East is East

been a holocaust of disaster, a funnel of ridicule for as long as Thanatopsis existed, and Jane Shine had put her down with the finality of a gravedigger. Sandy had tried his best to distract her afterward, and Irving was especially solicitous, but she felt as if the world had fallen to ash around her. Worse: all she had to look forward to now was the wrath of Saxby, the intransigence of Septima and the contempt of unknown sheriffs, the speckle-faced Abercorn and his loathsome little factotum. She went to bed after a single drink, the other colonists looking shrouds at her, and she pulled the darkness down around her and plunged into sleep as into a bottomless hole.

In the morning, it was the swamp. And Saxby. He was angry, upset, resentful, his eyes full of accusation and hurt. She met him out front of the Tender Sproats Motel and threw herself into his arms like a war bride while Owen and a potbellied little brown man in a tractor cap looked on. They were on a tight schedule, the police were waiting, the pygmy fish languishing in their far-flung buckets, but she couldn’t help getting the feel of the role. She was abused and misunderstood, she was self-sacrificing and courageous, giving herself up to her enemies so her man could go free … and she was a humanitarian too, going out into the pit of nowhere, fighting back mosquitoes, snakes, pygmy fish and worse, to save a poor misguided Japanese boy. She could feel her eyes beginning to water over the complexities of it. “Give me five minutes, Sax,” she whispered, “that’s all I ask. Five minutes alone with you.”

He hesitated. There were fish in his eyes—and something else too, hard and vengeful. But then he took her hand, led her to his room and pulled the door firmly shut behind them.

It wasn’t the time for love, though the thought of it came to her in an involuntary little spasm and her pulse quickened just perceptibly. She moved into his arms and let the tears come. Again and then again she reassured him that the thing with Hiro was nothing, totally innocent, a mistake, and that she’d been using him for her fiction and had no intention of helping him escape or find his way into the trunk of that car. He had to believe her. He did believe her, didn’t he?

Three hours in the Clinch County Jail hadn’t improved his temper any, but he was so fish-obsessed he couldn’t really focus his anger for more than a moment at a time. They were out there, his albinos, in five plastic buckets, without protection. He had to get to them and he’d worry about the rest later. “I believe you,” he said.

As it turned out, they drove down to the swamp together in the Mercedes, Owen following in his Mazda. Driving, his forearm slouched easily over the wheel, the radio up high, Saxby began to relax, chattering on about his fish and his nets and his tanks until Ruth began to think things would work out after all. When they arrived, Abercorn and Turco were waiting for them, as were the local sheriff, about two hundred sunburned gawkers with campers, coolers and smoking barbecues, and a throng of media people who came at Ruth with drawn microphones and flailing notepads. All this for poor Hiro? she thought, and then the seed of it, the first stirring: And for me? She ran a hand through her hair, put on a committed and absorbed look for the photographers. Was she here to save Hiro Tanaka? someone wanted to know. Was she romantically involved with him? Was he as dangerous as they said? She knew this role, this one was easy. “No comment,” she chirped, and she stepped high, moving right along till the police cordon opened up for her and the reporters fell away like so many flies.

In the next moment she stood face to face with Turco and Abercorn. Ruth felt Saxby tense beside her, but she clung to him and he held back. Abercorn stepped forward, his patchy face and artificial hair hidden beneath the brim of the most ridiculous hat she’d ever seen outside of a circus. He stood a head taller than anyone else in the crowd. “Glad you could make it,” he said, and there was nothing friendly about it. “The boat’s this way.” She pecked Sax a kiss, a kiss recorded by the click of lenses and the pop of flashbulbs from beyond the police line, and then she went off with him.

After that, it was the swamp. With a vengeance. There was the stink of it, first of all—the whole place smelled like the alley out back of a fish market. Then there were the bugs, legions of them, of every known species and appetite, not to mention the snakes in the trees or the blistered scum on the water. She looked out over the matted surface to the ghostly trees beyond and to the trees that shadowed them and so on all the way to the horizon and thought of a diorama she’d once seen depicting the dinosaurs in their heyday. But then the diorama was in a cool, dark, antiseptic museum, and the trees were painted on.

