East is East

The next night—saturday—ruth didn’t turn up for Cocktails, and Saxby sat with his mother on the veranda and watched for her. When Armand rang the dinner bell and still she hadn’t come in from the studio, he ambled into the main dining room and sat at one of the small tables in back with Septima and Owen. His mother rattled on about colony business—who was coming in the fall and how so-and-so had been turned down at Yaddo and how she wouldn’t dream of inviting her—and he closed his ears, shut down his brain and lifted the fork to his lips. After dinner he retired to the back parlor to brood over his aquarium. That morning he’d drained the tainted water, discarded the plants and gravel and rocks—he was going to give the thing a rest for a couple of days, and then he was going to start all over again. But he’d learned his lesson. This time he was going to Aquarium City and he was going to be patient. No more fooling around: he was going to breed albinos and he was going to make money. And what’s more, he was going to take his place among the great amateur aquarists of the century: William Voderwinkler, Daniel DiCoco and Paul Hahnel, father of the fancy guppy.

He tried the title out on himself—Saxby Lights, father of the albino pygmy sunfish—and then he put on a tape—Albinoni, one of his mother’s favorites—and settled into the easy chair with the latest National Geographic.

He tried to read an article about the declining resilience of beards among Pacific Coast mussels and its implications for the future of the shellfish industry, but he couldn’t concentrate. He was restless. There was a reading that night—Bob Penick was previewing some new poems—but Saxby really didn’t have much use for poetry and would have gone only to please Ruth—and Ruth wasn’t back yet. A shadow fell over the house, and he reached to turn on the lamp: it was coming on to dusk.

And then suddenly he was out of the chair, his mind made up in an instant—damn it, he didn’t care what the rules were, he was going out there to surprise Ruth. She’d been working for twelve hours straight, for Christ’s sake—she could have written War and Peace backwards and forwards by now. Enough was enough. If he fractured her creative bubble, so much the worse, but she could reconstruct it tomorrow. He was tired of waiting.

Red dirt, green gone to gray: the path lay before him like a coil of smoke. He hurried along, sandflies giving way to mosquitoes, anoles rustling through the deepening clots of undergrowth. Up ahead, he heard the soft chuck and plaintive sobbing wills-widow

of the night-flying bird whose call gives rise to its name, and the branches above him were filled with the roosting chatter of the day birds. It was the hour of evening when the diamondback extracts itself from a hole in the ground, drawn to the scurrying warmth of the quick-blooded mammals on which it preys. Saxby stepped lightly.

And then, as he was coming down the final stretch to the cottage, a shadow settled into the path before him. Thick, furtive, dark with the shades of night. It was probably just a cornsnake, but he and Ruth would be coming back up this path in a few minutes, and he didn’t want any surprises. Ten feet from the thing—it was a snake, all right, coiling itself like a lariat, dead center in the middle of the path—Saxby bent for a stick. Crouching, one foot extended and the stick outstretched like a foil, he inched toward the thing and felt his heart freeze within him when it struck at the stick and thrashed its rattles all in the same instant. The chirring was explosive, grating, loud as castanets. But it subsided almost immediately, and the shadow of the snake melted into the undergrowth with the faintest crepitation of leaf and twig.

Saxby dropped the stick and moved on up the path, blood pounding in his ears. Always fun playing with snakes, he thought, setting one foot down after the other with the exaggerated care of a man wading through wet cement. Night was settling in as he came round the final loop in the path, and he cursed himself for having forgotten his flashlight. But Ruth would have one—and if she didn’t, they’d cut a stick and sweep the path before them, as he used to do when he was a boy coming home late from some adventure on the other end of the marsh. He was thinking of Ruth, a comical version of the snake encounter already taking shape in his mind, when the cottage came into view.

There was no light.