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 res
t 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:
I don’t care if it rains or freezes,
Long as I got my plastic Jesus
Glued up own the dashboard of my car.
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.