East is East

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.