East is East

by T. C. Boyle

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Did you—” she began, and she was going to ask if Saxby had hurt him, if the raging Saxby had emerged, the aggressive, the rough, but she thought better of it. “I mean, did he say anything or did he run away again or what? Did you try to help him?”

  Saxby was keyed up, speaking in breathless explosive little bursts. “It was Roy and me. He was in the trunk. By the time I knew what was happening he was gone.”

  “Gone?”

  And then she got the full story. Saxby told her how he’d packed the car yesterday afternoon, too excited to remember whether he’d shut the trunk or not, and how they were out on a spit of land, water on three sides of them, and how Roy was backing the boat down the ramp. He told her how Hiro had leaped from the trunk like a wild-eyed maniac and plunged into the boat pond—“Every time I lay eyes on the guy he’s jumping into some mudhole”—and how he’d kept going till he reached the far bank and the swamp beyond. “The guy’s a fanatic,” Saxby concluded. “A nut case. And if he thought Tupelo was something, he’s got a real surprise coming.”

  Suddenly Ruth was laughing—she couldn’t help herself. Laura Grobian came wide-eyed down the stairs to breakfast in the silent room and Ruth was laughing, gagging, nearly hysterical with the news, so weak she could barely hold the phone to her ear. The picture of Saxby standing there dumbfounded with his strapping feet and hopeless hands, of Hiro, his crooked teeth set in the big moon of his face, splashing for his life all over again, churning up the duckweed and plunging ever deeper into the swamp—trading one swamp for another—it was too much. It was like something out of Heart of Darkness —or the Keystone Kops. Yes, that was it: The Keystone Kops Meet Heart of Darkness. And the irony—that was what really killed her. The plan had worked. Hiro had finally got his wisli—he was off Tupelo Island—and he’d made it in the trunk of Saxby’s mother’s car. It was funny, oh, it was funny.

  “It’s not funny, Ruth. It’s not.” Saxby was hot, his voice pinched to a rasp. “Look: Roy’s already called the police. I’m calling to warn you. After yesterday … I mean, the guy turns up in the trunk of my car and they’re going to believe I didn’t know about it? Or you either?”

  She hadn’t thought of it that way. But still it was funny. “You’re innocent, Sax—they never hang an innocent man.” She knew she would regret it, but she couldn’t help herself: suddenly her mood had improved. She was positively giddy. This was fun.

  “Goddamn it, Ruth. This is your deal. You’re the one who—” Saxby stopped dead. His voice just wilted. Static crackled over the line. Outside, the sun emerged to dig a shallow grave in the mist.

  “Sax?”

  “Tell me the truth,” he demanded, “and no crap now—you didn’t help him escape, did you?”

  Later — she couldn’t possibly go back to sleep after that phone call, and she knew they’d be at her again, the sheriff and Detlef and that little slime—and him she wouldn’t talk to, never, never again—she took a walk out to the studio to survey the wreckage. The overcast had cooled things down a bit and she caught a premonitory whiff of fall in the drizzle that lifted her spirits, but she was pretty well soaked through by the time she came round the double bend in the path. Before she even laid eyes on the cabin she noticed the little things, boot prints in the mud, the undergrowth trampled back here and there, and then, right in the middle of the path, she found half a dozen shell casings, red plastic and bright untarnished brass. She bent for the casings, fingered them, and threw them back down in disgust. Then she rounded the final bend and came upon the cabin.

  From a distance it looked just as it had the night before last. There were the oaks, brooding over the roof with their beards of Spanish moss, there were the palmettos and berry bushes, there the steps, the door, the invitation of the windows. Insects hung in the air, birds shot overhead and lighted in the branches: it seemed as if nothing had changed. But as she drew closer she saw the glass glittering on the worn planks of the porch and saw that the screens had been perforated, the screen door shattered. Shell casings littered the yard, splinters of wood, hot bright nuggets of glass. And the porch—it was so spattered with shot it looked as if every woodpecker in Georgia had been at it, and there was a chunk the size of her fist missing from one of the uprights.

