East is East

Ruth looked down at her lap. She was still clutching the manila folder. When she looked up again, she’d made her decision. “No,” she said finally, “I’ll read.”

The Power of the Human Voice

The first thing he was going to do when they got him out of here was find that little paramilitary goon with the scraggly beard and kick his ass into the next county. And Abercorn too, that crud. The strong-arm tactics might go down with some poor scared hyperventilating wetback drowning in his own sweat, but he’d be damned if anybody was going to slap him around. Or Ruth either. It was unnecessary, totally unnecessary. It was outrageous, that’s what it was.

Saxby Lights, scion of the venerable Tupelo Island clan, son of the late Marion and Septima Hollister Lights and lover of an obscure literary artist from Southern California, found himself in a concrete-block cell in the Clinch County Jail in Ciceroville, Georgia, guest of Sheriff Bull Tibbets and Special Agent Detlef Abercorn of the INS. The cell featured a stainless-steel toilet bolted to the floor and a cot bolted to the wall. Three of the walls were painted lime green and displayed an ambitious overlay of graffiti relating to Jesus Christ Our Savior, the probability of His coming, and the sex act as it was practiced between men and women, men and men, men and boys, and men and various other species. Crude drawings of a bearded Christ replete with halo alternated with representations of huge bloated phalluses that floated across the walls like dirigibles. The fourth wall, which gave onto a concrete walkway, was barred from floor to ceiling, like the monkey cage in a zoo. The whole place smelled of Pine Sol cut with urine.

Saxby was on his feet—he was too angry to sit. In the interstices of his anger he was alternately depressed and worried, anxious for Ruth—and for himself too. Had she helped the kid escape? Had she concealed him in the trunk? He wouldn’t put it past her, not after she’d hidden the whole business from him, not after she’d lied to him. Sure he was worried. He hadn’t seen the inside of a jail cell since college, when he’d spent a night in the lockup at Lake George on a drunk-and-disorderly charge. But that hardly made him a career criminal. And while he could appreciate that the whole business with the Japanese kid looked pretty suspicious, especially after what Ruth had done, and he could understand that Abercorn was frustrated and beginning to look more than a little foolish, it didn’t excuse a thing. They were such idiots. He was no criminal, couldn’t they see that? He was the one who’d reported the guy in the first place. And yet here they’d sicked their commandos on him and wrenched his vertebrae out of joint, they’d handcuffed him and humiliated him and dragged him off to jail like some Sicilian drug runner. They didn’t have to do that. He would have gone with them peaceably.

Or maybe he wouldn’t have. On second thought, he definitely wouldn’t have. That was the thing. Nothing could have gotten him off that island this morning—nothing short of physical force, that is—and the minute Donnager Stratton showed up he was going back, police cordon or no. What was he thinking?—settling the score with Abercorn and his henchman could wait.

The reason, of course, was Elassoma okefenokee (or Elassoma okefenokee lightsei—he couldn’t resist appending his own name, though he knew it was a bit premature, and, well, a little childish too). He’d found them. He’d finally found them. And he’d just gotten going, just thrown his nets and discovered the mother lode, when that brain-dead little storm trooper came at him from behind. Talk about bad timing—he’d finally found his albinos, over two hundred of them in his first six pulls, only to have them taken away from him. Or to be more accurate, he was taken away from them.