East is East

Everybody’s Secret

She was in trouble, deep trouble, and she knew it the minute Saxby stepped in the door. For one thing he was supposed to be gone by now, long gone, off to the Okefenokee to dip his nets and scare up his fishes. And then there was the expression on his face—grim and disappointed, the look of a man revising his options, altering his world view, the look of the outraged moralist, the inquisitor, the hanging judge. A tiny chill of recognition brought her back to the previous night. He’d been waiting for her in the billiard room when she got back late from the cabin, and though they’d sat up for an hour and then made love, he’d seemed morose, preoccupied, he’d seemed distant and untouchable. All this rushed on her in the moment of waking as he slipped in the door and pushed it shut behind him.

The room was dark still—she’d drawn the shades before going to bed, thinking to sleep late—but the light of day, hard and uncompromising, assaulted her even as he shut it out with the wedge of the door. Brightness trembled at the corners of the windowframe, the sun insinuated itself under the door. It was Sunday. The clock read 7:15. “Saxby?” she murmured, awake already, awake instantly. “Is anything wrong?”

Of course there was something wrong—he should have been two hours gone by now. Saxby said nothing. Just stood there, his back to the door. And then he was moving suddenly, crossing the room in two angry strides to jerk open the shade. Ruth felt the light explode in the room, her eyes pinched tight, squinted—it was an ache, an assault. “They got him,” he said. “He’s in jail.”

She couldn’t help herself. He’d caught her off guard and she fell back on her natural defenses. She sat up, pressing the sheet to her breast. Her mouth was small, her eyes big. “Who?” she said.

He looked angry, dangerous, looked as if he’d been gored. “Don’t be coy, Ruth. You know who I’m talking about. Your pet. Your houseboy. Or was he more than that, huh? ‘I just want to try something different,’ you said, isn’t that what you said. Huh? Something different?”

“Sax,” she said.

He was standing over her now, his muscles cut, backlit against the window. She could see the veins standing out in his arms. “Don’t ’Sax’ me,” he said. “I was there, Ruth. Last night. I saw him.”

She shifted her weight, tucked the sheet up under her arms. “Okay,” she said, reaching for a cigarette, “all right. I helped him. But it’s not what you think.” She paused to strike a match, inhale, shake it out and deposit the spent curl of it in the ashtray on the night table. “I felt sorry for him, you know? Like with a stray dog or something. Everybody was after him and he was—he’s just this kid, and besides, I needed him—I mean, not at first—but I needed him for this story I’m writing …”

Saxby held himself rigid. He was the man in the boat on Peagler Sound, focused and invincible, beyond her control. “How long?” he demanded. “Two weeks? Three? A month? It’s a big joke, isn’t it? On all of us. Abercorn and that little peckerwood Marine or whatever he is, Thalamus, Regina, Jane—my mother even. But what really burns my ass is you put it over on me too. What, you couldn’t trust me with it? Answer me, goddamn it!”

She was busy with her cigarette. It was all she could do to keep from grinning, grinning with guilt and shame and defiance, and that would only make it worse. And she needed Sax on her side, now more than ever. If he knew—and the thought made her stomach clench—then they all knew, and they wouldn’t find it very funny. She was an accessory, an aider and abettor. She could go to jail. “I wanted to tell you, Sax—I was going to—” she began, and then she trailed off. The light heightened. The room was silent. “Look, Sax: it was a game. Something I knew that none of them did—not Peter Anserine or Laura Grobian or Irving Thalamus either. I was insecure here, you know that. And this was something I could hold on to, something of my own—”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice thick with disgust and self-pity, “but what about me?”

She was angry suddenly. She was in trouble—deep trouble—and he’d put her there. “No,” she said, stabbing the cigarette at him for emphasis, “what about me?” Here he was, her lover, her confidant, the sweet funny guy with the big feet, and he’d betrayed her. “You turned him in, didn’t you?” she said, taking the offensive.

His face changed. She loved him, she did, but he was weak inside, and now she had him. “You, you never told me,” he stammered. “I see him there on your porch and I’m thinking about all those cans of fried dace and bamboo shoots—what do you expect me to do? I mean, at least you could have told me.”

“You shit, Sax.” Now she was crying. Her shoulders quaked a bit and the sheet slipped to her waist. She reached for it, to cover her breasts, but then she let it fall away again. She could see herself as through the lens of a camera, sobbing in the morning light, in bed, naked to the waist, betrayed by her man and at the mercy of the authorities. It was a poignant moment, just like real life. She glanced up at Saxby. He was struck dumb.

“Don’t you ever think?” she gasped. “Don’t you know what this means? They’re going to come after me now, they’re going to want to question me—they could arrest me, Sax.” She’d worked herself up now. The bed was trembling, her breast heaving. She was feeling scared, angry, feeling sorry for herself.

Saxby came to her. She felt him ease down on the bed, reach out to stroke her arm. “Hush,” he said. “You know I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“I’m scared,” she said, and she was holding him. “He was just—it was like a stray dog or something,” and then she was sobbing all over again.

Sheriff Peagler stopped by around noon, a grim-looking Abercorn and grimmer-looking Turco flanking him. There was no Sunday morning ferry, so they’d put Hiro in an old slave-holding cell for safekeeping till Ray Manzanar made his eight o’clock run to the mainland and back. (There was an earlier ferry, at six, but as the sheriff was to inform Ruth with an executioner’s grin, they were going to need all the daylight they had to comb over the scene for evidence.) Ruth knew the cell—it was out back of John Berryman, the closest of the studios to the big house, and currently occupied by Patsy Arena. Saxby had showed her the cell the day they arrived: it was the sort of thing tourists liked to look at. Actually, there were two cells, stone and crumbling plaster, big oaken doors with sliding bolts and a barred window twelve feet off the ground. The planters would immure a new slave in the one—wild-eyed, feverish, fresh from Goree or Dakar and the scarifying trip across the pitching wild sea—and in the other, a long-broken docile doddering old fatherly type, and the old slave would sweet-talk the new one, calm his fears, indoctrinate him. The cells were in an outbuilding behind the studio. If it weren’t for the trees, you could have seen it from the big house.

Ruth had had four hours to compose herself, though all Than-atopsis was abuzz with the news. She’d posted Saxby at the door—Irving had been by, Sandy, Bob, Ina, Regina, even Clara and Patsy, but Saxby wouldn’t let them in. She’d hear the knock, watch Saxby rise, pull back the door and step into the hallway, and then she’d strain to hear the whispered colloquy that followed. At eleven, Septima herself, regal in a blue silk dress with lace trim and pearls, huffed her way up the stairs. Saxby couldn’t deny his own mother, and he helped her into the room. Ruth was in bed still, feeling like an invalid, though she’d pulled on a blouse and shorts. “I really don’t know whatever this is all about,” Septima began in her breathy old patrician’s tones, “but I do suspect that you are entirely innocent of any wrongdoin’, Ruthie—isn’t that right?”

Ruth assured her that it was. “If he was in there, Septima—and it burns me to think of all that beautiful old paneling all shot full of holes, and god knows what they did to my typewriter and the manuscript I’ve been slaving over for the last six weeks—if he was there, you have to know it was totally without my knowledge or consent. He snuck in at night, I guess. Who’s to stop him?”

Septima sniffed. She trained her watery gray eyes on something outside the window. “And you never noticed anythin’ amiss, Ruthie? Nothin’ out of place?”

Ruth was ready for this one. She forced a smile, and she shrugged. “I’m embarrassed to say it,” she said, indicating the room, which was a festival of strewn underwear, tops, socks, shoes, spine-crushed books, rolls of toilet paper and tattered magazines, “but you know, I’ve never been much at keeping things up. It’s my artistic temperament, I guess.” She looked up at Sax. He looked away. “Sax can tell you: where it drops, it stays.”

Sheriff Peagler wanted to know the same thing.

It was noon. They were in the front parlor—she and Saxby, Peagler, Abercorn and Turco—and the door was shut behind them. It was hot—stifling—and though the windows were open wide, there wasn’t even the hint of a breeze. The house was quiet. The diehards among the colonists were dispersed in their studios, typing, painting, molding clay and poring over scores; the others were sailing, fishing, taking the air in Savannah.

Sheriff Peagler—Theron Peagler, college-educated and cold as a snake—leaned toward her. He was sitting in a leather wing chair and he held an untouched glass of ice water in his hand. In a minute he would ask Saxby to leave the room. Rut now he leaned forward to ask Ruth if she’d ever noticed anything out of place in the studio—the furniture moved around, the windows up, anything.

Ruth had spent some time on her makeup, marshaling all the weapons in her arsenal. She had a feeling she was going to need them. She’d glanced at Abercorn when they stepped into the room, but that was it—she really couldn’t look him in the eye. Not yet, anyway. She took a minute. Smoothed her skirt. Composed herself. “Septima—Mrs. Lights—asked me the same thing. But you must have seen the place, I mean, even before they started shooting it up”—a dig, a tiny dig—“and it’s a real mess. I’m sorry. I’m just not much for housekeeping. I mean, I don’t notice things.”

This was the point at which the sheriff glanced up at Saxby and asked if he wouldn’t mind leaving the room.

Saxby looked at Ruth, and then at the sheriff, and finally he heaved himself up out of the chair and strode across the floor. Ruth counted his footsteps—eight, nine, ten—and listened to the gentle, well-oiled click of the heavy walnut door as it shut behind him. She felt hot and cold suddenly and her heart was singing in her ears. She could hear them breathing on either side of her. There was no other noise.

No one said a word. Hot and cold. Ruth stared at the carpet and for a moment she considered going faint with the heat, but she rejected the notion as soon as it entered her head—it would only incriminate her. They were toying with her, she realized, toying with her, the little pricks. She felt Abercorn’s eyes on her, and she lifted her head.

The blotted skin, pink eyes, hair like false whiskers: how could she ever have considered him even remotely attractive? He was trying to stare her down, a crease of rage between his hard pink bunny’s eyes. Let him stare. She gave it right back to him.

“Miss Dershowitz.” The sheriff was addressing her. She held Abercorn’s gaze a second longer than she had to, and then turned to look at the leathery little man in the jeans, workshirt and badge. He looked sly, insidious, a man who’d heard all the alibis and knew all the answers. Her courage failed her. She would break down, that’s it. Break down and admit it all.

“About the food. We found—what do you call it—Oriental food stuffs on the premises, seaweed and dried roots and suchnot. How do you explain that?”

“I wouldn’t know.” Her own voice sounded strange to her, distant. “Maybe he brought the stuff in at night. I don’t eat dried roots.”

“Cut the shit, lady.” Turco’s voice came at her like a kick in the side, and she shot her eyes at him; he was perched on the edge of the chair, mouth working in his beard, a little homunculus, the gnome that violates the virgin in the fairy tale. “Just cut it, will you? You been jerking us around here for six weeks now.”

Ruth turned away from him. She would break down, yes, but prettily, and in her own good time.

“Enough,” Abercorn spat, and Ruth was shocked at the rage in his voice. He was big, powerful in a lank and sinewy way, an athlete: perhaps she’d underestimated him. She felt something stir in her, though the timing was inappropriate, to say the least. “Ruth, listen,” and his voice softened just perceptibly, from a snarl to a growl, “we’ve got enough on you right now to book you as an accessory to manslaughter in the death of Olmstead White, arson in Hog Hammock, harboring a fugitive from justice and giving false information to an agent of the federal government.” He paused to let the terminology have its effect. “Make it easy on yourself, will you? I mean, Sheriff Peagler can put the cuffs on you right now, if that’s what you want. But there’s no need for anybody to get nasty here. We just want to know the facts, that’s all.”

Abercorn eased back in his chair, as if he were settling in for the first act of a play. “Now,” he said, his voice placid, complacent, the voice of a man who already has what he wants, “when did the suspect, Hiro Tanaka, first contact you?”

The rest of the afternoon was a thing that hovered at the windows and took the breath out of the air, bloated and interminable. Ruth sweated in places she’d never sweated before—between the toes, in the runnels of her ears—and in the usual places too. Her thighs met in a glutinous embrace, the elastic band of her panties became a towel, a sponge, her breasts lay heavy and wet against her ribcage. Abercorn had read her her rights, and that scared her, and she sweated all the more. In another context it would have been comical, like something out of Dragnet or Miami Vice, but here, now, it made her sick inside: this was one role she wanted no part of. When he offered her immunity from prosecution if she would tell him everything—and testify to it in court—she jumped at the chance. “After all, Ruth,” he’d said, the bunny eyes gone hard with malice, “nobody’s after you. Though I do want to emphasize just how serious your little, uh—prank, let’s call it—has been. Is. And what a dim view my office—not to mention my boss and his boss in Washington—takes of obstructing justice and aiding and abetting those elements that would enter the country illegally.” He paused to study his nails. “Especially when they commit criminal acts and mayhem.”

More terminology.

She bowed her head and agreed with him. He was wise, and she was penitent.

In all, they kept her for nearly two hours. It was a classic grilling, right out of the INS handbook (if there was such a thing). Abercorn had settled down to play the pal, the protector, interceding for her against the grunts and curses and pained incoherent cries of Turco and the steady ferrety pursuit of Peagler, and she’d given him what he wanted. Mostly. She told him about Hiro making off with her lunch bucket and how she’d discovered it and took pity on him. And she admitted the business with the Oriental food—he was like a stray dog. Or cat. Didn’t they see that? It was like putting out a salt lick or a bird feeder. On the issue of harboring a fugitive, she was firm: she denied it outright. If he slept in her studio she knew nothing about it—there was no lock on the door, after all. As far as she knew he came only at lunchtime and took the food like a wild animal. And no, she’d never provided him with clothes or money or anything like that: it was just the food, and she left it there on the porch.

And then there came a point at which the three of them fell silent. Flushed and greasy, her hair and makeup devastated, she studied her feet and felt their eyes on her. In that moment she realized she had a headache. A tiny whirring drill began to bore through her skull, front to back, back to front, over and over. “You’re free to go now, Miss Dershowitz,” the sheriff had said, and Ruth got up and left the room in a daze. Mercifully, the front hallway was deserted.

She made her way to her room, shrugged out of her clothes and let the window fan dry the sweat from her skin. She took an aspirin and two short hits from the pint of bourbon she kept on the night table, and she began to feel better, if only marginally. It was then that she thought of Hiro. He was out there now in the infernal heat of that crumbling cell, awaiting prison, deportation and whatever the Japanese would do to him after that. She thought of the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, Alec Guinness emerging from the sweatbox in The Bridge on the River Kwai, and then she lay face down on the bed and began to massage her temples.

Hiro. Poor Hiro. She had made love to him, after all—for the novelty, yes, and because the moment was right—but there was feeling there too. There was. And she ached for him in that parched and blistering cell, Abercorn and Turco hanging over him with their obscene and insatiable curiosity. She ached for him, she did, but she’d been through an ordeal herself, and now, as the afternoon settled in, she closed her eyes and drifted off into a sleep that was depthless and pure.

She woke to a discreet, solicitous tapping at the door. It was five in the afternoon. There was a stale taste in her mouth, the residue of nicotine and bourbon. “Yes?” she called.

It was Saxby, waking her for the second time that day. This time there were no recriminations. This time he was beaming, grinning, puffed up to the roots of his hair with boyish glee. “Ruth! Ruth!” he cried, and it sounded like a dog’s bark at the door, and then he was in the room, on the bed, snatching her hands up in his own.

“Ruth!” he cried again, as if she’d been lost for years. His eyes were swimming. He looked delirious. “Ruth!” he shouted, though he was right there, right on the bed beside her. He didn’t ask how she was feeling, how the interrogation had gone, whether they were going to shackle her to a bunch of spouse abusers on the chain gang or hang her by her thumbs—he just kept repeating her name, over and over. She wanted to know if he was drunk.

“Drunk? Hell, no: Ruth!”—there it was again—“Ruth!”—and again—“Roy Dotson just called!”

Yes? And so?

“He’s found them. My albinos. I’m out the door this minute.” And then he was up from the bed, shuffling his big feet, jerking his limbs and tugging at his ears like one of the afflicted.

“Really?” She was grinning back at him now, feeling good, feeling happy for him, though the fish business was an ongoing mystery to her. Why fish? she wanted to ask him. What was the attraction? Seals, she could see, otters, the purple gallinule, for Christ’s sake—but fish? They were cold-blooded, stupid, gaping mouths and cartoon eyes: she hated fish. Hated aquariums. Hated dip nets and seines, canoes, rivers, lakes, swamps, hated it all. But watching him there in the stippled shadows of the lace curtains, tasting his excitement, she was happy.

Then he bent to kiss her, deep and hard—the kiss of an explorer leaving home, the kiss of a lepidopterist or spelunker—and he was out the door. But then he was back, poking his head round the doorframe. “Oh, yeah,” he said, hanging there, his motor revving, fish on the brain, “I almost forgot: How’d it go? With the sheriff and all?”

The question brought her back, and for a moment she was afraid all over again, but then it passed. She was okay. She was in one piece. Hiro was in jail and her novella was shot full of holes—literally—but they weren’t going to do anything to her. She could write another novella, forget all about the Japanese and their weird rites and customs, let somebody else portray suicide in the surf and sex in kimonos. She had Sax and Septima and Thanatopsis House, she had Irving Thalamus and Laura Grobian—and Jane Shine was gone for the weekend. No, there was nothing to worry about, nothing at all.

“How’d it go?” She repeated his question, reaching for a cigarette and feeling Olympian, impervious, unscathed, La Dershowitz ascendant. She took a minute with the response, Saxby hanging there in the doorway, the late shafts of the sun gilding the curtains till they seemed solid as pillars. “Fine,” she said. “Just fine.”

On Sundays, Armand served dinner at seven and sometimes a bit later, depending on his whim and the mood of the colonists. Sunday was, after all, the day of rest, or so Septima reasoned, and long before she’d engaged her current chef she’d pushed back cocktails and dinner by an hour on the Lord’s Day, and it was now a Thanatopsis tradition. Sunday afternoons were long and languorous, and no one stirred before six, when the first sunburned and subdued clumps of artists began to gather on the patio or in the front parlor for cocktails. Sometimes there would be music—a poet would sit down at the piano or a biographer would reveal a hidden talent for the clarinet, ravishing the room with the adagio from Mozart’s concerto or a Gershwin medley—and the ice cubes would tumble into shaker or glass with a rhythmic click that was salvation itself for the sun-dazed and weary.

It was close to seven when Ruth came down for dinner. She’d scrubbed and showered and scrubbed again, ridding herself of any vestige of the sweaty film that had clung to her earlier that afternoon, clogging her pores and making her feel dirty and vulnerable while Abercorn hung over her with his unfinished face and chummy questions. She was wearing a white Guatemalan peasant blouse embroidered with bright blue flowers and matching full skirt, and she descended the steps and crossed the front hallway feeling light, airy, lustral, feeling unconquerable all over again.

When she entered the front parlor, Sandy was at the piano, stroking the petrosal keys as if they were flower petals, dripping his way through one syrupy Beatles tune after another. The melodies were perfect reconstructions of a thousand memories, syrupy or not, and with the help of their third or fourth cocktails, the colonists were in a mellow mood. Ruth stepped through the door and recognized them all, her friends and fellow artists, her community, her family, poised on sofas and ottomans, hovering over the bar, each and every one of them a joy and a solace.

Irving Thalamus was the first to call out her name, as usual—it was his way, chutzpah thrown up like a screen, the legend crowing—and then a murmur went through the room and they converged on her as if she’d just broken the tape in the marathon.

“You fox,” Thalamus said, shaking his legendary head, “you sly fox.” And then, turning to the others, “Can she keep a secret or what?” He was beaming at her, embracing her, squeezing her as if she were exotic fruit. “This,” he pronounced, “is a writer.”

Ruth hugged him back, giving them all a knowing but self-deprecatory grin, and reddening, if ever so slightly. Ina was staring at her in wonder. Bob’s eyes were glowing. Regina, in a chartreuse leather halter, looked up from a game of solitaire and one of the cigars she was now affecting, and Sandy broke off in the middle of “Fool on the Hill” to leap a barstool and pour Ruth a conspicuous martini—a whiff of vermouth and three olives, just the way she liked it. Clara and Patsy were there too, hovering at the edge of the press and looking like Tweedledee and Tweedledum in matching pantsuits.

“Hey, La D.: you’re just in time,” Sandy hollered, elbowing his way toward her with the drink held high, “—we just sent out for sushi.”

And oh, they laughed at that, her fellow colonists, mellow and proud, an excess of moisture in their eyes, warming up for the evening, the week, the month to come, with its string of Japanese jokes, its cops and robbers routines, and the audacious, awe-inspiring theme that would underlie it all: What La Dershowitz won’t do for a story, huh? And all the while the delectable questions—how long, how much, had she slept with him and what did the sheriff say?—hung in the air, awaiting fulfillment.

During the soup course, Ruth managed tête-à-têtes with Irving, Sandy, a myopic poet in a strapless gown with whom she’d never before exchanged a word, and a vacuous, wide-eyed Ina Soderbord. Over salad, Clara and Patsy pressed her for details, and while she tore into the main course—she found that she was ravenous after all the day’s excitement—Septima herself wanted clarification of some of the statements she’d made earlier. It wasn’t a dinner—it was musical chairs. By the time Rico brought out dessert and the big gleaming coffee urn, Ruth was the center of a group that wheeled out from her like planetary bodies, circling, tangential, held fast by the irresistible force of gossip.

After-dinner drinks were served on the patio.

Ruth was chatting with Bob and Sandy, enjoying the relative cool of the evening, feeling reborn, when she felt a hand slip into her own and looked up into the depthless haunted eyes of Laura Grobian. At fifty, Laura Grobian was the doyenne of the dark-eyed semi-mysterious upper-middle-class former-bohemian school of WASP novelists, famous for a bloodless 209-page trilogy set in 1967 San Francisco. She’d published a few slim volumes since (each phrase chiseled like sculpture—or dental plaster, depending on your point of view) and she’d been photographed by Karsh, Avedon and Leibowitz, her sunken cheeks, black bangs and haunted eyes as fixed an image in the public consciousness as Truman Capote’s hat or Hemingway’s beard. She dismissed Bob and Sandy with a neurasthenic bob of her head and drew Ruth aside.

“Oh, Ruth,” she gasped, fanning herself while bats careened overhead and mosquitoes hovered, “I heard, I heard all about it. How terrified you must have been—”

Ruth gazed on her with wonder. If Irving Thalamus was a legend in his own time, Laura Grobian was supernal, divine, and here she stood in the flesh, not merely acknowledging Ruth’s existence, but seeking her out, conferring with her, pumping her! Ruth leaned toward her and dropped her voice to a stagey whisper: “I’ve never been so afraid in my life, Laura.” She paused a beat to see how the haunted-eyed Laura Grobian was taking this little familiarity, and then went on. “Well, the sheriff—he was the worst. He’s got those Southern manners, yes, but when he gets you in that room and starts grilling you, let me tell you he’s the most powerful and intimidating man I’ve ever been this close to in my life. You know what he does?”

Laura Grobian’s spectral eyes were canny and fixed. She was all ears.

It was at this moment that a vaguely familiar automotive cough and rumble insinuated itself between the buzz of conversation and the shrilling of the insects, and the colonists looked up briefly from their Grand Marnier and Rémy-Martin to the fleeting wash of a pair of headlights. A gleam of silver flitted beneath the lights of the drive, there was the rise and fall of the car’s engine shutting down and the elegant thump of first one door and then the other closing on perfection: Jane Shine was back.

Ruth could feel them, the whole group, the whole colony, abuzz as they were with excitement over her exploits, her daring, her immaculate bedeviling of the powers that be, hesitate in the breach of that moment. The chatter died round her and her heart sank. But then Laura Grobian’s ruined but exquisite tones floated out to fill the vacuum—“But tell me, Ruth, honestly: you were hiding that desperate man all along, weren’t you?”—and it was over. As one, the colony turned back to the conversation, to the drink at hand and the company present. Jane Shine was back. So what else was new?

It couldn’t have gone any better for Ruth, queen of the hive once again—she was even readying herself to grant the inevitable and gracious billiard-room audience to Jane Shine later that night, or maybe she’d snub her, maybe she would—it couldn’t have gone any better, till there came a single wild shout from out beyond John Berryman that grew immediately into a chorus of cries and lamentation and gave rise in the next moment to a parade of footsteps storming the patio. “What is it?” someone cried, and Ruth saw the sheriff’s face, wild and white, Abercorn’s, Turco’s, their mouths drawn tight and eyes rabid, and then the sheriff seized on her, Ruth, as the first face he recognized. “The phone,” he barked, “where’s the phone?”

She was frozen. They were at her again, at her like hounds. Everything broke down in that instant, faces flapping round her like sheets in the wind. “Phone?” she repeated, stupid, dazed.

“Goddamn it, yes,” he snarled, looking on her with hatred, real hatred, before turning away in disgust and seizing on Laura Grobian. And then he was turning wildly away from her too, flailing his arms at the crowd gathered there on the patio with their sweet drinks and snifters of swirling dark cognac. “I need your help, all of you,” he cried, and then his voice dropped down to nothing and he finished the thought as if he were talking to himself, “—the son of a bitch is gone and got himself loose again.”

Four Walls

They’d caught him. run him down. overwhelmed him with their guns and their dogs and their Negroes. They’d caught him, yes. Oh, yes. Slapped him, handcuffed him, jerked their elbows into his ribs, his gut, the small of his back. They shoved him, abused him, humiliated him, made him walk the gauntlet of them as if they were red Indians in the forest, jeering and spitting and cursing him for a Jap, a Nip, a gook and a Chinaman. Yes. But they weren’t red Indians. They were white-faced and black-faced, blue-eyed, kinky-haired, they stank of butter and whiskey and the loam that blackened their fingernails, and it was they who’d exterminated the red Indians with a ferocity so pitiless and primeval it made the savages seem civilized. Yes. Oh, yes. And they hated him. Hated him so deeply and automatically it froze his heart: this was American violence, bred in the bone. This was the mob, the riot, this was dog eat dog.

