East is East

In the next moment she stood face to face with Turco and Abercorn. Ruth felt Saxby tense beside her, but she clung to him and he held back. Abercorn stepped forward, his patchy face and artificial hair hidden beneath the brim of the most ridiculous hat she’d ever seen outside of a circus. He stood a head taller than anyone else in the crowd. “Glad you could make it,” he said, and there was nothing friendly about it. “The boat’s this way.” She pecked Sax a kiss, a kiss recorded by the click of lenses and the pop of flashbulbs from beyond the police line, and then she went off with him.

After that, it was the swamp. With a vengeance. There was the stink of it, first of all—the whole place smelled like the alley out back of a fish market. Then there were the bugs, legions of them, of every known species and appetite, not to mention the snakes in the trees or the blistered scum on the water. She looked out over the matted surface to the ghostly trees beyond and to the trees that shadowed them and so on all the way to the horizon and thought of a diorama she’d once seen depicting the dinosaurs in their heyday. But then the diorama was in a cool, dark, antiseptic museum, and the trees were painted on.

And then a man she hadn’t noticed till that moment was helping her into the boat—he was clean-shaven, neither young nor old, and he wore a baseball cap with a pair of fold-down sunglasses attached to the visor. She sat up front beside a pair of loudspeakers—the sort of arrangement local politicians favor as they Doppler up and down the streets—while the man in the cap climbed into the rear and busied himself with the engine. It was a big boat, long, wide and flat-bottomed, and reassuringly stable. She looked straight ahead as Abercorn stationed himself in the middle and Turco, in his jungle fighter’s costume, crouched down just behind her. The motor coughed, sputtered and then roared to life, and they were off.

By eleven o’clock she was hoarse, thirsty, sweat-soaked and sunburned, and bitten in all the key regions of her anatomy. Every time she paused to catch her breath or take a sip of water Turco’s nasty little voice was there to fill the void, urging her on: “Come on, come on, keep it up—I tell you it’s going to work, I know these people, I know them.” It didn’t take her long to realize that this was his idea, yet another demented variation on the boom box and the designer clothes. She wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t speak to him, wouldn’t so much as turn her head, but she kept it up—for Saxby’s sake, for Septima’s sake, for her own sake and Hiro’s—kept it up till she had no voice left.

It must have been about four when the sky clouded over and the storm came up on them. Abercorn and the man in the cap—his name was Watt-Something and he was one of the sheriff’s men—wanted to go in, but Turco wouldn’t hear of it. He was clenched like a fist, his face dark and angry. His tone was pathology itself. “I can smell him,” he hissed. “He’s out there, I know it.” And then to Ruth: “Keep it up, goddamn it, keep it up.”

She held the microphone to her lips and called out Hiro’s name, over and over, though she knew it was absurd, hopeless, as asinine as serenading the bugs with Donna Summer. “Hiro!” she bellowed to the tree toads and tuitles, to the birds and bears and the mute identical trees, “Hiro!,” and the gnats swarmed down her throat and up her nose. She was still at it when the storm broke and the rain lashed them like a whip, windblown and harsh. And then all of a sudden Turco was pinching her arm and shushing her and there it was, thin and plaintive, the distant rain-washed bleat of subjection and defeat: “Haha! Haha! Haha!”

Hiro came to her arms, came running, awash in filth, bleeding from every pore, his clothes hanging in shreds, splashing through the sludge like a boy coming in off the playground. “Haha! Haha!” he cried, “Okāsan! Okāsan!” He was crazed, delirious, she could see that, could see it in his face and in the mad wide stare of his eyes. Turco crouched like an insect behind her and Hiro spread his arms wide, running, splashing, stumbling for her, and she felt in that instant that nothing mattered in the world but this poor tortured man, this sweet man, this man she’d kept and fed and loved, and she called out his name once more—”Hiro!”—and this time, for the first time, she meant it.