East is East

himself, was Detlef Abercorn. He was wearing his waders and he clutched a satchel full of halizone tablets, sun block, 6-12, Off! and calamine lotion as if he were afraid it would sprout wings and fly away. He was also wearing a bright orange life jacket, though he felt a little foolish in it. Roy Dotson had insisted on the life jacket and Abercorn had obliged him for two reasons. The first was purely diplomatic. Turco had informed Dotson, who was after all going out of his way to help them, that he would shove it—the life jacket—up his—Roy Dotson’s—ass if he said another word about it, and so Abercorn, in the spirit of pacification, had meekly slipped into his own. The second reason was more basic: he was scared witless about going out amongst the alligators and snakes and felt he needed all the help he could get. With the waders and life vest, the only place a snake could get him, he figured, was in the face, and he planned to keep that portion of his anatomy high, dry and out of reach.

Still, for all that, the ride wasn’t half bad. The breeze kept the mosquitoes off his swollen ears and dried the sweat at his temples, and the swamp seemed a little less threatening now that he was actually out on it. Nothing crept into his waders to bite, sting and gouge him, no snakes dropped from the trees and the only alligator he saw was the size of a woman’s purse. He was surprised too that there was open water—quite a bit of it. If he squinted his eyes behind the prescription sunglasses with the clear plastic frames he could almost imagine he was a boy again, out on Lake Casitas with his dad and mom and brother Holger.

Another surprise was the dock at Billy’s Island. There was actually a dock there, nothing much more than two posts sunk into the murk and a grid of weathered boards, but a dock nonetheless. And beyond the dock, terra firma. Or almost. He began to feel a bit overdressed in his waders and life jacket—he’d pictured something out of The African Queen, up to his waist in quicksand and slime, but this was just plain old ordinary dirt. Or mud. A little spongy maybe but nothing that would have ruined his day if he’d been dressed in jeans, T-shirt and hiking boots.

Roy Dotson led the way, closely shadowed by Turco, who stepped lightly, tense and alert and hulking under the weight of his pack. Abercorn brought up the rear, loping along with his big gangling strides, ducking away from the squadrons of insects that converged on his every step and fanned out to anticipate the next. They were following a crude trail to the far side of the island, where, according to Roy Dotson, Saxby had set up his fishing camp the previous morning. (“Pygmy fish,” Turco had snorted when Dotson told them the story. “You ask me, it’s a cover is what it is.”)

They walked in single file for a quarter of an hour under a canopy of slash pine that cut the sunlight to a muted dapple. The air was heavy here, so thick it was like another medium, and the heat had them running sweat till they were as drenched as if they’d swum the whole way from the tourist center. Salt pills, Abercorn thought, and he cursed himself for having forgotten them. He was wondering what happened to you when you ran out of salt in your system—you collapsed, didn’t you, something to do with electrolytes, or was that batteries?—when Turco took hold of Roy Dotson’s arm and the three of them halted. “What?” Dotson said. “What is it?”

Turco tightened his grip. “The camp,” he breathed. Somewhere a bird began to cry out, hard and urgent, as if some unseen hand were plucking it alive. Roy Dotson started to say something but Turco cut him off with a hiss. “Shhhh!” he said, and his eyes had gone cold. “Stay here, both of you. I’m going in alone.”

Abercorn saw nothing but tree trunks and leaves. The waders were a sweat box, the life vest constricted his lungs. He sucked in a breath and coughed out insects.

“Shhhh!”

“Lewis—” Abercorn warned, meaning to point out that this was not the Ho Chi Minh Trail, appearances to the contrary, and that Saxby was not an armed and treacherous communist guerrilla but a decent guy who loved fish and Ruth Dershowitz, not to mention an American citizen with inalienable rights, and who probably wasn’t involved in all this anyway, or at least not too deeply, but Turco gave him a look of such uncompromising fury that he gave it up. This was what Turco was paid for, this was what he was doing here—there was no stopping him now. Abercorn exchanged a look with Roy Dotson as Turco shrugged out of his pack and darted off silently through the undergrowth. Though he still saw nothing—no camp, no tent, no sign whatever of civilization—Abercorn fumbled for his tape recorder and notepad, feeling the excitement rise in him despite himself. Maybe Lewis was right after all, maybe the Nip was hiding out there with Saxby and they could throw the cuffs on him, pack it up and get out of this shithole for good.