The hate. It took him aback, it did. He was like them—that was the whole point, couldn’t they see that? He was a mutt too. But they didn’t see it, didn’t care. They cuffed him and shoved him and spat their curses at him and he saw the hate in their cold rinsed-out hakujin eyes, saw it in the black stony glare of the Negroes: he was an insect, a snake, something to be stepped on and ground into the dirt, eliminated. The face of the Negro boy had been almost ecstatic with hate as he crouched there in the path, consumed in his passion, implacable, worse even than the dogs. (They were there too—right there, right in Hiro’s face—choking back snarls and drool and breath that stank of meat gone bad, trembling all over with the urge to fall on him and tear him to pieces.) Uncle! the boy kept shouting, as if it were some sort of war cry, Uncle! Uncle!, his fists clenched, his eyes hard, tongue swollen, his very blood turned to acid with the ferocity of his hate.

And then there was the puffed-up little man in fatigues who pulled the boy off him and forced his wrists into the handcuffs, and the other Negro who called off the dogs, and the spatterface from the INS and the sheriff too: there was no glimmer of humanity in any of them. They’d never smiled, laughed, enjoyed a meal, friendship, love or affection, never petted a dog, stroked a cat or walked a child to school. They were hunters. Killers. And Hiro was their quarry, foreign and strange and worth no more time or thought than a cockroach dropped from the ceiling into their morning grits.

Their hands were on him, firm hands, iron hands, and the cuffs bit into his wrists. The sheriff hauled him to his feet and walked him back down the path, grim and purposeful, jerking impatiently at his manacled forearm while a deputy prodded him from behind. Hiro could hear them hooting and cursing and shooting off their weapons somewhere up ahead, but then the sheriff called out to them in a fiery hoarse shout and the noise of the guns abruptly ceased, lingering for a moment as echo and then fading away to stillness. A hush fell over the morning and all at once Hiro was afraid. He held the fear in a lump inside him, a tumor of fear, and he bowed his head and concentrated on his feet.

The man in fatigues and the boy with the dogs had fallen into step behind Hiro and the sheriff—they were quiet now, the dogs, whining and panting like housepets out for a stroll in the park—and behind them were the agency man and the spidery Negro boy whose towering unquenchable Amerikajin hate had brought Hiro down. It was a parade, that’s what it was. Grim, silent, angry, a parade in celebration of hate. But Hiro had no time to get philosophical about it—already they were emerging on the clearing at Ruth’s place and a murmur went up around him. He kept his eyes on the ground, but he could feel the presence of them, black and white, a mob of them, and he could smell the gunsmoke on the air. No one spoke. No one cursed or abused him. And then suddenly a man dried up like a stick of firewood stepped in front of him—“You Jap bastards kilt my brother Jimmy,” he snarled—and Hiro felt a stitch in his side, the elbow to the kidney, and then all the rest of them were spewing it at him—hate—until the sheriff got him in the car and out of there, out of the jungle and down the black macadam road to the cell that awaited him.

And now, here he was, in a gaijin cell, fulfilling his destiny.

From the storage room of the Tokachi-maru to the big bedroom at Ambly Wooster’s to the cramped loveseat at Ruth’s to this joyless cubicle of rotten mortar and stone, he was a prisoner in perpetuity, hopeless and defeated. The City of Brotherly Love was an illusion, a fairy tale—he saw that now. And then he thought of Jōchō and Mishima. In defeat, there was only one path to honor, and that was death. Mishima had addressed the soldiers of the Self-Defense Forces on the day he died, exhorting them to join him in rising up to purify Japan, and when they didn’t join him, when they laughed and jeered, he’d turned a sword in his own guts and made a mockery of them all. Alone in his cell with the stirrings of his guilt and shame, Hiro fell back on Jōchō. He didn’t have the battered and stained little volume—the sheriff had taken it from him, along with the picture of Doggo and the few odd little coins he’d got back from the girl in the Coca-Cola store—but he knew the formula, knew it by heart. The more they hated him, the more Japanese he became.

It couldn’t have been much past seven in the morning and the heat was like a weight on him already, pounds per square inch, a measure of his defeat. He sat there on the stone floor and pressed tentatively at his stomach, feeling a sword there, feeling liberation and honor, and something else too: hunger. Stinking and mud-encrusted, bruised, flayed and terrorized, humiliated to the point at which there was no alternative but suicide, he was hungry. Hungry. It was an embarrassment. A joke. The urgings of life crowding in on a funerary rite, a preparation for death gone up in dreams of sweet bean cake and ice cream.

Well, all right. Perhaps he wasn’t defeated yet. It was all in the interpretation, wasn’t it? Small matters should be taken seriously, Jōchō said. Well, then, his hunger was a small matter, and he would take it very seriously indeed—and the larger matter, the matter of his solitary and eternal fate, he would take lightly. As for the smaller matter, he was sure they would feed him something—not even the hakujin could be so barbaric as to let a prisoner starve to death. And as for the larger matter, he would have the right to a fair trial, wouldn’t he? He thought about that a moment, a fair trial, justices in their funereal robes, a jury of long-noses empaneled to vent their hate on him, Hiro Tanaka, the victim, the innocent, the happa from Japan trussed up like a turkey and studying the scuffed tiles of the courtroom floor as if their pattern would somehow reveal the solution to his predicament… and then all at once a glorious notion came into his head, a notion that tossed off fair trials, fuming sheriffs, dogs and Negroes and gun-toting crackers as if they were so much refuse, the outer wrapping of a morsel so sweet and nourishing it inflated his hara just to think about it: he would escape.

Escape. Of course. That was it: that was the solution. Two little syllables leaped into his head and he felt the blood beating in his veins, in his tiniest vessels and capillaries. He was a man with hara, a modern samurai, and if he’d escaped from the storage closet of the Tokachi-maru, from Wakabayashi and Chiba and all the rest, then he had the wits and courage and stamina to defeat all the gaijin cowboys in all the endless streets and alleys and honky-tonk bars of the whole Buddha-forsaken country, and he could escape from here too.

For the first time since they’d slammed the door on him he looked around, really looked, letting his eyes linger over each detail. The cell was ancient, filthy, slowly giving itself back to the chaos from which it had evolved in some dim colonial epoch. It was like a stall in a barn, except that there was no water, no straw, no place to relieve oneself—not even a bucket. The amenities consisted of a wooden bench built into the wall opposite and two lawnchairs—aluminum tubing and plastic mesh—propped up in the corner. Above the bench, twelve feet from the ground at least, there was a single barred window that apparently gave onto an interior room beyond it, judging from the light. And that was it, but for the door through which he’d been bundled half an hour ago.

He was sitting on the stone floor where they’d left him, where they’d dumped him in a rush of clattering shoes and urgent feet, his ribs throbbing and a long nasty gash coloring his left shin. When he wet his lips, he tasted blood at the corner of his mouth, and there was a tender spot—and some swelling, it felt like—along the cheekbone beneath his right eye. At least they’d removed the cuffs, though it seemed a small thing to be thankful for after all they’d inflicted on him. He rubbed his wrists. And he scanned the cell again, hopefully, wondering if he’d missed something. He hadn’t. He was locked in. He’d been abused and humiliated. There was no way out.

But then he gazed up at that dim high window, and then down at the lawnchairs and back up again, and a picture came to him of a pair of jugglers he’d seen on TV as a boy, one balancing atop a stack of stage chairs while the other offered him a whirl of knives, Indian clubs and flaming torches to spin over his head. If he stacked those chairs on the bench and if he could manage to climb atop them, he could reach the window—and if he could reach the window he could find out what was on the other side and see if one of the bars wasn’t maybe just a tiny bit loose. But then why would it be loose? he thought, sitting there still, aching with a dull persistence. And yet, why not? The building was old and disused, a relic of the times when the Negroes were shackled and the red Indians butchered. And this cell—this must have been where the hakujin kept their Negroes before they dragged them out to whip and lynch and burn them.

The thought lifted him to his feet.

He stood a moment at the door—a slab of oak, featureless, solid as rock—and then he noiselessly crossed the cell and took up the lawnchairs. They were frayed and dirty and their joints were locked with rust, but he managed to unfold them nonetheless. What followed bore less resemblance to a feat of skill performed in the center ring than an elaborate pratfall. The first attempt landed him on the stone floor and jammed that tough little appendage of bone at the nether end of his spine right up into his mouth. The second attempt twisted a knee, traumatized an elbow and put a permanent bow in the frame of one of the chairs. There was noise, of course—the stiff applause of the chairs clattering from bench to floor, the thump of perspiring flesh against unyielding stone, the small astonished grunts and gasps of pain—but no one came to the door as he lay there panting and writhing. For this, he was thankful.

He stacked the chairs again and again, balancing, teetering, clutching and falling, until finally, on his eighth attempt, as the chairs shot perversely out from under him and his arms flew up over his head, he made a wild snatch at the highflown bars and to his amazement caught hold of them—two of them, that is. For a moment he hung there, gratified, till the bars gave way and he dropped back into the cell, grazing the bench on the way down and reopening the gash on his shin as surely as if he’d been aiming for it. When he recovered, he found that he was still clutching the pitted iron bars as if they were a pair of dumbbells. Above him, the window gaped like a damaged mouth: four bars remained where a moment before there had been six. Better yet, numbers 2 and 3 were in his hands and the gap they left was easily wide enough to squeeze through. On the down side, his brief glimpse beyond the window had revealed a second cell, identical to his own, but for the lawnchairs. Clinging there, poised in the moment between hoisting himself up and lurching back from the window in a storm of dust and mortar pellets, he discovered a familiar bench, a scatter of refuse, and a heavy ancient solid-core door, firmly shut and for all he knew as immovable as the one behind him.

If he was disappointed, he didn’t have time to dwell on it, because at that moment the outside bolt slid back with a screech of protest and a low rumble of voices startled him to his feet. He looked wildly around him. The chairs lay crippled on the floor, the window gaped in the most obvious and incriminating way, and the bars—the bars were still clutched in his hands! Think fast: isn’t that what the Americans say? They throw you a live hand grenade and say, Think fast. But Hiro, in that moment, leaped beyond thought and into the realm of pure reaction: even as the door pushed open, he slipped the cold iron bars into the rear waistband of his shorts and sat heavily in the bowed lawnchair, simultaneously booting its mate back into the corner with a discreet jerk of his foot. And then the heat from outdoors hit him like a fist and there they were, the sheriff and the two government men, edging warily into the cell.

For a long moment the three of them stood there in the doorway, watching him as they might have watched a tethered animal, as if trying to gauge how dangerous he might be and how far and suddenly he might leap. Hiro sat there on his iron bars and watched them watching him. The tall one, the spatterface, had the eyes of a rodent, pink and inflamed, the strangest eyes Hiro had ever seen in a member of his own species. Those eyes fastened on him with a look of wonder and bafflement. The sheriff’s eyes were the eyes of a white-boned demon, as hard and sharp and blue as the edge of a blade. The little man—and it struck him in that moment how much he resembled the photo of Doggo, with his long blond hair and beard, a hippie for all his military trappings—the little man looked bemused. If the tall one regarded him with awe, as if he’d just dropped down to earth from another planet, and if the sheriff gave him that implacable look of gaijin hate, the little man’s eyes said I’ve seen it all before. The moment lingered. No one spoke, and though it shrieked for attention, though it hovered over them like a great flapping bird, no one seemed to notice the window.

“Here,” the little man said finally, shoving something at him—a paper bag, a white paper bag with the legend HARDEE’S printed on it in bright roman letters.

Hiro took the bag and cradled it stiffly in his lap. The little man held out a Styrofoam cup. Hiro reached for it, smelling coffee, and bowed his head reflexively in acknowledgment of the gesture. He felt the heavy pitted bars dig into his hams and his heart began to race.

Then the tall one spoke, his face spattered with the strange paint of his skin. “Sheriff Peagler,” he said, his voice officious and cold, the voice of the prosecutor calling in the evidence, and the sheriff reached out to pull the door closed. “Thank you,” he murmured, and he turned to Hiro, the look of wonder replaced now by something harder, more professional. “We’d like to ask you a few questions,” he said.

Hiro nodded. He concentrated on their shoes—the sheriff’s steel-toed cowboy boots, the tall one’s gleaming impatient loafers, the scuffed suede hiking boots that embraced the little man’s delicate feet. The shoes edged closer. Outside, beyond the heavy door, a bird called out in a high mocking voice. And then the three of them started in on him, insinuating, badgering, hectoring, and they didn’t let up for nearly four hours.

Was he familiar with the Red Brigades? Did the name Abu Nidal mean anything to him? Where had he learned to swim like that? Was he aware of the penalties for entering the country illegally? What was his full name? What had he hoped to gain by attacking the late Olmstead White? Was it a burglary? An assault? How long had he known Ruth Dershowitz?

The heat rose steadily. Hiro crouched over the paper bag and clung to the Styrofoam cup till the black liquid grew tepid. His hara rumbled, the iron bars cut into his backside like files. And yet he didn’t dare move, not even to sip the coffee—the slightest agitation could collapse the chair, send him reeling in a clatter of iron and aluminum, the bars he’d pried from the window exposed to his inquisitors’ eyes, and then where would he be? He held himself as rigid as a statue.

His interrogators were insatiable. They wanted to know everything, from what school he’d attended to his grandmother’s maiden name and what each of Ruth’s lunches contained, right on down to the number of seeds in the pomegranate, and yet, rapacious as their curiosity was, never once did they glance up and discover the naked evidence hovering over their heads. For the first half hour or so they remained standing, circling him, punching their questions at him with quick jabs of their fingers and fists—what time? what day? what hour? why? how? when?—riding a current of body English and cold hakujin rage; but then, starting with the tall one, they began to succumb to the heat, and they settled in on the narrow bench beneath the window, buttock to buttock, firing questions in a synchronized barrage and jotting notes in the little black pads they produced from their shirt pockets.

Hiro answered them as best he could, head bowed, eyes lowered, responding with the restraint and humility his obāsan had instilled in him. He tried to tell them the truth, tried to tell them about Chiba and Unagi and how the Negro had attacked him and how he’d tried to save the old man when the fire exploded round them, but they wouldn’t listen, didn’t care, caught the vaguest glimmer of what he was saying and shouted him down. “You went there to steal, didn’t you?” the spatterface cried. “You attacked an officer aboard your own ship, took advantage of a senile old lady and her crippled husband, set fire to an innocent man’s house when he resisted you—isn’t that right?” Hiro never had a chance to respond. The little man was on him. Then the sheriff. And then it was back to the spatterface and on and on and on.

“You’re a thief.”

“A liar.”

“An arsonist.”

They knew all the answers: all they needed was confirmation.

What seemed to interest them most, though, what aroused even the increasingly sleepy-eyed sheriff, was Ruth. They wanted to implicate her, and as the morning wore on, it seemed to be all they cared about. Hiro was already packaged, already wrapped up and condemned—he was history. But Ruth, Ruth was an unknown quantity, and they converged on the mention of her like sharks on a blood spoor. Had she given him food, clothing, money, sex, drugs, alcohol? Had she harbored him, tucked him in at night, was she planning to help him escape from the island and evade the law? Had she fondled him, kneaded his flesh, conjoined her lips and her private parts with his own? Was she a communist, a scofflaw, a loose woman? Was she a folksinger, did she wear huaraches, attend rallies, eat lox and bagels? Was she a Jew? She was, wasn’t she?

No, he said, no. No to every question. “She doesn’t know me,” he said. “I take her food, sleep when she go away.”

The tall one was particularly aroused. “You’re lying,” he mocked, glaring like a big spattered rodent. “She harbored you all along, she shared her bed with you, brought you groceries and clothing.”

“No. She doesn’t.” Hiro ached in every joint from holding himself erect. He wanted to tear open the bag and fall on the food, wanted to moisten his lips with the tepid coffee, but he didn’t dare. The iron bars were part of him now. The chair creaked when he spoke. The window gaped.

“All right,” the tall one said finally, rising and consulting his wristwatch. He looked at the sheriff. “It’s noon now. I’m going to want him alone—just me and Turco, after we’ve talked to her.”

The sheriff rose. He stretched and rolled his head back on the axis of his neck, rubbing the cords and muscles there. “Sure. You do what you need to. It’s you fellas that’re going to have to handle this anyway—it’s way out of our league.” He sighed, cracked his knuckles and gave Hiro the sort of look he might have given a twoheaded snake preserved in a jar. “I’ve heard about all I want to hear.”

Then the little man stood too, and the three of them shuffled their feet in unison as if it were part of an elaborate soft-shoe routine, and then they were out the door and the door slammed shut behind them. Hiro felt the thump of that door in his very marrow, and all at once he found he could breathe again. Gingerly, he lifted first one leg and then the other and eased the adamantine bars away from his flesh, which seemed by now to have incorporated them as a living tree incorporates a rusted spike or the abandoned chain of a dog long dead. He dropped the bars to the floor and worked himself out of the chair, wincing, cup and bag still clutched in his hand. His legs were raw, cramped, bloodless, his buttocks inert, and he felt as if he’d been hoisting sumo wrestlers up on his shoulders, one after another, for whole days and nights, for weeks and months and years … but then he looked up at the window and broke out in a grin.

Ha! he exulted. Ha! The fools. They were so stupid it was incredible. Four hours they’d sat there, and never once did they glance up at the window. It was the American nature. They were oafs, drugged and violent and overfed, and they didn’t pay attention to detail. That’s why the factories had shut down, that’s why the automakers had gone belly up, that’s why three professional investigators could sit in an eight-by-ten-foot cell for four hours and never notice that two of the bars had been pried from the window. Hiro wanted to laugh out loud with the joy of it.

And then, still standing, he turned his attention to the paper bag. Inside there were two rock-hard biscuits, each wrapped around a sliver of congealed egg and a pink tongue of what might once have been ham. It never ceased to amaze him how the Americans could eat this stuff—it wasn’t even food, really. Food consisted of rice, fish, meat, vegetables, and this was … biscuits. No matter: he was so hungry he scarcely used his teeth. He bolted the biscuits, which tasted of salt and grit and grease so ancient it could have been the mother of all grease, and he washed it down with the cold coffee.

In the next moment he was scaling the wall again. It took him only two tries this time, his arms flailing, the chairs swaying wildly beneath him. He found toeholds in the rough masonry, and for a long while he clung to the ledge, dangling like a pendant. When he’d finally caught his breath, he was able to replace the two bars he’d removed from the window, even going so far as to mold neat little plugs of masonry crumbs at their base. He knew that the Amerikajin agents would be back in the afternoon, and he didn’t want to press his luck. He knew too that they planned to take him to the ferry in the evening and thence to the mysterious mainrand, where a modern cell awaited him. And why wouldn’t he know? They’d discussed their plans right there in front of him, as if he were deaf and blind, as if English had suddenly become impenetrable to him despite the fact that they’d just got done asking him about six thousand questions in that very same language. Oh, they were sloppy. Sloppy and arrogant.

Hiro, however, had no intention of winding up in that mainland cell—or in any other, for that matter. When they were finished with him, when they were hunkered down over their chili beans and barbecue and generic beer, when the hypnotic voice of the TV murmured from every porch and window and even the dogs grew drowsy and stuporous, that was when he would make his move. That was when he would scale the wall one last time and drop catlike into the adjoining cell to try his luck on the outer door, all the while praying that it wouldn’t be locked. And it wouldn’t be. He knew that already. Knew it as positively and absolutely as he’d ever known anything in his life, knew it even as he let his exhaustion catch up to him and he drifted off to sleep. It was just the sort of detail the butter-stinkers would overlook.

He woke to a sharp thrust of light and a sudden escalation of heat as withering as the blast of an oven. His sleep had been deep and anonymous and they took him by surprise, the tall one with the rodent’s eyes and his runt of a companion. It must have been late in the afternoon, shadows lengthening in the barn that enclosed the cell, a flash of electric green just perceptible in the moment the door swung open to reveal the great gaping wagonhigh entranceway to the barn itself. Hiro sat up. His clothes were wet through, his throat parched. “Water,” he croaked.

The tall one shut the door and the day was gone. The little man laughed. He had something in his hand—a tape player, Hiro saw now, Japanese-made and big as a suitcase—and he maneuvered round Hiro to set it beside him on the wooden bench. The little man’s smile had changed—it was a cruel smile, unstable, no longer bemused. Were they going to force a confession out of him as the police did in Japan? Were they going to tape it and edit out the groans and screams and cries for mercy? Hiro edged away from the thing. But then, flexing the muscles of his neck and shoulders, the little man reached out to depress a button atop the machine and immediately the cell swelled with music, disco. Hiro recognized the tune. It was—

“Donna Summer,” the little man said, flexing and grinning. “You like it?”

This time, they questioned him for what seemed like days, but what actually must have been closer to two hours, Hiro later realized. They asked him the same questions they’d asked him earlier, over and over again. Questions about his politics, about Honda and Sony and Nissan, about Ruth and Ambly Wooster and the old Negro and the accident at the shack. And all the while the disco beat drummed in his head and his voice cracked around the parched kernel of his throat. They held out the promise of water as a bargaining chip—if he cooperated he would be rewarded; if not, they’d watch him die of thirst and never lift a finger. He cooperated. He told them, over and over again, about Chiba and Unagi and Ruth and her lunches and everything else he’d told them a hundred times over, only this time he told it with Donna Summer and Michael Jackson for accompaniment. Every once in a while he would say something that struck the little man and the little man would interrupt him to give the tall one a look and say, “See? What’d I tell you? Squarest in the world.” They left him a Tupperware pitcher of tepid water and another Hardee’s bag, this one filled to the grease-spattered neck with twists of cold greasy potato and two geometrically perfect hamburgers.

Hiro forced himself to eat. And he drank down the water too, every drop: he didn’t know when—or if—he’d see more. There were two deputies outside the door—he’d seen them when his inquisitors had let themselves in and out of the cell. He could hear the soft murmur of their voices, smell the flare of their tobacco. Twenty minutes. He would give them twenty minutes to eat their corn dogs and piccalilli and butterscotch ripple ice cream, twenty minutes to stupefy themselves with gin and whiskey and beer. Then he would make his break.

He counted out each of those interminable minutes, second by second—one a thousand, two a thousand, three—and he heard the faint but distinctive hiss of pop-tops, and there was the smell of hot grease and more tobacco, and then the murmur of voices faded away to silence. The time had come. The time for action. The time when a man of action must make up his mind within the space of seven breaths. Hiro only needed one. He sprang for the wall, clambering up the slick stones like a lizard, removed the false bars and squeezed through into the adjoining cell. Head first, then shoulders and torso and the right leg, then reverse position and drop lightly to the bench below. His blood was singing. He was moving, acting, in control of his own destiny once again—and the door? His fingers were on the rusted handle, his thumb poised over the latch—it was the moment of truth, the moment on which all the rest depended. He pressed: it gave. Ha!

Rusty hinges. Open a crack. Look. There, leaning back in a chair propped against the door of the first cell, was a deputy, red hakujin face and wheat-colored mustache, pointy nose and slivered lips. His head was thrown back, the cigarette smoking between his fingers, the can of beer and grease-stained bag at his side, and his breathing was deep and regular, somnolent, breath caught in the pit of the larynx and released again with the faintest stertor. Yes: the long-nosed idiot was asleep!

Hiro almost swaggered when he realized it: asleep! But he contained himself—discipline, discipline—and slipped out the door like a shadow, a ninja, the nimblest assassin ever to float over two feet. But what of the other guard? What of him? He was nowhere to be seen. Stealthy, stealthy. The red cheeks and flaming nose, the air sucked down the tubes and vomited out again: Hiro couldn’t resist. He bent over the sleeping deputy and slipped the cigarette from between his fingers, justifying it to himself as a precaution: it was only a matter of a minute or two before the fool singed himself awake. But the chicken—it was chicken, breaded and fried, wings, drumsticks and thighs, in the grease-stained bag—the chicken was another matter. Casually—as casually as Yojimbo hiking up his yukata or Dirty Harry scratching his stubble—Hiro leaned forward to pluck a drumstick from the bag, savoring the moistness of it as he eased along the inner wall, looking for a door that would give onto the yard out back.

And what was here? A shadowy vastness, rafters and crossbeams, a smell of urine, fungus, the body functions of animals dead a hundred years. He moved to his left, away from the deputy and the glaring high double doors of the barn’s main entrance, flattening himself against the cool stone wall. The place was deserted: an ancient pitchfork against the damp wall, the stalls where livestock had once been kept, the odd strands, like fallen hair, of antediluvian hay. Something stirred in the rafters overhead and he looked up into the slatted shadows to see a pair of swallows beating through the gloom. And the other deputy? Hiro was light on his feet, invisible, a ghost in the place of ghosts. At the end of the line of stalls a weak light leaked round the corner and down a hallway. Hiro made for it.

He turned down the hallway to his right, proud and scornful and ready for anything—he was escaping, escaping again!—and the light swelled to embrace him. There was a doorway there, vacant and bleeding light—a doorless doorway, the wooden slab with its latch and handle apparently lost to some ancient hakujin cataclysm. Beyond the doorway he saw green—the virescent glow of freedom in all its seething jungle urgency—and he hurried for it.

But it wasn’t as easy as all that.

He paused in the crude stone doorframe, glanced right and left—a driveway, cars, shrubs, trees, lawn—and then made his break, bolting for the band of vegetation that rose up at the far end of the lawn, thick and reclusive and no more than a hundred feet away. He was bent low and scurrying like a crab, already ten steps out of hiding and exposed for all the world to see, when suddenly he froze. There was a dog there, right in front of him, lifting its leg against a tree. A dog. Better than forty dogs, better than the snarling seething pack that had closed in on him at Ruth’s, but a dog nonetheless—and no lap dog either, but a big raw-boned gangling shepherd sort of thing that looked as if it had been put together with spare parts. The dog finished its business in that moment and Hiro saw its eyes leap with something like recognition as it loped toward him, a woof—a tiny grandfatherly woof—rippling from its throat. Hiro was planted, rooted, he’d grown up out of the ground like a native shrub, hopeless and immobile. The woof would become a concatenation of woofs, an improvisatory riff of woofing, followed by bared teeth and the bloodcurdling howls and the angry voices of discovery, while through it all the clink of handcuffs played in counterpoint. Was this it? Was it over already?

It might have been, had not the sensory organs of his fingertips communicated a swift tactile message to him: he was holding a half-eaten drumstick. Holding meat. Chicken. Dripping and irresistible. And what did dogs eat? Dogs ate meat. “Here, boy,” he whispered, making a kissing noise with his lips, “good boy,” and then he was inserting greasy bone in woofless mouth. But even as he did so and even as the dog melted away from him in greedy preoccupation, he heard a ribald screech of laughter and looked up to see three hakujin—two men and a woman—emerge from the very line of trees into which he’d hoped to disappear. They were dressed in tennis whites and carrying racquets, and they hadn’t noticed him yet—or if they had they didn’t remark it, absorbed as they were in themselves. The woman leaned into the men with a bawdy whoop and all three doubled up, spastic with laughter.

