East is East

Ruth dropped the tags in the wastebasket and crossed the room to hang the coat in the closet. The coat was brick red—not neon red, not flame red, not hello-are-you-acquainted-with-me-yet red—but a more restrained and dramatic shade. A more mature shade. In the course of the past week a sea change had occurred in Ruth, a change that saw her opt for the less flashy color, a change that had brought her to Savannah and required her to borrow fifteen hundred dollars from her father for three new outfits, two purses, a pair of scintillating (but mature) black snakeskin pumps and the Italian coat. What it amounted to was this: she was now a journalist. On assignment. Not that fiction wouldn’t always be her first love and true métier, and she hoped to get back to it someday—someday soon—but she’d had an offer she couldn’t refuse.

The whole thing began with Hiro. Began on that grim morning when she was impressed into the service of the INS, the morning after the single worst night of her life. Nothing could cheer her that night. Her reading had been a holocaust of disaster, a funnel of ridicule for as long as Thanatopsis existed, and Jane Shine had put her down with the finality of a gravedigger. Sandy had tried his best to distract her afterward, and Irving was especially solicitous, but she felt as if the world had fallen to ash around her. Worse: all she had to look forward to now was the wrath of Saxby, the intransigence of Septima and the contempt of unknown sheriffs, the speckle-faced Abercorn and his loathsome little factotum. She went to bed after a single drink, the other colonists looking shrouds at her, and she pulled the darkness down around her and plunged into sleep as into a bottomless hole.

In the morning, it was the swamp. And Saxby. He was angry, upset, resentful, his eyes full of accusation and hurt. She met him out front of the Tender Sproats Motel and threw herself into his arms like a war bride while Owen and a potbellied little brown man in a tractor cap looked on. They were on a tight schedule, the police were waiting, the pygmy fish languishing in their far-flung buckets, but she couldn’t help getting the feel of the role. She was abused and misunderstood, she was self-sacrificing and courageous, giving herself up to her enemies so her man could go free … and she was a humanitarian too, going out into the pit of nowhere, fighting back mosquitoes, snakes, pygmy fish and worse, to save a poor misguided Japanese boy. She could feel her eyes beginning to water over the complexities of it. “Give me five minutes, Sax,” she whispered, “that’s all I ask. Five minutes alone with you.”

He hesitated. There were fish in his eyes—and something else too, hard and vengeful. But then he took her hand, led her to his room and pulled the door firmly shut behind them.

It wasn’t the time for love, though the thought of it came to her in an involuntary little spasm and her pulse quickened just perceptibly. She moved into his arms and let the tears come. Again and then again she reassured him that the thing with Hiro was nothing, totally innocent, a mistake, and that she’d been using him for her fiction and had no intention of helping him escape or find his way into the trunk of that car. He had to believe her. He did believe her, didn’t he?

Three hours in the Clinch County Jail hadn’t improved his temper any, but he was so fish-obsessed he couldn’t really focus his anger for more than a moment at a time. They were out there, his albinos, in five plastic buckets, without protection. He had to get to them and he’d worry about the rest later. “I believe you,” he said.

As it turned out, they drove down to the swamp together in the Mercedes, Owen following in his Mazda. Driving, his forearm slouched easily over the wheel, the radio up high, Saxby began to relax, chattering on about his fish and his nets and his tanks until Ruth began to think things would work out after all. When they arrived, Abercorn and Turco were waiting for them, as were the local sheriff, about two hundred sunburned gawkers with campers, coolers and smoking barbecues, and a throng of media people who came at Ruth with drawn microphones and flailing notepads. All this for poor Hiro? she thought, and then the seed of it, the first stirring: And for me? She ran a hand through her hair, put on a committed and absorbed look for the photographers. Was she here to save Hiro Tanaka? someone wanted to know. Was she romantically involved with him? Was he as dangerous as they said? She knew this role, this one was easy. “No comment,” she chirped, and she stepped high, moving right along till the police cordon opened up for her and the reporters fell away like so many flies.