Tom Boyle - East is East

It was strange. She couldn’t get the image of him out of her head. Where was he? What was he eating? What was he thinking? He’d been ashore a week now and he was still at large, hiding out, buried somewhere in the weeds. There were reports of him everywhere—Saxby swore he’d seen him running for the bushes out back of Cribbs’ Handi-Mart—but where was he? The whole island was in an uproar, from the blacks at Hog Hammock to the veiny retirees of Tupelo Shores Estates. The newspaper account had made him out to be something of a desperate character, a violent and reckless sort who’d broken out of the ship’s brig, assaulted several of his shipmates and taken a suicidal plunge over the side. The Coast Guard had given up its search after two eyewitnesses from the artists’ colony—Ruth couldn’t help feeling a little stab of disappointment when she wasn’t mentioned by name—had seen him come ashore on the southeast tip of Tupelo Island. The authorities were pursuing the matter. He was believed to be armed and dangerous.

Ruth had had to fight for the paper—this was the biggest thing to hit Tupelo Island since the swine flu epidemic, and everybody wanted to be in on the action. The paper arrived, a day late as usual, two mornings after the encounter on the bay. In the interim she and Saxby had spoken by phone with reporters from the Atlanta Constitution, the Savannah Star and the bi-monthly Tupelo Island Breeze; a special agent of the INS from Savannah who identified himself as Detlef Abercorn; the county sheriff (or “shurf,” as the locals had it); and a Mr. Shikuma, president of the Japan-America Society in New York. Mr. Shikuma, in a flurry of thank-yous and apologies, had wanted to congratulate them on identifying Seaman Tanaka and to assure them that the young sailor, though mentally deranged, would cause no one any irreparable harm.

Actually, Ruth liked the attention. She hadn’t been herself since she and Saxby had arrived at Thanatopsis House. Perhaps she’d felt intimidated by the Peter Anserines and Laura Grobians, perhaps she’d felt threatened by her contemporaries, as she had at Iowa and Irvine. Certainly she felt awkward about her special relationship with Saxby and the sort of gossip and backbiting it was sure to provoke: Ruth Dershowitz? Who is she anyway? I mean, what has she written? Or does she even have to write—isn’t she the son’s latest squeeze, isn’t that it? In any case, she’d held her peace with the others—she hadn’t said much of anything to anyone. Oh, she’d exchanged banalities over cocktails or dinner with whoever sat to her left or right, but she hadn’t committed herself at all—the ground was shaky yet and she was still learning to walk. But on the night they came in off the bay, she couldn’t help herself.

It was late, past two, and the only light in the big house came from the billiard room on the second floor. They took the stairs two at a time, Ruth struggling to match Saxby’s long strides. She was out of breath when he flung open the door and tugged her into the room. She saw wainscoting, a chandelier, lamps in the corners. It took her a moment, blinking like someone roused from a sound sleep, to identify the usual crowd of insomniacs.

Irving Thalamus was there, sitting at the card table, his fingers fidgeting as he tried to fight down the impulse to look up and give away his hand. A poet named Bob sat across from him. Bob had a book out from Wesleyan and he was very serious, though he looked more like a beer distributor than an assistant professor at Emory, which he was. Next to Bob, hunched over a Diet Coke and scratching herself unconsciously, was Ina Soderbord, a square-faced, big-shouldered blonde from Minnesota who wrote as if she were in the throes of delirium tremens. In the corner, enfolded in her metronomic silence, the walleyed composer nodded over a book, while the punk sculptress, in leather shorts and a T-shirt the size of a pup tent, leaned over the billiard table in a blaze of light.

Before anyone could greet them, before anyone could glance up with a casual “hello” or “what’s up?,” Saxby was spewing out the story in his usual hyperbolic style, the encounter on the bay no less stupefying than an encounter with outerspace aliens. But they all loved Saxby. Loved him for his wit and the square of his shoulders and his utter lack of interest in things artistic. Ruth clung to his arm.

“No, I swear it,” he was saying, “ the guy looked like Elmer Fudd, except with hair, and Ruth and I were getting romantic—or we’d already got romantic and were thinking about getting romantic again—I mean, I’m naked, for Christ’s sake—don’t blush, Ruth; is she blushing? Anyway, it’s a little disconcerting. We’re out there on the water, and if it was a seal or a tuna or even a whale, I could understand it, but a Chinese Elmer Fudd? And with hair?”

Ruth stepped aside, two steps back and one to the left, and watched their faces as Saxby waved his arms and mugged and ran his voice up and down the register. They were spellbound. When Sax was finished, when he’d left the frightened interloper thrashing through the Spartina grass like a spooked buffalo, Irving Thalamus set down his cards and looked up. “You want to take order now?” he said in falsetto, his face expressionless. “You like egg loal or Chinese wegetable?”

“Maybe he was trying out for the Olympics or something,” Bob said, and he was about to expand on this notion when the punk sculptress cut him off. “You people are really fucked,” she snarled, slamming down the cue stick. She stood glaring at them from the center of the room. “You’re as bad as the crackers. Worse.” She drew herself up, as if to spit on the floor, and stalked out of the room.

“What’s with her?” Saxby said, helping himself to a handful of peanuts from the bowl in the middle of the card table. “I mean, it’s not like we’re in the East Village here or something. This is Georgia”—and he thickened his accent—“the sweet ol’ downhome Peach State, and I’d say finding a Chinaman in the middle of Peagler Sound is pretty damned incredible—I’d say, for a fact, that the Chinese population of the Sea Islands just soared from zero to one.”

Irving Thalamus broke open a peanut with an authoritative crack, and everyone turned to watch him as he bent over it to extract the dicotyledonous kernel from the shell. “No sense of humor,” he observed in his smoker’s rasp, and Bob began to snicker.

It was then that Ruth felt herself letting go. She was overwrought, desolate, flooded with conflicting emotions: How could they be so blasé? There’d been a shipwreck. She’d watched an exhausted, half-hysterical survivor flounder to shore and flail through the bushes in a panic. And all they could do was make Chinese jokes. How many others were out there even now, crying out for help, the black unforgiving waters closing over them? “We’ve got to call the police,” she said suddenly. “And the Coast Guard. A ship went down, I know it, it’s obvious. Did anyone listen to the radio tonight?”

They were all watching her—even the walleyed composer, who jolted awake with a snort at the mention of radio. “Radio?” she echoed, and then they were all talking at once. “Did anyone?” Ruth repeated.

Peter Anserine had. Ina Soderbord, who had the room next to his, had heard him listening to some news program around eight. But he’d been asleep for hours now, and who wanted to wake him?

Suddenly Ruth was furious, the whole thing—Thanatopsis House, the cynicism, the pressure, the backbiting—too much for her. In an instant, the carefully constructed edifice of her reserve fell to pieces. She was part of it now, centerstage. “I don’t believe it,” she blurted, and she felt light-headed with the intensity of her emotion. Saxby was there, his arm around her shoulder. “It’s okay,” he said, but she wasn’t through yet. “People could be drowning out there and you, you—you make jokes!”