East is East

The couple hesitated there on the threshold until Irving Thalamus rose with a mighty roar—“Orlando! Mignonette!”—and crossed the room to embrace them. The buzz started up again. Brie, a look of rapture on her face, began drifting toward the triumvirate of embracing lions as if in a trance. It was then that Laura Grobian took hold of Ruth’s arm. Brie seemed somehow to sense the motion and froze. Ruth looked down at Laura, not yet alarmed, but afraid she was about to start up with the Masada business again while the precious minutes of the cocktail hour dwindled away to nothing. “Ruth”—Laura held her with those fathomless eyes—“I’ll see you tonight, after dinner?”

“Yes, sure,” Ruth said, though the ground had shifted beneath her again. She was Laura Grobian’s intimate, yes, but what in god’s name was she talking about now?

Laura smiled up at her as if they’d just come back from sailing around the world together. “Jane’s reading. Jane Shine’s. You haven’t forgotten, have you?”

Brie swooped back in on them at the mention of Jane. “Jane Shine?” she gasped, hovering over them as if one of the secret names of Jehovah had just been revealed to her. “She’s here too?”

The tectonic plates were really shaking now, grinding up against one another with all their terrible rending force. Off balance, Ruth could only nod.

“Oh, Ruthie”—Brie glanced wildly from Ruth to Laura and back again—“do you know her?”

Where the Earth Trembles

Vast and primeval, unfathomable, unconquerable, bastion of cottonmouth, rattlesnake and leech, mother of vegetation, father of mosquito, soul of silt, the Okefenokee is the swamp archetypal, the swamp of legend, of racial memory, of Hollywood. It gives birth to two rivers, the St. Mary’s and the Suwannee, fanning out over 430,000 leaf- choked acres, every last one as sodden as a sponge. Four hundred and thirty thousand acres of stinging, biting and boring insects, of maiden cane and gum and cypress, of palmetto, slash pine and peat, of muck, mud, slime and ooze. Things fester here, things cook down, decompose, deliquesce. The swamp is home to two hundred and twenty-five species of birds, forty-three of mammals, fifty-eight of reptiles, thirty-two of amphibians and thirty-four of fish—all variously equipped with beaks, talons, claws, teeth, stingers and fangs—not to mention the seething galaxies of gnats and deerflies and no-see-ums, the ticks, mites, hookworms and paramecia that exist only to compound the misery of life. There are alligators here, bears, puma, bobcats and bowfin, there are cooters and snappers, opossum, coon and gar. They feed on one another, shit and piss in the trees, in the sludge and muck and on the floating mats of peat, they dribble jism and bury eggs, they scratch and stink and sniff at themselves, caterwauling and screeching through every minute of every day and night till the place reverberates like some hellish zoo.

Drain it, they said, back in the days when technology was hope. They tried. In 1889, Captain Harry Jackson, a man with a vision, formed the Suwannee Canal Company to dredge the swamp and drain off the water, bugs, slime, alligators, snakes, turtles, frogs and catfish, and convert the rich remaining muck to farmland. He got some capital together, brought in half a dozen huge steam dredges capable of digging a canal forty-five feet wide and six feet deep at the rate of forty-four feet per day. He erected a sawmill to cut lumber for fuel and for profit, and he kept the dredges going round the clock, and the more he dug, the more the water poured in. But he kept at it, and the canal advanced at the rate of some three miles a year. The problem was that by all estimates it would take three hundred miles of canals to effectively drain the swamp, and even a man with vision couldn’t expect to live to a hundred and forty. Captain Harry Jackson didn’t. He died in 1895, having made a tiny wound in the flank of the unassailable swamp, a wound into which the water flowed as if an artery itself had been severed. The dredges rotted and sank, the sawmill fell to ruin. Leaves and vines and fine young trees closed over it all.