Though in that moment he recalled the words of Jōchō—A true samurai must never seem to flag or lose heart—Hiro found himself on the verge of panic, mental disintegration and physical collapse. He could not move. He was caught in a bad dream, powerless, his limbs as useless as a quadriplegic’s, and they were coming for him, coming to devour his flesh and crack his bones. His eyes flew to the points of the compass: there was the dog, happily frolicking with the scrap of chicken, and there was the line of trees that promised release—and there, interposed between him and his goal, were the tennis players, they who at any moment would look up in stunned surprise and raise a shout of horror and dismay. What to do? He hadn’t a clue. Move, and he was dead. Stand still, very still, and he was dead too. All at once the decision was made for him: a pair of stocky women in bonnets and tentlike sundresses suddenly rounded the far corner of the barn with a great booming shout. “If it isn’t McEnroe and Connors!” the smaller of the two bellowed in the direction of the tennis players. “And Chrissie Evert too!” the larger added in a stentorian shrill.

That was it. That was enough. Suddenly Hiro was moving, head down, back to them, walking with purpose and determination, as if he belonged here, just another artist out for a stroll on the grounds. Directly ahead of him was the parking lot, with its cars and pavement, shrubs and trees and flowers in plucked beds, the big house rising above it in the near distance: it wasn’t the direction he would have chosen. “Patsy!” a woman’s voice cried behind him, “Clara!” And then one of the men shouted, “Vodka and gin!” This was followed by a general roar and a spate of lubricious laughter.

“Just heading over ourselves!”

“Join us?”

“Join you? We’ll lead the way—better yet, we’ll race you!”

Whoops and more whoops.

“Last one”—out of breath—“last one there’s a rotten egg!”

Hiro kept going, dog, women and tennis trio fading away in his wake, certain that at any moment the hue and cry would rise up to engulf him. The drive curved through the trees in front of him and a huge forsythia bush rose up to block the house from view. He saw a Toyota, an American car that looked like a Toyota, and a Mercedes—a big, royal blue Mercedes sedan—parked at the curb with its trunk open. And then, as the grass gave way to pavement under his feet and the shouts at his back subsided to a trickle of giggles and guffaws, something Ruth had said came back to him: It’s got a trunk the size of the Grand Canyon.

The rest was a whirl—deliberate, but a whirl nonetheless. There were more voices, men’s voices, and movement off to his left. It was now or never. Fighting the urge to run, he crossed the pavement in crisp, businesslike strides—movement behind the forsythia now, legs, shoes, a gabble of voices—and in one clean motion threw himself into the trunk of the Mercedes as if he were tumbling into bed. Things gouged and poked at him—fishing traps, a camp stove—but he didn’t have time to worry about it. He lifted his right hand from the depths of the trunk and took hold of the steel ribs of the lid, and then, as casually as if he were pulling the covers up over his head, he pulled it closed.

The Whiteness of the Fish

Son of a bitch. Son of a fucking bitch. The humiliation level here was climbing like a rocket. What had it taken them, six weeks to catch this joker? Six weeks to nail one sorry slump-shouldered fat-assed Nip who looked like he was about twelve years old. And now, when it was all over, when he’d been hauled in, reamed out and locked up like a hamster in a cage, the yokels turn around and let him go. Yeah. Right. And now what, call out the National Guard?

Lewis Turco was angry. He was incensed. It was getting dark and things were looking grim. Nobody knew anything, least of all the half-wit deputy who’d opened up the door to take the prisoner to the ferry and discovered an empty cell. Oh, the cell had chairs in it, all right, stacked up under the window, and the window had a couple bars left in it too, but it was empty space, one hundred percent Nipless. And then he’d asked his buddy about that, but his buddy had been out back taking a leak and so they figured they’d better tell the sheriff, and now here they all were, running around like mental defectives, shouting in everybody’s face. Meanwhile, the light was nearly gone, the artistic types were milling around on the patio enjoying the show, the dogs were back over there in Niggertown and the sheriff looked like he’d just chewed off a piece of his own ass and swallowed it. And the Nip—the Nip was probably halfway to Hokkaido. The incompetence of these people. The shit and stupidity. Jesus.

And these artists. Christ, they made him want to puke. Aberclown sucked up to them, especially the little Jew bitch who’d been hiding the guy all along—hiding him and then lying about it, just to jerk them off. Big joke. Ha, ha, ha. There she was now, right in the thick of it, cradling a drink and giving everybody that wide-eyed innocent look, pure as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, what would she know about it?

He would have found out. If Aberclown had only let him go, he would have found out a hundred and five percent of everything she ever knew, from her daddy’s ATM number to how many hairs she had on her twat—he’d been in on some cold interrogations, men and women both, VC as hard and silent as stones, and nobody knew how to put the fear into them like he did—but with her it wasn’t an interrogation, it was a tea party. He’d sat there for two sweaty stinking hours with Aberclown and the sheriff and it was all he could do to keep himself from taking her by the hair and jerking her head back till her throat opened up like a slow drain with a snake down it. Damn. But Aberclown and the hick sheriff treated her like a senator’s wife or something and she threw out a couple crumbs and that was it. She hadn’t told them the half of it. Why should she? She was an artist, right?

He was standing there, fuming, when he felt a pressure on his arm and all at once he was staring up into the puffy face of another artist, a great big fluty-voiced ass of a woman with a cast in one eye. “What’s this all about?” she gasped. “What’s happening?”

He couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t—he felt himself slipping, three toes over the line and whatever you do don’t pull that ripcord. “What the fuck you think is happening,” he snarled, jerking his arm away from her. “It’s Armageddon, they’re fucking dogs out there, eating human flesh. Wake up, bitch.” The rage was racing in his veins as he watched her shrink away from him.

But what now? The sheriff had disappeared into the house, Aberclown’s big speckled face was coming up on his left like something out of planetary alignment and the deputies were standing around with their thumbs up their asses—son of a fucking bitch. He’d been all packed and ready to go, he’d stowed his gear and chowed down his last hunk of overcooked barbecue and a couple warm Budweisers in somebody’s greasy back kitchen, and he was looking forward to kicking back at home, smoke some weed, take the boat out, maybe look up that waitress from Shucker’s—what was her name, Linda?—and now he was going to have to start all over again.

Just then the lights went on in the house, a spill of silver washing over thirty pairs of dress shoes. Turco squared his shoulders and looked round him: here he was in a crisis situation and what the hell was he doing about it? He was just standing around like the rest of the shitheads, his feet cemented to the flagstones: in a minute he’d have a drink in his hand and before you knew it he’d be an artist himself. “Lewis!” It was Aberclown—now he had a hand on him, it was feel-up-Turco night. “Lewis, we’ve got to get—”

“Get shit,” Turco said. “Get fucked.”

It was at that moment that Dershowitz threw back her head and laughed—laughed—whooping like the ringer in a comedy club, bending over to pat her breastbone and give her tits a good shake for everybody to see. And the rest of them—the surfer boy with the cute little bleached forelock and the old guy with the hairy wrists—they were laughing too. This laughter—these artists with their drinks in their hands and their twenty-five-dollar haircuts and their clean white sculptured teeth—it was too much to take. “Lewis,” Aberclown was saying, “Lewis, I’m talking to you—” but it didn’t register.

Turco came at them without warning, catching the old guy with an elbow that doubled him up in his own puke and drilling the beachboy with a single shot to the sternum that sent him sprawling, and then he had her, the bitch, had her by the hair, the glass shattering on the flagstones at her feet and her hands caught fast behind her. “Where is he?” he demanded, barking, raging, jerking at the knot of her hair as if he were climbing rope. “Where the fuck is he?”

The moment lingered like a shock wave, and then they were on him—Aberclown, the hairy old geek and the beachboy, the fag with the flattop, everybody, even the lame-ass deputies—and he hurt at least one of them with a chop to the groin and he nailed another with a side-blade kick, but the bitch broke away from him and they got him down by sheer force of numbers. They were yammering like dogs, he couldn’t hear them, everybody in on the act now, and she was coming at him like a Harpy, kicking him over and over again with the point of a sharp-toed little red shoe. “My father’ll make you pay for this,” she yelped, makeup smeared, sunglasses gone, “you bastard … if Saxby was here …”

Saxby? Who the hell was Saxby? Not that it mattered, because Aberclown had him all wrapped up in his orangutan’s arms and there were about fourteen bodies attached to his, hustling him out onto the lawn and into the shadows that were closing over the trees like the curtain falling on the very last act of a play. Or not just a play, a tragedy.

At that moment, the moment of the altercation on the patio, the moment Ruth invoked his name, Saxby wasn’t on Tupelo Island at all. He was in his mother’s Mercedes, tooling down the highway at seventy-five, heading for Waycross, Ciceroville and the western verge of the Okefenokee Swamp. In the back seat, trembling slightly with the motion of the car, was a dirty yellow gym bag into which he’d stuffed his toothbruth, razor, a change of underwear, three pairs of socks, two of shorts, a T-shirt and a bandanna. Alongside the gym bag, low humps of nylon in the dark, were his sleeping bag and one-man tent. He’d put his traps and waders, a cylinder of oxygen and a roll of clear heavy-duty plastic bags—for fish transport, with twists—in the trunk. The Mercedes wasn’t exactly the most convenient vehicle to be taking on a collecting trip, but the pickup was in the shop—Fords! six thousand miles on the damn thing and already it was leaking oil—and when Roy Dotson called to tell him he’d caught a bucketful of albinos in a trough on the back side of Billy’s Island, he didn’t have time to think about it: this was what he’d been waiting for since he left La Jolla.

He was excited, hurtling through the long shadows of the evening, the radio cranked up high. The music was country, of course—he liked soft rock, Steely Dan and that sort of thing, but once you left the city you got nothing but your hard-core redneck honky-tonk psychodrama—but he cranked it anyway. Albino pygmies. Roy Dotson had them, a whole tankful. And they were his. His for the asking. He felt so exhilarated he beat time on the steering wheel and sang along in a high-pitched, off-key whinny that would have cleared the Grand Ole Opry in ten seconds flat:

He roared past clapboard filling stations, towns that consisted of three farmhouses and a single intersection, past shanties and dumb-staring cattle and low pink-and-white fields of cotton and on into the twilight, the steel-belted radials beating rhythm beneath him. He was feeling good, as good as he’d ever felt, picturing the reflecting pool out front of the big house converted to a breeding pond, milk-white albinos churning up the surface as he cast food pellets out over the water, orders from aquarists all over the world, a steady stream of offers to lecture and consult … but then he thought of Ruth and the picture switched channels on him. He’d felt bad about leaving her like that, but Roy’s phone call had lit up all his lights, galvanized him—she’d be all right, he’d told himself, the adrenaline pumping through him as he tore around the house, hurrying to make the six o’clock ferry. And if she wasn’t all right—and here he had to admit how hurt he’d been—it was her own fault. She hadn’t told him, hadn’t trusted him. He’d felt betrayed. Angry. Felt like getting back at her. And so he’d gone to Abercorn—who wouldn’t?

But it wasn’t as cold as she made it out to be. He’d got Abercorn’s promise to go easy on her—and no, there was no question of prosecution, none at all—and he’d sat with her through the questioning till Theron got up and asked him to leave the room. She’d seemed fine when he kissed her goodbye, seemed her old self again. If she’d suffered a little, maybe she deserved it. He believed her when she claimed the Japanese kid was nothing more than a curiosity—he was ridiculous, pitiful, with a face like putty waiting to be molded and a head too big for his body—but she carried things too far. To think that she’d kept the whole thing a secret from him, her lover, her man—and he’d do anything for her, she knew that—well, it hurt and there were no two ways about it.

Still, Saxby wasn’t one for brooding. He punched another button on the radio and the small glowing Teutonic space of the cab swelled with the skreel of fiddles and the twang of guitars, and before he knew it he was yodeling along with a tune about truckers and blue tick hounds and Ruth slipped from his mind, replaced by the glowing alabaster vision of a pygmy sunfish gliding through the silent weedy depths of the Okefenokee.

It was dark by the time Saxby reached Ciceroville. He gassed up at Sherm’s Chevron and then swung into the parking lot of the Tender Sproats Motel, Mr. Gobi Aloo, Proprietor. The tiny fly-spotted office was deserted, but when Saxby depressed the buzzer connected to the apartment in back, Gobi appeared like a genie sprung from a bottle. The little man’s features lit with pleasure as he bundled himself through the door and sidled up to the desk, a smell of curry wafting along with him. “Well, if it ain’t the man hisself, Saxby Lights, from Tup-e-lo Island, Georgia.” He spoke with the slow drawl he’d developed within days of his emigration from the Punjab, slurring the syllables round the wad in his cheek. “Saxby, Saxby,” he drawled, wagging his delicate head, but then, as he did from time to time, he slipped into the light musical cadence of the subcontinent: “And to what do we owe the pleasure? Fish, I would be thinking, yes?”

“You guessed it, Gobe.” Saxby could barely contain himself—he was bursting with the news. “Roy’s found them. Soon’s I check in I’m going straight over there to have a look at what he’s got and in the morning we’re going to pull some nets and hopefully we’re going to get lucky. I mean real lucky. Jackpot time.”

Gobi beamed up at him, a buttery little man in a dirty feedstore cap, an overstretched T-shirt and a pair of overalls. If it weren’t for the caste mark between his eyes, you might have mistaken him for a sunburned cracker. His drawl thickened with the exchange: “Y’all gone git you some, Ah know it—y’all deserves nothin’ less.” He turned his head to spit a reddish-brown stream of tobacco and betel-nut juice into the wastebasket under the counter.

On his last two visits to the Okefenokee, Saxby had stayed here, at the Tender Sproats Motel in Ciceroville. It was forty-seven miles from the dock at Stephen C. Foster State Park, on the western edge of the swamp, but it was a five-minute walk from Roy Dotson’s place. And that made it convenient. He signed the register Gobi slid 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 Green Eggs and Ham?”

“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 Pequod II stenciled on its bow, one of Roy’s little jokes. “Mornin’,” Roy said, laconic and slow-smiling, and he handed Saxby a Hardee’s bag and a Styrofoam cup of coffee, black.

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 ramp. On one side of them was the dredged and widened pond in which the rental boats were kept, and on the other, the channel that led to Billy’s Lake and the infinite shifting maze of watery trails that snaked through the swamp beyond it. It was drizzling still and the sky hung low over the treetops in a dull metallic wash. The place was quiet but for the handful of fishermen loading their boats with a soft murmur of expectation, and the jays and catbirds that cursed one another intermittently from the trees. The water, peat-stained and tepid, was the color of fresh-brewed tea.

Saxby stood at the door of the Mercedes and watched Roy back the trailer down the ramp. When the trailer was in the water, Roy cut the engine, pulled the parking brake and got out to release the boat, while Saxby ambled to the rear of the Mercedes to fetch his gear. He wouldn’t need the oxygen and plastic bags till he headed home with what he hoped would be the nucleus of his breeding stock, but he was thinking of his waders, minnow traps and dip net, as well as the little thirty-foot seine that might just come in handy in a relatively clear patch of water. He hadn’t opened the trunk since he’d hastily loaded it some twelve or thirteen hours earlier, but as he fit the key into the lock he could visualize its contents, already leaping ahead to picture them stowed away in the bottom of Roy’s boat and the boat itself gliding off under the sure silent stroke of their paddles. The lock accepted the key. The key turned in the lock.

It was the sort of thing that happens every day.

A Jungle

What had happened to her? what was wrong with her? where was the visionary who woke up rigid, forsaking breakfast to stride boldly through the dripping forest to the nunnery of the studio, the cross of her art? Ruth didn’t know. All she knew was that she felt as drained of energy as when she’d contracted mono as a teenager. She had a headache—it seemed as if she’d had a headache for days, weeks, the better part of her life—and her limbs felt tentative, as if they weren’t really attached. Maybe she was coming down with something, maybe that was it.

It was dawn, just, the light pale and listless, and she made a groggy but furtive dash for the bathroom down the hall—thank god no one was stirring yet—and then slipped back to her room and fell into the bed as if her legs had been shot out from under her. Thirty seconds more and she would have been gone, pulled back down into the vestibule of sleep, but then the phone rang deep in the bowels of the house and consciousness took hold of her. The sound was faint, distant, the buzz of an insect on the far side of the room—but she knew it was ringing for her. She knew it. Very faintly, and again at an incalculable distance, she heard footsteps—Owen’s footsteps—crossing the downstairs hallway to the phone in the foyer. She fought to keep her eyes closed, to shake it off, but the phone was ringing and she knew it was ringing for her.

Three times it rang, four, and then it choked off in the middle of the fifth ring. She couldn’t begin to hear the murmur of Owen’s voice, but she imagined it, and she listened as the footsteps started up again, as the dull stealthy tread of them recrossed the foyer, mounted the stairs and started down the upper hallway. She sat up. It was her father, she was sure of it. The doctor had warned him—the stress of the courtroom, the late nights, the obsessive tennis and racquetball, the cigarettes, martinis, New York steaks. Her father! Grief flooded her. She saw his face as clearly as if he were standing there beside her, the glint of his wire-frame glasses, the splash of gray in his beard, the look of the menscb, the lawgiver, the man of wisdom and peace … there would be a funeral, of course, and that would mean she’d have to leave Thanatopsis for a week, maybe longer. Black crepe. She’d look good in that, slim through the hips, and her tan would glow … but her father, it was her father, her daddy, and now she was naked to the world—

The footsteps halted outside her door, and then came Owen’s knock and his subdued rasp—no language games, no chirp of humor: “Ruth, it’s for you. Long-distance.”

She knew it, she knew it.

“It’s Saxby.”

Saxby? Suddenly the picture clouded over. Her father was all right, he was okay, as healthy as the Surgeon General himself and sleeping peacefully at one of the better addresses in Santa Monica. But it was—six o’clock? What could Saxby want at six o’clock? Her heart gave a little skip of fear—was he hurt? But no. Why would he be calling if he was hurt—it would be the police or the hospital, wouldn’t it? And then she thought of his fish. If he was dragging her out of bed because of some damned little loopy-eyed fish—

“Ruth, wake up. Telephone.”

She caught herself. “Yes, yes, I’m awake. Tell him I’ll be right there.”

The footsteps retreated. She bent to shuffle through the mess on the floor. She was looking for her terry-cloth robe, and her cigarettes, and maybe something to wrap round her hair in case anyone was up. She found the robe—she’d borrowed it from a hotel in Las Vegas on her way out from California, and there was a rich reddish stain over the left breast where she’d upended a glass of cranberry juice on it—and she came up with the cigarettes too, but no lighter and no scarf. She caught a glimpse of herself in the bureau mirror—sunken eyes, too much nose, a frenzy of fractured little lines tugging at her mouth—and then she ducked out the door, cradling her cigarettes, and found herself staring into the huge startled gypsy eyes of Jane Shine.

Jane was on her way to the bathroom. She was wearing an antique silk kimono over a white voile nightgown and her feet were prettily encased in a pair of pink satin mules. Her hair, ever so slightly mussed from sleep, was thicker, curlier and glossier than any mere mortal’s had a right to be. Her face, bereft of makeup, was perfect.

Ruth was wearing a fifty-nine-cent pair of Taiwanese flipflops, the stolen robe was six sizes too big and practically stiff with filth, and her face, as she knew from her glancing appraisal in the bureau mirror, was the face of one of the walking dead. Sleepy, oblivious, off-guard, Ruth had stepped out of her room with a vague idea of the telephone, and there she was, Jane Shine, her greatest enemy, looking like some forties actress having breakfast in bed on the backlot of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Jane’s eyes narrowed. Her face was alert but impassive. She blinked twice, stepped round Ruth as if she were a minor nuisance, a small but annoying impediment to her majestic progress—a pile of luggage, a potted palm left out of place by the help—and floated on down the hall with a gentle swish of silk. Oh, the bitch, the bitch! Not a word, not an excuse me or beg pardon, not a good morning, hello, goodbye, drop dead, anything. Oh, the icy arrogant bitch!

Ruth just stood there, immobilized, rigid with hate. She waited for the click of the bathroom door behind her, and then she started down the hallway, clenching her jaws so hard her teeth had begun to ache by the time she reached the phone at the foot of the stairs. “Sax?” she practically snarled into the receiver.

His voice came right back at her. He was excited about something—fish, no doubt—and her mood, which was poisonous to begin with, took a turn for the worse. “Ruth,” he was saying, “listen, I’ve got to tell you this before anybody else does—”

She cut him off. All he cared about was fish. Lewis Turco had hurt her, had taken her by the hair and hurt her, and all he cared about was fish. “He grabbed me by the hair, Sax, and he called me a bitch in front of everybody, called me a lying Jew bitch right out on the patio in front of everybody.” The phone gave it back to her—she could hear the outrage trembling in her voice, a slice of anger that fell away into hurt. “If he thinks he’s going to get away with it, he’s crazy … I’ll sue him. I will. I’ll file a complaint… Sax,” she bleated, “oh, Sax.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. Saxby was confused, and when he was confused he got flustered. “What are you telling me, somebody pulled your hair?” And then he made a leap. “You mean the Japanese kid? Is that how he escaped?”

“Japanese kid? I’m talking about Turco. Lewis Turco. The little Nazi jerk that tags around with Detlef. He went berserk out on the patio last night and he”—her voice broke—“he assaulted me. He went for Irving too, and Sandy. You should see the bruises on Sandy’s chest. He wouldn’t touch me if you were here, he wouldn’t dare, but—but—” She felt herself breaking down.

“Ruth, stop it. Listen to me.”

Saxby wouldn’t allow it, wouldn’t listen. He had something to tell her, something more important than the fact that some overdeveloped clod had beat up his girlfriend, some miraculous fish find, the news that would send shock waves through the world of overgrown adolescents who spent their entire lives watching fish fuck in little glass tanks. She was angry. “No, you listen. He attacked me, goddamn it—”

“Ruth, the Japanese kid is here. Hiro. Hiro Tanaka. He’s here.”

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 have become self-destructive, hateful. Shooting drugs, drinking, whoring around. She would never make the national news again, and she knew it, her life a downward spiral from the age of one and a half on. And what would she do then? She’d marry some tattooed greaseball fifteen years her senior, a drummer in a rockabilly band, and then—but that was as far as Ruth had gotten. And now, reading over what she’d written, sifting through her notes, she felt nothing but despair. The idea stank. She stank. The whole miserable muggy drizzling world stank.

She lurched up from her desk and stepped out on the porch. It was no later than ten, ten thirty, though with the cloud cover it was hard to judge. She wondered if Owen was planning to bring her lunch. They’d seen plenty here over the years, from nervous breakdowns to fistfights to heart attacks and every sort of drunken and debauched behavior imaginable—artists would be artists, after all—but they’d never seen this. Hiro Tanaka, the Japanese desperado; La Dershowitz, his self-sacrificing succorer—or that didn’t sound right: protector, then; and the glorious, full-color, Dolbyenhanced Attack of the Rednecks! They’d never seen a studio shot up before. If for nothing else, they’d remember her for that—even if she never wrote another word. In years to come they’d lean over the bar or push back their dinner plates or bubble round the convivial table to corner some newcomer, some ingénue, and allow the incredulity to light up their faces as some one of them, queen of the hive or king of the jungle, gasped, Don’t tell me you’ve never beard the story of the bullet holes in Hart Crane?

Yes, Owen would bring lunch, all right. Business as usual. They’d seen everything but this, and it would go down in Thanatopsis legend, but Septima would never allow anything to interfere with the orderly business of creation, let alone the frenzy of the mob, destruction of property, attempted murder, anarchy and Yahooism. The only thing was, Ruth wouldn’t be there to eat the lunch Owen would bring her. She was too dispirited. Too anxious, too depressed even to work. And then she had a thought: maybe it was closer to eleven, after all. If so, the mail would be in. Maybe she’d just take a stroll back to the big house and see if there was anything for her. She couldn’t work today. Not today. And who could blame her?

As it turned out, there was something for her. Two things, actually. She checked her box in the coatroom, her eyes hungrily scanning the grid of mailboxes, noting as she did every day the volume of mail jamming Laura, Irving and even Jane’s boxes while her own remained conspicuously and degradingly empty. They got letters from publishers, agents and editors, high-tone magazines, review copies, fan mail. She got nothing. (For a while she’d toyed with the idea of stuffing envelopes with dummy letters and mailing them to herself, but she was afraid the postmarks would give her away—to Owen, at any rate. He was the one who sorted the mail—and any secret, any tidbit about anyone was fair game at Thanatopsis; the place was a jungle, it really was—and if that got out she’d never be able to show her face again.)

She envied Laura Grobian, who got fan mail from all over the world. When she was alone in the mailroom, when she was sure no one was looking, Ruth pulled the letters out and fanned through them, transfixed by the postmarks, the addresses, the exotic foreign stamps and legends. She was envious of Irving too. And Jane, though it sickened her to admit it even to herself. Jane got letters from her publisher, of course, and proofs to correct, and once she’d even gotten an envelope from Harper’s that looked and felt suspiciously like an acceptance letter, not to mention the thin blue aerograms from Italy that came two or three times a week. As often as not, Ruth got nothing—and everyone knew it. They probably made a joke of it—who would want to write her, anyway? She didn’t have a publisher. She didn’t have an agent. She didn’t have fans or a mysterious hot-blooded Venetian lover who franked his letters only with the initials C. da V. or even friends. Her mother never even wrote her.

But today she was surprised.

She spotted the big manila envelope projecting from her box the moment she stepped through the door, and she knew instantly what it was. It was the manuscript of “Days of Fire, Nights of Ashes,” returned from the Atlantic. The New Yorker had rejected it promptly, but she’d prevailed on Irving once again to lend his name and influence to her cause and she’d held out high hopes for the Atlantic. They’d had it for three weeks. And now here it was, back again, a dead albatross, refuse in a neat foursquare envelope, one more dismissal from the world at large. As she snatched the thing from the box, her second piece of mail fluttered to the floor. It was a postcard, glossy and inviting, showing the sunstruck beach at Juan-les-Pins. On the reverse, six lines from Betsy Butler, a poet she knew from Iowa who if anything was even more obscurely published than she, and therefore someone Ruth could continue to enjoy. Betsy was on the beach. She had a poem coming out in a magazine Ruth had never heard of. All right. Fine. But there was a P.S.: had Ruth heard the news? About Ellis Disick who’d been at Iowa with them? His first novel had just gone at auction for $250,000, movie rights went to Universal and the book was a main selection of Book-of-the-Month for the spring: wasn’t that just too much? Gritting her teeth, Ruth tore grimly into the envelope from the Atlantic. Just as she’d suspected, her manuscript, slightly worn about the edges, stared back at her. The rejection slip, signed in a mad indecipherable scrawl, was curt: “Too hot for us. Try Hustler.”

