East is East

something—we didn’t do anything wrong, and they’re sure to drop the charges and beg us to withdraw the suit and all that, but still Stratton says we’ve got to cooperate.”

“But Sax”—her voice was butter, honey, frankincense and myrrh—“why you? You’re totally innocent, they know that.”

“Abercorn’s just being a prick, is all. He thinks we—you and I—have something going with this Japanese kid and that somehow we got him out of that old cell out back of Patsy’s studio and hustled him into the Mercedes— and we didn’t, did we, Ruth?”

“I love you, Sax,” she whispered. It was a signal. When someone says “I love you,” you say: “I love you too.” It’s like hello and goodbye, how are you and what’s happening? Saxby didn’t respond. “Sax,” she repeated, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” he said finally, but there was no conviction in it and that scared her.

“I told you, Sax,” she said, “I swear it: I had nothing to do with it. All I want to see is Hiro Tanaka in jail and this whole ordeal over with.”

That seemed to mollify him. He was going to stay down there at the motel—he was worried about his fish: yes—and the spark leaped back into his voice, he was her Sax, boyish and enthused—he’d got them! They were out on Billy’s Island in a couple of buckets and he hadn’t had time to set up the oxygenator and he was going back out there first thing in the morning. After he met her, of course. She was coming, wasn’t she?

“Yes, Sax,” she whispered, “of course. I’d do anything for you.” And then her voice had faded away almost to nothing. “You know that.”

And so for a moment—a long moment, two or three pages at least—she was reading, but she wasn’t focused, not fully. She came back to herself on the final page and took the story out with a muted, unpretentious, nontheatrical flair. She looked up. Smiled. The applause was like the faintest spatter of rain in the desert. Her fellow colonists looked grim, haggard. Laura Grobian might have been the survivor of a train wreck, Orlando Seezers was making some sort of peculiar clucking or humming noise deep in his throat, Sandy looked as if he’d just woken up. Had she gone on too long? The thought flitted into her head and she dismissed it—after all, the main event, the piece de resistance, was yet to come. They’d had their cake, and now it was time for the icing.

Ruth trod delicately with “Of Tears and the Tide,” trying to walk the fine line between capitalizing on the dramatic events on the patio two nights ago (and her attendant seduction of Hiro, Abercorn and the sheriff and her victory over them all), and emphasizing in her every phrase and gesture that she, unlike the histrionic Shine, was an artist toiling away at the deep stuff of fiction. Her introduction was like a chat with a sick friend. It was warm, intimate, unassuming, and it alluded to the events of the past few days (and the preceding weeks too) without directly mentioning Hiro or Saxby or the ceaselessly ringing phone in the foyer or the Clinch County Jail. She mentioned the Japanese, though, mentioned them repeatedly. Was she an expert? Did she have direct, hands-on knowledge? She gave them her mysterious smile, just as she’d planned, and then she began to read.

Halfway through the story Orlando Seezers began to snore. It was nothing outrageous, no tromboning of the breath through constricted nostrils, no deep flatulent blasts from the bellows of the lungs, but snoring nonetheless. Ruth glanced up from the page. Seezers was flung back in the wheelchair as if he’d been shot, his wiry goatee thrust to the heavens, the little plaid cap he never removed clinging to his scalp in defiance of gravity. His snores were soft, almost polite, but audible for all that—and everyone was aware of them.

Everyone who was awake, that is. When Ruth looked up she was shocked. Septima was nodding in her chair. Laura Grobian had snapped off the light beside her and drawn a thin comforter up over her shoulders, the famous haunted eyes staring out on nothing. Brie’s head had come to rest on Sandy’s shoulder; Sandy seemed to be having trouble with his lower lip; Ina and Regina looked terminally bored. In front, on the sofa, Irving was struggling, Teitelbaum looked embarrassed—should she poke Orlando or not?—and Jane, Jane looked triumphant.

