and the hick sheriff treated her like a senator’s wife or something and she threw out a couple crumbs and that was it. She hadn’t told them the half of it. Why should she? She was an artist, right?
He was standing there, fuming, when he felt a pressure on his arm and all at once he was staring up into the puffy face of another artist, a great big fluty-voiced ass of a woman with a cast in one eye. “What’s this all about?” she gasped. “What’s happening?”
He couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t—he felt himself slipping, three toes over the line and whatever you do don’t pull that ripcord. “What the fuck you think is happening,” he snarled, jerking his arm away from her. “It’s Armageddon, they’re fucking dogs out there, eating human flesh. Wake up, bitch.” The rage was racing in his veins as he watched her shrink away from him.
But what now? The sheriff had disappeared into the house, Aberclown’s big speckled face was coming up on his left like something out of planetary alignment and the deputies were standing around with their thumbs up their asses—son of a fucking bitch. He’d been all packed and ready to go, he’d stowed his gear and chowed down his last hunk of overcooked barbecue and a couple warm Budweisers in somebody’s greasy back kitchen, and he was looking forward to kicking back at home, smoke some weed, take the boat out, maybe look up that waitress from Shucker’s—what was her name, Linda?—and now he was going to have to start all over again.
Just then the lights went on in the house, a spill of silver washing over thirty pairs of dress shoes. Turco squared his shoulders and looked round him: here he was in a crisis situation and what the hell was he doing about it? He was just standing around like the rest of the shitheads, his feet cemented to the flagstones: in a minute he’d have a drink in his hand and before you knew it he’d be an artist himself. “Lewis!” It was Aberclown—now he had a hand on him, it was feel-up-Turco night. “Lewis, we’ve got to get—”
“Get shit,” Turco said. “Get fucked.”
It was at that moment that Dershowitz threw back her head and laughed—laughed—whooping like the ringer in a comedy club, bending over to pat her breastbone and give her tits a good shake for everybody to see. And the rest of them—the surfer boy with the cute little bleached forelock and the old guy with the hairy wrists—they were laughing too. This laughter—these
Turco came at them without warning, catching the old guy with an elbow that doubled him up in his own puke and drilling the beachboy with a single shot to the sternum that sent him sprawling, and then he had her, the bitch, had her by the hair, the glass shattering on the flagstones at her feet and her hands caught fast behind her. “Where is he?” he demanded, barking, raging, jerking at the knot of her hair as if he were climbing rope. “Where the fuck is he?”
The moment lingered like a shock wave, and then they were on him—Aberclown, the hairy old geek and the beachboy, the fag with the flattop, everybody, even the lame-ass deputies—and he hurt at least one of them with a chop to the groin and he nailed another with a side-blade kick, but the bitch broke away from him and they got him down by sheer force of numbers. They were yammering like dogs, he couldn’t hear them, everybody in on the act now, and she was coming at him like a Harpy, kicking him over and over again with the point of a sharp-toed little red shoe. “My father’ll make you pay for this,” she yelped, makeup smeared, sunglasses gone, “you bastard … if Saxby was here …”
Saxby? Who the hell was Saxby? Not that it mattered, because Aberclown had him all wrapped up in his orangutan’s arms and there were about fourteen bodies attached to his, hustling him out onto the lawn and into the shadows that were closing over the trees like the curtain falling on the very last act of a play. Or not just a play, a tragedy.
At that moment, the moment of the altercation on the patio, the moment Ruth invoked his name, Saxby wasn’t on Tupelo Island at all. He was in his mother’s Mercedes, tooling down the highway at seventy-five, heading for Waycross, Ciceroville and the western verge of the Okefenokee Swamp. In the back seat, trembling slightly with the motion of the car, was a dirty yellow gym bag into which he’d stuffed his toothbruth, razor, a change of underwear, three pairs of socks, two of shorts, a T-shirt and a bandanna. Alongside the gym bag, low humps of nylon in the dark, were his sleeping bag and one-man tent. He’d put his traps and waders, a cylinder of oxygen and a roll of clear heavy-duty plastic bags—for fish transport, with twists—in the trunk. The Mercedes wasn’t exactly the most convenient vehicle to be taking on a collecting trip, but the pickup was in the shop—Fords! six thousand miles on the damn thing and already it was leaking oil—and when Roy Dotson called to tell him he’d caught a bucketful of albinos in a trough on the back side of Billy’s Island, he didn’t have time to think about it: this was what he’d been
