East is East

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?”