Abercorn didn’t know if he actually wanted to bust Saxby—what charge were they talking here?—but having a conversation with him sounded like a good idea. And he really didn’t feature hanging around and dealing with the sheriff, who looked about as receptive as a guard dog. He shrugged and followed Turco up the steps and into the tourist facility, where six blondes of varying shades and ages stood expectantly behind a counter, each trying to outgrin the other.
Turco strode directly up to the youngest, a girl with big watery blue eyes and a nameplate that identified her as Darlene. “We need a boat,” he announced, giving her his LURP-from-hell look.
She didn’t seem to notice. “I’m sorry,” she said, and she was just as sweet as rainwater, though her accent was strictly bayou, “but I have orders from Mr. Chivvers and Mr. Dotson to not let any boats out.”
“For all intents and purposes, the park is closed,” the blonde beside her announced. This one looked to be about forty and wore her hair in an elaborate confectionary ball. “We regret the inconvenience,” she said, “but there’s a maniac a-loose in the swamp.”
“An Oriental man,” added another.
“Killed somebody east of here, is what I heard,” said the eldest, who must have been seventy and had the gift of speaking without moving her lips.
“Three grown men and a baby. Strangled them all,” the one with the hair said. All six of them froze their smiles.
This was Abercorn’s opening. He’d been hovering in the background, but now he stepped forward. “Special Agent Detlef Abercorn of the INS,” he said, flashing his identification, “of the district office in Savannah. We’re after that very man.” He tried a smile himself. “That’s why we need a boat.”
“Well,” the first girl, Darlene, wavered behind her official grin, “I don’t know …” She turned to the blonde next to her, a woman of indeterminate age in secretarial glasses and a bright-patterned scarf. “Lu Ann, what you think?”
Just then Roy Dotson stepped through a door at the rear of the office. He was dressed in his park ranger’s uniform and a pair of hip boots. “It’s all right, Darlene, give these men what they want.”
Darlene gazed up at Abercorn. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen and her grin was cavernous. Abercorn had one of those brief and inevitable sexual thoughts, and then the business came back into her voice. “I’ll need to see a driver’s license,” she said, “and a major credit card.”
Roy dotson sat at the helm of the eighteen-foot flat-bottomed boat, running the engine at full speed, which wasn’t much. Turco was crouched in the bow with all his jungle-fighting paraphernalia, his entrenching tools and wire cutters and whatnot dangling from the frame of his pack. In the middle, almost enjoying the ride despite himself, was Detlef Abercorn. He was wearing his waders and he clutched a satchel full of halizone tablets, sun block, 6-12, Off! and calamine lotion as if he were afraid it would sprout wings and fly away. He was also wearing a bright orange life jacket, though he felt a little foolish in it. Roy Dotson had insisted on the life jacket and Abercorn had obliged him for two reasons. The first was purely diplomatic. Turco had informed Dotson, who was after all going out of his way to help them, that he would shove it—the life jacket—up his—Roy Dotson’s—ass if he said another word about it, and so Abercorn, in the spirit of pacification, had meekly slipped into his own. The second reason was more basic: he was scared witless about going out amongst the alligators and snakes and felt he needed all the help he could get. With the waders and life vest, the only place a snake could get him, he figured, was in the face, and he planned to keep that portion of his anatomy high, dry and out of reach.
Still, for all that, the ride wasn’t half bad. The breeze kept the mosquitoes off his swollen ears and dried the sweat at his temples, and the swamp seemed a little less threatening now that he was actually out on it. Nothing crept into his waders to bite, sting and gouge him, no snakes dropped from the trees and the only alligator he saw was the size of a woman’s purse. He was surprised too that there was open water—quite a bit of it. If he squinted his eyes behind the prescription sunglasses with the clear plastic frames he could almost imagine he was a boy again, out on Lake Casitas with his dad and mom and brother Holger.
Another surprise was the dock at Billy’s Island. There was actually a dock there, nothing much more than two posts sunk into the murk and a grid of weathered boards, but a dock nonetheless. And beyond the dock, terra firma. Or almost. He began to feel a bit overdressed in his waders and life jacket—he’d pictured something out of The African Queen, up to his waist in quicksand and slime, but this was just plain old ordinary dirt. Or mud. A little spongy maybe but nothing that would have ruined his day if he’d been dressed in jeans, T-shirt and hiking boots.