Ruth spent the afternoon in bed. She licked her wounds, brooded, poked desultorily through a Czechoslovakian novel Peter Anserine had recommended with an emphatic quiver of intellectual fervor animating his Brahmin’s nostrils, and ate her way miserably through a two-pound box of tollhouse cookies. She found she was missing Sax—the old Sax, the ardent sexy Sax who lately seemed to have sublimated all his libidinous energy in the pursuit of pygmy fishes—and she very nearly let her malaise overwhelm her desire for cocktails and company. But she struggled back beyond the humiliation of the scene on the patio and the grimness of the cabin to the moment of her triumph over the entire affair of Hiro, and that cheered her. There was plenty of mileage to be got yet from that—and too, this was the day that the new arrivals would be putting in their initial appearances, and it would be a shame to miss that. Ruth spent half an hour on her face, fished through her wardrobe for something red, and came down the big staircase to cocktails as a queen to coronation.

The first person she laid eyes on was Brie Sullivan, who was standing in the foyer amidst a clutter of mismatched suitcases, looking bewildered. Ruth knew Brie from Bread Loaf and she liked her for her myopic pursed-lip expression—she always looked slightly dazed—and her air of the eternal hick and newcomer, and because, like Betsy Butler, she hadn’t published much (and judging from her workshop stories, all of which seemed to be about disembodied brains and talking unicorns, she never would). She had a broad smooth forehead and strong hands and hair that flew round her face as if she were caught in a perpetual windstorm. “Brie,” Ruth said, offering her outspread palms as she swept down the staircase, her voice rich with noblesse oblige.

Brie’s response registered somewhere on the scale between a yelp and a screech, before trailing off into frequencies audible only to more sensitive lifeforms. “Ruthie!” was the rough sense of the sound she produced, and then they were in each other’s arms, sisters torn asunder by the Fates and at long last reunited. After a moment they fell back a pace, still clutching one another but attaining enough distance for a quick but keen mutual appraisal. Brie looked good, Ruth had to admit it—but then why wouldn’t she, she was only twenty-six. “I’m knocked out,” Brie gasped, her dull gray gaze licking about the foyer, darting into the fuzzy purviews of the parlor where the dim forms of the cocktail crowd could be seen hanging protectively over their drinks, and then settling again on Ruth, “—I really am. I’m stunned. The place is fantastic, much tonier than I’d imagined even—”

“Yes,” Ruth agreed with a proprietary air, “it’s first class all the way here. Septima—that’s my boyfriend Saxby’s mother?—she keeps the place competitive, that’s for sure. They know how to spoil you. The food alone …” Ruth put three fingers together and waggled them in appreciation.

Brie was treating her to a broad open-faced look of wonder and unadulterated joy. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said in a kind of bark. “I thought I was going to be the only one—” Brie hesitated. “The only …”

Only what? Ruth wondered. Talking unicorn? Ditzy blonde? Rank amateur? Was Brie insulting her, was that it? Was she saying that she’d thought it would be all Grobian, Anserine, Kleinschmidt and Thalamus, all celebrity and anointed royalty, but that now she saw there was a peonage here as well and that Ruth was part of it? Like herself? Ruth could feel her ears turning red.

Brie never finished the thought. She squealed something unintelligible followed by “Oh, Ruthie, it’s so good to see you!” A second obligatory hug ensued, slightly less fervent than the first, and then Ruth led Brie into the parlor for cocktails.

At the bar, Ruth introduced her to Sandy, Regina, Ina and Bob, each of whom received in return a look of such awe and abasement they might have been Salinger, Nevelson, Welty and Ashbery. Brie then grilled them, as a group and individually both, about the minutest and most banal details of their personal histories, ending up with the verboten question: “So what are you working on now?”

Ruth smiled serenely throughout, exchanging occasional glances with her friends and giving them the odd shoulder shrug for their unspoken commiseration. She was the undisputed queen here, after all—or she was so long as the pretender, Jane Shine, remained under wraps. And where was La Shine, with her flamenco hair and phony laugh—choking to death on a bit of pickled truffle in her lofty and well-appointed room? Out for a drive with her Nordic slave? No matter. In giving Brie the great good gift of her patronage—if she was all right in La Dershowitz’s eyes, she was all right, period—Ruth felt charitable, saintly even. It was the least she could do.

She let it go on a bit—“And you’re a Scorpio too?” Brie was gurgling at Ina in a battle of shoulders and flying hair—and then she cut in and took Brie by the elbow. “You’re going to want to unpack,” she said. “I’ll get Owen for you. But first”—a pause, casual as a yawn—“would you like to meet Irving Thalamus?”

Brie was a game-show contestant, second runner-up for the title of Miss America, she’d won the lottery and hit the jackpot at Vegas. The squeal of sheer wonder, amaze and delight shot directly out of the bounds of human hearing, and Sandy, Ina and Bob smiled softly to themselves, as they might have smiled at the antics of a child or a puppy; Regina fell back on her punk scowl. “Really?” Brie managed when she’d caught her breath, “Irving Thalamus? Is he here?”

Ruth led her over to where Irving sat propped up in an armchair with a double vodka and an issue of a literary magazine devoted exclusively to an appreciation of his work. It was good reading, and Irving was absorbed in it, oblivious, frowning behind his patriarchal eyebrows and the diminutive reading glasses perched like a toy on the end of his nose. He obliged them with a smile, and after Brie had made her obeisance—at the height of it Ruth thought she was going to roll on the floor and piss herself—he turned on the Thalamus charm and treated them to an in-depth, line-by-line assessment of the merits and failings of the critics the magazine had solicited to do honor to him.

Ruth got Brie a Calistoga and herself a bourbon, and she sat at Irving’s right hand while he went on about a certain Morris Ro-senschweig of Tufts University with all the wit, charm and self-deprecating irony of a man who still had something to live for. Ruth watched, and listened, and thought it was a pretty good act.

Clara and Patsy were next, and then a group of minor figures who happened in the door as Ruth was guiding Brie back up to the bar, and lastly, Laura Grobian. Laura was seated alone in the far corner, as usual, a golden high-stemmed glass of sherry catching the light from the reading lamp beside her. She had her notebook with her—she always had her notebook with her; that notebook drove Ruth crazy—and she was writing in it, her head bent to the page. “Laura”—Ruth’s voice was steady, chummy, full of cheer—“I’d like you to meet Brie Sullivan, one of our new colonists?”

Laura glanced up at them from beneath the celebrated black bangs and Ruth had a shock. She looked terrible. Looked haggard, confused, looked as if she’d been drinking secretly, living on the street, haunting graveyards. Cancer —the word leaped into Ruth’s head—an inoperable tumor. Two months. Three. But then Laura smiled and she was her old self again, regal, unassailable, the ascetic middle-aged beauty with the devouring eyes and terrific bone structure. She held out her hand to Brie. “I’m pleased that you’ve joined us,” she said.

Brie squirmed, squared her shoulders, blew the hair out of her face. She was working herself up for this one. Laura blinked at her in wonder, and then the flood came. “I’m honored,” Brie began, trying to control her voice, but it was pitched too high, unsteady with worship and excitement, “I mean, I’m blown away. I am. I mean the Bay Light trilogy, after I read it, it was the only thing I could read for the longest, for years … I think I know every word by heart. I’m, I’m—this is really amazing, it’s an honor, it’s—it’s—”

“Do you know the story of Masada?” Laura asked suddenly, glancing down at the page in her lap and then back up at them—Brie and Ruth both. “Ruth, certainly you must know it?”

Masada? What was she talking about? Was it a quiz or something? “You mean where the Jews killed themselves?”

“A.D.73, April the fifteenth. Mass suicide. I’ve been reading about it. About Jonestown too. And the Japanese at Saipan and Okinawa. Did you know about Saipan? Women and children flung themselves from cliffs, cut out their own entrails, swallowed cyanide and gasoline.” Laura’s voice was quiet, husky round the edges of its exotic ruination.

Brie puffed at her hair, shifted the glass from hand to hand: she was clearly at a loss. Ruth didn’t know quite what to say either—this wasn’t cocktail-hour banter, this wasn’t gossip and publishing and wit—it was morbid, depressing. No wonder Laura always sat alone, no wonder she barely managed to look alive. “How horrible,” Ruth said finally, exchanging a look with Brie.

“The U.S. Marines were about to land and the civilians had been abandoned. The rumor was that to become a Marine you had to murder your own parents. Can you imagine that?—that’s what they thought of us. The Japanese—civilians, women and children—leaped from a cliff into the sea rather than fall into the hands of such monsters.”

Ruth said nothing. She took a nervous sip of her second bourbon—or was it her third? What was she driving at?

“I read a story about that once—it was like the people were lemmings or something,” Brie announced, settling on the arm of the chair opposite Laura. “In fact, I think it was called ’Lemmings’—yeah, it was, I’m sure of it. I think.”

“Exactly.” Laura Grobian held them with her haunted—and, Ruth was beginning to think, ever so slightly demented—gaze. “Mass hysteria,” she said, seeming to relish the hiss of it. “Mass suicide. A woman steps up to the edge of the cliff, clutching a baby to her breast, the five-year-old at her side. People are jumping all around her, screaming and weeping. It goes against all her instincts, but she shoves the five-year-old first, the half-formed limbs kicking and clawing at the poor thin air, and then she follows him into the abyss. And all because they thought we were monsters.”

Ruth had had a rough day, what with the cabin torn to pieces, the utter collapse of her work and inspiration, the excitement of Hiro’s jailbreak and Saxby’s phone call, not to mention the scene on the patio last night, and she didn’t need this, not now, not even from Laura Grobian—but how to escape? And then, because she couldn’t help herself, because the moment was so uncomfortable, she asked the interdicted question: “You’re working on an essay? A new novel?”

Laura was slow to reply, and for a moment Ruth wondered if she’d heard her. But then, in a vague and distant way, she murmured, “No. Not really. I just… find the subject… fascinating, I guess.” And then she came back to them, shrugging her shoulders and lifting the sherry glass from the table.

It sounded like an exit line to Ruth, and she was thinking of the routine she could make of this, of Laura Grobian’s gloom and doom, and if she’d dare it, when the buzz of conversation in the room suddenly died and all heads turned to the doorway. The two other new arrivals had appeared for cocktails. Both of them. Together.

Ruth watched Brie squinting toward the doorway in expectation of some new revelation, some further miracle of earthbound celebrity, and then watched as her head turned, her brow furrowed and her lips formed the question: “Isn’t that—?”

“Orlando Seezers,” Ruth said.

The figure was unmistakable. Though Ruth had never met him, she’d seen photographs. He was sixtyish, black, goateed and confined to the gleaming electric wheelchair in which he now appeared. During the campus riots of the sixties he was injured in an altercation with a student who claimed he only wanted to go to class. It was at NYU, as Ruth recalled, on a staircase. Before the accident he wrote bittersweet blank verse about blues and jazz figures and fiery outraged polemics that won him comparison with James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver; afterward, he wrote sestinas and a series of very popular comedies of manners centered on life on the Upper East Side.

“And—?” Brie wondered aloud, squinting till her face seemed on the verge of falling in on itself.

“Mignonette Teitelbaum.” Ruth didn’t know her either, not personally, but Septima had informed her that she was coming with Orlando Seezers—“I heah they are practically inseparable”—and she knew of her, of course. Teitelbaum—and Ruth couldn’t help hearing a breathless “La” affixed to the surname—was six foot three, flat-footed, hipless, breastless and Seezers’s junior by some thirty years. She was the author of two books of minimalist stories set in the backwoods of Kentucky, though she’d been born and raised in Manhattan, attended Barnard and Columbia and lived in Europe most of her adult life. Rumor had it they’d met at a dance club in SoHo.

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 ketō, the long-nose, his nemesis and rival at love, Ruth’s big hairy bōifurendo… 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 Jōchō, 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 bōifurendo’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 bōifurendo 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 bōifurendo immobilized, his accomplice up to his knees in the murk and gaping up at him in bewilderment. He could have darted past the bōifurendo, 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.

Déjà vu.

But this time the water wasn’t salt—it was bathwater, turgid, foul, the swill they flushed down the drain after the whole village has bathed for a week. He slashed at the duckweed and surface scum, powering for the far side of the lagoon before the astonished fishermen behind him could drop their tackle boxes and fire up the engines of their leaping blunt-nosed hakujin swamp boats. He reached the far shore—but it wasn’t land, actually, it was something else, something that rocked beneath his feet like the taut skin of a trampoline—while the familiar shouts rose behind him and the outboard engines sprang to life with the growl of the hunting beast. No matter: he was already gone.

Yes, but now what? If he’d thought the island was bad, if he’d had his fill of bogs and mosquitoes and clothes that never dried, then this mainrand was hell itself. He fought his way through the bush, away from the voices and the scream of the outboards, clawing his way through the tangle, but there was no rest, no surcease, no place to set his feet down or pull himself from the muck. The water was knee-deep, waist-high, two feet over his head, and beneath it was the mud that sucked at him, sank him to the hips, pulled him inexorably down. With each desperate flailing stroke he was sinking deeper. Such an ignominious death, he thought, invoking Jōchō, inflating his hara, but going down all the same. Finally, his limbs numb with fatigue, gasping for air and choking on the gnats and mosquitoes that blackened the air around him, he managed to heave himself out of the muck and up onto the slick bony knees of a tree that rose up before him like a pillar of granite.

He lay there panting, too sapped even to brush the insects away from his face, the gloom of the big moss-hung trees darkening the morning till it might have been night. A swamp! Another swamp! A swamp so massive it could have swallowed up Ruth’s cabin, Ambly Wooster’s subdivision, the big house and all the piddling bogs and mud puddles on Tupelo Island without a trace. Shit, he gasped. Backayard. Son of a bitch. He felt like a mountaineer who’s dragged himself up the face of a sheer cliff, inch by agonizing inch, only to find a second cliff, twice as high, rearing above it. What had happened to him? How had he gotten here? Doggo, his obōsan, Chiba, Unagi: they were faces he could barely recall. But Ruth: he saw her clearly, in sharp focus, saw her in all her permutations: the slim white-legged secretary, the seductress, the lover, his protector and jailer. She’d shared her food with him and her bed, shared her tongue and her legs, and she was going to smuggle him to the mainrand —not this mainrand, not the mainrand of rot and stink and demented nature, but to the mainrand of cities and streets and shops where happas and wholes walked hand in hand.

It was then—delivered from the trunk of the Mercedes and thrust back into the swamp—that he had a thought that stopped him cold. For forty-eight hours now, from the time they’d run him down with their guns and their dogs and their glassy cold eyes, through his escape from the holding cell and the swollen stultifying hours of his entombment in the trunk, he’d been circling around the hard knot of an inadmissible question—Who bad betrayed him? —and its equally painful corollary, Who knew he was hiding out in the cabin in the woods? Now the answer came to him, the answer to both questions, wrapped up in a single resonant monosyllable: Ruth.

There was a way the paddle dipped into the water and with a single deft motion of the wrist dug, rotated and dipped again, a rhythm and coordination that held out the possibility of perfection, and it pleased him. It was tidy. Neat. The stroke conserved energy and expended it too—not like those idiots in their motor launches on the public trails—and it felt good in the shoulders and triceps. It was so quiet too—he could almost imagine himself a Seminole or a Creek, slipping up on gator or ibis or even one of the palefaces who’d driven them into the swamp in the days of Billy Bowlegs.

Jeff Jeffcoat was gliding through a dream. Ever since he was a boy in Putnam Valley, New York, he’d wanted to do this, to push through the greatest swamp in America, skirting danger, unfolding miracles, watching the gator in its wallow, the anhinga in its nest, the cottonmouth curled in the branches of a tree in deadly semaphore. And here he was—thirty-eight years old, newly arrived in Atlanta to work in the colorization lab at TBS, his wife Julie perched on a cushion amidships, his son Jeff Jr. plying his paddle in the bow—here he was, doing it. And it was glorious—something new round every bend. It was hot, sure, he had to admit it, and the bugs were horrendous despite the repellent that stung his eyes, soured the corners of his mouth and dripped steadily from the tip of his nose along with about half a gallon of sweat. But what was a little discomfort compared with the chance to see an alligator snapper in the wild—a hundred and fifty pounds, big around as a cocktail table—or the legendary black puma or that rarest of rare birds, the ivory-billed woodpecker?

“Dad.” Jeff Jr.’s voice was low and insistent, the terse whisper of the scout; Jeff felt Julie come to attention, and his own eyes shot out past the bow to scan the mass of maiden cane and titi up ahead. “Dad: eleven o’clock, thirty yards or so.”

“What?” Julie whispered, snatching up the binoculars. She was wearing a hairnet to combat the bugs, a pair of Banana Republic shorts and the pith helmet Jeff had bought her as a joke. She was as excited as he was.

Jeff felt a thrill go through him: this was life, this was adventure, this was what the explorers must have known through every waking moment of their lives. “What is it, Jeffie—what do you see?”

“Some—”

“Shhhh: don’t scare it off.” ’

The whisper of a whisper: “Something big. See it, up there, where the bushes are shaking?”

“Where?” Julie breathed, the binoculars pressed to her face. “I don’t see anything.”

Jeff fanned the paddle in the water, ever so silently, the canoe creeping forward under its own momentum. It was probably an alligator—the swamp was crawling with them. Yesterday, their first day out, they went nearly an hour before they spotted their first gator—and it was a runt, two feet or less even—but the moment had been magical. They’d spent half an hour motionless in the canoe, just watching it lying there, as inert as the cypresses towering over it. He must have taken two rolls of film of that gator alone, and every shot would be the same, he knew it—gator in ooze—but he’d gotten carried away. Later, as the day wore on and the gators popped up everywhere, as common as poodles in the park, the family became so inured to their presence that Jeff Jr. had done a very foolish thing. A big gator—ten, twelve feet long—had nosed up to the canoe while they were lunching on the chicken breast and avocado sandwiches Julie had made the night before, and Jeff Jr., bored or heedless or just feeling full of the devil, as boys will, had begun to toss bits of bread and lettuce into the water and the gator had gone for them. That was all right. But familiarity breeds contempt, as Jeff’s father used to say, and Jeffie had flung an apple at the thing. Hard. He was a pretty good pitcher, Jeffie was, the ace of his Little League team, and the apple drilled the alligator right between the eyes—and that was when all hell broke loose. The thing had come up out of the water and slammed down again like a cannonballer coming off the high dive, and then it vanished, leaving the canoe rocking so wildly the water sloshed over the side and soaked the camera bag, the picnic basket and Jeffie’s backpack. That was a close one, and Jeff Jr. had seemed so upset—his eyes big and his shoulders quaking—that Jeff had forgone the lecture till they set up camp later that evening.

But now they were closing in on it, whatever it was—he could see something thrashing around in the weeds up ahead—and Jeffie suddenly sang out: “It’s a bear! A—a—a brown one, a big brown bear!” ’

A bear! Jeff could feel his blood racing—a bear could turn on them, upset the canoe, deliver them in an instant to the snakes and gators and snapping turtles. He backpaddled hard, his eyes leaping at the vegetation ahead—there it was, a snatch of brown, the maiden cane trembling, a splash, then another—

But it wasn’t a bear after all—and they had a good laugh over that one—it was a pair of otters. Otters. “My god,” Julie gasped, “you had me scared half to death, Jeffie.” She’d dropped the binoculars in her lap and her face was pale under the brim of the pith helmet. The otters darted under the boat, bobbed up again and gave them an inquisitive look.

They were like puppies, that was what they reminded him of, sleek and playful puppies, and they instantly incorporated the canoe into their game of tag. It was a thrill, and they watched them for half an hour before Jeff remembered himself, checked his watch and got them going again.

They were on a schedule, and they had to stick to it—by law. Jeff had made reservations for this canoe trip a year in advance, as soon as he’d gotten a firm commitment from Turner and put the house up for sale. The Park Service allowed only six canoe parties at a time to overnight in the swamp, and competition for those six spots was fierce. Each party had to follow a set itinerary and was required, by park regulations, to arrive at its designated camping platform by 6 P.M., when the rangers closed the park down for the night and all fishermen, bird-watchers and other day trippers were required to return to the dock. The Park Service literature explained that this six o’clock deadline—all paddles out of the water, all overnighters to be on their platforms—had been established for the canoeists’ own safety. It was dangerous out here, what with the gators, the cottonmouths, coral snakes and rattlers, and that gave Jeff a thrill too—but he was sensible and punctual and he didn’t really like surprises, and he always obeyed the law to the letter, even on the highway, where he stuck doggedly to 55 while the big rigs and Japanese sports cars shot past him as if he were parked in the driveway. The Park Service allowed them eight hours to get from platform to platform, and so they had plenty of time to dawdle and see the sights, but after the otter business they were running late. Jeff dug deep with his paddle.

It was quarter to six in the evening, and he was beginning to stew—had they taken a wrong turn somewhere?—when Jeffie crowed, “I see it, I see it, dead ahead!”—and there it was, the elevated platform that was their second night’s destination. The weathered support beams and the crude roof detached themselves from the wall of vegetation, a great blue heron lifted itself into the air with a clap of its wings, and they were there, gliding up to the platform on a burning shimmer of light. Like the platform on which they’d camped the previous evening, this one was three hundred feet square and roofed with porous planks, and it rose a precarious three feet above the water level of the swamp. Its amenities consisted of a chemical toilet, a charcoal brazier and a logbook, in which each overnighter was required to record date and time of arrival and departure.

Jeff Jr. and Julie steadied the canoe while Jeff clambered up onto the platform, alert for snakes or lizards in the rafters—or anything else that crept, crawled or climbed. The previous night Julie had let out a shriek they could have heard back in Atlanta when a coachwhip suddenly appeared from one of the overhead beams, plunged into the potato salad and lashed itself across the floor and into the duckweed on the far side of the platform. This time, they were taking no chances. Jeff was thorough, visually inspecting the beams and the underside of the platform, and poking a stick into each of the overhead crannies where beam and plank came together. Then he turned to the logbook. The Murdocks, of Chiltonberry, Arkansas, had preceded them, and in the space reserved for comment they’d observed: “Skeeter Hell.” Before them it was the Ouzels of Soft Spoke, Virginia, and all they had to say was: “Beautiful stars.” It was the line above the Ouzels’ that caught his eye—someone, described only as “Fritz” and whose handwriting was so pinched and secretive Jeff could barely make it out, had written: “Note: 14′ gator can get up on platform.” “Can” was underlined three times.

“Jeff, what’s taking you so long? I’ve got to use the ladies’.”

“Yeah, sure,” he replied absently, wondering if he should mention the acrobatic gator and deciding that he would, but later, after supper, when they were all settled in for the night. “All clear,” he called, keeping it simple.

Jeff made a fire with the real oak briquettes he’d brought along from Atlanta, and Julie extracted three princely New York strip steaks from the cooler. They shared a beer and Jeff Jr. had a Coke while the steaks sizzled and sent up a clean searing aromatic smoke that for a while overwhelmed the reek of the mud and disoriented the mosquitoes. The water was shallow out back of the platform—no more than shin-deep—but out front there was a considerable pool, an enlarged gator wallow, no doubt, and Jeff kept his eye on this for the agile gator, who for all Jeff knew liked his steak rare. Jeffie got out his fishing pole, but Jeff and Julie both insisted that he practice his clarinet first—they believed that an individual should be well-rounded, and though Jeff Jr. was only ten, they were already looking ahead to college admissions—and so while the meal cooked and Jeff swirled his half a can of warm beer round a plastic camp cup, the angst-ridden strains of Carl Nielsen floated out over bog, hammock and wallow, tempering the mindless twitter of the birds and tree frogs with a small touch of precision.

After dinner it began to cloud over and Jeff suspended a groundcloth from the beams to cut the wind from the southeast, where lightning had begun to fracture the sky and the distant dyspeptic rumble of thunder could be heard. Then he built up the fire with an armload of pine branches he’d thought to collect earlier in the day, and the family gathered round to roast marshmallows, swat mosquitoes and tell stories. “Well,” Jeff said, settling down beside Julie as the groundcloth flapped and the smoke swirled, “you all know why this great swamp is called the Okefenokee—”

“Oh, come on, Dad—you’ve already told us about fifty thousand times already.”

“Jeffie, now don’t you use that tone with your father—”

“—the land of trembling earth, because it’s important to the story I’m going to tell, a tragic story, horrible in its way”—and here Jeff paused to let the adjectives work their spell on his audience, while the rumble of the thunder came closer and closer—“the story of Billy Bowlegs, last of the great Seminole chiefs.”

Jeff Jr. was sitting cross-legged on one of the flotation cushions. He leaned forward, that alert look he got when he was practicing or doing his homework settling into his eyes and the incipient furrows of his brow. “It’s because the peat rises in mats and trees grow on them and stuff and then when you try to walk on it you fall through—like Mom yesterday. It was so funny. It was like”—his tone had begun in the adenoidal reaches of exasperation, but now he was enjoying himself, riding the pleasure of his own authority—“like all these little trees were attacking her or something.”

Jeff brought him back. “Right, Jeffie: and what is peat?”

“Um, it’s like coal, right?”

Jeff wasn’t too sure himself, though he’d devoured every guidebook available on the Okefenokee, but then the lesson had gone far enough anyway and the story was waiting. “Right,” he said. “It’s important to know because of what happened to Billy Bowlegs after one of the bloodiest massacres in the history of this region. Anyway, this was about in 1820, I think, and Billy Bowlegs was chased into the swamp with about thirty braves after raiding a settler’s cabin. He hated the whites with a passion, even though he wasn’t a fullblooded Indian—legend had it that his father was a white man, a criminal who escaped from a lynching party and got himself lost in the swamp …”

It was then that the first wind-whipped spatters of rain began to tap at the groundcloth and Jeff paused to mentally congratulate himself for having thought to secure the bottom too. There was a flash of lightning followed by a deep peal of thunder and the whole family looked round them, surprised to see that dusk had crept up on them. Jeff wanted a cigarette, but he’d given up smoking—it was unhealthy, and both he and Julie agreed that it set a bad example for Jeff Jr.—so he took out a pack of sugarless gum and offered it round instead.

