East is East (40 page)

But if they couldn't eliminate the Okefenokee, they could at least rape it. And so the logging company came in. They built two hundred miles of elevated railway trestles throughout the swamp to get at the virgin stands of cypress, they built a town on Billy's Island with a hotel, a general store and telephone connection to the outside world. From 1909 to 1927, the shriek of the saw dominated the mighty swamp. And then the big stands of cypress were gone, and so was the lumber company. The trains backed off into civilization, the trestles collapsed, the hotel, the store, the telephone itself vanished as if the whole thing were a traveling show, a mirage, and within ten years there was nothing left but the rusted hulks of useless machinery, devoured in weed, to indicate that a town had stood on Billy's Island.

In 1937, the federal government did the only reasonable thing
and declared the swamp a wildlife refuge, in the process tracking down and evicting the last of the bushwhackers, poachers, gator skinners, moonshiners and assorted inbred primitives and desperadoes who had fled here as to the earth's remotest outpost. The Okefenokee became a refuge for every least thing that swam or flew or crept on its belly, but it was a refuge no longer for the swamp hollerers and law benders. The water rose, the trees thickened, the star grass and bladderwort and swamp haw proliferated, the gators rolled in the muck and multiplied, and the old ways, the oldest ways, the eternal and unconquerable ways, triumphed.

Of course, hiro knew none of this. All he knew was the trunk of the Mercedes, all he knew were shin splints, muscle cramps, aching joints and nausea, all he knew was the dawning realization that the invisible driver up front yowling about his plastic Jesus like some drunk in a
karaoke
bar was the king butter-stinker himself, the
ket
ō
,
the long-nose, his nemesis and rival at love, Ruth's big hairy
b
ō
ifurendo
… all he knew was the moment of release.

And oh, how he ached for that moment through every lurch and swing and bump of the car, through every hairpin turn and crunch of the tires and through the long sweltering night at the motel—yes, it was a motel, he could hear the cars pulling in and out, the doors slamming, the chatter of voices. Left alone, he tried to tear his way through the wall of the trunk and into the back seat, but there was no room to work and the wall was unyielding, adamantine, a thing the Germans had built to last. And so he ached and tried to massage his muscles and breathe the close stale air with patience and concentration; and so he waited like a samurai, like J
ō
ch
ō
, like Mishima, like a Japanese, for the moment the key would discover the lock.

When the moment came, he was ready. Tired, sore, hungry for the light and air, seething with a slow deep unquenchable rage for all his hurts and wrongs, for the naked cheat of the City of Brotherly Love and the loss of Ruth, he was ready, ready for anything. But
when at long last the key turned in the lock and the lid rose above him like the lid of a coffin, the explosion of light blinded him and he hesitated. Shielding his eyes, he squinted up into the face that hung over him, a familiar face, the
b
ō
ifurendo's
face, frozen in shock and disbelief. That was it, that was enough. AH the rest was as automatic as the engine that drove his heart or the surge of blood that shot through his veins.

He sprang, taking his adversary by surprise. But there was no need for the karate he'd mastered through assiduous study of the diagrams in the back of a martial arts magazine, no need to grapple, kick or gouge—the
b
ō
ifurendo
had fallen back in horror, his eyes hard as nuggets, a look of impotence and constipation pressed into his features. Good. Good, good, good. Hiro came up out of his offensive crouch and darted a glance round him to get his bearings. And then, with the shock of a slap in the face, came his second big surprise: as far as he could see there was nothing but water, muck, creeper and vine, the damnable unending fetid stinking wilderness of America. But no, it couldn't be. Was it all swamp, the whole hopeless country? Where were the shopping malls, the condos, the tattoo parlors and supermarkets? Where the purple mountains and the open range? Why couldn't the butter-stinker have popped open the trunk at the convenience store, at Burger King or Saks Fifth Avenue? Why this? Why these trees and these lily pads and this festering
gaijin
cesspool? Was it some kind of bad joke?

No one moved. Hiro stood there poised on the brink of capture and escape, the
b
ō
ifurendo
immobilized, his accomplice up to his knees in the murk and gaping up at him in bewilderment. He could have darted past the
b
ō
ifurendo,
dodging round him on the narrow spit of dry land, but there were more butter-stinkers behind him, a whole legion of them with fish poles and pickup trucks and boat trailers, the hate and loathing and contempt already settling in their eyes. There was no choice: hesitate and you are dead. Three strides, a running leap, and he was in his element, in the water, in the water yet again, born to it, inured to it, as quick and nimble and streamlined as a dolphin.

Déjà vu.

But this time the water wasn't salt—it was bathwater, turgid, foul, the swill they flushed down the drain after the whole village has bathed for a week. He slashed at the duckweed and surface scum, powering for the far side of the lagoon before the astonished fishermen behind him could drop their tackle boxes and fire up the engines of their leaping blunt-nosed
hakujin
swamp boats. He reached the far shore—but it wasn't land, actually, it was something else, something that rocked beneath his feet like the taut skin of a trampoline—while the familiar shouts rose behind him and the outboard engines sprang to life with the growl of the hunting beast. No matter: he was already gone.

Yes, but now what? If he'd thought the island was bad, if he'd had his fill of bogs and mosquitoes and clothes that never dried, then this
mainrand
was hell itself. He fought his way through the bush, away from the voices and the scream of the outboards, clawing his way through the tangle, but there was no rest, no surcease, no place to set his feet down or pull himself from the muck. The water was knee-deep, waist-high, two feet over his head, and beneath it was the mud that sucked at him, sank him to the hips, pulled him inexorably down. With each desperate flailing stroke he was sinking deeper. Such an ignominious death, he thought, invoking J
ō
ch
ō
, inflating his
hara,
but going down all the same. Finally, his limbs numb with fatigue, gasping for air and choking on the gnats and mosquitoes that blackened the air around him, he managed to heave himself out of the muck and up onto the slick bony knees of a tree that rose up before him like a pillar of granite.