Roy Dotson led the way, closely shadowed by Turco, who stepped lightly, tense and alert and hulking under the weight of his pack. Abercorn brought up the rear, loping along with his big gangling strides, ducking away from the squadrons of insects that converged on his every step and fanned out to anticipate the next. They were following a crude trail to the far side of the island, where, according to Roy Dotson, Saxby had set up his fishing camp the previous morning. (“Pygmy fish,” Turco had snorted when Dotson told them the story. “You ask me, it’s a cover is what it is.”)
They walked in single file for a quarter of an hour under a canopy of slash pine that cut the sunlight to a muted dapple. The air was heavy here, so thick it was like another medium, and the heat had them running sweat till they were as drenched as if they’d swum the whole way from the tourist center. Salt pills, Abercorn thought, and he cursed himself for having forgotten them. He was wondering what happened to you when you ran out of salt in your system—you collapsed, didn’t you, something to do with electrolytes, or was that batteries?—when Turco took hold of Roy Dotson’s arm and the three of them halted. “What?” Dotson said. “What is it?”
Turco tightened his grip. “The camp,” he breathed. Somewhere a bird began to cry out, hard and urgent, as if some unseen hand were plucking it alive. Roy Dotson started to say something but Turco cut him off with a hiss. “Shhhh!” he said, and his eyes had gone cold. “Stay here, both of you. I’m going in alone.”
Abercorn saw nothing but tree trunks and leaves. The waders were a sweat box, the life vest constricted his lungs. He sucked in a breath and coughed out insects.
“Shhhh!”
“Lewis—” Abercorn warned, meaning to point out that this was not the Ho Chi Minh Trail, appearances to the contrary, and that Saxby was not an armed and treacherous communist guerrilla but a decent guy who loved fish and Ruth Dershowitz, not to mention an American citizen with inalienable rights, and who probably wasn’t involved in all this anyway, or at least not too deeply, but Turco gave him a look of such uncompromising fury that he gave it up. This was what Turco was paid for, this was what he was doing here—there was no stopping him now. Abercorn exchanged a look with Roy Dotson as Turco shrugged out of his pack and darted off silently through the undergrowth. Though he still saw nothing—no camp, no tent, no sign whatever of civilization—Abercorn fumbled for his tape recorder and notepad, feeling the excitement rise in him despite himself. Maybe Lewis was right after all, maybe the Nip was hiding out there with Saxby and they could throw the cuffs on him, pack it up and get out of this shithole for good.
Roy Dotson didn’t think so. His mouth was drawn tight and an angry crease had appeared between his eyebrows. “The guy’s crazy,” he said in a terse whisper. “Like I told you, Sax was as shocked as I was to see that man there in the trunk of the car.” Abercorn didn’t respond. He’d fixed his eye on the tangle of growth into which Turco had disappeared, and now he started forward, moving as stealthily as could be expected from a six-foot-five-inch albino in a pair of hip waders. Roy Dotson shrugged and fell into step behind him.
Nothing moved. The forest was still, locked in the grip of the heat. The bird cried out again, terrible, lonely, hurt in some deep essen
tial place. Abercorn kept his eyes on a conjunction of branches up ahead, the waders grunting and squelching beneath his sweat-soaked feet. He stepped over the stump of a felled tree, and then another. Mosquitoes settled on his arms, his face, the backs of his hands, and he didn’t bother to swat them away.
And then, what he’d been waiting for: a shout. It ruptured the silence, a single mad stunned bellow of surprise that rose up to steal the heat from the trees. Suddenly they were running and nothing mattered but the snarl of voices up ahead and the sudden sharp snap of branches and the thrashing in the undergrowth. The Nip! Abercorn was thinking, Turco’s got the Nip!, and in his excitement he shot ahead of Roy Dotson, his knees pumping, the waders flapping like sails in a high wind. There! Just ahead: a tent—how could he have missed it?—a circle of charred rocks, a fishing net strung from the trees. Another shout. A curse. And then he was there, stumbling over the cold cookfire as the figures of Saxby and Turco materialized from the camouflage of briar and palmetto.