“That last one was close,” Julie said, the glow of the fire playing off her smooth dependable features. She looked good, tough, a pioneer woman who’d fight off the Indians with one hand and burp babies with the other. “Good thing you thought to hang the groundcloth. You think I should put up the tent—I mean with this roof and all?”

He was wise, fatherly, firm. “No,” he said, “we’ll be all right.” “What about the story, Dad?”

“Yeah. Well. It was a stormy night like this one and Billy Bowlegs and his men smeared their faces with mud on Billy’s Island and then poled their dugouts to the edge of the swamp. There was a white family there, settlers, who’d just come from, from—from New York—”

“Aw, come on, Dad—you’re making it up.”

“No, no: I read it. Really. Anyway, there were three of them, husband, wife and son—a boy about your age, Jeffie—and they had a dog and some cattle, a mule, I think. Farmers. They’d drained a couple of acres and were trying to grow cotton and tobacco in the rich soil underneath. They’d been there a couple of months, I think it was—they hadn’t even been able to get a house up. All they had was a lean-to, on a platform like this, a roof, but the sides were open—”

“Dad.”

Jeff ignored the interruption. He had him now, he knew it. He gave Julie a furtive wink. “Billy Bowlegs told his men to take the woman and leave the men for dead. But the rain was coming down so hard one of the Indians slipped and fell and the musket went off, just as the rest of them were coming out of the bushes with a whoop. ’Run!’ the father shouted, and all of a sudden there were tomahawks and arrows everywhere, but the son and mother took off and the father fired his gun to give them a headstart and then he ran too. But you know what?”

Jeff Jr. was leaning so far forward he had to prop himself up on his elbows. “What?” he said in a kind of gasp.

“They ran right out onto a peat island that had torn loose in the storm and suddenly it was like they were running in a dream, going as fast as they could and getting nowhere, and there was Billy Bowlegs, his face streaked with mud. the tomahawk raised over his head—”

At that moment a gust of wind tore loose the binding of the groundcloth and it collapsed, dousing them with a wild oceanic spray. Suddenly it was pouring, whipping in through the opening and gushing through the colander of the roof. In the confusion, Jeff sprang to his feet and shot a glance out back of the platform, while Julie and Jeff Jr. howled and scrambled for their rain slickers, and what he saw there froze him in place. A figure had materialized from the gloom, and it wasn’t the acrobatic alligator and it wasn’t the bear they’d missed either. Bowlegged, tattered, smeared with mud and filth, it was the figure of Billy Bowlegs himself.

For his part, Hiro didn’t know what to think. There was a storm coming, it was getting dark and he’d been bitten six or eight times by every last mosquito on earth, not to mention their cousins, the ticks, chiggers, deerflies and gnats. Choking on mud and vomit, carved hollow as a gourd with hunger, he’d staggered out of a bog, scattering birds, reptiles and frogs, and into a stand of trees where the water was shallower, the mud firmer. Hours back, when the sun stood directly overhead, he’d blundered across a raft of bitter purple-black berries and crouched in the ooze, gorging till they came back up like the dregs of a bad bottle of wine. For a long while he lay there enervated, cursing himself, his hakujin father and strong-legged mother, cursing Ruth—she’d betrayed him, the bitch, used him for her story, her fiction, used him on a whim and then discarded him like so much human rubbish. The water cradled him. He closed his eyes on a hail of mosquitoes and slept afloat. And then, as the sun dropped out of the sky and every animate thing in the swamp came to him for its hourly ration of Japanese blood, his senses reawakened. It was a sound that got him going first—a soft lilting incongruous melody weaving in and out of the cacophony of roars and grunts and screeches that tore at him without remit. Was it a flute? Was somebody playing a flute out here in the hind end of nowhere? And then his sense of smell kicked in and the knowledge of cookfire and meat came to him.

The storm broke round him as he lurched out of the trees and up onto the bed of semifirm mud, something like earth beneath his feet once again—a small miracle in itself—but what lay before him was a puzzle. A crude structure, nothing more than a lean-to really, struggled out of the tangle a hundred feet away, and there were people inhabiting it, hakujin, gathered round a fire. Was this a house? Were these hillbillies—or swampbillies? And what was a “billy” anyway—some sort of goat, wasn’t it?—and how could anyone, swampbilly or no, actually live here? But then this was America, and nothing about these people would surprise him. Whether they were buffalo skinners, young Republicans or crack dealers, it was all the same to him—he was dying of the wet and hunger and a despair that was all talons and claws and wouldn’t let go of him, and he needed them.

Still, dying or not, this was nothing to rush into. He recalled the bug-eyed Negro fighting for his oysters, the girl in the Coca-Cola store, Ruth, who’d lulled him into submission only to turn on him and cut his heart out. He smelled the meat, saw the shelter, imagined what it would be like to dry himself, if only for a minute … but how could he approach these billies? What would he say? Pleading hunger was no good, as the Negro had taught him; the Clint Eastwood approach had backfired too, though he’d been satisfied with his curses, proud of them even. The only thing that had worked was dissimulation: Ambly Wooster had believed he was someone called Seiji, and if she’d believed him, maybe these people would too. But he had to be cautious. Living out here—he still couldn’t believe it—they had to be primitive and depraved. What was that movie, with the city dwellers in canoes and the hillbillies attacking them from the cliffs?

But now they’d seen him. The lightning flashed, the rain drove at him. There was a man standing there on the platform, wearing a dazed and frightened expression—it looked bad already—and he was yelling something and the other two—a woman and a boy—froze. What was he saying? Oh, yes. Yes. The hakujin war cry: “Can we help you?”

Hiro stared at them and then glanced round him at the rain-washed swamp. He was beaten, starved, swollen with insect bites, filthy, saturated, anemic with loss of blood—and it seemed as if it had been going on all his life. He took a chance. Let them shoot him, let them string him up and nail him to a cross, flay the skin from his bones, devour him: he didn’t care. Ruth had betrayed him. The City of Brotherly Love was a fraud. There was the swamp, only the swamp. “Toor-ist!” he called, echoing the girl in the store. “Fall out of boat!”

Nothing. No reaction. The two smaller faces flanked the larger and the three pairs of rinsed-out eyes fastened on him like pincers. The wind screamed. The trees danced. “Toor-ist!” Hiro repeated, cupping his hands to his mouth.

What followed was as astonishing as anything that had happened since he’d taken the plunge from the wingdeck of the Tokachi-maru: they believed him. “Hold on!” the man called as he might have called to a drowning child, and in the next moment he was down off the platform and splashing toward him through the mire. It was nothing short of a rescue. The man threw Hiro’s arm over his shoulder as if he were a casualty of war, as if the rain were a shower of bullets and hot shrapnel, and scuttled back with him to the shelter, where the woman and boy were in motion too, hastily hanging some sort of dropcloth as a protection against the elements. Within minutes the fire was snapping, he was toweling his hair dry and the man was offering him a sleeping bag to wrap himself up in. Then the kettle sang out and a Styrofoam cup of hot instant noodles was thrust into his hand and he was eating while the three fed the fire, stopped the holes in the roof and watched him with bleeding eyes. “More?” the man asked after Hiro had finished, and when he nodded yes, a second Cup O’Noodles appeared as if he’d conjured it.

“You’ll need dry clothes,” the man said, and before he could even communicate the need to the woman, she was digging through a backpack crammed with shirts, shorts, towels and socks. Backpack? Were they campers, then? And if they were, why weren’t they camping out on the clean sweet dry expanse of the open prairie instead of in this sewer? Gaijin: he would never understand them, not if he lived to be a hundred and four. They offered him clothing—a T-shirt that bore a huge childish drawing of a smiling face and the legend WORLD’S GREATEST DAD, a pair of too-tight underwear and cut-off blue jeans that would never have fit him if he hadn’t suffered so much privation of the hara. Hiro went off into the far corner to dress, all the while bowing and asserting his gratitude, calculating on and giving thanks so profuse he could have raised a shrine to them. Did he want more to eat? He did. And then it was meat snapping on the grill, potato chips, hard-boiled eggs, carrot sticks, cabbage salad and pound cake. “Dōmo” he said, over and over, “dōmo arigatō.”

They were watching him. Sitting there in a semicircle before him, hands clasped to their knees, eyes aglow with charity and fellow-feeling. They watched him eat as a doting young mother might watch her baby spooning up his mashed peas and carrots, hanging on every bite. Inevitably, though, now that they’d rescued and fed him, the questions began. “You’re a Filipino?” the man asked as Hiro fed a wedge of pound cake into his mouth.

Careful, careful. He’d decided that the best policy—the only policy—was to lie. “Chinese,” he said.

Their faces showed nothing. The smoke swirled. Hiro reached for the last piece of pound cake. “And you were out here on a day trip?” the man persisted.

Day trip, day trip: what was he talking about? “Excuse and forgive me, but what is this ’day trip’?”

“In the swamp. As a tourist—like us.” For some reason the man laughed at this, a hearty, beautifully formed laugh that bespoke ease and health and success in business, and which burst from an orthodontic marvel of a mouth. “I mean, did your boat overturn, was anyone hurt? Were you alone?”

“Alone,” Hiro said, leaping at the answer provided for him. He felt that a smile would be helpful at this juncture, and so he gave them one, misaligned teeth and all. This lying business wasn’t so hard really. It was the American way, he saw that now. He was amazed that he’d had such trouble with it at Ambly Wooster’s.

They were the Jeffcoats, from Atlanta, Georgia. From New York, actually. Jeff, Julie and Jeff Jr. (The boy blushed when his father introduced him.) Hiro bowed to each in turn. And then they were watching him again, but with a look of expectation now. What? he wanted to ask them. What is it?

“And you are—?” the man prompted.

“Oh!” Hiro let a little gasp of embarrassed surprise escape him. “How silly. Forgetful. I am—” and then he stopped cold. Who was he? He’d told them he was Chinese, hadn’t he? Chinese, Chinese: what did the Chinese call themselves? Lee, Chan, Wong? There was a place called Yee Mee Loo two blocks from his obā san’s apartment, but the name was ridiculous—he, Hiro Tanaka, standard-bearer for Mishima and Jōchō before him, couldn’t be a Yee Mee Loo. Never.

“Yes?” They were leaning forward, smiling like zombies, all three of them, absolutely delighted to be out here in this drizzling hellhole exchanging pleasantries with a mud-smeared Chinaman. Rain dripped from the timbers overhead, fell like shot on the surface of the water before them.

“I am called … Seiji,” he decided finally—what would they know, Americans; how would they know a Chinese from an Ugandan?—“Seiji … Chiba.”

And then, feeling expansive, dry and warm and wrapped in a down blanket, his stomach full for the first time in days, he told them the pathetic story of his misadventures in the swamp. His boat had overturned, yes, two days ago—it was a crocodile that attacked him. It dropped from the trees on him and he wresded with it, but the boat went under and he lost everything, all his bags of meat, his Cracker Jack, his Levi’s and his surfboard. And so he wandered, on the verge of death, eating berries and drinking from the swamp, until they rescued him—and he ended by praising them for a full five minutes, in English and Japanese both.

When he was finished, there was a silence. The storm had let up and insects had begun to whine through the fevered air; something bellowed in the night. “Well,” the man said, clapping his hands together like a referee, “I guess we all better turn in, huh? It’s been quite a day.”

Sometime in the deep still vibrating hub of that night, when the chittering and hooting and screeching had subsided to a muted roar and the new generation of mosquitoes lay waiting to be born, Hiro awoke shivering and discovered that the rain had started up again. He knew where he was at once and knew too that the insulated blanket they’d given him—these Amerikajin seemed to have two of everything—was soaked through. The wind had shifted to the north and there was the unmistakable scent of autumn on it. But what month was it? August? September? October? He had no idea. He’d been gone so long, living like a bum on the street, like a barbarian in a cave, that he didn’t even know what month it was, let alone what day or hour. Shivering, he thought about that, and began to feel very sorry for himself indeed.

They would be after him soon, he knew that. The bōifurendo would go to the police and the tired pointy-nosed little sheriff would round up his Negroes and dogs and take a flotilla into the swamp, speedboats and pontoon boats, canoes and dinghies and floating jail cells. The spatterface and his hard little companion would be there, Ruth, Captain Nishizawa—they’d batter the trees with helicopters, tear open the sky with their sirens and the long-drawn-out bloodthirsty howls of the dogs. If they hated him two days ago, they loathed him now to the depths of their being. He’d made fools of them. And they would come after him with everything they had.

It was a shame. It was. If that Mercedes had belonged to anyone but the chief butter-stinker himself, if it had belonged to an itinerant peddler, an encyclopedia salesman, a hit man, Hiro could have been a thousand miles away by now—in the Big Sky Country, in Motown or at the Golden Gate. But it hadn’t, and he wasn’t. What he needed, he realized with a jolt of intuition, was a boat. If he had a boat he could paddle his way to the edge of the swamp, strike out cross-country and find a road, and then—then what? More double-dealing? More hate? More hakujin backstabbing and Negro viciousness? Yes, and what choice did he have—they were going to hunt him down like an animal. He lay there, wet and miserable, wrapped in his sheet of lies, and he hardened his heart. He knew where there was a boat. A canoe. Sleek and quick and provisioned for an army.

The Jeffcoats slept as one, the gentle stertor of their breathing synchronized, sleep a reward, their goods spread out round them like an emperor’s ransom. The canoe lay there in the shadows at the edge of the platform, blackly bobbing. He could have spat in it from where he lay. But what was he thinking? They’d been kind to him, like Ambly Wooster. There was no hate in their eyes, only health and confidence. How could he steal from them, how could he abandon them to their fate out here in the howling wilderness?

How? Easily. They were hakujin, after all, hakujin like all the others, and after they found out who he was they’d lock him up themselves, twist the handcuffs tight with the cracked porcelain gleam of righteousness in their eyes. He was a Japanese. A samurai. To be ruthless was his only hope.

He was about to make his move, about to slip out of the wet blanket and stir himself to betrayal, when the boy began to moan in his sleep. The sound was incongruous and devastating in the dead black night. “Uhhhhhh,” the boy groaned, swallowed up in his dreams, “uhhhhhh.” In the space of that groan Hiro was plunged back into his own boyhood, awakened to the demons that haunted his nights and the birdlike embrace of his grandfather, and then a figure rose up in the dark—the father, the boy’s father—and Hiro heard the gentle shushing, the susurras of comfort and security. Father, mother, son: this was a family. He let the apprehension wash over him until it became palpable, undeniable, until he knew that the canoe, his only hope, would stay where it was.

He woke to the smell of corned beef hash and eggs. It was an unusual smell—aside from the slop Chiba concocted, he’d had little experience of foreign foods—but he recognized the habitual hakujin odor of incinerated meat. “Seiji!” a voice chirped at him the moment he opened his eyes. It was Julie Jeffcoat. She was in shorts and a shell top that emphasized her breasts, motherly and sexy all at once. “Sleep well?” she asked, crossing the platform to hand him a cup of simmering black coffee. The sun was up. It was hot already. Jeff Jr. perched at the edge of the platform, methodically flicking a lure from the tip of his rod to the far edge of the pond and then drawing it back again, while his father bent over the canoe, stowing away their gear in tight precise little bundles. He whistled while he worked. “Well,” he boomed, glancing over his shoulder at Hiro, “ready for some breakfast, pardner?”

Dazed by the assault of cheer and energy, Hiro could only nod his assent. He was feeling a bit queasy—but then why wouldn’t he, with all he’d been through—and he hoped the food would help steady him.

Jeff Jeffcoat turned back to his work. Jeff Jr.’s line sizzled through the guys and there was a distant splash. Hiro sat up to blow at his coffee and Julie Jeffcoat presented him with a plastic plate heaped with eggs, hashed meat, puffed potatoes and fruit cocktail from a can. It looked like something Chiba would whip up for one of his western-style lunches. “Ketchup?” Julie asked, and when he nodded, she squirted a red paste over everything.

“Denver omelet, yes?” Hiro said.

Julie Jeffcoat smiled, and it was a beautiful Amerikajin smile, uncomplicated and frank, a smile that belonged on the cover of a magazine. “Sort of,” she said.

Half an hour later, Hiro watched Jeff Jeffcoat steady the canoe as first Jeff Jr. and then Julie eased themselves into the narrow trembling envelope of the vessel. It was heaped to the gunwales with the neatly stowed paraphernalia of their adventure in the wilderness, with their cooler, their charcoal and starter fluid, their binoculars and fishing rods and mess kit, their tents and sleeping bags and changes of clothing, their paperback books, flashlights, lip balm and licorice. There was no room for Hiro. Jeff Jeffcoat had assured him that they would paddle straight back to the boat launch and get a ranger to come rescue him. He looked pained—he was pained—because they couldn’t take Hiro with them. But Hiro—or Seiji, as they knew him—wouldn’t be forgotten, he had Jeff’s word on that.

Before he shoved off, Jeff Jeffcoat had impulsively sprung from the canoe to shuck his loafers and hand them to Hiro. “Here,” he said, “I’ve got another two pairs in my backpack, and you’re going to need these more than I do.” Hiro accepted the shoes with a bow. They were Top-Siders, the sort of shoes the blond surfers wore in the beer commercials on Japanese television. Hiro slipped them on, feeling like a surfer himself in the cutoffs and oversized T-shirt, as Jeff Jeffcoat eased back into the canoe and shoved off with a mighty thrust of the paddle. “So long,” he called, “and don’t worry: they’ll be here to get you by noon. I promise.”

“ ’Bye!” Jeff Jr. cried, shrill as a bird.

Julie turned to wave. “Bye-bye,” she called, and her voice was like Ruth’s, and for a moment it stirred him. “You take care now.”

They’d left him food, of course—six sandwiches, a Ziploc bag crammed with marshmallows, three plums, two pears and a sack of tortilla chips the size of a laundry bag, not to mention the two-liter bottle of orange soda with which to wash it all down. “Sank you,” Hiro called, “sank you so much,” wondering if on could be calculated in the negative, for what wasn’t done as well as what was. He owed them a debt, an enormous debt—but then they owed him too. He hadn’t bludgeoned them to death, hadn’t stolen their food, their canoe, their paddles and fishing rods and charcoal briquettes. When you came right down to it, he’d sacrificed himself for them—and wasn’t that something?

He stood there on the platform a long while, watching them as they threaded their way up the narrow channel, paddles flashing in perfect harmony, father, mother, son.

Tender Sproats

There were two motels in Ciceroville, “gateway to the Okefenokee Wilderness,” and both were on the order of refugee camps as far as Detlef Abercorn was concerned. The first, Lila’s Sleepy Z, featured a miniature golf course in the middle of the parking lot and a café with a hand-lettered sign in the window offering breakfast for 990, with unlimited refills of coffee and grits. It was booked solid. The other place, the Tender Sproats, enticed the weary traveler with a swimming pool filled to the coping with what appeared to be split pea soup. Abercorn thought of all those billboards along Interstate 80 touting homemade split pea soup, as if anyone in any condition would ever actually want split pea soup beyond the first spoonful. This was an improvement: here you got to swim in it. He shrugged and pulled into the lot.

It wasn’t as if he was planning to spend much time in the swimming pool anyway. His job was on the line here—his whole career. Forget the le Carré, the six-pack and the air-conditioned room alive only to the soothing flicker of the color TV; from here on out it was more like James M. Cain, a cup of piss-water doused with iodine, sweat, sunburn and aching joints. He’d had a call early that morning from Nathaniel Carteret Bluestone, the regional head in Atlanta. Real early. Six-thirty A.M. early. He was never at his best at 6:30 A.M., but he’d been out past two tramping all over the island with Turco and the sheriff and about six hundred yapping dogs on the lukewarm trail of Hiro Tanaka and when he picked up the phone he was so exhausted he could barely think.

N. Carteret Bluestone had wanted to know why Special Agent Abercorn was bent on making a mockery of the INS. Had he seen the morning papers? No? Well, perhaps he’d find them instructive. The Nip—Japanese, Bluestone corrected himself—was front-page news all of a sudden. Abercorn tried to explain that the papers were a day late at Thanatopsis House, but Bluestone talked right over him, quoting the headlines in an acidic tone: “‘At Large 6 Weeks, In Jail 6 Hours’; ‘Score 1 for the Japanese, 0 for the INS’; ’Jailbreak on Tupelo Island: Alien Makes It Look Easy.’ ” And what was this about Lewis Turco attacking some woman and making wild—and litigious—accusations? It was a mighty sorry way to run an investigation, mighty sorry.

Abercorn couldn’t argue with him there, except maybe to add that “sorry” was far too tame an adjective. He could have offered excuses—it was the sheriff’s people who’d let the suspect go; be hadn’t attacked anybody and couldn’t answer for Turco; everybody down here talked like Barney Fife and had an IQ to match—but he didn’t. All he said was, “I’ll do my best, sir.”

Bluestone opined that his best seemed to fall short of the mark. Far short.

“I’ll do my damnedest, sir,” Abercorn said.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “You do that,” Bluestone said finally. “And this time, handcuff the suspect to your own goddamned wrist. And do me a favor—”

“Yes?”

“Swallow the key, will you, so it comes out with the rest of your shit.”

News of the second call, the one from Roy Dotson, didn’t reach him till nearly four in the afternoon. And why not? Because he was out in the boondocks, sifting through the mudholes of Tupelo Island, as if anybody believed it would do any good. If they were looking for frogs they would have been in heaven. Or mosquitoes. The temperature was up around a hundred, the sun had ground to a halt directly overhead and he thought he was just about to die from the stink when one of Peagler’s deputies came sloshing toward them with the news that they were wasting their time. The suspect had fled the island. And where was he? In a sharecropper’s shack? Hitchhiking to Jacksonville? Digging his chopsticks into a plate of shaved beef and onions at a sukiyaki joint in downtown Atlanta? No. He was in a swamp, another swamp, a swamp that made this one look like a wading pool.

And so here he was at the Tender Sproats Motel in Ciceroville, Georgia, Gateway to the Okefenokee Wilderness. It was seventhirty at night and the neon sign glowed against the darkening sky in a halfhearted imposture of civilization. Lewis Turco was asleep in the passenger seat, reeking like a sewage plant. Mud encrusted his boots, clung to his fatigues, caked his beard and hair. They’d had a falling-out over the Dershowitz incident and hadn’t spoken more than ten words to each other all day. The moment the bulletin came through on Tanaka, Turco had dropped his stick (he’d been beating the bushes, literally), and without a word turned and stomped back to the big house, where he flung his gear into the Datsun and settled into the passenger seat. By the time Abercorn got there he was unconscious.

Abercorn pulled up to the motel office and shut down the wheezing engine. He figured he would check in, have a quick shower and a cup of coffee, coordinate with the local sheriff and interview Roy Dotson at his home. Then he would get a couple hours’ sleep and start the chase again in the morning. That was the plan. But he was tired, bone tired, and he didn’t smell too great himself.

The man behind the counter was short and dark, with the narrow shoulders and fleshless limbs of a child. He had the gut of an adult though, and a well-fed one, and he wore a caste mark beneath the greasy bill of his feedstore cap. His glittering dark eyes went directly to Abercorn’s face—he’d burned out there in the swamp, he knew it, and the burn made the dead-white discolorations of his condition stand out more than ever. Suddenly he felt self-conscious. “I need a double,” he said.

“Y’all mean a twin?” the little man drawled.

“Double,” Abercorn said. “Two beds. One for me and one for—for him.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the car, where Turco’s head and upthrust beard could just be made out over the dashboard.

The little man broke into a grin that showed off the bright red stubble of his teeth. He ducked down to spit something into a wastebasket under the counter, and then bounced back up again. “A twee-in, like Ah said. For a minute there—y’all ain’t from around Clinch County, am Ah correct in that assumption?”

Abercorn could feel the weariness settling into him like a drug, like the tingle of a good double shot of tequila on an empty stomach. Japanese. He should have stayed in Eagle Rock, busting Mexicans. “Savannah,” he managed. “L.A. originally.”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh.” The little man was nodding his head vigorously. “Ah coulda sworn it. Thought you was a Yankee—and for a minute there maybe a little, you know, funny. Wantin’ a double for two grown men …”

Abercorn was dragging, worn thin, but a tiny knot of inspiration flared in his brain. “Punjabi, right?” he said.

The little man beamed. “Chandigarh.”

“A twin. I need a twin.”

“Good,” the little man said, beaming still, beaming till he could have lit the room all by himself. “We take all kinds here.”

Turco was in a communicative mood the following morning, chattering on about the suspect as if they’d grown up together, as if they’d shared a bed in the orphanage and married sisters. “He’s a cagey one, this Nip—a whole lot cagier than we give him credit for, that’s for sure. He got this bitch to feed him—two bitches, if you count the old lady—and then he has the balls to bust out of jail and make for the last place on earth we’d expect to find him.” He paused reflectively and scratched at his newly washed beard. “Still, they don’t take to nature, the Nips—they’re a city people, subways and pigeons and that kind of thing—and ultimately he’s going to defeat himself, I’m about three-quarters sure of that.”

They were in the Datsun, heading into the swamp. It had rained the night before and the road was slick, but the sun was up already and burning it off in a dreamy drifting haze. Abercorn had gotten about four hours of fitful sleep, while Turco, who’d strung a hammock over the second bed, had snored blissfully through the small hours of the morning and well into the dawn. They’d passed on breakfast, nothing open that early but Hardee’s and a truck stop so full of potbellied crackers Abercorn couldn’t handle it and ordered a coffee to go. It was no loss to Turco, who seemed to have an infinite supply of roots and jerky tucked away in the folds of his rucksack. At the moment, he had a plastic bag of what looked to be dried guppies in his lap. From time to time he’d dip a hand into the bag and crunch them up like popcorn.

“And if you’re thinking disco and designer shirts, it ain’t going to work on this character,” Turco added, as if the ghetto blaster and Guess? jeans had been Abercorn’s idea in the first place. “No: we’re going to have to get a lot more devious than that.” He scratched his beard and a gentle drift of flaked guppy settled in his lap.

Abercorn looked away. Ever since the interview with Roy Dot-son, something had been troubling him. It was the question of Saxby. He liked Saxby, he did. And he didn’t think Saxby would consciously aid and abet a criminal—and an IAADA, at that—but it did look pretty bad. Ruth was capable of anything—he knew that from personal experience—and she could have put him up to it. Easily. “What do you think of Saxby, Lewis—I mean as far as his involvement in this thing?”