  All at once she understood what it meant—not in the abstract, not on the telephone with a laugh in her throat and the world somewhere out on the horizon, but here in the actuality, in the wet and the heat and the stink of decay: They’d tried to kill him. Crackers, rednecks, Turco, Abercorn: the mob. A chill went through her. This was no joke. The closest she’d been to a gun in her life was in the front row of a movie theater—you just didn’t mount guns in the back window of your BMW on Wilshire Boulevard, you didn’t pick your teeth with them or hunt widgeons or wild boar or whatever they slaughtered out here in the boondocks. But to have a gun, an actual gun, pointed at you—how could she begin to understand what Hiro had gone through?

  Inside, it was worse. It wasn’t the shell casings she was finding now, but the bullets themselves. The paneling was pockmarked, there was a hole through the cushion of the loveseat, one of her pitcher plants had been sheared in half. Glass littered the floor, along with the odd twisted bit of lead, and one of the cane rockers was overturned in the corner. About the only thing that had escaped unscathed was her typewriter. There it sat, the eternal page curled over the keyboard.

  She almost wished it hadn’t survived, almost wished it had been blasted beyond recognition, the platen gouged and twisted, the keys scattered like rice at a wedding. She looked at it sitting there in mute accusation and a sinking, empty, hungry feeling came over her—call it nerves, guilt, the bane of the writer who isn’t writing. “Of Tears and the Tide” was just wasted time—she didn’t have the stomach to continue it, not now. They’d tried to kill him. How could she do justice to that?

  But what now? She was living at an artists’ colony, surrounded by writers, and she hadn’t done any writing in a week. She hadn’t expected to work today—and no one would have expected it of her—but in some part of her she was disappointed that the damage hadn’t been more dramatic, more sweeping and cataclysmic, the sort of damage that would have precluded any thought of work. As it was, if she really wanted to, if the fit was on her, she could have swept up the glass and sat down to work right then and there, no need even to bother with the man Owen was sending out to patch the screens, replace the glass and putty up the bullet holes.

  Just to do something, she got out the broom and dustpan and swept up the shards and nuggets of glass and the odd little flattened bits of lead that hadn’t managed to embed themselves in the walls or slice clean on through and into the infinite. Then she dumped the ravaged pitcher plant over the front railing, fed one of the survivors the husk of a bluebottle she found amidst the debris on the windowsill, and finally sat down at her desk—but tentatively, as if she were only trying out the chair.

  For a long moment she gazed out through the gaping window and then she gathered up the fat sheaf of scrawled-over Xerox paper that represented the whole of “Of Tears and the Tide,” and buried it deep in the desk drawer. Down there, buried even deeper, she discovered the manuscript of an old, half-finished story she’d been meaning to rework. It was called “Two Toes,” and it was another thing she’d developed from a news story—this one a piece that had made the national news and galvanized the attention of the whole slumbering and self-obsessed country. Everyone knew it. It was the story of Jessica McClure, the eighteen-month-old girl who’d fallen down a well shaft in Texas and wound up wedged tight in a pipe less than a foot in diameter, and who was rescued after two and a half days of heroic effort on the part of miners, firemen, police and evangelists, albeit at the cost of two toes on her right foot. Ruth didn’t understand that exactly—the amputation of the toes, something to do with constricted blood flow—but her idea was to show the girl as a teenager, seventeen, eighteen maybe. Grown up now, living wi
th the memory of those two terrible days and the burden of her brief and fading celebrity, she would have become self-destructive, hateful. Shooting drugs, drinking, whoring around. She would never make the national news again, and she knew it, her life a downward spiral from the age of one and a half on. And what would she do then? She’d marry some tattooed greaseball fifteen years her senior, a drummer in a rockabilly band, and then—but that was as far as Ruth had gotten. And now, reading over what she’d written, sifting through her notes, she felt nothing but despair. The idea stank. She stank. The whole miserable muggy drizzling world stank.