Roy Dotson didn’t think so. His mouth was drawn tight and an angry crease had appeared between his eyebrows. “The guy’s crazy,” he said in a terse whisper. “Like I told you, Sax was as shocked as I was to see that man there in the trunk of the car.” Abercorn didn’t respond. He’d fixed his eye on the tangle of growth into which Turco had disappeared, and now he started forward, moving as stealthily as could be expected from a six-foot-five- inch albino in a pair of hip waders. Roy Dotson shrugged and fell into step behind him.

Nothing moved. The forest was still, locked in the grip of the heat. The bird cried out again, terrible, lonely, hurt in some deep essential place. Abercorn kept his eyes on a conjunction of branches up ahead, the waders grunting and squelching beneath his sweat-soaked feet. He stepped over the stump of a felled tree, and then another. Mosquitoes settled on his arms, his face, the backs of his hands, and he didn’t bother to swat them away.

And then, what he’d been waiting for: a shout. It ruptured the silence, a single mad stunned bellow of surprise that rose up to steal the heat from the trees. Suddenly they were running and nothing mattered but the snarl of voices up ahead and the sudden sharp snap of branches and the thrashing in the undergrowth. The Nip! Abercorn was thinking, Turco’s got the Nip!, and in his excitement he shot ahead of Roy Dotson, his knees pumping, the waders flapping like sails in a high wind. There! Just ahead: a tent—how could he have missed it?—a circle of charred rocks, a fishing net strung from the trees. Another shout. A curse. And then he was there, stumbling over the cold cookfire as the figures of Saxby and Turco materialized from the camouflage of briar and palmetto.

They were on the ground, rocking in each other’s arms, their legs flailing at the bush. Turco was all over Saxby, though Saxby had six inches and fifty pounds on him. “Get … off!” Saxby roared, but Turco had him in some sort of secret commando grip, forcing his face down into the wet earth, the handcuffs flashing in a shaft of sunlight. “Lewis!” Abercorn shouted, but Turco jerked the bigger man’s arm back and cuffed his wrists. “Lewis, what the hell—?” Abercorn’s voice was high. This was all wrong. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be …

“Det, are you crazy?” Saxby was furious, thrashing beneath Turco’s weight, a single smear of reddish dirt ground like a scar into his cheek. “Get him off me!”

But Turco had him, and he wouldn’t let go. He crouched atop him like a gnome, knee planted in the small of the back, left hand rigid at the base of the skull. “Shut it,” he said, and his voice was calm, even, not a hint of adrenaline in it. “You’re under arrest, motherfucker.”

Cheap Thrills

Everyone else simply read in the front parlor beneath the ancient brass chandelier, informally, comfortably, with the lights up and the colonists settled into easy chairs or stretched out languidly on the rug. There was coffee and sherry and there was always something sweet—cupcakes or cookies, often baked by Septima herself. It was homey, unthreatening, an arena in which an artist—no matter his or her status in the world beyond these walls— could present work in progress in an intimate and supportive atmosphere. If anything, the bias was anti- performance. You simply stood up there and read. No tricks, no gadgets, no histrionics. You read in a flat, unobtrusive voice, letting the work speak for itself—anything else would have been inappropriate, a violation of the unspoken rules and an embarrassment to your fellow colonists. In a word, rude. And you read in the front parlor, beneath the chandelier. Everyone did.

Everyone, that is, but Jane Shine.

No. Jane had to read out on the patio in the black of night, a single spot trained on her from overhead while a second light, more stagey and diffuse, played off her gypsy features from a box located in the azalea bushes. Ruth couldn’t believe it. The colonists were shunted outside and forced into folding chairs all marshaled in neat rows, as if this were Shakespeare under the stars or something. Three minutes in one of those chairs was like an hour on the rack. It was outrageous. What was she thinking?

Ruth came in with Brie just as Septima was working her way to the front to introduce Jane. She passed up the opportunity to sit with Sandy, Ina and Regina in order to take the seats directly behind Mignonette Teitelbaum