But if they couldn’t eliminate the Okefenokee, they could at least rape it. And so the logging company came in. They built two hundred miles of elevated railway trestles throughout the swamp to get at the virgin stands of cypress, they built a town on Billy’s Island with a hotel, a general store and telephone connection to the outside world. From 1909 to 1927, the shriek of the saw dominated the mighty swamp. And then the big stands of cypress were gone, and so was the lumber company. The trains backed off into civilization, the trestles collapsed, the hotel, the store, the telephone itself vanished as if the whole thing were a traveling show, a mirage, and within ten years there was nothing left but the rusted hulks of useless machinery, devoured in weed, to indicate that a town had stood on Billy’s Island.

In 1937, the federal government did the only reasonable thing and declared the swamp a wildlife refuge, in the process tracking down and evicting the last of the bushwhackers, poachers, gator skinners, moonshiners and assorted inbred primitives and desperadoes who had fled here as to the earth’s remotest outpost. The Okefenokee became a refuge for every least thing that swam or flew or crept on its belly, but it was a refuge no longer for the swamp hollerers and law benders. The water rose, the trees thickened, the star grass and bladderwort and swamp haw proliferated, the gators rolled in the muck and multiplied, and the old ways, the oldest ways, the eternal and unconquerable ways, triumphed.

* * *

Of course, Hiro knew none of this. All he knew was the trunk of the Mercedes, all he knew were shin splints, muscle cramps, aching joints and nausea, all he knew was the dawning realization that the invisible driver up front yowling about his plastic Jesus like some drunk in a karaoke bar was the king butter- stinker himself, the keto, the long-nose, his nemesis and rival at love, Ruth’s big hairy boifurendo… all he knew was the moment of release.

And oh, how he ached for that moment through every lurch and swing and bump of the car, through every hairpin turn and crunch of the tires and through the long sweltering night at the motel—yes, it was a motel, he could hear the cars pulling in and out, the doors slamming, the chatter of voices. Left alone, he tried to tear his way through the wall of the trunk and into the back seat, but there was no room to work and the wall was unyielding, adamantine, a thing the Germans had built to last. And so he ached and tried to massage his muscles and breathe the close stale air with patience and concentration; and so he waited like a samurai, like Jocho, like Mishima, like a Japanese, for the moment the key would discover the lock.

When the moment came, he was ready. Tired, sore, hungry for the light and air, seething with a slow deep unquenchable rage for all his hurts and wrongs, for the naked cheat of the City of Brotherly Love and the loss of Ruth, he was ready, ready for anything. But when at long last the key turned in the lock and the lid rose above him like the lid of a coffin, the explosion of light blinded him and he hesitated. Shielding his eyes, he squinted up into the face that hung over him, a familiar face, the boifurendo’s face, frozen in shock and disbelief. That was it, that was enough. AH the rest was as automatic as the engine that drove his heart or the surge of blood that shot through his veins.

He sprang, taking his adversary by surprise. But there was no need for the karate he’d mastered through assiduous study of the diagrams in the back of a martial arts magazine, no need to grapple, kick or gouge—the boifurendo had fallen back in horror, his eyes hard as nuggets, a look of impotence and constipation pressed into his features. Good. Good, good, good. Hiro came up out of his offensive crouch and darted a glance round him to get his bearings. And then, with the shock of a slap in the face, came his second big surprise: as far as he could see there was nothing but water, muck, creeper and vine, the damnable unending fetid stinking wilderness of America. But no, it couldn’t be. Was it all swamp, the whole hopeless country? Where were the shopping malls, the condos, the tattoo parlors and supermarkets? Where the purple mountains and the open range? Why couldn’t the butter-stinker have popped open the trunk at the convenience store, at Burger King or Saks Fifth Avenue? Why this? Why these trees and these lily pads and this festering gaijin cesspool? Was it some kind of bad joke?

No one moved. Hiro stood there poised on the brink of capture and escape, the boifurendo immobilized, his accomplice up to his knees in the murk and gaping up at him in bewilderment. He could have darted past the boifurendo, dodging round him on the narrow spit of dry land, but there were more butter-stinkers behind him, a whole legion of them with fish poles and pickup trucks and boat trailers, the hate and loathing and contempt already settling in their eyes. There was no choice: hesitate and you are dead. Three strides, a running leap, and he was in his element, in the water, in the water yet again, born to it, inured to it, as quick and nimble and streamlined as a dolphin.