And then a man she hadn’t noticed till that moment was helping her into the boat—he was clean-shaven, neither young nor old, and he wore a baseball cap with a pair of fold-down sunglasses attached to the visor. She sat up front beside a pair of loudspeakers—the sort of arrangement local politicians favor as they Doppler up and down the streets—while the man in the cap climbed into the rear and busied himself with the engine. It was a big boat, long, wide and flat-bottomed, and reassuringly stable. She looked straight ahead as Abercorn stationed himself in the middle and Turco, in his jungle fighter’s costume, crouched down just behind her. The motor coughed, sputtered and then roared to life, and they were off.

By eleven o’clock she was hoarse, thirsty, sweat-soaked and sunburned, and bitten in all the key regions of her anatomy. Every time she paused to catch her breath or take a sip of water Turco’s nasty little voice was there to fill the void, urging her on: “Come on, come on, keep it up—I tell you it’s going to work, I know these people, I know them.” It didn’t take her long to realize that this was his idea, yet another demented variation on the boom box and the designer clothes. She wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t speak to him, wouldn’t so much as turn her head, but she kept it up—for Saxby’s sake, for Septima’s sake, for her own sake and Hiro’s—kept it up till she had no voice left.

It must have been about four when the sky clouded over and the storm came up on them. Abercorn and the man in the cap—his name was Watt-Something and he was one of the sheriff’s men—wanted to go in, but Turco wouldn’t hear of it. He was clenched like a fist, his face dark and angry. His tone was pathology itself. “I can smell him,” he hissed. “He’s out there, I know it.” And then to Ruth: “Keep it up, goddamn it, keep it up.”

She held the microphone to her lips and called out Hiro’s name, over and over, though she knew it was absurd, hopeless, as asinine as serenading the bugs with Donna Summer. “Hiro!” she bellowed to the tree toads and tuitles, to the birds and bears and the mute identical trees, “Hiro!,” and the gnats swarmed down her throat and up her nose. She was still at it when the storm broke and the rain lashed them like a whip, windblown and harsh. And then all of a sudden Turco was pinching her arm and shushing her and there it was, thin and plaintive, the distant rain-washed bleat of subjection and defeat: “Haha! Haha! Haha!”

Hiro came to her arms, came running, awash in filth, bleeding from every pore, his clothes hanging in shreds, splashing through the sludge like a boy coming in off the playground. “Haha! Haha!” he cried, “Okasan! Okasan!” He was crazed, delirious, she could see that, could see it in his face and in the mad wide stare of his eyes. Turco crouched like an insect behind her and Hiro spread his arms wide, running, splashing, stumbling for her, and she felt in that instant that nothing mattered in the world but this poor tortured man, this sweet man, this man she’d kept and fed and loved, and she called out his name once more —”Hiro!”—and this time, for the first time, she meant it.

The rain drove down. The swamp festered and hummed. And then Turco was on him like some sort of parasite, choking him, forcing his face into the water, twisting his arms back till they went tight in the shoulders. They hauled him over the side like a fish and laid him face-up on the floor of the boat, and now his animation was gone—he looked half-dead lying there, his head thrown back and his sick tan eyes swimming in their sockets. They wouldn’t let her touch him. All she wanted was to cradle him, hold his head in her lap, but they wouldn’t let her. She lost control then, for just a moment, shoving at Turco, cursing him, and he came back at her with a ferocity that stopped her heart. He didn’t touch her, not this time, but the look on his face was a thing she would never forget— only the very thinnest single played-out strand of wire was holding him back. All the long way back to the dock she sat there, staring out on nothing, the rain beating at her, feeling helpless, feeling like an apostate, feeling violated.

That was the low point.

When they got back to the dock, when the crowd overwhelmed the thin line of police and pushed their way through to get a glimpse of Hiro Tanaka, the desperado, the jailbreaker, the foreigner, their plain sunburned faces and steady pale eyes prepared for any extreme of outrage and shock, when a kind of frenzy consumed the press and even the police were hard-pressed to clamp down on their wads of Redman and retain their equanimity, that’s when things began to turn. They were all over her, all over him. The police shouldered their way through, cleared a channel to the ambulance, the white arms and legs and sure hands of the paramedics, rain driving down and down and down. The lights flashed, the siren screamed and Hiro was gone, Ruth clinging dazedly to the picture of him laid out on the stretcher, Turco hanging over him like a vampire. They gave her five minutes, and in a fog she found her