  She lurched up from her desk and stepped out on the porch. It was no later than ten, ten thirty, though with the cloud cover it was hard to judge. She wondered if Owen was planning to bring her lunch. They’d seen plenty here over the years, from nervous breakdowns to fistfights to heart attacks and every sort of drunken and debauched behavior imaginable—artists would be artists, after all—but they’d never seen this. Hiro Tanaka, the Japanese desperado; La Dershowitz, his self-sacrificing succorer—or that didn’t sound right: protector, then; and the glorious, full-color, Dolbyenhanced Attack of the Rednecks! They’d never seen a studio shot up before. If for nothing else, they’d remember her for that—even if she never wrote another word. In years to come they’d lean over the bar or push back their dinner plates or bubble round the convivial table to corner some newcomer, some ingénue, and allow the incredulity to light up their faces as some one of them, queen of the hive or king of the jungle, gasped, Don’t tell me you’ve never beard the story of the bullet holes in Hart Crane?

  Yes, Owen would bring lunch, all right. Business as usual. They’d seen everything but this, and it would go down in Thanatopsis legend, but Septima would never allow anything to interfere with the orderly business of creation, let alone the frenzy of the mob, destruction of property, attempted murder, anarchy and Yahooism. The only thing was, Ruth wouldn’t be there to eat the lunch Owen would bring her. She was too dispirited. Too anxious, too depressed even to work. And then she had a thought: maybe it was closer to eleven, after all. If so, the mail would be in. Maybe she’d just take a stroll back to the big house and see if there was anything for her. She couldn’t work today. Not today. And who could blame her?

  As it turned out, there was something for her. Two things, actually. She checked her box in the coatroom, her eyes hungrily scanning the grid of mailboxes, noting as she did every day the volume of mail jamming Laura, Irving and even Jane’s boxes while her own remained conspicuously and degradingly empty. They got letters from publishers, agents and editors, high-tone magazines, review copies, fan mail. She got nothing. (For a while she’d toyed with the idea of stuffing envelopes with dummy letters and mailing them to herself, but she was afraid the postmarks would give her away—to Owen, at any rate. He was the one who sorted the mail—and any secret, any tidbit about anyone was fair game at Thanatopsis; the place was a jungle, it really was—and if that got out she’d never be able to show her face again.)

  She envied Laura Grobian, who got fan mail from all over the world. When she was alone in the mailroom, when she was sure no one was looking, Ruth pulled the letters out and fanned through them, transfixed by the postmarks, the addresses, the exotic foreign stamps and legends. She was envious of Irving too. And Jane, though it sickened her to admit it even to herself. Jane got letters from her publisher, of course, and proofs to correct, and once she’d even gotten an envelope from Harper’s that looked and felt suspiciously like an acceptance letter, not to mention the thin blue aerograms from Italy that came two or three times a week. As often as not, Ruth got nothing—and everyone knew it. They probably made a joke of it—who would want to write her, anyway? She didn’t have a publisher. She didn’t have an agent. She didn’t have fans or a mysterious hot-blooded Venetian lover who franked his letters only with the initials C. da V. or even friends. Her mother never even wrote her.

  But today she was surprised.

  She spotted the big manila envelope projecting from her box the moment she stepped through the door, and she knew instantly what it was. It was the manuscript of “Days of Fire, Nights of Ashes,” returned from the Atlantic. The New Yorker had rejected it promptly, but she’d prevailed on Irving once again to lend his name and influence to her cause and she’d held out high hopes for the Atlantic. They’d had it for three weeks. And now here it was, back again, a dead albatross, refuse in a neat foursquare envelope, one more dismissal from the world at large. As she snatched the thing from the box, her second piece of mail fluttered to the floor. It was a postcard, glossy and inviting, showing the sunstruck beach at Juan-les-Pins. On the reverse, six lines from Betsy Butler, a poet she knew from Iowa who if anything was even more obscurely published than she, and therefore someone Ruth could continue to enjoy. Betsy was on the beach. She had a poem coming out in a magazine Ruth had never heard of. All right. Fine. But there was a P.S.: had Ruth heard the news? About Ellis Disick who’d been at Iowa with them? His first novel had just gone at auction for $250,000, movie rights went to Universal and the book was a main selection of Book-of-the-Month for the spring: wasn’t that just too much? Gritting her teeth, Ruth tore grimly into the envelope from the Atlantic. Just as she’d suspected, her manuscript, slightly worn about the edges, stared back at her. The rejection slip, signed in a mad indecipherable scrawl, was curt: “Too hot for us. Try Hustler.”