Turco turned to give him a look. “Who?”

“Saxby. You know, Ruth’s—I mean, Dershowitz’s—uh—”

“Oh, him. Yeah. He’s guilty. As guilty as she is. What do you think, it’s just a coincidence that he brings this Nip out here and lets him go like Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch? Are you kidding me? The guy’s as guilty as Charlie Manson, Adolf Hitler—and if he’s not, then what’s he doing camping out in the middle of the Okefenokee Swamp?” He dug into the bag of flaked fish. “The whole thing stinks if you ask me.”

They’d passed the sign welcoming them to Stephen C. Foster State Park several miles back and yet there was no indication that anyone except a construction crew had ever been here before them. The road cut a straight and undeviating line through the wet and the green, a green so absolute that Abercorn had to glance up periodically at the sky to be sure what planet he was on. He supposed some people found this beautiful or inspiring or whatever, but to him it was just one more pain in the ass—they could make a parking lot out of the goddamned place as far as he was concerned. He couldn’t stop thinking about Saxby and how embarrassing it was going to be to have to put the cuffs on him, if it came to that. And beyond Saxby, he was thinking of the Nip—and yes, he’d call a Nip a Nip and INS etiquette be damned—and wondering if he was going to spend the rest of his life getting sunburned three different colors and having his ears chewed off by mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds. (And that rankled him too—why the ears, of all places? His own ears, never exactly small by any measure, were swollen to twice their normal size and looked like slabs of salami stuck to the side of his head.) He drove on, trying not to look at himself in the rearview mirror.

Finally, buildings began to appear—long low wooden structures, a museum, a tourist center—and then he was pulling into a dirt lot behind a phalanx of police cars, two fire trucks and an ambulance. The lot was jammed with campers and pickups and there were people everywhere, though it was early, very early, so early it should have been the shank of the night still. People milled around the boats, peeked in the windows of the police cars, twirled binoculars round their necks, breakfasted out of picnic baskets, lifted brown paper bags to their lips. Bare-legged kids tore across the macadam, trying to lift kites into the lifeless air, an old man was watching TV in the back of a jeep and a woman with big meaty arms and breasts backed away from a battered Ford with a birdcage and set it down in the middle of the lot. It was crazy. It was like the Fourth of July or the beginning of a music festival, only worse. Abercorn felt his stomach sink.

“Lewis, you don’t think all these people—?” he began, but the idea of it, the fear of it, locked the words in his throat and he couldn’t go on. These people weren’t just happy campers and holiday makers gathered here inadvertently at 7 A.M. on a weekday morning. No. They were gathered here as they gathered at the site of any disaster, patient as vultures. They were waiting for bloodshed, violence, criminality and despair, waiting for excess and humiliation, for the formula that would unlock the tedium of their lives. “But how in Christ’s name did they know? We just found out about the Nip—I mean, the Japanese—I mean, the Nip—ourselves. Am I right?”

Turco didn’t answer, but he looked grim.

The moment Abercorn swung open the door a group of people detached themselves from the crowd and converged on him. He’d noticed them out of the corner of his eye as he maneuvered into the parking space—they were too well dressed for tourists and they seemed nervous, edgy, as if they were about to break into a trot, and what was that, a camera?—but now everything came clear: the press. They were on him before he could unfold himself from the car and there was his face, swollen ears and all, staring back at him in three angry colors from the dark eye of the TV camera.

“Mr. Abercorn!”—his name, they knew his name—“Mr. Abercorn!”

A woman with a plastic face and frozen hair had squared off in front of him like a wrestler. She looked familiar, looked like someone he’d seen on television, back in the days when he had an apartment, an office, when he was a member of society with a dull nine-to-five job like everyone else. TV, he thought, hey, I’m going to be on TV, and felt a little jolt of excitement despite himself. But then he understood that N. Carteret Bluestone was sure to see him there and he felt his stomach clench round the pool of cheap diner coffee that churned there, deep down, eating at him like battery acid.

What had begun as a little story, a six-line thing on page 28 of the Savannah Star, something to fill the odd space left over after they printed up the specials on boneless chicken and toilet paper, was now a big story, a TV story. He should have seen it coming. This was a real potboiler, after all, full of sex, violence, miscegenation, hair-raising escapes, swamps teeming with snakes and alligators, rumors of official incompetence and collusion on the part of a bunch of suspect writers and artists. Christ, it could be a soap opera, a miniseries. As the Swamp Turns. From Here to Okefenokee. Jap Hunter.

The woman with the plastic face wanted to know why it had taken the INS better than six weeks to capture this fugitive—and what about allegations of incompetence? She furrowed her brow in an investigatory frown, as if it hurt her to put such hard questions. Before Abercorn could frame an answer, a fiftyish man with a savage nose and forearms bristling with white hair poked a microphone at him and asked what the problem was with the security at the Tupelo Island prison facility—was somebody napping on the job? And if so, who?

And then the voices rose in a clamor: How did he feel about working with the local authorities? What was the suspect eating out there? Did they expect to catch him soon? Was he dangerous? What about quicksand? Snakes? Alligators? What about Ruth Dershowitz?

Abercorn found himself backed up against the car, feeling two feet taller than he already was, feeling naked and conspicuous, his face reddening like bratwurst on a rotisserie. There were too many of them and they were all jabbing at him at once. He’d never had to deal with the public before, never been asked a single question about a case, not even by telephone, not even the time the Hmong microwaved the chihuahua and the AKC compared them to Nazis at Auschwitz. His tongue thickened in his throat. He didn’t know what to say. And he might have stood there eternally, looking stupid in living color for N. Carteret Bluestone and half the rest of the world, if it hadn’t been for Turco. “No comment,” Turco snarled, slashing through the thicket of microphones with a homicidal leer and jerking him by the arm. And then they were moving, briskly, heading for the cover of the police cordon and the clutch of cleanshaven men in uniform gathered beyond it.

Abercorn recognized the man at the center of the clutch: Sheriff Bull Tibbets of the Ciceroville Police Department. If Theron Peagler had been something of a surprise—college-educated, soft-spoken, intelligible—Sheriff Tibbets was just what he’d expected. He was a grim-looking fat man with a wad of tobacco bloating his cheek, a big-brimmed trooper’s hat shoved back on his head and a pair of mirror sunglasses masking eyes that were too small and dull to be fully human. He’d given Abercorn a look of undisguised contempt at the Ciceroville station the preceding night, and now he didn’t so much as turn his head as he and Turco joined the group. There seemed to be a debate going on, but Abercorn couldn’t catch much of what they were saying—the accent was pure hell down here, sounded like they were chewing on sweatsocks or something.

“Gawl rawl, rabid rib,” the sheriff said.

The man beside him—he was like a toy compared to the sheriff and as slippery, low-browed and loose-jointed as a Snopes—pressed the point. When he spoke, he sounded as if he were in great pain.

There was a moment’s silence, and then the sheriff rolled his massive head back on his neck, exposing a spatter of angry red pustules just beneath his chin and flashing the heavens with the light reflecting off his sunglasses. “Gawl rawl,” he repeated himself, “rabid rib.”

Turco folded his arms. He looked bored, looked impatient. In the distance, yet another bird, all legs and wings, swooped across the cremated sky. “What’s the deal?” Abercorn asked.

Turco lowered his voice. “The squirrely guy wants to bring the dogs in, sheriff says no.” He gazed out over the landing, the weeds and muck and the mad growth of trees, narrowing his eyes as if he expected to spot the suspect sculling across the horizon. “Dogs are prohibited here,” he added by way of clarification. “Park regulations. Alligators go crazy for them, overturn canoes, jump right up out of the water to snatch them off the dock. It’s like catnip to a cat.”

Abercorn was dumbfounded. Alligators! Jesus. The more he learned about this place, the more he longed for Hollywood Boulevard.

They stood there another minute, listening to the sheriff and his men chew socks at one another, and then they were moving again, Turco leading, Abercorn following. “These guys are a bunch of cheesebags,” Turco pronounced, spitting the words over his shoulder. Abercorn couldn’t have agreed more, but wondered where exactly they were going and how it was going to help them capture, prosecute, imprison and deport Hiro Tanaka and get N. Carteret Bluestone off his back. And beyond that, how it was going to get him out of Crackerland and back to the mossy somnolent streets of Savannah and the attentions of girls like Ginger and Brenda who wanted only to sip juleps, eat oysters and fuck athletically on the rug in front of the air conditioner. Turco was leading him back toward the police cordon and the tourist center beyond it.

“Where are we going, Lewis—what’s the plan?”

Turco paused on the steps, for once eye-to-eye with him. “I say we get hold of one of these powerboats and go bust this Saxby clown. He’ll tell you where the Nip is, believe me.”

Abercorn didn’t know if he actually wanted to bust Saxby—what charge were they talking here?—but having a conversation with him sounded like a good idea. And he really didn’t feature hanging around and dealing with the sheriff, who looked about as receptive as a guard dog. He shrugged and followed Turco up the steps and into the tourist facility, where six blondes of varying shades and ages stood expectantly behind a counter, each trying to outgrin the other.

Turco strode directly up to the youngest, a girl with big watery blue eyes and a nameplate that identified her as Darlene. “We need a boat,” he announced, giving her his LURP-from-hell look.

She didn’t seem to notice. “I’m sorry,” she said, and she was just as sweet as rainwater, though her accent was strictly bayou, “but I have orders from Mr. Chivvers and Mr. Dotson to not let any boats out.”

“For all intents and purposes, the park is closed,” the blonde beside her announced. This one looked to be about forty and wore her hair in an elaborate confectionary ball. “We regret the inconvenience,” she said, “but there’s a maniac a-loose in the swamp.”

“An Oriental man,” added another.

“Killed somebody east of here, is what I heard,” said the eldest, who must have been seventy and had the gift of speaking without moving her lips.

“Three grown men and a baby. Strangled them all,” the one with the hair said. All six of them froze their smiles.

This was Abercorn’s opening. He’d been hovering in the background, but now he stepped forward. “Special Agent Detlef Abercorn of the INS,” he said, flashing his identification, “of the district office in Savannah. We’re after that very man.” He tried a smile himself. “That’s why we need a boat.”

“Well,” the first girl, Darlene, wavered behind her official grin, “I don’t know …” She turned to the blonde next to her, a woman of indeterminate age in secretarial glasses and a bright-patterned scarf. “Lu Ann, what you think?”

Just then Roy Dotson stepped through a door at the rear of the office. He was dressed in his park ranger’s uniform and a pair of hip boots. “It’s all right, Darlene, give these men what they want.”

Darlene gazed up at Abercorn. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen and her grin was cavernous. Abercorn had one of those brief and inevitable sexual thoughts, and then the business came back into her voice. “I’ll need to see a driver’s license,” she said, “and a major credit card.”

Roy Dotson sat at the helm of the eighteen-foot flat-bottomed boat, running the engine at full speed, which wasn’t much. Turco was crouched in the bow with all his jungle-fighting paraphernalia, his entrenching tools and wire cutters and whatnot dangling from the frame of his pack. In the middle, almost enjoying the ride despite himself, was Detlef Abercorn. He was wearing his waders and he clutched a satchel full of halizone tablets, sun block, 6-12, Off! and calamine lotion as if he were afraid it would sprout wings and fly away. He was also wearing a bright orange life jacket, though he felt a little foolish in it. Roy Dotson had insisted on the life jacket and Abercorn had obliged him for two reasons. The first was purely diplomatic. Turco had informed Dotson, who was after all going out of his way to help them, that he would shove it—the life jacket—up his—Roy Dotson’s—ass if he said another word about it, and so Abercorn, in the spirit of pacification, had meekly slipped into his own. The second reason was more basic: he was scared witless about going out amongst the alligators and snakes and felt he needed all the help he could get. With the waders and life vest, the only place a snake could get him, he figured, was in the face, and he planned to keep that portion of his anatomy high, dry and out of reach.

Still, for all that, the ride wasn’t half bad. The breeze kept the mosquitoes off his swollen ears and dried the sweat at his temples, and the swamp seemed a little less threatening now that he was actually out on it. Nothing crept into his waders to bite, sting and gouge him, no snakes dropped from the trees and the only alligator he saw was the size of a woman’s purse. He was surprised too that there was open water—quite a bit of it. If he squinted his eyes behind the prescription sunglasses with the clear plastic frames he could almost imagine he was a boy again, out on Lake Casitas with his dad and mom and brother Holger.

Another surprise was the dock at Billy’s Island. There was actually a dock there, nothing much more than two posts sunk into the murk and a grid of weathered boards, but a dock nonetheless. And beyond the dock, terra firma. Or almost. He began to feel a bit overdressed in his waders and life jacket—he’d pictured something out of The African Queen, up to his waist in quicksand and slime, but this was just plain old ordinary dirt. Or mud. A little spongy maybe but nothing that would have ruined his day if he’d been dressed in jeans, T-shirt and hiking boots.

Roy Dotson led the way, closely shadowed by Turco, who stepped lightly, tense and alert and hulking under the weight of his pack. Abercorn brought up the rear, loping along with his big gangling strides, ducking away from the squadrons of insects that converged on his every step and fanned out to anticipate the next. They were following a crude trail to the far side of the island, where, according to Roy Dotson, Saxby had set up his fishing camp the previous morning. (“Pygmy fish,” Turco had snorted when Dotson told them the story. “You ask me, it’s a cover is what it is.”)

They walked in single file for a quarter of an hour under a canopy of slash pine that cut the sunlight to a muted dapple. The air was heavy here, so thick it was like another medium, and the heat had them running sweat till they were as drenched as if they’d swum the whole way from the tourist center. Salt pills, Abercorn thought, and he cursed himself for having forgotten them. He was wondering what happened to you when you ran out of salt in your system—you collapsed, didn’t you, something to do with electrolytes, or was that batteries?—when Turco took hold of Roy Dotson’s arm and the three of them halted. “What?” Dotson said. “What is it?”

Turco tightened his grip. “The camp,” he breathed. Somewhere a bird began to cry out, hard and urgent, as if some unseen hand were plucking it alive. Roy Dotson started to say something but Turco cut him off with a hiss. “Shhhh!” he said, and his eyes had gone cold. “Stay here, both of you. I’m going in alone.”

Abercorn saw nothing but tree trunks and leaves. The waders were a sweat box, the life vest constricted his lungs. He sucked in a breath and coughed out insects.

“Shhhh!”

“Lewis—” Abercorn warned, meaning to point out that this was not the Ho Chi Minh Trail, appearances to the contrary, and that Saxby was not an armed and treacherous communist guerrilla but a decent guy who loved fish and Ruth Dershowitz, not to mention an American citizen with inalienable rights, and who probably wasn’t involved in all this anyway, or at least not too deeply, but Turco gave him a look of such uncompromising fury that he gave it up. This was what Turco was paid for, this was what he was doing here—there was no stopping him now. Abercorn exchanged a look with Roy Dotson as Turco shrugged out of his pack and darted off silently through the undergrowth. Though he still saw nothing—no camp, no tent, no sign whatever of civilization—Abercorn fumbled for his tape recorder and notepad, feeling the excitement rise in him despite himself. Maybe Lewis was right after all, maybe the Nip was hiding out there with Saxby and they could throw the cuffs on him, pack it up and get out of this shithole for good.

Roy Dotson didn’t think so. His mouth was drawn tight and an angry crease had appeared between his eyebrows. “The guy’s crazy,” he said in a terse whisper. “Like I told you, Sax was as shocked as I was to see that man there in the trunk of the car.” Abercorn didn’t respond. He’d fixed his eye on the tangle of growth into which Turco had disappeared, and now he started forward, moving as stealthily as could be expected from a six-foot-five-inch albino in a pair of hip waders. Roy Dotson shrugged and fell into step behind him.

Nothing moved. The forest was still, locked in the grip of the heat. The bird cried out again, terrible, lonely, hurt in some deep essential place. Abercorn kept his eyes on a conjunction of branches up ahead, the waders grunting and squelching beneath his sweat-soaked feet. He stepped over the stump of a felled tree, and then another. Mosquitoes settled on his arms, his face, the backs of his hands, and he didn’t bother to swat them away.

And then, what he’d been waiting for: a shout. It ruptured the silence, a single mad stunned bellow of surprise that rose up to steal the heat from the trees. Suddenly they were running and nothing mattered but the snarl of voices up ahead and the sudden sharp snap of branches and the thrashing in the undergrowth. The Nip! Abercorn was thinking, Turco’s got the Nip!, and in his excitement he shot ahead of Roy Dotson, his knees pumping, the waders flapping like sails in a high wind. There! Just ahead: a tent—how could he have missed it?—a circle of charred rocks, a fishing net strung from the trees. Another shout. A curse. And then he was there, stumbling over the cold cookfire as the figures of Saxby and Turco materialized from the camouflage of briar and palmetto.

They were on the ground, rocking in each other’s arms, their legs flailing at the bush. Turco was all over Saxby, though Saxby had six inches and fifty pounds on him. “Get … off!” Saxby roared, but Turco had him in some sort of secret commando grip, forcing his face down into the wet earth, the handcuffs flashing in a shaft of sunlight. “Lewis!” Abercorn shouted, but Turco jerked the bigger man’s arm back and cuffed his wrists. “Lewis, what the hell—?” Abercorn’s voice was high. This was all wrong. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be …

“Det, are you crazy?” Saxby was furious, thrashing beneath Turco’s weight, a single smear of reddish dirt ground like a scar into his cheek. “Get him off me!”

But Turco had him, and he wouldn’t let go. He crouched atop him like a gnome, knee planted in the small of the back, left hand rigid at the base of the skull. “Shut it,” he said, and his voice was calm, even, not a hint of adrenaline in it. “You’re under arrest, motherfucker.”

Cheap Thrills

Everyone else simply read in the front parlor beneath the ancient brass chandelier, informally, comfortably, with the lights up and the colonists settled into easy chairs or stretched out languidly on the rug. There was coffee and sherry and there was always something sweet—cupcakes or cookies, often baked by Septima herself. It was homey, unthreatening, an arena in which an artist—no matter his or her status in the world beyond these walls—could present work in progress in an intimate and supportive atmosphere. If anything, the bias was anti-performance. You simply stood up there and read. No tricks, no gadgets, no histrionics. You read in a flat, unobtrusive voice, letting the work speak for itself—anything else would have been inappropriate, a violation of the unspoken rules and an embarrassment to your fellow colonists. In a word, rude. And you read in the front parlor, beneath the chandelier. Everyone did.

Everyone, that is, but Jane Shine.

No. Jane had to read out on the patio in the black of night, a single spot trained on her from overhead while a second light, more stagey and diffuse, played off her gypsy features from a box located in the azalea bushes. Ruth couldn’t believe it. The colonists were shunted outside and forced into folding chairs all marshaled in neat rows, as if this were Shakespeare under the stars or something. Three minutes in one of those chairs was like an hour on the rack. It was outrageous. What was she thinking?

Ruth came in with Brie just as Septima was working her way to the front to introduce Jane. She passed up the opportunity to sit with Sandy, Ina and Regina in order to take the seats directly behind Mignonette Teitelbaum and Orlando Seezers, who was stationed in his wheelchair at the end of the aisle. After a flurry of hushed helios and some pronounced and disapproving mosquito-swatting, Ruth settled in to study La Teitelbaum from the rear. Did they have sex? she wondered. It depended on how far down the spine he’d been injured, didn’t it? Teitelbaum wasn’t much in any case. She was only a couple years older than Ruth, but she really showed it—and her hair, her hair looked like that stuff they pack crates with—what was it called? There were lines in the back of her neck too. But not just lines—seams, grooves, ruts you could fall into.

Ruth’s reverie was broken by the amplified blast of Septima’s voice—a microphone, she was using a microphone for god’s sake! No one had ever used a microphone at Thanatopsis before, and now, because of Jane Shine, Septima—the power behind the whole place, its founder and arbiter of its tastes and traditions—was speaking through a microphone. It was sickening. A perversion of everything Thanatopsis stood for. Ruth couldn’t fathom how everyone could just sit there as if nothing were going on, as if this, this sound system and lights, had anything at all to do with a sharing of work in progress. She felt her scalp tense beneath the roots of her hair. “This is ridiculous,” she hissed at Brie while Septima’s genteel tones roared out over the treetops.

Brie turned to her, enraptured, her expression as vacant as a cow’s, her big watery eyes swollen beneath the skin of her contacts. “What are you saying?” she hissed back. “I think it’s—it’s magical.”

“… my very great pleasure, and a personal three-ill,” Septima boomed; she was clutching at the microphone as if it were a cobra she’d discovered in bed and seized in desperation. Ruth saw Saxby’s eyes in her eyes, Saxby’s nose, pinched with age, in her nose. She was wearing a tan linen suit, beige pumps and the pearls she never seemed to take off, and she’d had her hair done. “I repeat, a three-ill, to introduce an extraordinarily gifted young writer, author of a prize-winnin’ volume of stories and a novel forthcomin’ from”—here Septima paused to squint at a 3 × 5 card she held tentatively in her soft veiny hand—“from”—she named a major New York house and Ruth felt her jaws clench with hate and jealousy; “… youngest winner ever, I am told, of the prestigious Hooten-Warbury Gold Medal in Literature, given annually in England for the best work of foreign fiction, and the equally prestigious—”

Ruth tried to tune her out, but the amplification made it impossible: Septima’s stentorian words of praise throbbed in her chest, her lungs, her very bowels, vibrating there as if on a sounding board. Septima went on to compare Jane to just about every female writer in history, from Mrs. Gaskell to Virginia Woolf to Flannery O’Connor and Pearl S. Buck, using the term “prestigious” like a dental drill. (She must have used it twenty times at least—Ruth stopped counting at five.) And then finally, after what seemed an eternity, she wound it up with a carnival barker’s enthusiasm: “Ladies and gendemen, fellow artists and Thanatopsians”—yes, she actually said Thanatopsians—“I give you Jane Shine.”

A burst of applause. Ruth felt ill. But where was she? Where was La Shine? Certainly not sitting quietly up front or standing modestly to one side of the microphone. People craned their necks, the applause fell off. But then, all at once, a murmur went up and the applause started in again, stronger than before—as if just by deigning to appear here before these mere mortals she should be congratulated—and there she was, Jane Shine, sweeping through the French doors and out onto the patio.

Her hair—her impossible gleaming supercharged mat of flamenco dancing hair—was piled up so high on her head all Ruth could think of was the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Dressed all in black—another one of those high-collared faux-Victorian things she paraded around in like a lost princess—she moved through the crowd with quiet determination, a small frown etched on her lips—oh, this was serious business, this was high drama—looking straight ahead of her, her back stiff, her steps tiny, delicate, the nibbling little mincing steps of a girl on her way to school. Flamenco siren, Victorian princess, schoolgirl: who was she kidding?

The light caught her face perfectly, exquisitely—even Ruth had to admit it. The overhead spot set her hair aflame, made a corona of it, a diadem, a glittering ball of light and highlight, while the second spot, the softer one, put a glow into her extraterrestrial eyes and lit her bee-stung lips from beneath. “Collagen treatments,” Ruth whispered to Brie, but Brie was mesmerized by the spectacle of Jane Shine, La Shine, who’d fucked her way to the top, and Brie didn’t acknowledge her. Jane bowed. Thanked Septima. Thanked the audience. Thanked Owen and Rico and Raoul Von Somebody for the lighting and audio, and then she fastened her eyes on the audience and held them, in silence, for a full thirty seconds.

And then she began, without introduction, her voice as natural and attuned to the microphone as Septima’s was not. Her voice was a caress, a whisper, something that got inside you and wouldn’t come out. The story she read was about sex, of course, but sex couched in elaborate and gothic imagery that made high art of painting one’s toenails and having a monthly period. Three lines into the story Ruth realized that this wasn’t work in progress at all—this was a story Jane had published two years ago and then polished—and repolished—for her first collection. It was finished work. Old work. Nothing from the “forthcoming” novel or the pages she’d presumably turned out here. Instead she was performing, giving them a set piece she’d read god knew how many times at the invitation of Notre Dame or Iowa or NYU. Ruth was so outraged—so pissed off, rubbed raw and just plain furious—that she nearly got up to leave. But then she couldn’t, of course. If she did, everyone would think she was, well, jealous of Jane Shine or something—and she couldn’t have them thinking that. Never. It would be like being gored out on the African veldt, vultures swooping in, hyenas laughing in the bush.

So she sat there, seething. Orlando Seezers brayed with a rich too-loud laugh when Jane’s story ran to what passed for wit, and toward the end, where the star-crossed fourteen-year-old lovers paint each other’s toenails prior to parting eternally, Mignonette Teitelbaum had to hold his hand to keep him from blubbering aloud. Jane was shameless. Not only did she pander to the audience, raving like a madwoman and repeatedly pushing a carefully coiffed strand of hair out of her face, she even did a Swedish accent as if she thought she was Meryl Streep or something (the boy was Swedish, a Nordic demigod in short pants; the girl, of course, was a Connecticut ingénue with the hair of a Catalonian shepherdess and outer-space eyes). When she was finished, there was a stunned silence, and then someone—was it Irving?—shouted “Yes!” and the applause fell on her like a landslide. Brie had tears in her eyes, and Ruth would never forgive her that. Sandy whistled and pounded his hands together till they were red, and Ruth would never forgive him either.

The reception afterward was just one of those things you had to live through. The last thing Ruth wanted was to stand around and congratulate Jane Shine, but she had no choice really. If it came right down to it she could put on a face and play the game, no problem. She loved Jane Shine. She’d been to school with her. She wished her well. Right?

If only it was that easy.

Someone put on a tape of old Motown hits—Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, the Four Tops—and Ruth almost let the beat infect her, almost let go, until she realized that the music was for Jane, who’d made a big deal of praising it in a recent issue of Interview, a copy of which had magically come to appear on one of the end tables in the parlor. Oh, yes, Jane had practically lived Motown when she was a girl—a very young girl, of course, in kindergarten—or was it first grade? It was a beat and, she didn’t know, soul, she guessed, that made it great. She tried for the same sort of thing in her writing, not that she could ever touch “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” or “My Ding-a-Ling,” but there was a rawness there, a sensuality, a je ne sais quoi that she strived for. Ruth had read the article surreptitiously. It made her gag.

