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 waiting for since he left La Jolla.
He was excited, hurtling through the long shadows of the evening, the radio cranked up high. The music was country, of course—he liked soft rock, Steely Dan and that sort of thing, but once you left the city you got nothing but your hard-core redneck honky-tonk psychodrama—but he cranked it anyway. Albino pygmies. Roy Dotson had them, a whole tankful. And they were his. His for the asking. He felt so exhilarated he beat time on the steering wheel and sang along in a high-pitched, off-key whinny that would have cleared the Grand Ole Opry in ten seconds flat:
He roared past clapboard filling stations, towns that consisted of three farmhouses and a single intersection, past shanties and dumb-staring cattle and low pink-and-white fields of cotton and on into the twilight, the steel- belted radials beating rhythm beneath him. He was feeling good, as good as he’d ever felt, picturing the reflecting pool out front of the big house converted to a breeding pond, milk-white albinos churning up the surface as he cast food pellets out over the water, orders from aquarists all over the world, a steady stream of offers to lecture and consult … but then he thought of Ruth and the picture switched channels on him. He’d felt bad about leaving her like that, but Roy’s phone call had lit up all his lights, galvanized him—she’d be all right, he’d told himself, the adrenaline pumping through him as he tore around the house, hurrying to make the six o’clock ferry. And if she wasn’t all right—and here he had to admit how hurt he’d been—it was her own fault. She hadn’t told him, hadn’t trusted him. He’d felt betrayed. Angry. Felt like getting back at her. And so he’d gone to Abercorn—who wouldn’t?
But it wasn’t as cold as she made it out to be. He’d got Abercorn’s promise to go easy on her—and no, there was no question of prosecution, none at all—and he’d sat with her through the questioning till Theron got up and asked him to leave the room. She’d seemed fine when he kissed her goodbye, seemed her old self again. If she’d suffered a little, maybe she deserved it. He believed her when she claimed the Japanese kid was nothing more than a curiosity—he was ridiculous, pitiful, with a face like putty waiting to be molded and a head too big for his body— but she carried things too far. To think that she’d kept the whole thing a secret from him, her lover, her man—and he’d do anything for her, she knew that—well, it hurt and there were no two ways about it.
Still, Saxby wasn’t one for brooding. He punched another button on the radio and the small glowing Teutonic space of the cab swelled with the skreel of fiddles and the twang of guitars, and before he knew it he was yodeling along with a tune about truckers and blue tick hounds and Ruth slipped from his mind, replaced by the glowing alabaster vision of a pygmy sunfish gliding through the silent weedy depths of the Okefenokee.
It was dark by the time Saxby reached Ciceroville. He gassed up at Sherm’s Chevron and then swung into the parking lot of the Tender Sproats Motel, Mr. Gobi Aloo, Proprietor. The tiny fly-spotted office was deserted, but when Saxby depressed the buzzer connected to the apartment in back, Gobi appeared like a genie sprung from a bottle. The little man’s features lit with pleasure as he bundled himself through the door and sidled up to the desk, a smell of curry wafting along with him. “Well, if it ain’t the man hisself, Saxby Lights, from Tup-e-lo Island, Georgia.” He spoke with the slow drawl he’d developed within days of his emigration from the Punjab, slurring the syllables round the wad in his cheek. “Saxby, Saxby,” he drawled, wagging his delicate head, but then, as he did from time to time, he slipped into the light musical cadence of the subcontinent: “And to what do we owe the pleasure? Fish, I would be thinking, yes?”
“You guessed it, Gobe.” Saxby could barely contain himself—he was bursting with the news. “Roy’s found them. Soon’s I check in I’m going straight over there to have a look at what he’s got and in the morning we’re going to pull some nets and hopefully we’re going to get lucky. I mean real lucky. Jackpot time.”
Gobi beamed up at him, a buttery little man in a dirty feedstore cap, an overstretched T-shirt and a pair of overalls. If it weren’t for the caste mark between his eyes, you might have mistaken him for a sunburned cracker. His drawl thickened with the exchange: “Y’all gone git you some, Ah know it—y’all deserves nothin’ less.” He turned his head to spit a reddish-brown stream of tobacco and betel-nut juice into the wastebasket under the counter.
On his last two visits to the Okefenokee, Saxby had stayed here, at the Tender Sproats Motel in Ciceroville. It was forty-seven miles from the dock at Stephen C. Foster State Park, on the western edge of the swamp, but it was a five-minute walk from Roy Dotson’s place. And that made it convenient. He signed the register Gobi slid
