cut the surface of the whiskey-complected water. For just a moment then, Roy relaxed his official face. “AH right, go ahead,” he said. “But you understand you’re on your own. I won’t be able to join you, not now. And if it gets bad,” he added, “I’ll come out there after you myself.”
And so Roy walked off toward the office and the telephone that would summon Bull Tibbets, Detlef Abercorn and Lewis Turco and a whole chin-thrusting, neck-stretching pack of intensely curious people representing the nation’s supremely curious press, and Saxby set out alone for Billy’s Island in Roy’s long low flat-bottomed boat.
It was early yet, and when Saxby got beyond the fishermen with their cane poles, straw hats and early- morning Budweisers, the swamp was still and silent, a place of immemorial wakings floating beneath a breath of mist. Roy’s directions were flawless—for all his easy country ways, when you came down to it he was as precise as a brain surgeon—and Saxby had no trouble finding the crude trail that led round to the back side of Billy’s Island. The trail was off-limits to anyone without a special permit, and since it wouldn’t admit any of the motor-driven rental boats in any case, it was little used, overgrown with cascades of honeysuckle and cassena. Saxby had to pole his way through, stopping from time to time to cut back the vegetation with the machete Roy had thought to provide. By nine o’clock the sweat had soaked right on through to his underwear and the ribs of his socks, and the boat was a traveling salad of chopped leaves, twigs and fat disoriented spiders. The drizzle had cleared off and the sun was coming on strong by the time he glided out onto the titi-fringed pond Roy had described right on down to the last lily pad.
The pond looked ordinary enough—fifty feet across, six or eight feet deep, a prairie beyond it snarled with marsh grass, pipewort and lily pads, the slash pine of Billy’s Island backing up on it from the rear. It was nothing more than an oversized gator wallow, really—in fact, an eight-footer hung in the water ahead of him, floating like a sky diver in the blue, its legs spread wide, the crenelated tail hanging motionless. Yes, the pond looked ordinary enough—no different from a thousand others—but to Saxby it was entirely unique, the pond of all ponds, the place in which the albino pygmy sunfish lurked in all its rare and recondite glory.
He could barely restrain himself. He wanted to toss out the minnow traps, float the seine, make the water churn with the hard flat caudal muscles of his quarry—but he knew better. Though it looked clear, the sun hot, the sky arching electric overhead, he knew the weather could change out here from moment to moment and that he had to set up camp first—just to be safe. Half an hour, that’s all it would take.
When he drifted back out onto the pond, the sun had set it aflame and the gator had gone (which was just as well—the last thing he needed was tangling an angry gator up in his net). He set and baited half a dozen minnow traps and then he floated the seine across the pond. He wasn’t particularly confident in the seine—if there were too many obstructions the net would snag and the fish would escape—but he was hoping to get lucky. Short of dynamite, the seine was the quickest and most efficient way to discover what lay beneath the surface. And there was no thrill like it—as the two sides of the net drew together like a purse, you could see the fish fighting it, roiling the water and beating at the mesh, and then, as you pulled it ashore, there they were, silver and gold, flashing in the bag like rare coin.
The first pull produced nothing—the net fouled on a sunken branch. But the second—the second hit the jackpot. There he was, drowned in sweat and a paste of crushed mosquitoes, up to his thews in the muck, the net sweeping closer, the neck of the bag constricting, and he could feel the weight and the life of them. And then he had the bag over the gunwale of the boat that floated beside him, and there they were. His albinos. Two of them, three, five, six and eight and ten, counting breathlessly as he plucked them from the farrago of thrashing fish, casting aside the darters and the bluegills and the ordinary dark-skinned pygmies like so much refuse. He put the good ones, the albinos, in an array of sloshing buckets in the bottom of the boat, and then he cast the net again and again. Finally, late in the afternoon, he forced himself to stop and take his treasure back to camp (he was like a forty-niner, a crazed old galoot onto the richest vein in the hills, and he didn’t want to stop, couldn’t, but he had to—the sun was slowly raising the temperature in the buckets and he was afraid he’d lose everything he had if he didn’t). Yes, and then he went back to camp to set the buckets in the shade beneath the trees. Yes. And then Turco hit him.
