East is East

The day was high and clear, warm without being oppressive, and about as dry as Savannah gets. It was mid-September, the seasons grudgingly changing, the scorching humid endless days of high summer giving way to something milder, expectant, the rich long Indian summer that would push back autumn to the edge of winter. Ruth was unpacking, finding hangers for her things, clipping the tags from a new three-quarter-length Italian cloth coat with dolman sleeves and oversized buttons, and a drop-dead black-and-white suit that featured slashing triangles against a flowing field of parabolas. Saxby had called it a fish dress. Fish? she’d echoed, holding the skirt up for him to admire. They were in her room at Thanatopsis at the time and she was in her bra and panties, trying her new things on for him. It’s the scales, baby, he said, punching the sobriquet with all the lewd innuendo of a disc jockey. Is that all you ever think about? she’d responded and he’d said No, I’m thinking about something entirely different right now. Prove it, she said, and she dropped the skirt to the floor.

But now she was in Savannah, for the week, a guest in the glossy bright high-arching home of Dave and Rikki Fortunoff, a home that had been featured in the pages of Architectural Digest and the New York Times Magazine. Dave was a friend of her father’s from law school and he often stopped by the house when business brought him to Los Angeles—Ruth had known him all her life. Still, she hadn’t really wanted to stay with the Fortunoffs—they were thirty minutes by taxi from the hospital where Hiro was gradually regaining his strength, under guard, and refusing to speak to the press, the police or his speckle-faced tormentor from the INS—but the advantage of the arrangement was obvious: she could stay here for nothing. A hotel would have cost her sixty or seventy dollars a night, minimum, plus meals, and she didn’t have that kind of money. Not yet.

She studied herself in the mirror for a long moment, thinking she might just use a rinse on her hair before she left for the hospital. It would highlight her tan—and show off the new suit too. Outside, beyond the French doors to the courtyard, lay the bright vacancy of the pool, and beyond it the massed oleanders and potted begonias that fed off its reflection. She wished Saxby were here with her, but he was home at Thanatopsis, awaiting her return, his tanks and buckets overbrimming with pale little fish the size and color of a gum eraser. When she’d left for Savannah he was wearing a yellow hardhat and supervising the dredging of the reflecting pool, future home of the pygmy fish and their happy descendants. He’d waved as she pulled out of the drive, a look of pure rhapsody on his face.

Ruth dropped the tags in the wastebasket and crossed the room to hang the coat in the closet. The coat was brick red—not neon red, not flame red, not hello-are-you-acquainted-with-me-yet red—but a more restrained and dramatic shade. A more mature shade. In the course of the past week a sea change had occurred in Ruth, a change that saw her opt for the less flashy color, a change that had brought her to Savannah and required her to borrow fifteen hundred dollars from her father for three new outfits, two purses, a pair of scintillating (but mature) black snakeskin pumps and the Italian coat. What it amounted to was this: she was now a journalist. On assignment. Not that fiction wouldn’t always be her first love and true metier, and she hoped to get back to it someday—someday soon—but she’d had an offer she couldn’t refuse.

The whole thing began with Hiro. Began on that grim morning when she was impressed into the service of the INS, the morning after the single worst night of her life. Nothing could cheer her that night. Her reading had been a holocaust of disaster, a funnel of ridicule for as long as Thanatopsis existed, and Jane Shine had put her down with the finality of a gravedigger. Sandy had tried his best to distract her afterward, and Irving was especially solicitous, but she felt as if the world had fallen to ash around her. Worse: all she had to look forward to now was the wrath of Saxby, the intransigence of Septima and the contempt of unknown sheriffs, the speckle-faced Abercorn and his loathsome little factotum. She went to bed after a single drink, the other colonists looking shrouds at her, and she pulled the darkness down around her and plunged into sleep as into a bottomless hole.

In the morning, it was the swamp. And Saxby. He was angry, upset, resentful, his eyes full of accusation and hurt. She met him out front of the Tender Sproats Motel and threw herself into his arms like a war bride while Owen and a potbellied little brown man in a tractor cap looked on. They were on a tight schedule, the police were waiting, the pygmy fish languishing in their far-flung buckets, but she couldn’t help getting the feel of the role. She was abused and misunderstood, she was self-sacrificing and courageous, giving herself up to her enemies so her man could go free … and she was a humanitarian too, going out into the pit of nowhere, fighting back mosquitoes, snakes, pygmy fish and worse, to save a poor misguided Japanese boy. She could feel her eyes beginning to water over the complexities of it. “Give me five minutes, Sax,” she whispered, “that’s all I ask. Five minutes alone with you.”