  Ruth spent the afternoon in bed. She licked her wounds, brooded, poked desultorily through a Czechoslovakian novel Peter Anserine had recommended with an emphatic quiver of intellectual fervor animating his Brahmin’s nostrils, and ate her way miserably through a two-pound box of tollhouse cookies. She found she was missing Sax—the old Sax, the ardent sexy Sax who lately seemed to have sublimated all his libidinous energy in the pursuit of pygmy fishes—and she very nearly let her malaise overwhelm her desire for cocktails and company. But she struggled back beyond the humiliation of the scene on the patio and the grimness of the cabin to the moment of her triumph over the entire affair of Hiro, and that cheered her. There was plenty of mileage to be got yet from that—and too, this was the day that the new arrivals would be putting in their initial appearances, and it would be a shame to miss that. Ruth spent half an hour on her face, fished through her wardrobe for something red, and came down the big staircase to cocktails as a queen to coronation.

  The first person she laid eyes on was Brie Sullivan, who was standing in the foyer amidst a clutter of mismatched suitcases, looking bewildered. Ruth knew Brie from Bread Loaf and she liked her for her myopic pursed-lip expression—she always looked slightly dazed—and her air of the eternal hick and newcomer, and because, like Betsy Butler, she hadn’t published much (and judging from her workshop stories, all of which seemed to be about disembodied brains and talking unicorns, she never would). She had a broad smooth forehead and strong hands and hair that flew round her face as if she were caught in a perpetual windstorm. “Brie,” Ruth said, offering her outspread palms as she swept down the staircase, her voice rich with noblesse oblige.

  Brie’s response registered somewhere on the scale between a yelp and a screech, before trailing off into frequencies audible only to more sensitive lifeforms. “Ruthie!” was the rough sense of the sound she produced, and then they were in each other’s arms, sisters torn asunder by the Fates and at long last reunited. After a moment they fell back a pace, still clutching one another but attaining enough distance for a quick but keen mutual appraisal. Brie looked good, Ruth had to admit it—but then why wouldn’t she, she was only twenty-six. “I’m knocked out,” Brie gasped, her dull gray gaze licking about the foyer, darting into the fuzzy purviews of the parlor where the dim forms of the cocktail crowd could be seen hanging protectively over their drinks, and then settling again on Ruth, “—I really am. I’m stunned. The place is fantastic, much tonier than I’d imagined even—”

  “Yes,” Ruth agreed with a proprietary air, “it’s first class all the way here. Septima—th
at’s my boyfriend Saxby’s mother?—she keeps the place competitive, that’s for sure. They know how to spoil you. The food alone …” Ruth put three fingers together and waggled them in appreciation.

  Brie was treating her to a broad open-faced look of wonder and unadulterated joy. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said in a kind of bark. “I thought I was going to be the only one—” Brie hesitated. “The only …”

  Only what? Ruth wondered. Talking unicorn? Ditzy blonde? Rank amateur? Was Brie insulting her, was that it? Was she saying that she’d thought it would be all Grobian, Anserine, Kleinschmidt and Thalamus, all celebrity and anointed royalty, but that now she saw there was a peonage here as well and that Ruth was part of it? Like herself? Ruth could feel her ears turning red.

  Brie never finished the thought. She squealed something unintelligible followed by “Oh, Ruthie, it’s so good to see you!” A second obligatory hug ensued, slightly less fervent than the first, and then Ruth led Brie into the parlor for cocktails.

  At the bar, Ruth introduced her to Sandy, Regina, Ina and Bob, each of whom received in return a look of such awe and abasement they might have been Salinger, Nevelson, Welty and Ashbery. Brie then grilled them, as a group and individually both, about the minutest and most banal details of their personal histories, ending up with the verboten question: “So what are you working on now?”

  Ruth smiled serenely throughout, exchanging occasional glances with her friends and giving them the odd shoulder shrug for their unspoken commiseration. She was the undisputed queen here, after all—or she was so long as the pretender, Jane Shine, remained under wraps. And where was La Shine, with her flamenco hair and phony laugh—choking to death on a bit of pickled truffle in her lofty and well-appointed room? Out for a drive with her Nordic slave? No matter. In giving Brie the great good gift of her patronage—if she was all right in La Dershowitz’s eyes, she was all right, period—Ruth felt charitable, saintly even. It was the least she could do.