East is East

“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.