He hesitated. There were fish in his eyes—and something else too, hard and vengeful. But then he took her hand, led her to his room and pulled the door firmly shut behind them.

It wasn’t the time for love, though the thought of it came to her in an involuntary little spasm and her pulse quickened just perceptibly. She moved into his arms and let the tears come. Again and then again she reassured him that the thing with Hiro was nothing, totally innocent, a mistake, and that she’d been using him for her fiction and had no intention of helping him escape or find his way into the trunk of that car. He had to believe her. He did believe her, didn’t he?

Three hours in the Clinch County Jail hadn’t improved his temper any, but he was so fish-obsessed he couldn’t really focus his anger for more than a moment at a time. They were out there, his albinos, in five plastic buckets, without protection. He had to get to them and he’d worry about the rest later. “I believe you,” he said.

As it turned out, they drove down to the swamp together in the Mercedes, Owen following in his Mazda. Driving, his forearm slouched easily over the wheel, the radio up high, Saxby began to relax, chattering on about his fish and his nets and his tanks until Ruth began to think things would work out after all. When they arrived, Abercorn and Turco were waiting for them, as were the local sheriff, about two hundred sunburned gawkers with campers, coolers and smoking barbecues, and a throng of media people who came at Ruth with drawn microphones and flailing notepads. All this for poor Hiro? she thought, and then the seed of it, the first stirring: And for me? She ran a hand through her hair, put on a committed and absorbed look for the photographers. Was she here to save Hiro Tanaka? someone wanted to know. Was she romantically involved with him? Was he as dangerous as they said? She knew this role, this one was easy. “No comment,” she chirped, and she stepped high, moving right along till the police cordon opened up for her and the reporters fell away like so many flies.

In the next moment she stood face to face with Turco and Abercorn. Ruth felt Saxby tense beside her, but she clung to him and he held back. Abercorn stepped forward, his patchy face and artificial hair hidden beneath the brim of the most ridiculous hat she’d ever seen outside of a circus. He stood a head taller than anyone else in the crowd. “Glad you could make it,” he said, and there was nothing friendly about it. “The boat’s this way.” She pecked Sax a kiss, a kiss recorded by the click of lenses and the pop of flashbulbs from beyond the police line, and then she went off with him.

After that, it was the swamp. With a vengeance. There was the stink of it, first of all—the whole place smelled like the alley out back of a fish market. Then there were the bugs, legions of them, of every known species and appetite, not to mention the snakes in the trees or the blistered scum on the water. She looked out over the matted surface to the ghostly trees beyond and to the trees that shadowed them and so on all the way to the horizon and thought of a diorama she’d once seen depicting the dinosaurs in their heyday. But then the diorama was in a cool, dark, antiseptic museum, and the trees were painted on.

And then a man she hadn’t noticed till that moment was helping her into the boat—he was clean-shaven, neither young nor old, and he wore a baseball cap with a pair of fold-down sunglasses attached to the visor. She sat up front beside a pair of loudspeakers—the sort of arrangement local politicians favor as they Doppler up and down the streets—while the man in the cap climbed into the rear and busied himself with the engine. It was a big boat, long, wide and flat-bottomed, and reassuringly stable. She looked straight ahead as Abercorn stationed himself in the middle and Turco, in his jungle fighter’s costume, crouched down just behind her. The motor coughed, sputtered and then roared to life, and they were off.

By eleven o’clock she was hoarse, thirsty, sweat-soaked and sunburned, and bitten in all the key regions of her anatomy. Every time she paused to catch her breath or take a sip of water Turco’s nasty little voice was there to fill the void, urging her on: “Come on, come on, keep it up—I tell you it’s going to work, I know these people, I know them.” It didn’t take her long to realize that this was his idea, yet another demented variation on the boom box and the designer clothes. She wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t speak to him, wouldn’t so much as turn her head,