Tom Boyle - East is East

He looked up. Ally was gone. Roy hovered over him. “Can we get more?”

Roy was smiling his quiet smile. He understood the sort of excitement that made the breath come quick in the presence of a certain butterfly or slug or a glistening pale little fingernail-sized fish. “We can sure try,” he said.

The next morning the telephone roused saxby from dreams of the colorless depths. It rang once and he seized it as if it were prey, as if he’d been lying still there all night so as to lull the thing into giving itself away. “Yeah?” he gasped.

It was Gobi. “Rise and shine, y’all,” he crooned in his Indo-cracker drawl. “It’s five-fifteen.”

Ten minutes later Roy was out front with his pickup and a boat trailer. A long narrow flat-bottomed boat rested atop the trailer, the legend Pequod II stenciled on its bow, one of Roy’s little jokes. “Mornin’,” Roy said, laconic and slow-smiling, and he handed Saxby a Hardee’s bag and a Styrofoam cup of coffee, black.

Saxby could have opened the trunk of the Mercedes right then and there—and he almost did, and he cursed himself afterward for resisting the impulse—but he decided not to bother. If he hauled out his waders and traps and the O 2and the rest of it and transferred them to the pickup, it would delay them a precious few minutes, and he was really stoked to get going. And anyway, he’d want his own car down there at the swamp if he did have to stay on a day or two. In the end, he took the coffee and the bag of fast food and shrugged. “Guess I’ll just follow you,” he said. “All right?”

A low pale ghostly mist clung to the road all the way down to Fargo, and then, when they swung onto 177 to head into the swamp itself, the mist turned to drizzle. Saxby listened to the swish of the wet tires, watched the boat sway on the trailer ahead of him. He felt a deep sense of peace, of connection, of calm. Deer stood poised at the edge of the road, wading birds feinted and shook their great wings into flight. He was going to get everything he wanted: he knew it.

The drizzle fell back into the mist, the mist thickened, and then they were there. He followed Roy through the parking lot out front of the tourist center and pulled up ahead of him on the narrow spit of land by the boat ramp. On one side of them was the dredged and widened pond in which the rental boats were kept, and on the other, the channel that led to Billy’s Lake and the infinite shifting maze of watery trails that snaked through the swamp beyond it. It was drizzling still and the sky hung low over the treetops in a dull metallic wash. The place was quiet but for the handful of fishermen loading their boats with a soft murmur of expectation, and the jays and catbirds that cursed one another intermittently from the trees. The water, peat-stained and tepid, was the color of fresh-brewed tea.

Saxby stood at the door of the Mercedes and watched Roy back the trailer down the ramp. When the trailer was in the water, Roy cut the engine, pulled the parking brake and got out to release the boat, while Saxby ambled to the rear of the Mercedes to fetch his gear. He wouldn’t need the oxygen and plastic bags till he headed home with what he hoped would be the nucleus of his breeding stock, but he was thinking of his waders, minnow traps and dip net, as well as the little thirty-foot seine that might just come in handy in a relatively clear patch of water. He hadn’t opened the trunk since he’d hastily loaded it some twelve or thirteen hours earlier, but as he fit the key into the lock he could visualize its contents, already leaping ahead to picture them stowed away in the bottom of Roy’s boat and the boat itself gliding off under the sure silent stroke of their paddles. The lock accepted the key. The key turned in the lock.

It was the sort of thing that happens every day.

What had happened to her? what was wrong with her? where was the visionary who woke up rigid, forsaking breakfast to stride boldly through the dripping forest to the nunnery of the studio, the cross of her art? Ruth didn’t know. All she knew was that she felt as drained of energy as when she’d contracted mono as a teenager. She had a headache—it seemed as if she’d had a headache for days, weeks, the better part of her life—and her limbs felt tentative, as if they weren’t really attached. Maybe she was coming down with something, maybe that was it.

It was dawn, just, the light pale and listless, and she made a groggy but furtive dash for the bathroom down the hall—thank god no one was stirring yet—and then slipped back to her room and fell into the bed as if her legs had been shot out from under her. Thirty seconds more and she would have been gone, pulled back down into the vestibule of sleep, but then the phone rang deep in the bowels of the house and consciousness took hold of her. The sound was faint, distant, the buzz of an insect on the far side of the room—but she knew it was ringing for her. She knew it. Very faintly, and again at an incalculable distance, she heard footsteps—Owen’s footsteps—crossing the downstairs hallway to the phone in the foyer. She fought to keep her eyes closed, to shake it off, but the phone was ringing and she knew it was ringing for her.

Three times it rang, four, and then it choked off in the middle of the fifth ring. She couldn’t begin to hear the murmur of Owen’s voice, but she imagined it, and she listened as the footsteps started up again, as the dull stealthy tread of them recrossed the foyer, mounted the stairs and started down the upper hallway. She sat up. It was her father, she was sure of it. The doctor had warned him—the stress of the courtroom, the late nights, the obsessive tennis and racquetball, the cigarettes, martinis, New York steaks. Her father! Grief flooded her. She saw his face as clearly as if he were standing there beside her, the glint of his wire-frame glasses, the splash of gray in his beard, the look of the menscb, the lawgiver, the man of wisdom and peace … there would be a funeral, of course, and that would mean she’d have to leave Thanatopsis for a week, maybe longer. Black crepe. She’d look good in that, slim through the hips, and her tan would glow … but her father, it was her father, her daddy, and now she was naked to the world—

The footsteps halted outside her door, and then came Owen’s knock and his subdued rasp—no language games, no chirp of humor: “Ruth, it’s for you. Long-distance.”

She knew it, she knew it.

“It’s Saxby.”

Saxby? Suddenly the picture clouded over. Her father was all right, he was okay, as healthy as the Surgeon General himself and sleeping peacefully at one of the better addresses in Santa Monica. But it was—six o’clock? What could Saxby want at six o’clock? Her heart gave a little skip of fear—was he hurt? But no. Why would he be calling if he was hurt—it would be the police or the hospital, wouldn’t it? And then she thought of his fish. If he was dragging her out of bed because of some damned little loopy-eyed fish—

“Ruth, wake up. Telephone.”

She caught herself. “Yes, yes, I’m awake. Tell him I’ll be right there.”

The footsteps retreated. She bent to shuffle through the mess on the floor. She was looking for her terry-cloth robe, and her cigarettes, and maybe something to wrap round her hair in case anyone was up. She found the robe—she’d borrowed it from a hotel in Las Vegas on her way out from California, and there was a rich reddish stain over the left breast where she’d upended a glass of cranberry juice on it—and she came up with the cigarettes too, but no lighter and no scarf. She caught a glimpse of herself in the bureau mirror—sunken eyes, too much nose, a frenzy of fractured little lines tugging at her mouth—and then she ducked out the door, cradling her cigarettes, and found herself staring into the huge startled gypsy eyes of Jane Shine.