They were on the ground, rocking in each other’s arms, their legs flailing at the bush. Turco was all over Saxby, though Saxby had six inches and fifty pounds on him. “Get … off!” Saxby roared, but Turco had him in some sort of secret commando grip, forcing his face down into the wet earth, the handcuffs flashing in a shaft of sunlight. “Lewis!” Abercorn shouted, but Turco jerked the bigger man’s arm back and cuffed his wrists. “Lewis, what the hell—?” Abercorn’s voice was high. This was all wrong. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be …
“Det, are you crazy?” Saxby was furious, thrashing beneath Turco’s weight, a single smear of reddish dirt ground like a scar into his cheek. “Get him off me!”
But Turco had him, and he wouldn’t let go. He crouched atop him like a gnome, knee planted in the small of the back, left hand rigid at the base of the skull. “Shut it,” he said, and his voice was calm, even, not a hint of adrenaline in it. “You’re under arrest, motherfucker.”
Cheap Thrills
Everyone else simply read in the front parlor beneath the ancient brass chandelier, informally, comfortably, with the lights up and the colonists settled into easy chairs or stretched out languidly on the rug. There was coffee and sherry and there was always something sweet—cupcakes or cookies, often baked by Septima herself. It was homey, unthreatening, an arena in which an artist—no matter his or her status in the world beyond these walls—could present work in progress in an intimate and supportive atmosphere. If anything, the bias was anti-performance. You simply stood up there and read. No tricks, no gadgets, no histrionics. You read in a flat, unobtrusive voice, letting the work speak for itself—anything else would have been inappropriate, a violation of the unspoken rules and an embarrassment to your fellow colonists. In a word, rude. And you read in the front parlor, beneath the chandelier. Everyone did.
Everyone, that is, but Jane Shine.
No. Jane had to read out on the patio in the black of night, a single spot trained on her from overhead while a second light, more stagey and diffuse, played off her gypsy features from a box located in the azalea bushes. Ruth couldn’t believe it. The colonists were shunted outside and forced into folding chairs all marshaled in neat rows, as if this were Shakespeare under the stars or something. Three minutes in one of those chairs was like an hour on the rack. It was outrageous. What was she thinking?
Ruth came in with Brie just as Septima was working her way to the front to introduce Jane. She passed up the opportunity to sit with Sandy, Ina and Regina in order to take the seats directly behind Mignonette Teitelbaum and Orlando Seezers, who was stationed in his wheelchair at the end of the aisle. After a flurry of hushed helios and some pronounced and disapproving mosquito-swatting, Ruth settled in to study La Teitelbaum from the rear. Did they have sex? she wondered. It depended on how far down the spine he’d been injured, didn’t it? Teitelbaum wasn’t much in any case. She was only a couple years older than Ruth, but she really showed it—and her hair, her hair looked like that stuff they pack crates with—what was it called? There were lines in the back of her neck too. But not just lines—seams, grooves, ruts you could fall into.
Ruth’s reverie was broken by the amplified blast of Septima’s voice—a microphone, she was using a microphone for god’s sake! No one had ever used a microphone at Thanatopsis before, and now, because of Jane Shine, Septima—the power behind the whole place, its founder and arbiter of its tastes and traditions—was speaking through a microphone. It was sickening. A perversion of everything Thanatopsis stood for. Ruth couldn’t fathom how everyone could just sit there as if nothing were going on, as if this, this sound system and lights, had anything at all to do with a sharing of work in progress. She felt her scalp tense beneath the roots of her hair. “This is ridiculous,” she hissed at Brie while Septima’s genteel tones roared out over the treetops.
Brie turned to her, enraptured, her expression as vacant as a cow’s, her big watery eyes swollen beneath the skin of her contacts. “What are you saying?” she hissed back. “I think it’s—it’s magical.”