Ruth caught herself. She glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner—no, it couldn’t be—and realized with dawning horror that she’d been reading for something like two and a half hours. “My god,” she gasped, and for the first time that night her voice achieved some animation. “I’m so—I didn’t realize how long I’ve gone on …” A few of the colonists, sniffing change, sniffing blood, struggled up in their seats. “Well,” Ruth murmured, covering herself as best she could but already hearing the new billiard room shtik—Ruth’s reading? Yeah, it was like three months on the chain gang— “you’ve been very patient and I thank you all.”

Dazed, the colonists shook themselves, shuffled their feet, rubbed their blasted eyes. Irving started up the applause—she couldn’t believe it, the love she’d felt for them earlier, the joy, and now all she felt was shame and mortification and hate: she hadn’t even finished—and a feeble stunned sort of involuntary applause startled the room into wakefulness. She could read it in their eyes—cocktails, they were thinking, or maybe just one, and then bed. Irving rose to congratulate her; Septima’s head jerked up and the milky gray eyes struggled to come into focus.

“Hey, La D., Ruthie,” Irving boomed, enfolding her in his arms, “that was some stuff. You’re great, babes.” She could see Sandy standing behind him, smiling weakly, a preambulatory Brie clutching at him for support. And beyond them, she saw Jane Shine rise from the couch to stretch and yawn theatrically, yawing the mass of her hair this way and that and exchanging some nasty little witticism with Mignonette Teitelbaum and the gaping, blinking, eye-rubbing, nose-blowing form of Orlando Seezers. The three of them shared a laugh that was like shredding metal and then Jane swept back her hair so Ruth could get a look at her pajamas.

Ruth felt a sudden hot stab at her insides. These weren’t lounging pajamas, this wasn’t a tunic or a djellabah, this was no fashion statement—no, Jane Shine was wearing a put-down, a slap in the face, the decisive killing counterthrust to Ruth’s feeble parry: she was in her nightdress. It was that simple: Jane had come prepared for bed.

Ruth looked away, but the damage was done. The night was a disaster, she was careening from the Thanatopsian heavens, burned to a cinder like a poor extinguished meteor, and all she could think of was the billiard room and how they would slaughter her over this.

Haha

They left, the Jeffcoats, the way they had come, on a shimmer of light. Hiro watched them till they were out of sight, till the moving paddles, the glistening hull and the strong square rhythmically working shoulders were swallowed up in the merciless bank of green. They were heading back to the dock, back to where the flame-faced hakujin crouched over their catch and the sheriffs and park rangers fingered their weapons beneath the wide brims of their hats. They were on a mission of mercy, violating the sanctity of their itinerary and scrapping their schedule for him, Seiji Chiba, the Chinese tourist attacked by crocodiles.

Hiro felt light-headed. He sat heavily on the platform beside the bundle of food they’d left him and languished a doleful look on the bend round which they’d disappeared. In an hour they would hate him. They would glide into the dock with their wide-open faces and confident eyes, gee-whizzing and gollying at the sheriff’s convention awaiting them, at the baying dogs, revving engines and jaws set with hate. There’s a man in trouble out there, they’d say. Where? the sheriffs would bark, where is be? Red trail platform, Jeff Jeffcoat would answer, but what’s the problem? Jail break, the sheriffs would spit. A Jap, and a arsonist into the bargain. Assaulted some people, migbta killed a poor innocent old black man. But no, Jeff Jeffcoat would say, you’ve got it all wrong, this man’s a tourist, be lost his boat. For Christ’s sake, Jeff Jeffcoat would say, he’s Chinese.

They’d be after him soon, homing in on this very platform like heat-seeking missiles, like avenging angels. He had to get up. Had to slosh back off into the muck and neck-deep water, had to crawl back up the orifice of America the Primitive. But he felt enervated, weak, felt as if all the fight had been drained out of him and Jocho reduced to the mad gibbering irrelevant monk he was. He was sick, that’s what it was. He raised a hand to his brow and felt the fever burning there. And then it was in his guts, tearing at him like Mishima’s sword, and he doubled over and vomited up the corned beef hash, the ketchup and coffee and eggs, the Cup O’Noodles, the potato chips and pound cake, vomited till he tasted the deep bitter purple-black berries and the gall of his bile. For a long while he lay there,