All the long way back to the dock, all the way up the rough wooden planks, through the phalanx of reporters and photographers and into the tourist center where Sheriff Bull Tibbets sat chewing his cud and stroking his gut as if it were a crystal ball, Saxby protested his innocence. He raged, he wheedled, he reasoned, pleaded, threatened, but Abercorn wouldn’t listen. Abercorn was angry. His jaw was set, his pink eyes were hard. “No more Mr. Nice Guy,” he said, and his voice was cold and uncompromising, “I’m through fooling around.” Saxby knew something he wasn’t telling him, he claimed—and so did Ruth—and there were going to be some charges leveled. People were going to jail here. This was serious business. Deadly serious. On the other hand, if Saxby cooperated—if
Saxby was furious, enraged, frightened. No matter what he said, they didn’t believe him. He knew nothing. But until he did know, until he told them precisely where Hiro Tanaka was and why and how he’d helped him escape, he was going to sit in a jail cell and work hard at remembering. For the longest while, Saxby couldn’t even think straight—all he wanted was to spring out of the chair, snap the handcuffs like some superhero and pound that acid-washed face till it burst like a tomato. But then Abercorn waved him away in disgust and they shipped him off to the Clinch County Jail in Ciceroville and gave him his phone call. He phoned his mother. She was a towering presence, all-powerful, the mother he’d clung to as a fatherless boy trying to survive a Yankee accent in a Guale Coast school. She honed her anger in the clearest tones of reassurance and threat: “Donnager Stratton will have you out of that cell inside the hour, I guarantee you that, and we will have the governor himself in on this by nightfall—really, I still cannot believe it—and those odious petty little agents will find themselves the ones in hot water, just you believe me.”
“Mama,” he’d said to her then, “Mama, they want Ruth down here.”
“Ruthie?” she repeated, and he could almost hear the tumblers clicking in her head. “Certainly they don’t think—?”
“They think everything, Mama. They want her down here to go out in the swamp with a megaphone or something and call out his name—they say she’s the one he knows, the only one he’ll listen to—”
“But that’s absurd.”
“That’s what I told them.” He thought of Abercorn, cold ridiculous Abercorn, and what he’d said:
Septima told her. And she didn’t like it. Not a bit. Ruth felt suddenly that she was losing her grip on Saxby, on Septima and Thanatopsis House and the whole wide brilliant world of celebrity and accomplishment that radiated out from it, felt as if she were clinging to a ledge above a yawning gulf while Jane Shine and Detlef Abercorn and even Septima herself beat at her fingers with their microphones and the hard flat unyielding plank of the law. She had no choice in the matter. In the morning Owen was going to drive her down to the Okefenokee Swamp and she was going to go out in a boat with Detlef Abercorn and Lewis Turco and anybody else they wanted to include and she was going to cry out Hiro’s name and beg him to surrender. That was what she was going to do—for Saxby and for Septima too. And maybe even for Hiro himself.
But that was tomorrow. Tonight she was going to read.
At nine o’clock the colonists gathered in the front parlor and settled themselves into the familiar easy chairs, loveseats and sofas in the glow of the subdued and very ordinary light that emanated from the reading lamps stationed round the room. There were no spotlights and there was no microphone. Ruth appeared promptly at nine, dressed as if she were going to an outdoor barbecue. She’d spent some time on her face, her nails and her hair, but the clothes she kept simple—the T-shirt, jeans and heels she’d first envisioned. She was determined that every detail of this reading would stand in opposition to the one that preceded it. There would be no cheap thrills tonight, no Swedish accents and maudlin histrionics—just work, honest work, presented in an honest voice.
The first thing Ruth noticed as she took her seat in the big armchair beneath the chandelier was that Septima