“… my very great pleasure, and a personal three-ill,” Septima boomed; she was clutching at the microphone as if it were a cobra she’d discovered in bed and seized in desperation. Ruth saw Saxby’s eyes in her eyes, Saxby’s nose, pinched with age, in her nose. She was wearing a tan linen suit, beige pumps and the pearls she never seemed to take off, and she’d had her hair done. “I repeat, a three-ill, to introduce an extraordinarily gifted young writer, author of a prize-winnin’ volume of stories and a novel forthcomin’ from”—here Septima paused to squint at a 3 × 5 card she held tentatively in her soft veiny hand—“from”—she named a major New York house and Ruth felt her jaws clench with hate and jealousy; “… youngest winner ever, I am told, of the prestigious Hooten-Warbury Gold Medal in Literature, given annually in England for the best work of foreign fiction, and the equally prestigious—”
Ruth tried to tune her out, but the amplification made it impossible: Septima’s stentorian words of praise throbbed in her chest, her lungs, her very bowels, vibrating there as if on a sounding board. Septima went on to compare Jane to just about every female writer in history, from Mrs. Gaskell to Virginia Woolf to Flannery O’Connor and Pearl S. Buck, using the term “prestigious” like a dental drill. (She must have used it twenty times at least—Ruth stopped counting at five.) And then finally, after what seemed an eternity, she wound it up with a carnival barker’s enthusiasm: “Ladies and gendemen, fellow artists and Thanatopsians”—yes, she actually said Thanatopsians—“I give you Jane Shine.”
A burst of applause. Ruth felt ill. But where was she? Where was La Shine? Certainly not sitting quietly up front or standing modestly to one side of the microphone. People craned their necks, the applause fell off. But then, all at once, a murmur went up and the applause started in again, stronger than before—as if just by deigning to appear here before these mere mortals she should be congratulated—and there she was, Jane Shine, sweeping through the French doors and out onto the patio.
Her hair—her impossible gleaming supercharged mat of flamenco dancing hair—was piled up so high on her head all Ruth could think of was the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Dressed all in black—another one of those high-collared faux-Victorian things she paraded around in like a lost princess—she moved through the crowd with quiet determination, a small frown etched on her lips—oh, this was serious business, this was high drama—looking straight ahead of her, her back stiff, her steps tiny, delicate, the nibbling little mincing steps of a girl on her way to school. Flamenco siren, Victorian princess, schoolgirl: who was she kidding?
The light caught her face perfectly, exquisitely—even Ruth had to admit it. The overhead spot set her hair aflame, made a corona of it, a diadem, a glittering ball of light and highlight, while the second spot, the softer one, put a glow into her extraterrestrial eyes and lit her bee-stung lips from beneath. “Collagen treatments,” Ruth whispered to Brie, but Brie was mesmerized by the
spectacle of Jane Shine, La Shine, who’d fucked her way to the top, and Brie didn’t acknowledge her. Jane bowed. Thanked Septima. Thanked the audience. Thanked Owen and Rico and Raoul Von Somebody for the lighting and audio, and then she fastened her eyes on the audience and held them, in silence, for a full thirty seconds.
And then she began, without introduction, her voice as natural and attuned to the microphone as Septima’s was not. Her voice was a caress, a whisper, something that got inside you and wouldn’t come out. The story she read was about sex, of course, but sex couched in elaborate and gothic imagery that made high art of painting one’s toenails and having a monthly period. Three lines into the story Ruth realized that this wasn’t work in progress at all—this was a story Jane had published two years ago and then polished—and repolished—for her first collection. It was finished work. Old work. Nothing from the “forthcoming” novel or the pages she’d presumably turned out here. Instead she was performing, giving them a set piece she’d read god knew how many times at the invitation of Notre Dame or Iowa or NYU. Ruth was so outraged—so pissed off, rubbed raw and just plain furious—that she nearly got up to leave. But then she couldn’t, of course. If she did, everyone would think she was, well, jealous of Jane Shine or something—and she couldn’t have them thinking that. Never. It would be like being gored out on the African veldt, vultures swooping in, hyenas laughing in the bush.
So she sat there, seething. Orlando Seezers brayed with a rich too-loud laugh when Jane’s story ran to what passed for wit, and toward the end, where the star-crossed fourteen-year-old lovers paint each other’s toenails prior to parting eternally, Mignonette Teitelbaum had to hold his hand to keep him from blubbering aloud. Jane was shameless. Not only did she pander to the audience, raving like a madwoman and repeatedly pushing a carefully coiffed strand of hair out of her face, she even did a Swedish accent as if she thought she was Meryl Streep or something (the boy was Swedish, a Nordic demigod in short pants; the girl, of course, was a Connecticut ingénue with the hair of a Catalonian shepherdess and outer-space eyes). When she was finished, there was a stunned silence, and then someone—was it Irving?—shouted “Yes!” and the applause fell on her like a landslide. Brie had tears in her eyes, and Ruth would never forgive her that. Sandy whistled and pounded his hands together till they were red, and Ruth would never forgive him either.