After the applause had died down, Ruth wandered into the party with Brie—Owen had taken the whole thing inside because of the bugs, but the French doors stood open to the patio and the sound system was still wired out there in case anyone wanted to liberate the carnal spell of Jane’s reading with a bout of groin-rubbing and hip-grinding. Ruth didn’t. She planned to remain relatively inconspicuous—a presence, yes, La Dershowitz after all, star of last night’s dramatic scene on the patío, reigning queen of the hive, impresario of the whole Hiro Tanaka adventure—a looming figure certainly, but not the cynosure. Not tonight. Brie began to bob her head to the music and then she had a drink and before Ruth could stop her she was gushing over the reading. “I’ve never heard anything like it,” she gasped, “I mean knock me down, blow me away, that’s the best story I’ve ever heard. The best reading I’ve ever heard. Anywhere. I mean it.”

Brie was goggling at her, vapid, open-faced, a little mustachio of pale sweat trembling atop her upper lip. Ruth held herself perfectly still. “Bullshit,” she snapped. “Cheap theatrics, that’s all. You call that reading? You call that sharing a work in progress? I call it grandstanding. I call it an insult.”

Brie looked stunned, lost; she didn’t know what to do with her hands.

“And the story itself”—Ruth gave her a withering look—“it’s the cheapest kind of melodrama. Fourteen-year-old Swedes, I mean give me a break.”

“Ruthie”—the tone was admonitory, two attenuated syllables, a punch on the first and a long trailing tongue-cluck on the second—“you can’t really mean that, can you?” Irving Thalamus had materialized at her elbow. He was wearing a chartreuse and yellow shirt, open at the neck to show off the black creeping jungle of his chest hair. Ruth realized with a jolt that this was the matching top to the shorts she’d pilfered for Hiro. Irving was smiling at her, his lips tight and sardonic, a smile that caught at the corners of his mouth and pricked her like a goad.

Brie began to gulp for breath as if they were treading water in the deep end of a swimming pool. “That’s what I was saying, Mr. Thalamus—”

He forestalled her with a raised palm and a tender squeeze of the elbow that managed to be both fatherly and lewd at once. “Irving,” he said, “call me Irving,” his voice rich and promiscuous.

“That’s just what I was saying, Irving”—she gave him a smile, cute, cute—“I mean I’ve heard a lot of readings at school, and in New York, and this one just blew me away, I mean knock me down with a stick, it’s like she’s possessed or something, I mean talk about acting, talk about dramatic interpretation …” Brie was so worked up she couldn’t go on. She just stood there, bare-shouldered, wide-eyed, goggling and gasping like a goldfish.

“And how do you feel about it, Ruthie?” Irving’s eyes were hooded. Somehow he’d managed to work an arm round Brie’s waist. He was really enjoying this.

But Ruth wasn’t about to give him a show. And she certainly didn’t want to talk about Jane Shine, let alone get drawn into a debate over her trumped-up stories and half-witted histrionics. She was going to be cool. Olympian. Above it. “Give me a break, Irving,” she said, leveling her eyes on him. “That wasn’t a reading, it was a premenstrual breakdown.” And then she turned on her heels and left them to their flesh-squeezing and body hair.

She went to Sandy for solace, but Sandy was as bad as Brie. He sat on the far side of the room with Bob, tapping his fingers to the music and basking in the afterglow of Jane’s reading. Ruth tried to turn him, tried to steer him away from idolatry and sow the seeds of disaffection, but it was no use. He pulled blissfully at the neck of a beer, glancing over at the little group around Jane—Seezers and Teitelbaum, Septima, Laura Grobian, Clara and Patsy and half a dozen others—as if they were disciples gathered round the Messiah himself. Or herself.

She found Regina in the corner, scowling into a glass of rum, and she knew that at least she would have no qualms about calling shit shit and seeing Jane for the imposter she was. Regina had darkened her eye sockets with kohl and dyed her hair an interstellar black; she looked like a woman in purdah who’s had the veil snatched away from her face. “So,” Ruth said, sidling up to her, “do we bury her next to Wordsworth or what? Or maybe P.T. Barnum would be more like it.” She gave a mirthless little laugh.

“Jane?” Regina snubbed out a cigarette in the potted palm behind her. She straightened up with a shrug, searched Ruth’s eyes for a second and then looked away. “I don’t know—she can be a real pain in the ass, a real prima donna, if you know what I mean, but I thought the thing tonight was at least dramatic.”

“Dramatic?” Ruth echoed. She was incredulous.

“Half of this shit puts me to sleep after about six words—at least she, like, held my interest.”

Ruth couldn’t help herself—her voice got away from her. “Yeah, but with what? Fakery. Crap. The kind of trumped-up horseshit that hides the fact that there’s nothing there.”

Regina attempted a smile, but it faded as quickly as it bloomed. She fumbled in her leather jacket for another cigarette.

“Damn it,” Ruth cried, yelped—she was going too far, she knew it, but she couldn’t stop now—“can’t you see that Jane”—she tried to lower her voice, tried to contain the damage—“Jane Shine is nothing but hot air and horseshit?”

Ruth became aware in that instant that Regina wasn’t looking at her—she was looking just over her shoulder and she was trying to do something with her mouth and blackened eyes. Ruth turned as if she were caught in taffy, tar, as if she were up to her neck in the La Brea pits.

Septima stood there before her, her expression climbing up and down the ladder of emotion. Not ten feet away was Jane Shine, on the move, regal, her feet, hips and shoulders touched ever so gracefully by Motown funk, her face locked up like a vise beneath the towering shako of her hair. Between them, the ring of toadies and yea-sayers had opened up like a receiving line. All eyes were on Ruth.

Jane kept coming. When she reached Septima’s side, she pulled herself up. “Yes,” she said, and you could skewer meat on the edge in her voice, “I’m sure we’re all holding our breath till you get up there, La Dershowitz”—she spat out the sobriquet as if it burned her tongue and then paused to let it gather force. “That is, if you’ve got anything to read—you do, don’t you? You must have been working on something all this time.”

Ruth didn’t know what to do. Marvin Gaye was dancing all over her head and every face in the room was turned toward her. Her instinct was to lash out, slam the clenched white ball of her fist into those outer-space eyes, rip the lace collar from her throat, demolish the hair, call her out for the conniving leg-spreading literary whore that she was, but she hesitated and lost hold of the moment. Her face was working. Her brain was in overdrive. They were all—every one of them—waiting.

“Ruthie”—Septima had her by the hand and she began to chatter as if nothing had happened, as if the cold talentless bitch hadn’t just called her out, humiliated her, smashed open the hive and stung her to death—“Ruthie, darlin’, we was all—Orlando and Mignonette and Laura and I—we was all just sayin’ what a pleasure it would be to have you read from your work too, and you know, as everyone here does, that while we don’t require room and board from our artists, we do feel privileged to receive payment in kind …” She looked up at the ceiling as if it were transparent, a faraway smile fixed on her lips. “Some of the things we’ve heard in this very room …”

This was the challenge. This was it. This was the slap in the face, the gauntlet at her feet. She’d wanted to be inconspicuous, let Jane have her moment, fight her with subterfuge and innuendo, but she’d blown it. Her heart was going, her eyes must have been wild, but she knew her lines, oh yes indeed. “Septima,” she said in her calmest, steadiest tones, and she looked into those milky old gray eyes as if they were the only eyes in the room, as if Jane Shine weren’t standing there twelve inches to the right, as if she didn’t exist, had never existed, as if this were a private tête-à-tête with the woman who could well be her future mother-in-law, “I’d be honored.”

The doyenne of Thanatopsis House broadened her smile till her thin old lips were stretched taut. “Tomorrow night, then?” she said, and something flickered to life in the depths of her moribund eyes.

Ruth nodded.

“Same time as tonight’s?”

Marvin Gaye: what was he singing? Ain’t no mountain high enough/Ain’t no river deep enough. Ruth took a deep breath. “Sure,” she said, “no problem.”

In the morning, she cursed herself. How could she have been so stupid? How could she have let herself get sucked in like that? Jane Shine. She wished her an early death, wished her sagging breasts and pyorrhea, wished she’d explode like the puffed-up frog in Aesop’s fable.

But wishes get you nowhere.

Ruth was in her studio, working hard, before anyone in the big house had even the vaguest semiconscious presentiment that morning had arrived and that breakfast and work and the slow miraculous unveiling of the day awaited them. She was working with an ease and concentration that would have amazed her if she’d stopped to think about it, hammering away at the keyboard and wielding her Liquid Paper like a sword while a stack of clean new perfectly wrought pages mounted before her. By ten o’clock she’d substantially rewritten sections of “Two Toes,” “Of Tears and the Tide”—it wasn’t so bad, not really—and the piece that had come back from the Atlantic, which in a burst of inspiration she’d retitled “Sebastopol,” to suggest the sort of battle her main characters—two couples—were engaged in. What she thought she’d do was present fragments from each of the stories—real work in progress, the real thing, not some typeset and justified artifact—ending up with the section of “Tears” that described the very Hiro-like husband of the doomed woman. They would sit there—Irving, Laura, Septima, Seezers and Teitelbaum and E.T. herself—and they would think of her, Ruth, and her triumph over the sheriff and Abercorn and the macho little toad who’d given them a taste of real-life drama right out there on the patio before their wondering eyes. Then too, there was sure to be a certain prurient interest in the piece—what did she know about Japanese sex? Had she slept with him? Had she helped him escape? And she’d give them her enigmatic smile, the smile of La Dershowitz, regnant and unassailable, and let it rest. Yes, she’d show them what a reading was all about.

She worked through lunch, worked through the racket of hammering and cutting and banging as Parker Putnam—or was it Putnam Parker?—did his best imitation of a working carpenter. Hunched and sinewy, burned the color of tobacco, he showed up at eleven with a toolbox the size of a small vehicle, claiming in a halting rheumy voice that “Miz Lights” had asked him to come out and clean the place up. It took him most of the afternoon to knock the shards of broken glass out of the windows and nearly an hour just to get the old screen door off the hinges, but she hardly noticed. Normally, he would have driven her crazy, but today she welcomed him—he was there to test her, to lay one more stone atop the cart to see if it would tip over. But it wouldn’t. Her concentration was complete.

It was getting late—four? five?—when he packed up his tools (a process that in itself involved half an hour) and left for the day. The hammering ceased. The splintering of glass, the wheezing and spitting and dull reverberant booming were no more. Silence fell over the studio, and it was then that Ruth felt the first faint stirrings of uncertainty. What if—what if the work was no good, after all? What if they didn’t like it? What if she got up there and froze? She imagined the satisfaction that would give Jane Shine, and she felt her stomach clench. But no, it was hunger, that was all, and she realized in that moment that she’d skipped lunch.

She sat at her desk and ate dutifully—cherry tomatoes fresh from the kitchen garden, salmon mousse with Dijon mustard and a sort of cracker bread Armand had devised himself—and she began to feel better. She thought of her makeup and hair and what she would wear. Nothing pretentious, that was for sure, no lace collars and Edwardian brooches. Jeans and a T-shirt. Earrings. Her aqua heels, the ones that showed off her toes and instep. She would keep it simple. Honest. Genuine. Everything the Shine extravaganza was not. And if the stories weren’t finished, weren’t yet what she wanted them to be, it wouldn’t matter one whit—she was reading sections only, and the sections were strong. The thought lifted her spirits—food, that was all it was—and she felt the strength seeping back into her.

She rose from her desk and gathered up her papers, inserting the new crisply typed pages in an old unpretentious manila folder. The room was still. The sun held in the windows. She was aware for the first time that day of the birds slashing through the shadows, lighting in the bushes, making music for her alone. She was standing there at the window, her back to the door, having one last cigarette before heading back to get ready, when a sudden noise on the front porch startled her. Turning, expecting to see Parker Putnam fumbling around for some tool he’d forgotten, she had a shock: this wasn’t Parker Putnam. It was Septima.

Septima. Ruth’s first thought was that she’d lost her way, an embarrassment of age, but the look in the old lady’s eye told her different. Septima stood there on the doorstep, giving the place a tight-lipped scrutiny, Owen at her side. She was wearing her gardening clothes—a straw sunbonnet, an old smock over a pair of jeans, men’s shoes. “Ruthie,” she called in a voice that sounded harsh and strained, “I hate to disturb you, but I—may I come in?”

Ruth was so surprised she couldn’t answer—Septima made it a strict rule never to visit any of the artists’ studios, out of respect for their privacy, and Hart Crane was a long walk for a woman of her age. Ruth crossed the room wordlessly and swung open the door.

Something was wrong. She could see it in Owen’s face, see it in the way Septima avoided her eyes as she moved past her and lowered herself into the cane rocker. “Whew!” the old woman exclaimed, “this heat! I swear I’ll never get used to it, never. Would you have a glass of water for me, please, Ruthie?”

“Of course,” Ruth said, and she poured a glass for Owen too, who remained standing in the doorway as if he hadn’t really meant to come in. “Thanks, Ruth,” he said, draining the glass in a gulp. “Think I’ll just step outside here a minute and inspect the damage,” he said to the room in general, setting the glass down on the windowsill. He focused on Septima. “You call if you need me.”

When Owen had gone, the screen door tapping gently behind him, Septima lifted her head to give Ruth a long slow look. The air was still, heavy with a premonition of rain. The crepitating sounds of the forest rushed in to fill the silence. “I see Parker’s been here,” Septima said finally.

Ruth nodded. “He was banging around here all day—but it didn’t disturb me, not really. I was lost in my work.”

“It’s a pity,” Septima sighed, and Ruth agreed, though she wondered just what the old woman was referring to—Parker Putnam’s dismal showing, the weather, the danger of being lost in one’s work? “A real pity the way they shot up this place, Theron Peagler and all the rest of them. You’d think they’d know better. And the way they harried that poor Japanese boy—”

Again Ruth nodded. Again the old lady fell silent. Just outside the window a bird hit four notes in quick succession, up and down, up and down.

“Ruthie,” Septima said after a minute, “I’m very sorry for dis-turbin’ you out here, and especially at a time when you’d be workin’ hard to prepare for your readin’, but a matter of the utmost importance has come up.”

Ruth had been fussing round the little room in an unconsciously defensive way, a proprietary way, but now she took hold of the arms of the other rocker and settled into it as if it might come alive at any moment with the shock of 50,000 volts.

“I want to ask you about this Japanese boy—and I want to know the whole truth of the matter. It’s become somethin’ of an embarrassment for the colony, especially since he’s gone and escaped—the phone, Ruthie, has been ringin’ off the hook all day, reporters from New York and Los Angeles, everywhere. Well, I want to know the extent of your involvement—the full extent. I think I have a right to that knowledge, don’t you?”

“Of course,” Ruth insisted, “of course you do, but like I told you—”

Septima cut her off. “You know I’m open-minded, Ruthie, and you know how I feel about the creative atmosphere at Thanatopsis and the artists’ behavior as regards their personal ethics and standards of sexual conduct—”

Ruth could only stare at her.

“Well, when my son told me he was bringin’ home a Jewish girl I didn’t bat an eye—why would I, with all the talented Jewish artists we’ve had here over the years—but I’m gettin’ away from what I want to say altogether. Whether you were more, more intimate with this foreign boy than you allow or not is really not at issue here …” She paused, and the silence could have engulfed ships and swallowed up oceans. “Ruth”—the sound of her own name made Ruth jump, she couldn’t help it—“Ruth, what I want to say is that I had a call from Saxby this afternoon.”

A call from Saxby, a call from Saxby. Yes? And so?

“He was in jail, Ruth. In the Clinch County Jail in Ciceroville.”

“In jail?” Ruth couldn’t have been more surprised had the old woman told her he was taken hostage in Lebanon. “For what?”

Septima gave her a close penetrating look. “My law-yers are seein’ to that, don’t you worry. He’ll be out by this time and that sheriff down there and all the rest of them will be mighty sorry they ever tangled with Septima Lights, believe you me—but that isn’t the point. The point is that they accused him of helpin’ that boy escape and takin’ him in my car, my Mercedes, down to that swamp. The point is, Ruthie, I wonder who put that boy in the trunk of that car and what you want to tell me about it.”

Ruth was stunned. Paralyzed. She could feel her toehold at Thanatopsis slipping, her career in jeopardy, Saxby alienated from her, waitressing looming up like a black hole in her future. “I lied,” she blurted, “I admit it and I’m sorry. But just about Hiro, I mean how much I helped him when he was … was at large. But I swear to you, I had nothing to do with his getting out of that cell, I knew nothing about it—and neither did Sax.”

They sat there for half an hour, and Ruth fed the old woman the bits and crumbs of the truth about Hiro—but she’d never been intimate with him, never, she insisted on that—always circling back to the justification that she’d been using him for a story, for research, for art. That was it: she’d done it for art. And she hadn’t meant any harm. She hadn’t. Really.

When she was finished, the shadows beyond the window had lengthened perceptibly and the chatter of the forest had settled into an evening mode, richer now with the chirp of tree frogs and the booming basso of their pond-dwelling cousins. Owen was at the door. Septima cleared her throat. “They want you to go down there tomorrow, Ruthie—Mr. Abercorn does—and it’s not a request. I know all about that shameful incident on the patio and I just kick myself for lettin’ that class of people stay on at Thanatopsis, and I don’t know how to be delicate about this, but I want you to go too.” Septima fixed her eyes on her. “And I’m afraid it’s not a request either.”

“But—but what they did, grabbed me by the hair, called me names—” Ruth was angry now, she couldn’t help herself. And then a little fist of fear clenched inside her. “What do they want with me?”

The old woman chose her words carefully. “I don’t really know, Ruthie, but it seems to me the least you can do. My boy’s gone to jail over this.” She let the words sink in, and the moment held between them, bloated and ugly. “In light of all this—” Septima said finally, searching for the words, “—this emotional upset, I would understand if you’d like to postpone your readin’ tonight …”

Postpone the reading! Ruth nearly came up out of the chair with joy and relief at the mention of it—off the hook, she was off the hook!—but then she caught herself. If she didn’t read, no matter what the reason, short of nuclear war, they’d be on her like jackals. Ruth backed down, they’d say, she’s nothing but talk; did you bear what Jane Shine said about it?

“You’re sure Saxby’s all right?”

“I’ve known Donnager Stratton for forty-two years and he went down there personally to set things right.” Septima sighed. “He’s a stubborn boy, Saxby, always has been. He’s after those little white feeish, Ruthie, and he’s goin’ back into that swamp after ’em, manhunt or no manhunt. That’s what he told me.”

Ruth looked down at her lap. She was still clutching the manila folder. When she looked up again, she’d made her decision. “No,” she said finally, “I’ll read.”

The Power of the Human Voice

The first thing he was going to do when they got him out of here was find that little paramilitary goon with the scraggly beard and kick his ass into the next county. And Abercorn too, that crud. The strong-arm tactics might go down with some poor scared hyperventilating wetback drowning in his own sweat, but he’d be damned if anybody was going to slap him around. Or Ruth either. It was unnecessary, totally unnecessary. It was outrageous, that’s what it was.

Saxby Lights, scion of the venerable Tupelo Island clan, son of the late Marion and Septima Hollister Lights and lover of an obscure literary artist from Southern California, found himself in a concrete-block cell in the Clinch County Jail in Ciceroville, Georgia, guest of Sheriff Bull Tibbets and Special Agent Detlef Abercorn of the INS. The cell featured a stainless-steel toilet bolted to the floor and a cot bolted to the wall. Three of the walls were painted lime green and displayed an ambitious overlay of graffiti relating to Jesus Christ Our Savior, the probability of His coming, and the sex act as it was practiced between men and women, men and men, men and boys, and men and various other species. Crude drawings of a bearded Christ replete with halo alternated with representations of huge bloated phalluses that floated across the walls like dirigibles. The fourth wall, which gave onto a concrete walkway, was barred from floor to ceiling, like the monkey cage in a zoo. The whole place smelled of Pine Sol cut with urine.

Saxby was on his feet—he was too angry to sit. In the interstices of his anger he was alternately depressed and worried, anxious for Ruth—and for himself too. Had she helped the kid escape? Had she concealed him in the trunk? He wouldn’t put it past her, not after she’d hidden the whole business from him, not after she’d lied to him. Sure he was worried. He hadn’t seen the inside of a jail cell since college, when he’d spent a night in the lockup at Lake George on a drunk-and-disorderly charge. But that hardly made him a career criminal. And while he could appreciate that the whole business with the Japanese kid looked pretty suspicious, especially after what Ruth had done, and he could understand that Abercorn was frustrated and beginning to look more than a little foolish, it didn’t excuse a thing. They were such idiots. He was no criminal, couldn’t they see that? He was the one who’d reported the guy in the first place. And yet here they’d sicked their commandos on him and wrenched his vertebrae out of joint, they’d handcuffed him and humiliated him and dragged him off to jail like some Sicilian drug runner. They didn’t have to do that. He would have gone with them peaceably.

Or maybe he wouldn’t have. On second thought, he definitely wouldn’t have. That was the thing. Nothing could have gotten him off that island this morning—nothing short of physical force, that is—and the minute Donnager Stratton showed up he was going back, police cordon or no. What was he thinking?—settling the score with Abercorn and his henchman could wait.

The reason, of course, was Elassoma okefenokee (or Elassoma okefenokee lightsei—he couldn’t resist appending his own name, though he knew it was a bit premature, and, well, a little childish too). He’d found them. He’d finally found them. And he’d just gotten going, just thrown his nets and discovered the mother lode, when that brain-dead little storm trooper came at him from behind. Talk about bad timing—he’d finally found his albinos, over two hundred of them in his first six pulls, only to have them taken away from him. Or to be more accurate, he was taken away from them.

But it was amazing. There they were, right where Roy said they’d be. And the thing was, Roy hadn’t even wanted him to go out—not after the Nipponese escape artist popped out of the trunk between them and tumbled headlong into the swamp. “What in god’s name was that?” Roy had said, scratching his head and gaping out across the boat pond to where Hiro Tanaka was cutting a clean frothing wake to the other side. Saxby hadn’t been able to answer him. He thought he was hallucinating. It was as if he’d thrown a ball up in the air and it hadn’t come down, as if he’d turned on the gas range and flames had burst from his fingertips. His mouth fell open, his arms dangled like wash at his sides. But then he recovered himself, then the impossible became possible and he connected the trunk and Tupelo Island and the ground beneath his feet, and the anger came up on him like a thousand little cars racing out of control through his bloodstream. “You son of a bitch!” he bellowed, charging into the water like a bull alligator and shaking his fist at the retreating swimmer, “you, you”—he’d never used the words before, never, but out they came as if they were the very oleo of his vocabulary—“you Nip, you Jap, you gook!” He was standing there, knee-deep in the water, shaking his fist and waving his arms and shouting, “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you yet!,” when Roy took him by the belt and led him back to shore.

After he’d calmed down he told Roy the story, and that was when Roy put on his official face, the face of the second in command and de facto overseer of the Okefenokee National Wilderness Area with his offices in the tourist center at the Stephen C. Foster State Park and his unwavering allegiance to the mammals, birds, fishes and reptiles of the swamp, not to mention the Secretary of the Interior, a man who had more than a passing interest in law and order and public relations. “We can’t go out there now,” he said, “not after this.”

“And why the hell not?”

Roy looked offended. “Why, we’ve got to call the sheriff, the authorities. They’ll want to coordinate some sort of manhunt with our people on this end”—he was no longer addressing Saxby, but thinking aloud—”… of course he won’t get far out there before he’s stung, bitten and chewed half to death, presuming he doesn’t drown—and that in itself’s a big presumption …”

“Roy?”

“Hm?”

“I’m going out there just the same.”

Roy gave no sign that he’d heard him. “You say he’s Japanese?”

Saxby nodded.

“Well, you never know. From what I’ve heard of the Japanese—they’re pretty resourceful, aren’t they?” Roy tugged at the bill of his cap, stroked his nose as if it were detached from him. “Still and all, I’d wager they haven’t got anything like this over there, and resourcefulness can only take you so far, know what I mean?” He looked past Saxby to the low pine building that housed the tourist center and then back across the lagoon to the spot where Hiro had vanished in a vegetable embrace. “I’d say they’ll have him back here by sundown.”

“All the more reason to let me go—hell, the park’s still open, isn’t it?”

They both glanced at Roy’s boat: it was canted back on the trailer, the gentle surge of the water baptizing its slick fiberglass hull in one long continuous motion. This was Roy’s particular boat, the one he’d built himself for swamping, a marvel of poise and maneuverability. Their eyes fastened on the stenciled legend—the Pequod II—and both of them smiled. All round them were men with tackle boxes and coolers, their faces sun-inflamed, their eyes a squint of cracker blue. They glanced furtively at Roy and Saxby, the phenomenon of the amphibious Japanese no less marvelous than an eighty-pound catfish or a three-legged deer, but they went about their business as if it were the commonest thing in the world. Engines sputtered to life, boats cut the surface of the whiskey-complected water. For just a moment then, Roy relaxed his official face. “AH right, go ahead,” he said. “But you understand you’re on your own. I won’t be able to join you, not now. And if it gets bad,” he added, “I’ll come out there after you myself.”

And so Roy walked off toward the office and the telephone that would summon Bull Tibbets, Detlef Abercorn and Lewis Turco and a whole chin-thrusting, neck-stretching pack of intensely curious people representing the nation’s supremely curious press, and Saxby set out alone for Billy’s Island in Roy’s long low flat-bottomed boat.

It was early yet, and when Saxby got beyond the fishermen with their cane poles, straw hats and early-morning Budweisers, the swamp was still and silent, a place of immemorial wakings floating beneath a breath of mist. Roy’s directions were flawless—for all his easy country ways, when you came down to it he was as precise as a brain surgeon—and Saxby had no trouble finding the crude trail that led round to the back side of Billy’s Island. The trail was off-limits to anyone without a special permit, and since it wouldn’t admit any of the motor-driven rental boats in any case, it was little used, overgrown with cascades of honeysuckle and cassena. Saxby had to pole his way through, stopping from time to time to cut back the vegetation with the machete Roy had thought to provide. By nine o’clock the sweat had soaked right on through to his underwear and the ribs of his socks, and the boat was a traveling salad of chopped leaves, twigs and fat disoriented spiders. The drizzle had cleared off and the sun was coming on strong by the time he glided out onto the titi-fringed pond Roy had described right on down to the last lily pad.

