East is East

The rain drove down. The swamp festered and hummed. And then Turco was on him like some sort of parasite, choking him, forcing his face into the water, twisting his arms back till they went tight in the shoulders. They hauled him over the side like a fish and laid him face-up on the floor of the boat, and now his animation was gone—he looked half-dead lying there, his head thrown back and his sick tan eyes swimming in their sockets. They wouldn’t let her touch him. All she wanted was to cradle him, hold his head in her lap, but they wouldn’t let her. She lost control then, for just a moment, shoving at Turco, cursing him, and he came back at her with a ferocity that stopped her heart. He didn’t touch her, not this time, but the look on his face was a thing she would never forget—only the very thinnest single played-out strand of wire was holding him back. All the long way back to the dock she sat there, staring out on nothing, the rain beating at her, feeling helpless, feeling like an apostate, feeling violated.

That was the low point.

When they got back to the dock, when the crowd overwhelmed the thin line of police and pushed their way through to get a glimpse of Hiro Tanaka, the desperado, the jailbreaker, the foreigner, their plain sunburned faces and steady pale eyes prepared for any extreme of outrage and shock, when a kind of frenzy consumed the press and even the police were hard-pressed to clamp down on their wads of Redman and retain their equanimity, that’s when things began to turn. They were all over her, all over him. The police shouldered their way through, cleared a channel to the ambulance, the white arms and legs and sure hands of the paramedics, rain driving down and down and down. The lights flashed, the siren screamed and Hiro was gone, Ruth clinging dazedly to the picture of him laid out on the stretcher, Turco hanging over him like a vampire. They gave her five minutes, and in a fog she found her way to the ladies’ room at the tourist center and wiped the mash of insects and sweat from her face, tied her hair up in a scarf one of the park girls gave her, and stepped out into the lobby to face them.

It was then, only then, that she began to realize just how big a story this was. And how big a part she’d played in it. And what she alone knew that no one else did. Forget Jessica McClure and the woman in the surf, this was the story of the hour and she was at the center of it. They jabbed microphones at her, there were lights and flashbulbs, and she knew that she had a story here, not a short story, not some labored fiction that strove for some obscure artistic truth, but a real true tough hard and painful real-life story—and what’s more, she was the heroine of it. The realization hit her in a single glowing flash-lit moment of epiphany. She smiled for the cameras.

The following day, jane had her accident.

Ruth was back at Thanatopsis, back in the good graces of Septima, back in the hive, the INS had their man and Saxby had his fish. She’d treated her inflamed epidermis to alternating hot and cold baths laced with Epsom salts, dabbed at each of her myriad swellings with alcohol and calamine lotion and slept till noon. Eating a very late breakfast on the patio—no one would have expected her to work after the ordeal she’d been through—she’d run into Irving Thalamus, who was nursing a hangover with the aid of a tall Calistoga and gin and the New York Review of Books. She had a long talk with Irving about her idea, about doing an extended magazine piece or even a book about the whole incident, and Irving had put her in touch with his agent, Marker McGill, of the venerable McGill Madden Agency. That was encouraging, but she was still feeling low over the disaster of her reading, though everyone assured her that it had gone off fine, even if it was a bit on the long side, and feeling lower yet over Hiro. She couldn’t get the shock of it out of her head, the way he’d looked with his fevered eyes and wasted limbs, his sunken cheeks and lacerated flesh—and the leeches, leeches all over him like sticking plaster—and the way he’d come to her. That made her feel lower than anything. He loved her. He trusted her. And she’d betrayed him. But then they hadn’t given her a choice. And in the long run it was for his own good—no jail could be worse than that swamp, and there was no question but that he would have died out there.