across the counter to him.
“Y’all be stayin’ one night or two?”
“One night,” Saxby told him, pressing a twenty into his palm and getting back a worn single and three nickels in exchange. If things worked out he’d be heading back to Tupelo tomorrow night; if not, Roy had gotten him a special permit and he was going to pitch his tent on Billy’s Island for as long as it took.
“Listen,” Gobi said, handing him the room key as his voice deepened into the whiskey-cracked gruffness of the cracker and the pioneer, “y’all take care now, hear?”
Saxby didn’t bother with the room. He pocketed the key, parked the Mercedes in the slot reserved for number 12, and started up the street for Roy’s house. He could barely fight down his euphoria. He felt connected to everything, holy, Whitmanesque, a man on the verge of a special communion with the mysteries of nature and the whiteness of the fish. The night conspired with him. It was perfect, so still and warm and peaceful the sky could have been a velvet glove cupped over the town, and he smelled honeysuckle and jasmine and heard the distant curt bark of a dog and thrilled deep within him to the sizzling pulse of tree frogs and crickets. Porch lights glowed against the suffocation of the night. The streets were deserted. Ciceroville was a dry town in a dry county, and all its population of 3,237 was already settled in for the evening, gathered round the tube with Coke and lemonade and cans of beer that sweated in their hands like contraband.
Roy was waiting for him on the porch. Saxby loped up the walk, his heart banging, and there he was, in the porch swing, his daughter Ally and a picture book in his lap. “Evenin’, Sax,” Roy drawled.
“Roy.” Saxby was so excited he couldn’t elaborate on the greeting, the punch of the syllable about all he could manage.
“Saxby, Saxby, Saxby!” Ally squealed, and in the next instant she was down off the porch and whirling in his arms. Roy was still in the porch swing, watching him, a grin on his face. The light over his head fluttered with moths.
“So you got them,” Saxby said finally, while Ally giggled and clawed at his arms and he fought to maintain his balance and keep her trusting head and frail arms away from the banister.
Roy nodded. He was thirty-one years old, his forehead sloped back from a face that was primarily nose and he wore his white-blond hair slicked back and drawn up in a ponytail. He worked for the National Park Service and he was second in command at the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. It was he who had arranged for Saxby’s special collecting permit—the least a former fraternity brother could do, as he rather dryly put it. “You want to go on inside and have a look at the fish,” he asked, “or you want to sit out here and listen to the rest of
“Give me a break, Roy,” Saxby said, but he’d already set Ally down like a package he didn’t want to forget and started up the steps. “Where are they—in the house or one of the tanks in the garage?”
Roy had risen to his feet. “Well, if you really want to see them,” he said, “—but are you sure you don’t want to watch the Braves game first? It’s a twi-night doubleheader.”
Saxby let him have his fun, but when Roy lightly bounced down the steps and ambled round the corner of the house, he was right on his heels. He saw that they were heading for the garage, a slouching two-story affair detached from the house and desperately in need of paint, putty, nails, lumber, floor joists, weight-bearing beams and four or five hundred roofing shingles. They passed Roy’s pickup and his wife’s Honda in the dirt drive, moribund leaves crunching underfoot, the dirt-smeared windows ahead of them glowing with a soft seductive light.
There was no room for the cars in the garage, which housed Roy’s bone and taxidermy collections, his traps and tools and cages and an aggregation of household refuse that would make the careers of any twenty future archaeologists: collapsed card tables and staved-in chairs, rolls of stained wallpaper and carpet remnants, cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling and spilling over with dismembered dolls, broken crockery, faded magazines and rusted Ginzu knives, rack upon rack of paint cans, empty wine bottles and jars of paint thinner, embalming fluid and formalin. In the midst of it all, Roy always kept a few mesh cages rattling with snakes and turtles and opossums, and half a dozen ancient slate-bottomed aquariums bubbling away under jury-rigged lights. If he found something interesting in the swamp, he brought it home with him.