He lay there panting, too sapped even to brush the insects away from his face, the gloom of the big moss-hung trees darkening the morning till it might have been night. A swamp! Another swamp! A swamp so massive it could have swallowed up Ruth's cabin, Ambly Wooster's subdivision, the big house and all the piddling bogs and mud puddles on Tupelo Island without a trace. Shit, he gasped.
Backayard.
Son of a bitch. He felt like a mountaineer who's dragged himself up the face of a sheer cliff, inch by agonizing inch,
only to find a second cliff, twice as high, rearing above it. What had happened to him? How had he gotten here? Doggo, his
ob
ō
san,
Chiba, Unagi: they were faces he could barely recall. But Ruth: he saw her clearly, in sharp focus, saw her in all her permutations: the slim white-legged secretary, the seductress, the lover, his protector and jailer. She'd shared her food with him and her bed, shared her tongue and her legs, and she was going to smuggle him to the
mainrand
—not this
mainrand,
not the
mainrand
of rot and stink and demented nature, but to the
mainrand
of cities and streets and shops where
happas
and wholes walked hand in hand.

It was then—delivered from the trunk of the Mercedes and thrust back into the swamp—that he had a thought that stopped him cold. For forty-eight hours now, from the time they'd run him down with their guns and their dogs and their glassy cold eyes, through his escape from the holding cell and the swollen stultifying hours of his entombment in the trunk, he'd been circling around the hard knot of an inadmissible question—
Who bad betrayed him?
—and its equally painful corollary,
Who knew he was hiding out in the cabin in the woods?
Now the answer came to him, the answer to both questions, wrapped up in a single resonant monosyllable:
Ruth.

There wasa way the paddle dipped into the water and with a single deft motion of the wrist dug, rotated and dipped again, a rhythm and coordination that held out the possibility of perfection, and it pleased him. It was tidy. Neat. The stroke conserved energy and expended it too—not like those idiots in their motor launches on the public trails—and it felt good in the shoulders and triceps. It was so quiet too—he could almost imagine himself a Seminole or a Creek, slipping up on gator or ibis or even one of the palefaces who'd driven them into the swamp in the days of Billy Bowlegs.

Jeff Jeffcoat was gliding through a dream. Ever since he was a boy in Putnam Valley, New York, he'd wanted to do this, to push through the greatest swamp in America, skirting danger, unfolding miracles, watching the gator in its wallow, the anhinga in its nest,
the cottonmouth curled in the branches of a tree in deadly semaphore. And here he was—thirty-eight years old, newly arrived in Atlanta to work in the colorization lab at TBS, his wife Julie perched on a cushion amidships, his son Jeff Jr. plying his paddle in the bow—here he was, doing it. And it was glorious—something new round every bend. It was hot, sure, he had to admit it, and the bugs were horrendous despite the repellent that stung his eyes, soured the corners of his mouth and dripped steadily from the tip of his nose along with about half a gallon of sweat. But what was a little discomfort compared with the chance to see an alligator snapper in the wild—a hundred and fifty pounds, big around as a cocktail table—or the legendary black puma or that rarest of rare birds, the ivory-billed woodpecker?

“Dad.” Jeff Jr.'s voice was low and insistent, the terse whisper of the scout; Jeff felt Julie come to attention, and his own eyes shot out past the bow to scan the mass of maiden cane and titi up ahead. “Dad: eleven o'clock, thirty yards or so.”

“What?” Julie whispered, snatching up the binoculars. She was wearing a hairnet to combat the bugs, a pair of Banana Republic shorts and the pith helmet Jeff had bought her as a joke. She was as excited as he was.

Jeff felt a thrill go through him:
this
was life, this was adventure, this was what the explorers must have known through every waking moment of their lives. “What is it, Jeffie—what do you see?”

“Some—”

“Shhhh: don't scare it off.” '

The whisper of a whisper: “Something big. See it, up there, where the bushes are shaking?”

“Where?” Julie breathed, the binoculars pressed to her face. “I don't see anything.”

Jeff fanned the paddle in the water, ever so silently, the canoe creeping forward under its own momentum. It was probably an alligator—the swamp was crawling with them. Yesterday, their first day out, they went nearly an hour before they spotted their first gator—and it was a runt, two feet or less even—but the moment
had been magical. They'd spent half an hour motionless in the canoe, just watching it lying there, as inert as the cypresses towering over it. He must have taken two rolls of film of that gator alone, and every shot would be the same, he knew it—gator in ooze—but he'd gotten carried away. Later, as the day wore on and the gators popped up everywhere, as common as poodles in the park, the family became so inured to their presence that Jeff Jr. had done a very foolish thing. A big gator—ten, twelve feet long—had nosed up to the canoe while they were lunching on the chicken breast and avocado sandwiches Julie had made the night before, and Jeff Jr., bored or heedless or just feeling full of the devil, as boys will, had begun to toss bits of bread and lettuce into the water and the gator had gone for them. That was all right. But familiarity breeds contempt, as Jeff's father used to say, and Jeffie had flung an apple at the thing. Hard. He was a pretty good pitcher, Jeffie was, the ace of his Little League team, and the apple drilled the alligator right between the eyes—and that was when all hell broke loose. The thing had come up out of the water and slammed down again like a cannonballer coming off the high dive, and then it vanished, leaving the canoe rocking so wildly the water sloshed over the side and soaked the camera bag, the picnic basket and Jeffie's backpack. That was a close one, and Jeff Jr. had seemed so upset—his eyes big and his shoulders quaking—that Jeff had forgone the lecture till they set up camp later that evening.