East is East

What was he saying? Ruth glanced up to see Owen dart round the corner for the kitchen. All the anger drained out of her. “Hiro? What do you mean? Where?”

“Here. In the Okefenokee. I opened the trunk of the car and there he was, curled up like a snake. In the trunk, for Christ’s sake.”

It was early yet and her head ached: it took her a moment to process the information. Saxby was gone, ferreting out his pygmy fish on the other side of the state. Hiro had escaped. The sky was above, the earth below. Gravity exerted its pull, there was magnetic attraction, the weak force. Fine. But Hiro in the trunk of Saxby’s car, Hiro in the Okefenokee Swamp? It was too much. It was a gag, a routine, Saxby was pulling her leg. Even now Abercorn and the sheriff and an army of yapping dogs and shotgun-toting crackers were combing the briar patches and cesspools of the island, and Hiro—the fugitive, the jailbreaker, the big soft kid with the pitiful eyes and overfed gut—was a hundred miles away. In a swamp. The swamp. The swamp to end all swamps. Poor Hiro. Poor Detlef. Poor Sax. But no, it couldn’t be: it was too perfect. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Did you—” she began, and she was going to ask if Saxby had hurt him, if the raging Saxby had emerged, the aggressive, the rough, but she thought better of it. “I mean, did he say anything or did he run away again or what? Did you try to help him?”

Saxby was keyed up, speaking in breathless explosive little bursts. “It was Roy and me. He was in the trunk. By the time I knew what was happening he was gone.”

“Gone?”

And then she got the full story. Saxby told her how he’d packed the car yesterday afternoon, too excited to remember whether he’d shut the trunk or not, and how they were out on a spit of land, water on three sides of them, and how Roy was backing the boat down the ramp. He told her how Hiro had leaped from the trunk like a wild-eyed maniac and plunged into the boat pond—“Every time I lay eyes on the guy he’s jumping into some mudhole”—and how he’d kept going till he reached the far bank and the swamp beyond. “The guy’s a fanatic,” Saxby concluded. “A nut case. And if he thought Tupelo was something, he’s got a real surprise coming.”

Suddenly Ruth was laughing—she couldn’t help herself. Laura Grobian came wide-eyed down the stairs to breakfast in the silent room and Ruth was laughing, gagging, nearly hysterical with the news, so weak she could barely hold the phone to her ear. The picture of Saxby standing there dumbfounded with his strapping feet and hopeless hands, of Hiro, his crooked teeth set in the big moon of his face, splashing for his life all over again, churning up the duckweed and plunging ever deeper into the swamp—trading one swamp for another—it was too much. It was like something out of Heart of Darkness —or the Keystone Kops. Yes, that was it: The Keystone Kops Meet Heart of Darkness. And the irony—that was what really killed her. The plan had worked. Hiro had finally got his wisli—he was off Tupelo Island—and he’d made it in the trunk of Saxby’s mother’s car. It was funny, oh, it was funny.

“It’s not funny, Ruth. It’s not.” Saxby was hot, his voice pinched to a rasp. “Look: Roy’s already called the police. I’m calling to warn you. After yesterday … I mean, the guy turns up in the trunk of my car and they’re going to believe I didn’t know about it? Or you either?”

She hadn’t thought of it that way. But still it was funny. “You’re innocent, Sax—they never hang an innocent man.” She knew she would regret it, but she couldn’t help herself: suddenly her mood had improved. She was positively giddy. This was fun.

“Goddamn it, Ruth. This is your deal. You’re the one who—” Saxby stopped dead. His voice just wilted. Static crackled over the line. Outside, the sun emerged to dig a shallow grave in the mist.

“Sax?”

“Tell me the truth,” he demanded, “and no crap now—you didn’t help him escape, did you?”

* * *

Later — she couldn’t possibly go back to sleep after that phone call, and she knew they’d be at her again, the sheriff and Detlef and that little slime—and him she wouldn’t talk to, never, never again—she took a walk out to the studio to survey the wreckage. The overcast had cooled things down a bit and she caught a premonitory whiff of fall in the drizzle that lifted her spirits, but she was pretty well soaked through by the time she came round the double bend in the path. Before she even laid eyes on the cabin she noticed the little things, boot prints in the mud, the undergrowth trampled back here and there, and then, right in the middle of the path, she found half a dozen shell casings, red plastic and bright untarnished brass. She bent for the casings, fingered them, and threw them back down in disgust. Then she rounded the final bend and came upon the cabin.

