East is East

It was early yet, and when Saxby got beyond the fishermen with their cane poles, straw hats and early-morning Budweisers, the swamp was still and silent, a place of immemorial wakings floating beneath a breath of mist. Roy’s directions were flawless—for all his easy country ways, when you came down to it he was as precise as a brain surgeon—and Saxby had no trouble finding the crude trail that led round to the back side of Billy’s Island. The trail was off-limits to anyone without a special permit, and since it wouldn’t admit any of the motor-driven rental boats in any case, it was little used, overgrown with cascades of honeysuckle and cassena. Saxby had to pole his way through, stopping from time to time to cut back the vegetation with the machete Roy had thought to provide. By nine o’clock the sweat had soaked right on through to his underwear and the ribs of his socks, and the boat was a traveling salad of chopped leaves, twigs and fat disoriented spiders. The drizzle had cleared off and the sun was coming on strong by the time he glided out onto the titi-fringed pond Roy had described right on down to the last lily pad.

The pond looked ordinary enough—fifty feet across, six or eight feet deep, a prairie beyond it snarled with marsh grass, pipewort and lily pads, the slash pine of Billy’s Island backing up on it from the rear. It was nothing more than an oversized gator wallow, really—in fact, an eight-footer hung in the water ahead of him, floating like a sky diver in the blue, its legs spread wide, the crenelated tail hanging motionless. Yes, the pond looked ordinary enough—no different from a thousand others—but to Saxby it was entirely unique, the pond of all ponds, the place in which the albino pygmy sunfish lurked in all its rare and recondite glory.

He could barely restrain himself. He wanted to toss out the minnow traps, float the seine, make the water churn with the hard flat caudal muscles of his quarry—but he knew better. Though it looked clear, the sun hot, the sky arching electric overhead, he knew the weather could change out here from moment to moment and that he had to set up camp first—just to be safe. Half an hour, that’s all it would take.

When he drifted back out onto the pond, the sun had set it aflame and the gator had gone (which was just as well—the last thing he needed was tangling an angry gator up in his net). He set and baited half a dozen minnow traps and then he floated the seine across the pond. He wasn’t particularly confident in the seine—if there were too many obstructions the net would snag and the fish would escape—but he was hoping to get lucky. Short of dynamite, the seine was the quickest and most efficient way to discover what lay beneath the surface. And there was no thrill like it—as the two sides of the net drew together like a purse, you could see the fish fighting it, roiling the water and beating at the mesh, and then, as you pulled it ashore, there they were, silver and gold, flashing in the bag like rare coin.

The first pull produced nothing—the net fouled on a sunken branch. But the second—the second hit the jackpot. There he was, drowned in sweat and a paste of crushed mosquitoes, up to his thews in the muck, the net sweeping closer, the neck of the bag constricting, and he could feel the weight and the life of them. And then he had the bag over the gunwale of the boat that floated beside him, and there they were. His albinos. Two of them, three, five, six and eight and ten, counting breathlessly as he plucked them from the farrago of thrashing fish, casting aside the darters and the bluegills and the ordinary dark-skinned pygmies like so much refuse. He put the good ones, the albinos, in an array of sloshing buckets in the bottom of the boat, and then he cast the net again and again. Finally, late in the afternoon, he forced himself to stop and take his treasure back to camp (he was like a forty-niner, a crazed old galoot onto the richest vein in the hills, and he didn’t want to stop, couldn’t, but he had to—the sun was slowly raising the temperature in the buckets and he was afraid he’d lose everything he had if he didn’t). Yes, and then he went back to camp to set the buckets in the shade beneath the trees. Yes. And then Turco hit him.