East is East

“La D.,” Sandy said, “what’s the poop?” He was already reaching for the vodka, the glass, the glistening bucket of ice.

“Nothing much,” Ruth said with a shrug, “—working, that’s about it.” What was she going to say—that she was harboring a fugitive from justice? She smiled at Ina. Ina smiled back.

“Straight, with a twist, right?”

Ruth nodded, and Sandy handed her the drink. The windows were full of golden light, and for a time, she merely stood there, caught up in the richness of the moment. Saxby was off somewhere with his nets and traps and hip waders, but she’d see him before the night was out—he’d promised her—and Hiro was back at the cabin, lying low. Waiting for her. Depending on her. For the first time in days she felt good, felt like her old self. But then the chatter began to drift in from the dining room and she had to concentrate hard to filter out Jane Shine’s maddening titter. When she lifted the glass to her lips, the vodka had turned sour on her. The moment was gone.

“You see this?” Sandy asked, easing a copy of the Breeze across the bar. She looked at it a moment before she saw it, and then she set the vodka down, ALIEN INVASION! the headline screamed in 24-point type, and beneath it there was a grainy picture of Hiro, looking sheepishly out from the page. Just under his chin, like some sort of growth, was a card bearing a series of mysterious ideographs and a seven-digit number. He looked lost and hopeless, and if she hadn’t known better, she would have guessed he was about twelve years old.

“Pretty desperate-looking character, huh?” Sandy said with a grin.

Ruth didn’t answer. She was scanning the columns of print, the boxed stories that set off the eyewitness accounts of Hiro’s rampage through the grottoes and flowerbeds of Tupelo Shores Estates. There was an interview with the woman who’d unwittingly harbored him; a statement from the next-door neighbor who claimed the fugitive had terrorized her by running unannounced through her yard; an account of the death, due to cardiac arrest, of one Olmstead White, who was overcome while confronting the suspect who’d attacked him in his home three weeks earlier.

“This Japanese guy’s really up shit creek, huh?” Sandy was grinning still. He leaned across the bar, gazing up at Ruth from beneath the dangle of his bleached locks. This was high comedy.

Ina sipped white wine with an ice cube in it. Her voice was breathy and small, considering the size of her frame. “I wish they’d just leave the poor man alone—I mean, just look at him”—and she bent forward to tap the paper with one lacquered nail—“does he look dangerous to you?”

Ruth was reading about Sheriff Peagler and how he’d vowed to put an end to this lawlessness one way or another—the fugitive wasn’t even an American citizen, didn’t even belong in this country—and no, he wouldn’t rule out shooting the expletive-deleted on sight.

“Get these hog farmers stirred up …” Ina trailed off.

“Uh-huh, that’s what I mean,” Sandy said, “it’s going to be like something out of The Chase.” He paused to sip at his screwdriver. “You know that movie? Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford?”

Ruth looked up at him for the first time. “Yeah,” she said, “I mean no. Listen, you mind if I take this, the paper, I mean?”

Ruth skipped dinner that night. She paid a quick visit to the kitchen, where Rico was scurrying around under the supervision of the head chef (Armand de Bouchette, the man who’d made Thanatopsis preeminent among artists’ colonies—so far as cuisine was concerned, at any rate), and she filled a pair of insulated lunch buckets with pompano en papillote, articbauts au beurre noir, steamed baby eggplant, French bread and potatoes in their own essence. “A romantic evening for two, eh?” De Bouchette was standing over her, the toque cocked back on his head, eyebrows lifted in amusement. He was in his late fifties, on the run from a string of bad marriages, a man who liked to sip cognac and spread his hand casually across the buttocks of the female colonists. “You and Saxbee? Or have you maybe been up to something you don’t tell us about?”

Ruth kept her head down, busy with the lunch buckets. “Working late, that’s all, Armand. Sax is going to join me later—if he gets back in time. Real romantic.” Then she turned her full-force smile on him, slipped a bottle of wine from the rack above the counter, and left him groping after her retreating flank.