From a distance it looked just as it had the night before last. There were the oaks, brooding over the roof with their beards of Spanish moss, there were the palmettos and berry bushes, there the steps, the door, the invitation of the windows. Insects hung in the air, birds shot overhead and lighted in the branches: it seemed as if nothing had changed. But as she drew closer she saw the glass glittering on the worn planks of the porch and saw that the screens had been perforated, the screen door shattered. Shell casings littered the yard, splinters of wood, hot bright nuggets of glass. And the porch—it was so spattered with shot it looked as if every woodpecker in Georgia had been at it, and there was a chunk the size of her fist missing from one of the uprights.

All at once she understood what it meant—not in the abstract, not on the telephone with a laugh in her throat and the world somewhere out on the horizon, but here in the actuality, in the wet and the heat and the stink of decay: They’d tried to kill him. Crackers, rednecks, Turco, Abercorn: the mob. A chill went through her. This was no joke. The closest she’d been to a gun in her life was in the front row of a movie theater—you just didn’t mount guns in the back window of your BMW on Wilshire Boulevard, you didn’t pick your teeth with them or hunt widgeons or wild boar or whatever they slaughtered out here in the boondocks. But to have a gun, an actual gun, pointed at you—how could she begin to understand what Hiro had gone through?

Inside, it was worse. It wasn’t the shell casings she was finding now, but the bullets themselves. The paneling was pockmarked, there was a hole through the cushion of the loveseat, one of her pitcher plants had been sheared in half. Glass littered the floor, along with the odd twisted bit of lead, and one of the cane rockers was overturned in the corner. About the only thing that had escaped unscathed was her typewriter. There it sat, the eternal page curled over the keyboard.

She almost wished it hadn’t survived, almost wished it had been blasted beyond recognition, the platen gouged and twisted, the keys scattered like rice at a wedding. She looked at it sitting there in mute accusation and a sinking, empty, hungry feeling came over her—call it nerves, guilt, the bane of the writer who isn’t writing. “Of Tears and the Tide” was just wasted time—she didn’t have the stomach to continue it, not now. They’d tried to kill him. How could she do justice to that?

But what now? She was living at an artists’ colony, surrounded by writers, and she hadn’t done any writing in a week. She hadn’t expected to work today—and no one would have expected it of her—but in some part of her she was disappointed that the damage hadn’t been more dramatic, more sweeping and cataclysmic, the sort of damage that would have precluded any thought of work. As it was, if she really wanted to, if the fit was on her, she could have swept up the glass and sat down to work right then and there, no need even to bother with the man Owen was sending out to patch the screens, replace the glass and putty up the bullet holes.

Just to do something, she got out the broom and dustpan and swept up the shards and nuggets of glass and the odd little flattened bits of lead that hadn’t managed to embed themselves in the walls or slice clean on through and into the infinite. Then she dumped the ravaged pitcher plant over the front railing, fed one of the survivors the husk of a bluebottle she found amidst the debris on the windowsill, and finally sat down at her desk—but tentatively, as if she were only trying out the chair.

For a long moment she gazed out through the gaping window and then she gathered up the fat sheaf of scrawled-over Xerox paper that represented the whole of “Of Tears and the Tide,” and buried it deep in the desk drawer. Down there, buried even deeper, she discovered the manuscript of an old, half-finished story she’d been meaning to rework. It was called “Two Toes,” and it was another thing she’d developed from a news story—this one a piece that had made the national news and galvanized the attention of the whole slumbering and self- obsessed country. Everyone knew it. It was the story of Jessica McClure, the eighteen-month-old girl who’d fallen down a well shaft in Texas and wound up wedged tight in a pipe less than a foot in diameter, and who was rescued after two and a half days of heroic effort on the part of miners, firemen, police and evangelists, albeit at the cost of two toes on her right foot. Ruth didn’t understand that exactly—the amputation of the toes, something to do with constricted blood flow—but her idea was to show the girl as a teenager, seventeen, eighteen maybe. Grown up now, living with the memory of those two terrible days and the burden of her brief and fading celebrity, she would