East is East

“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.”