The pond looked ordinary enough—fifty feet across, six or eight feet deep, a prairie beyond it snarled with marsh grass, pipewort and lily pads, the slash pine of Billy’s Island backing up on it from the rear. It was nothing more than an oversized gator wallow, really—in fact, an eight-footer hung in the water ahead of him, floating like a sky diver in the blue, its legs spread wide, the crenelated tail hanging motionless. Yes, the pond looked ordinary enough—no different from a thousand others—but to Saxby it was entirely unique, the pond of all ponds, the place in which the albino pygmy sunfish lurked in all its rare and recondite glory.

He could barely restrain himself. He wanted to toss out the minnow traps, float the seine, make the water churn with the hard flat caudal muscles of his quarry—but he knew better. Though it looked clear, the sun hot, the sky arching electric overhead, he knew the weather could change out here from moment to moment and that he had to set up camp first—just to be safe. Half an hour, that’s all it would take.

When he drifted back out onto the pond, the sun had set it aflame and the gator had gone (which was just as well—the last thing he needed was tangling an angry gator up in his net). He set and baited half a dozen minnow traps and then he floated the seine across the pond. He wasn’t particularly confident in the seine—if there were too many obstructions the net would snag and the fish would escape—but he was hoping to get lucky. Short of dynamite, the seine was the quickest and most efficient way to discover what lay beneath the surface. And there was no thrill like it—as the two sides of the net drew together like a purse, you could see the fish fighting it, roiling the water and beating at the mesh, and then, as you pulled it ashore, there they were, silver and gold, flashing in the bag like rare coin.

The first pull produced nothing—the net fouled on a sunken branch. But the second—the second hit the jackpot. There he was, drowned in sweat and a paste of crushed mosquitoes, up to his thews in the muck, the net sweeping closer, the neck of the bag constricting, and he could feel the weight and the life of them. And then he had the bag over the gunwale of the boat that floated beside him, and there they were. His albinos. Two of them, three, five, six and eight and ten, counting breathlessly as he plucked them from the farrago of thrashing fish, casting aside the darters and the bluegills and the ordinary dark-skinned pygmies like so much refuse. He put the good ones, the albinos, in an array of sloshing buckets in the bottom of the boat, and then he cast the net again and again. Finally, late in the afternoon, he forced himself to stop and take his treasure back to camp (he was like a forty-niner, a crazed old galoot onto the richest vein in the hills, and he didn’t want to stop, couldn’t, but he had to—the sun was slowly raising the temperature in the buckets and he was afraid he’d lose everything he had if he didn’t). Yes, and then he went back to camp to set the buckets in the shade beneath the trees. Yes. And then Turco hit him.

All the long way back to the dock, all the way up the rough wooden planks, through the phalanx of reporters and photographers and into the tourist center where Sheriff Bull Tibbets sat chewing his cud and stroking his gut as if it were a crystal ball, Saxby protested his innocence. He raged, he wheedled, he reasoned, pleaded, threatened, but Abercorn wouldn’t listen. Abercorn was angry. His jaw was set, his pink eyes were hard. “No more Mr. Nice Guy,” he said, and his voice was cold and uncompromising, “I’m through fooling around.” Saxby knew something he wasn’t telling him, he claimed—and so did Ruth—and there were going to be some charges leveled. People were going to jail here. This was serious business. Deadly serious. On the other hand, if Saxby cooperated—if Ruth cooperated—arrangements could be made, charges dropped. All he wanted was this illegal alien. And he was going to get him.

Saxby was furious, enraged, frightened. No matter what he said, they didn’t believe him. He knew nothing. But until he did know, until he told them precisely where Hiro Tanaka was and why and how he’d helped him escape, he was going to sit in a jail cell and work hard at remembering. For the longest while, Saxby couldn’t even think straight—all he wanted was to spring out of the chair, snap the handcuffs like some superhero and pound that acid-washed face till it burst like a tomato. But then Abercorn waved him away in disgust and they shipped him off to the Clinch County Jail in Ciceroville and gave him his phone call. He phoned his mother. She was a towering presence, all-powerful, the mother he’d clung to as a fatherless boy trying to survive a Yankee accent in a Guale Coast school. She honed her anger in the clearest tones of reassurance and threat: “Donnager Stratton will have you out of that cell inside the hour, I guarantee you that, and we will have the governor himself in on this by nightfall—really, I still cannot believe it—and those odious petty little agents will find themselves the ones in hot water, just you believe me.”

“Mama,” he’d said to her then, “Mama, they want Ruth down here.”

“Ruthie?” she repeated, and he could almost hear the tumblers clicking in her head. “Certainly they don’t think—?”

“They think everything, Mama. They want her down here to go out in the swamp with a megaphone or something and call out his name—they say she’s the one he knows, the only one he’ll listen to—”

“But that’s absurd.”

“That’s what I told them.” He thought of Abercorn, cold ridiculous Abercorn, and what he’d said: You’d be surprised at the power of the human voice. “But they’re not asking, Mama. They want her down here tomorrow morning or they’re going to lock her up too.” He paused. He was in a big room with lazy fans and wanted posters on the walls. The deputy was watching him. “You tell her that.”

Septima told her. And she didn’t like it. Not a bit. Ruth felt suddenly that she was losing her grip on Saxby, on Septima and Thanatopsis House and the whole wide brilliant world of celebrity and accomplishment that radiated out from it, felt as if she were clinging to a ledge above a yawning gulf while Jane Shine and Detlef Abercorn and even Septima herself beat at her fingers with their microphones and the hard flat unyielding plank of the law. She had no choice in the matter. In the morning Owen was going to drive her down to the Okefenokee Swamp and she was going to go out in a boat with Detlef Abercorn and Lewis Turco and anybody else they wanted to include and she was going to cry out Hiro’s name and beg him to surrender. That was what she was going to do—for Saxby and for Septima too. And maybe even for Hiro himself.

But that was tomorrow. Tonight she was going to read.

At nine o’clock the colonists gathered in the front parlor and settled themselves into the familiar easy chairs, loveseats and sofas in the glow of the subdued and very ordinary light that emanated from the reading lamps stationed round the room. There were no spotlights and there was no microphone. Ruth appeared promptly at nine, dressed as if she were going to an outdoor barbecue. She’d spent some time on her face, her nails and her hair, but the clothes she kept simple—the T-shirt, jeans and heels she’d first envisioned. She was determined that every detail of this reading would stand in opposition to the one that preceded it. There would be no cheap thrills tonight, no Swedish accents and maudlin histrionics—just work, honest work, presented in an honest voice.

The first thing Ruth noticed as she took her seat in the big armchair beneath the chandelier was that Septima hadn’t done her hair. She was wearing the same coif she’d worn for Jane’s reading, and though she looked elegant, always looked elegant, her hairdo was a bit ragged round the edges, as if she’d slept on it. The next thing Ruth noticed was Jane. La Shine was ensconced on the damask couch between Irving and Mignonette Teitelbaum, with Seezers, in his wheelchair, perched at the far end. She’d let down her hair, the great frozen shako of last night’s pelage combed out like a rug, its Medusan tendrils involved with Irving and Teitelbaum, woven into the fabric of the couch, providing cover for the icy glittering inhuman eyes. White silk pajamas—Ruth caught a glimpse of them beneath the typhoon of hair. Jane was relaxed, all right—she looked as if she’d been dropped into the couch from a passing jet. She was watching Ruth, a perfect little smirk of contempt ironed across her lips.

Ruth tried to ignore her, tried to ignore them all—but no, that wasn’t right. She had to be warm, personable, overflowing with camaraderie and joy in their shared and collective talents. She forced herself to look round the room, smiling into each pair of eyes. And then Septima stood, put her hands together, and said, simply, “Ruth Dershowitz.”

Ruth rose to a murmur of polite applause, and then she sat down again—she wouldn’t stand, she wouldn’t dominate them, she steadfastly refused to perform. This was the lesson of the reading, this was the corrective, the return to proper form, the example that would put Jane Shine in her place once and for all.

She began with “Two Toes,” introducing the selection in a voice that was hushed, barely inflected, the voice of one-on-one conversation, easy and intimate. As she spoke she began to warm to the moment and she looked out into the faces of her fellow colonists and felt something swelling inside her, something like love. She told them the genesis of the story—perhaps in too much detail, perhaps she erred there—told them of little Jessica McClure, whom they all remembered from the news accounts of her heroic infantine battle for survival in that dark Texas well shaft, described the process by which she, Ruth, had attempted in her humble and modest way to transmute the bare facts into art. And then she began to read, investing all her strength and the strange tingle inside her that was a kind of love for them all, even Jane, in the quiet authority of the human voice—the naked, unassisted, uninflected human voice.

She began with the section that showed little Jessica grown into a recalcitrant teenager unable to reconcile her soulless Texas life with the climactic hours spent in that Freudian tunnel deep underground. There was sex in this section, plenty of it—here she’d out-Shine Shine—and a kind of fierce negativity that was sure to electrify the Thalamuses and Grobians. Then she read a longish section that took the well-shaft girl, the little heroine of the nation, and put her into a brutal marriage with a tattooed drifter fifteen years her senior. She looked up from the page when she’d finished and gave her audience the most spontaneous and heartfelt smile of her life. The only thing was, they didn’t look exactly electrified—more the opposite. Their faces were noncommittal, withdrawn, lifeless: the term “stupefied” came to her. Or no, she was misreading them—they were stunned, that was all. She held the smile and there was a flutter of applause.

“Thank you,” she whispered, grinning blissfully, and she stirred her legs luxuriously, a cat waking from a nap in the sun. She could hardly believe it—here she was, La Dershowitz, holding them all, playing the role of the true and unpretentious artist, nearly drowning in the joy of it. “Next,” she said, her voice small and modest and thankful, “I’d like to share with you a section of a work in progress called ’Sebastopol’ “—and here she paused to irradiate Irving Thalamus with her smile—“a piece Irving has been generous enough to—how shall I say it?—to coach me on, for which I’m eternally grateful. Thank you, Irving.”

Irving briefly extricated himself from the explosion of Jane’s hair and gave her in return the great gleaming toothy Thalamus grin and said something that got them all laughing—Ruth didn’t quite catch it, but she knew from the tone that it was something winning, small tribute to the modesty and humility of La Dershowitz, the artist, the sharer, the humble organ of her work. She went on—at length, too much length, she would see that in retrospect—with an introduction to this piece as well, and then she read a lengthy section that consisted in its entirety of an interior monologue. The wife of the second couple—Babe, her name was and she was thir-tyish and delicately beautiful—was peeling shrimp and pounding octopus for a bouillabaisse and examining her unfulfilled life with Dexter, her lawyer husband, and the as yet unconsummated passion she felt for Marvel, the lawyer husband of her best friend Clarice, who together constituted the first couple. It was a story that featured more than a soupçon of sex—the story the Atlantic had turned down for its steaminess, in fact—but Ruth steered clear of it, selecting the section she did precisely because it was the only part of the piece that was relatively free of it. Jane had given them nothing but sex and Ruth had responded with her selection from “Two Toes”—no reason for overkill. Besides, the last piece, the tour de force and climax of the evening, was saturated with it.

She found herself drifting a bit during the “Sebastopol” selection—she was right there, reading carefully and with the proper lack of animation—but her mind took off on her, sailing back to the early evening when she was getting ready and Sax had called from Ciceroville. “Sax,” she’d gasped into the phone, “are you all right?” Brie and Sandy—were they a thing?—had been sitting there on the window seat in the foyer, chatting about editors, astrological signs and writers they knew mutually who’d gone to fat, baldness and loss of affect, and they raised their voices to give her some privacy. It was the quintessential La Dershowitz moment, audience and all—this was real drama, real life, her lover in jail, a manhunt going on, the press beating at the windows (she’d had calls from six newspapers already that afternoon).

“I’m fine,” he said. “Stratton had me out of here in two minutes and he’s slapping a false-arrest suit on them, all of them”—he paused to draw a long disgusted breath—“but still he thinks we ought in good faith to deal with them, you know, cooperate. They’ve got nothing on us—Jesus, I’m talking like somebody in a movie or 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 pièce de résistance, 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 Jōchō 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, unable to move, tiny iridescent flies settling on the mess even as it dripped through the slats of the platform to feed the massed and waiting mouths below. But then the pain tore at him again and he rose shakily and fumbled his way into the rough-wood cubicle of the toilet.

The flies greeted him. They rose from the chemical mouth of the thing, the crapper, in a miasma of dancing gnats and the reek of chemicals and human waste. He tore down his pants, the knife in his guts, the black steaming odor of shit—American shit, Julie Jeffcoat’s shit—stabbing at his nostrils. “Amerikajin” he cursed aloud as his guts exploded beneath him, the filth of them, flinging themselves down on plastic seats where a thousand others have flung themselves down before them, taking the dirt of the bowels to the table with them, sitting there over their food, as bland as stones, their buttocks and shoes reeking from the toilet. God, he thought, clutching at himself to keep from passing out with the pain of it, they were beasts, they were, and he hated them.

He didn’t know how long he sat there—he must have dozed—but he woke to something boring at his ankle and the sick corrupt reek of his own bowels. A film of cold sweat clung to his temples. He was sick—yellow fever, dysentery, encephalitis, hookworm, malaria, the dirty diseases of a dirty place—and he needed medicine, a bed, his obasan. But no, not his obasan—his mother, his dead mother, his mom. “Haha!” he cried out like an infant, his voice strained and odd in his own ears, “Mama!” And then he dozed again, seated there on that plastic throne where Julie Jeffcoat had sat and Jeff Jeffcoat and Jeffie and the legion of nameless butter-tinkers before them, white faces that crowded into his dream like a conquering army.

When he woke again he felt better. He wondered briefly where he was, and then he knew and the fear of the hakujin and of the chase seized him. They were here, they were sure to be here, and he was trapped. He thought of Musashi, the legendary samurai who’d once hidden from his enemies in a latrine, buried in offal, with only a straw through which to breathe, and then he was in motion. He sprang up off the seat as if it were electrified, hastily fastening the cutoffs and peering breathlessly through the crack of the door. He expected demons, long-noses, ketō, the waking nightmare into which he’d plunged from the wingdeck of the Tokachi-maru, expected shotguns, bullhorns, the bared teeth and rending snarls of the dogs … but there was nothing. Nothing but the swamp, stultified with sun, the womb and grave of everything. He cracked the door. Edged out. And then the heat hit him and his head ached and his eyes swam with a fresh assault of the fever.

The door was shut behind him and the planks creaking under his feet before he realized how wrong he was. There was something there on the platform with him, unmistakable, too big to miss, something slow-blooded and antediluvian and muscular that even now was swiveling its long grinning snout to fix him with a cold eye. This was a thing that dwarfed the platform, the serrated tail and one clawed foot hanging over the far edge and dipping into the slough beyond it, the rippled belly stretching the length of the planks, and in the foreground, the hard pale lump of the jaw pinning down the sack of sandwiches and the rest with the weight of an anvil. Hiro looked at this thing and he felt the fever loosen its grip. His heart was hammering at his rib cage, there was an ache in his temples. He had to form the words in his head before he could understand: he was standing six feet from a crocodile the length of a canoe and it was looking at him and he was looking at it. This was not good. This was bad and dangerous. This was a situation that might have taxed Jōchō himself.

For a long while the thing merely regarded him out of the motionless eye, frozen in its length and mass, the statue of a crocodile, carved of stone. Hiro could smell it, its pores giving up a wild scent of the deepest bottom, of decay and solitude and the dark quiet seep of gas. He wondered, briefly lucid, if he should back into the latrine and pull the door shut, leap for the rafters and live out his life on the roof, fling himself off the far edge of the deck and sprint for the trees through the slurry of muck and water. None of the options really grabbed him. In the end, he stood there, sailing in and out of the port of consciousness, wanting one moment to reach out and stroke the thing, to ride it into the cool depths and share his lunch with it, and in the next, contemplating his death in its iron jaws, the rending of the flesh, the transfiguration and ultimate conversion to crocodile shit. Finally, as if it had had enough of the whole business, the bloated inert thing came to sudden life and slid off the dock and into the water with a swift surprising grace, inadvertently taking the sack of food with it.

No matter, Hiro thought. He wasn’t hungry anyway.

The next time he came to himself he was lying on a mudbank somewhere, and the usual things were feeding on him. He glanced down at his feet and saw that he’d lost the Top-Siders, and saw too that his feet were bloated and raw, nicked in a hundred places. The small shapeless things, the things he’d pulled from his legs an eon ago outside the Coca-Cola store, clung thickly to his calves and thighs. He sat up and pulled them off, one by one, and each left a livid wet spot of blood to mark its forward progress. He made a nest of his intertwined fingers, too much a part of things now to bother with the mosquitoes and green flies, and watched the clouds converge on the dying sun.

He had places to go, things to do: he knew that. But he felt light, not only in his head but in his bones too, felt drunk—gloriously, blissfully, rapturously drunk. Had he been drinking sake? Yes, he was in his bunk now and they were crossing the Pacific with its thick green skin and he and Ajioka-san had been drinking sake in the canteen and talking of America, the excitement of it, America with its movie stars and rock and roll and long-legged women and beef. Not to mention the exchange rate. An ordinary seaman, even a wiper, would be rich there. And there was so much room, the Amerikajin in their mansions with four bathrooms and their Cadillacs with whiskey bars in the back seat. The sake was hot because there was a blow and the wind had chilled him on his watch, and now he was drunk.

But it was wonderful. A whole circus passing before his eyes as he lay there, birds with feet bigger than their wings springing from lily pad to lily pad, the holy crane gangling overhead, frogs swelling and deflating all round him. He turned his cheek on its pillow of ooze and there was a frog right beside him, crouched big-bellied over its coiled legs. And then it inflated its hara magically and gave out with a booming eructation that startled all the other frogs for the briefest instant till they could inflate themselves in turn and belch back a response. It was funny. Hilarious. Better than a cartoon. He laughed till he felt the sword in his gut and then he sat up and struggled with his pants.

If the day was high comedy, the night was tragic. It closed in on him like a shroud and it was haunted and deadly. The cold settled in and the swamp rang with shrieks of protest while Hiro shivered in his wet T-shirt and his wet cutoffs. The insects feasted on him and he slapped at them now, but he was a pincushion, a blood bank, his skin swollen in its hills and valleys till it felt like a text in braille. Late, very late, when the moon was a frozen speck in the sky, a reptile, thick around as his ankle, nosed in beside him for warmth. He felt it there, nosing at his armpit, his crotch, poking its bald face at his nostrils for the heat of his breath.

In the morning, he was worse. He shivered in his bed of muck till the sun rose to redeem him and then he lay there like a coldblooded thing, like an alligator hauled out on the bank, and the blood boiled in his veins. This time the fever took him back to Kyoto and he was a small boy clutching at his obāsan’s hand as they made their way through the festive Friday night crowd on Kawaramachi Street. There was a parade of neon, the smells of gyoza, soba, sweet broiled eel, people everywhere. His obāsan was taking him to meet Grandfather for a night out in celebration of his birthday—his sixth. They were going to have udon and tempura at Auntie Okubo’s and then they were going to the coffee shop round the corner to have American sweets, chocolate fudge sundae and banana split. His free hand, the left, was thrust snugly into the grip of a new fielder’s mitt with Reggie Jackson’s name etched into the leather in flowing American characters. A pachinko parlor: “Obāsan, please, let me play, just one game,” and he tugged her arm and he was off balance and staggered into a passing woman, an old woman, dressed not in western-style clothes like everyone else but in kimono and obi. She looked at him hard. “Sumimasen,” he said, bowing deeply, “excuse me, please.” Obāsan elaborated on the apology, but the old woman pinned him with her black hard eyes. “Gaijin,” she hissed finally and turned to go, but Hiro lost his head, the insult stinging like vinegar on an open wound, and he snatched at the wide flowing sleeve of her gown. “Amerikajin desu,” he said, “I’m an American.”

But he wasn’t. And he isn’t. He’d seen the hate in their eyes. He pushed himself up from the mudbank, the sweat burning at his temples, and thought of the orange soda the Jeffcoats had left him. And where was it? Crushed beneath the mute unthinking weight of the thing on the platform, the beast, the dinosaur that was America. He saw it then, orange fluid leaking from beneath the wattled belly like urine, like pale diluted blood. But it wasn’t blood, it was orange soda, and he longed for it now. The sweat stung his eyes and the fever blasted his throat: he could hardly breathe for thirst. He stood dazedly and saw the water all around him, an ocean, a planet of water. And then he bent to it, knowing he shouldn’t, knowing it would only make matters worse, bent to it and drank till he could feel it coming up.

Sometime during the course of the afternoon the clouds began to bunch up in the west, bare knuckles of white shading to gray and blue-gray and black. The sky receded, the sun melted away. The wind came up then, moderate but steady and with a taste of the Gulf Coast on it. Aching in every joint, blistered and burned till he wondered if they’d mistake him for a Negro, Hiro lay there on his mudbank, and the mud accommodated him, molding itself to the cup of his head, the spoon of his shoulders and the ceaselessly working jackknife of his shrunken buttocks and wasted thighs. Rain was coming and another night of cold and wet, of shivers and fever and the sword in the gut, but Hiro didn’t have the energy to move. And what would he do anyway? Put up his watertight tent and slip into a down bag? Fire up his hibachi and cook himself a cheeseburger—medium rare, hold the onion—over the glowing white coals of his charcoal briquettes? A dream, nothing but a dream. He watched the clouds bunch and spread and bunch again, and then he let his eyes fall shut.

He was back in Kyoto, eleven years old—a man, his ojisan said. His grandmother was at work, and he and Grandfather were watching TV, an American show in which a collie dog with hora saves a straw-haired boy from the dangers of ten lifetimes, week after week, in a neat half-hour format. “Grandfather,” Hiro asked, “tell me about my mother.” Grandfather’s legs were thin as fence posts beneath the folds of his yukata. They were sitting side by side on the tatami floor. Dressers crammed with clothing, soap, thread, mirrors and combs and all the other odds and ends of a household mounted the walls, one atop the other. “Nothing to tell.” His grandfather shrugged.

“She died,” Hiro said.

Grandfather studied him. On the TV, a long snaking line of bare-chested Aryan men stood on a beach, lifting mugs of Kirin draft to their lips in perfect synchronization. “She died,” he agreed. And then, because Hiro was a man now and because of the moving shadows the TV cast on the wall and because he was old and he needed to, Grandfather told him the story, and he spared nothing.

Sakurako was a failure. Some demon seed had got into her and she gave up her studies, the possibility of a decent marriage and family, the love and respect of her parents, for foreign music—and finally, a foreign husband. A hippie. An American. When he deserted her, as Grandfather knew he would, she sank into a shame worse than miscegenation, worse than the murder of her family. She became a bar hostess, “mama-san” to a hundred men. When she wheeled her bicycle through the old streets of Kyoto, her half-breed infant strapped to her back, people stopped to stare. She was doomed and she knew it. Worse: her child was doomed too. He was a happa, a gaijin, forever an outcast. Her only recourse was to go to America, to find Doggo and live there among the American hippies in a degradation that knew no hope or bottom. She had no money, no passport, no hope or knowledge of her hippie husband. She tried to come home. Grandfather barred the door.

Eleven years old, his hair cropped close and his eyes like two tortoiseshell beads, Hiro sat riveted. The television spoke to him but he didn’t hear. He was that happa. He was doomed.

“And then,” ojisan said, “and then one night she did what she had to do.” Hiro knew in that moment what it was, the knowledge sinking into his blood like a stone in a pond, at once and forever engulfing the flimsy edifice of his grandmother’s lies. His mother hadn’t succumbed to some vague disease—always vague, never a name for it. No. She died by her own hand. But the shock of that sudden knowledge was a ripple compared with the rest of it: she’d tried to take Hiro with her, tried to commit oyako-sbinjü, parent-child suicide, and she’d failed even at that. He knew the gardens at the Heian shrine, didn’t he? his grandfather asked.

Hiro knew them well—his obāsan took him there to feed the koi in the pools and sit and contemplate the sculptured perfection of nature. The mouths—his grandfather spoke and he saw the mouths of the koi gaping at the surface.

And the bridge?

Hiro nodded.

One night, late—she was racked with an insomnia that fed on her shame—she came back drunk from her barroom and strapped the infant to her back. The gates to the shrine were closed, the shaven-headed monks long asleep. She propped her bicycle against the wall and hoisted herself over. In the dark she made her way to the low covered bridge and she lifted the infant from her back. Frantic, scolding herself in a nagging broken whisper, her breath coming in gasps, she fought her way back to the path and dislodged a rock, an ornamental boulder, tearing at it with her nails till the rocks beside it were painted with her blood. She pushed at the rock, strained against it, rolled and shoved and beat at it. Finally she worked it across the planks of the bridge to where the infant, where Hiro, lay sleeping. In a final mad superhuman effort she lifted the stone to the rail, forced it into the breast of her bargirl’s kimono, pinned the child to her and gave herself up to the inexorable pull of gravity and the black transfiguration of the water below.

Water. Hiro woke to it, rain on his face. His mother was dead, but he was alive, flung from her arm as she hit the water and caught up in the muck, the muck in which he was mired now, hopeless, screaming, and the bald-headed monks came running. He struggled to sit up. Lightning tore at the sky. The rain seethed across the water, leaden pellets of it, beating the surface to a froth, hammering at his cushion of mud. Monks, he thought, where were they when you needed them? And he began to laugh, wheezing, delirious, sick and starved and hunted, he laughed like a boy at a Saturday matinee.

But wait: what was that? Out there, beyond the trees and the crack of the storm? A voice. A human voice. The thunder rolled across the sky, harsh and angry. The lightning sizzled. But there it was again—he knew that voice. It was, it was—

“Hiro, Hiro Tanaka, can you bear me? It’s Ruth. I—Want—To—Help—You!”

Help me.

“Hiro. Listen to me. I—Want—To—Help—You!”

It was, it was—his mother, his haha, his mama!

He was on his feet, rain in his face, the silly grinning T-shirt swirling round him in tatters. “Mama!” he cried. “Mama!”

A silence, deep and expectant, a silence that reverberated over the swamp and through the storm. “Hiro?” the voice called and it came from everywhere, from nowhere, ubiquitous as the voice of an angel.

“Haha, haha!” he cried, over and over, till he was breathless, till he was cold, till his brain locked up on him and there was no other word in the language. And then he saw it, the boat breaking the mist as in a dream, coming toward him, the anxious white face in the bow—his mother, it was his mother, come for him at last—and behind her, crouched there at her side, hippie hair and hippie beard, he knew that face—it was Doggo, yes, Doggo, his own Amerikajin father.

And he stood there, in the rain, and he called to them, called till he was hoarse, called Mother, called Father.