Now, with Ally sailing on ahead of them and chanting “Saxby’s fish, I wish, I wish” in a nasal singsong, they entered this cramped but hallowed space. The first thing to catch Saxby’s eye was a stuffed armadillo perched atop a coat tree, and then the mounted paw of a bobcat that had left it behind in a trap, something in a cage with black glittering eyes, and finally the aquariums, dimly lit and yet glowing like treasure from across the room. He was breathing hard—practically panting—as he waded through the slurry of refuse underfoot and made his way to the shining glass pane in front of which Ally had stationed herself. Crouching down to peer expectantly through the thick curtain of algae, he saw … a rippled snout and two dead saurian eyes peering back at him. Ally’s laugh was shrill as a fire alarm. “Tricked you!” she screeched.
“Next one over, Sax,” Roy coached. “To your right.”
Saxby turned his head then and experienced his moment of grace: there they were. His albinos. Opercula heaving, fins waving, cold little lips blowing him kisses. They were a small miracle.
He looked closer. None of them—there were eighteen in all—was longer than the cap of a Bic pen and most of them showed fin and tail damage from the attacks of their neighbors. Despite their size, they were an aggressive species, fiercely territorial and antisocial. Roy had provided a few twigs and stones for cover, but it was a halfhearted effort that didn’t begin to protect them from one another. What was he thinking? Didn’t he realize what they had here? Saxby felt the resentment rising in him, but he caught himself—there they were, albinos, pygmy sunfish as smooth and white as miniature bars of soap, and that was all that mattered.
For a long while he squatted there in front of the tank, watching them hang in the water, circle the surface, rise and fall and make sudden savage runs at one another. They were white, all right, and it amazed him. He’d known that they would be—intellectually, that is—but the reality leaped out at him. He’d seen albino catfish, cichlids as pale and pink as cherry yogurt, blind cavefish bleached of color through eons of groping in the dark, but this was something else. This was a legendary whiteness, the whiteness of purity, of June brides, Christo’s running fence, the inner wrapping of the Hershey bar. He would breed them, that’s what he would do, breed them because they were unusual, rarities, freaks, because they were white as the sheets and hoods of the Ku Klux Klan, white as ice, heartless and cold and necessary.
He looked up. Ally was gone. Roy hovered over him. “Can we get more?”
Roy was smiling his quiet smile. He understood the sort of excitement that made the breath come quick in the presence of a certain butterfly or slug or a glistening pale little fingernail-sized fish. “We can sure try,” he said.
The next morning the telephone roused saxby from dreams of the colorless depths. It rang once and he seized it as if it were prey, as if he’d been lying still there all night so as to lull the thing into giving itself away. “Yeah?” he gasped.
It was Gobi. “Rise and shine, y’all,” he crooned in his Indo-cracker drawl. “It’s five-fifteen.”
Ten minutes later Roy was out front with his pickup and a boat trailer. A long narrow flat-bottomed boat rested atop the trailer, the legend
Saxby could have opened the trunk of the Mercedes right then and there—and he almost did, and he cursed himself afterward for resisting the impulse—but he decided not to bother. If he hauled out his waders and traps and the O2 and the rest of it and transferred them to the pickup, it would delay them a precious few minutes, and he was really stoked to get going. And anyway, he’d want his own car down there at the swamp if he did have to stay on a day or two. In the end, he took the coffee and the bag of fast food and shrugged. “Guess I’ll just follow you,” he said. “All right?”
A low pale ghostly mist clung to the road all the way down to Fargo, and then, when they swung onto 177 to head into the swamp itself, the mist turned to drizzle. Saxby listened to the swish of the wet tires, watched the boat sway on the trailer ahead of him. He felt a deep sense of peace, of connection, of calm. Deer stood poised at the edge of the road, wading birds feinted and shook their great wings into flight. He was going to get everything he wanted: he knew it.
The drizzle fell back into the mist, the mist thickened, and then they were there. He followed Roy through the parking lot out front of the tourist center and pulled up ahead of him on the narrow spit of land by the boat
