East is East (17 page)

But what was this?—there was someone in his boat. Someone long, lanky, the build of a basketball player, L.A. Dodgers cap, acid-washed face: Abercorn. His jubilation was gone, switched off like a light. “Hello,” he said, feeling the mud between his toes, feeling foolish, as if this weren't his boat, his water, his trees, as if this weren't the ground on which his ancestors had been born and breathed their last for two centuries and more.

Abercorn was hunched over a yellow notepad and writing furiously, oblivious to Saxby, the day, the drift and tug of the boat on its painter. He was wearing headphones. Saxby followed the connection past Abercorn's blotched ears, spattered neck and wrinkled collar to the Walkman in his shirt pocket, and figured he was either writing a novel dictated by spirit guides or transcribing the tapes of his interviews with the various boneheads who populated the island. “Hello,” Saxby repeated, raising his voice.

When there was no reaction, he tossed his flippers into the boat, and that was all it took: Abercorn jumped as if he'd been attacked from within, betrayed by his own body. He gaped up—damn, if his eyes weren't pink, like a bunny's—and then flipped the 'phones from his ears with a confused wheeze of greeting. “Oh, hey,” he sputtered, looking as if he'd just come back from a long way off, “I'm just, uh—I hope you don't mind the boat and all, I was just, it was such a nice day, I—” and then, as if the air had run out of his balloon, he fell silent.

“Sure,” Saxby said, hardly less embarrassed than the pink-eyed
wonder before him, “no problem. I was just going to take the boat out. For a little swim. That's all.”

Abercorn made no effort to rise. Instead, he fixed, his suddenly shrewd eyes on Saxby and said, “Mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

Saxby sighed. The sun was like syrup and everything was drowning in it. “I've only got a minute,” he said, stepping into the water, gripping the boat to steady it and then swinging himself nimbly over the side.

Abercorn wanted to hear about the incident at the store—and he wanted more too on that first night on Peagler Sound: What did the Nip look like? how tall was he? did he attack without provocation?—and Saxby obliged him, all the while tinkering with the engine, checking the starter plug, the spare gas tank and the coil of the starter cord. Right in the middle of the store incident, just as Saxby was getting to the good part—how the Japanese guy bundled up his junk food and lowered his shoulder like a fullback and shot past him out the door—Abercorn interrupted him. “You know—could I ask you something?” he said.

Ask him something? Wasn't that what he was doing?

“Something personal, I mean.”

Saxby fiddled with the engine. “Sure,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“It's your accent. I mean, I'm from L.A., and everybody down here sounds like they just stepped out of Dogpatch or something—no offense—but you don't have it. You are from around here, right?”

It was a question he'd been asked a thousand times, and the answer was equivocal: he was and he wasn't. He'd been born in Savannah, yes, and he was heir to half the island, even if he did talk like a Yankee. But the reason he talked like a Yankee was that he'd spent half his life—the formative half—in New York and Massachusetts. That was his father's doing. Grandfather Saxby wasn't even cold yet in the grave when Marion Lights uprooted Septima and her year-old son and moved them up to Ossining, New York, on the Hudson River. The family had from time immemorial owned
a controlling interest in a big antiquated factory there that produced yeast, margarine, gin, vodka and the callowest whiskey known to man. Till Marion came along, the family had been content to manage the place from afar, but he had different ideas. He gave over the administration of the Tupelo Island estate (which was then called Cardross, after Cardross Lights, founder of the original plantation that had managed to survive intact through six generations of Lights, drought, flood, capricious cotton prices, carpetbaggers, boll weevils and a host of ravenous developers from the mainland) to a wily old former overseer by the name of Crawford Sheepwater, and moved north to become a Captain of Industry.

Saxby was staring at Abercorn, who'd paused to glance up from his notebook and frame the question, but he was seeing his father, that willful and supremely depressed man. Or at least he became depressed as the years of his exile wore on and he didn't exactly unseat the Rockefellers, Morgans and Harrimans. In the beginning he was almost manic with enthusiasm—when Saxby was six, seven, eight, he saw his father as a whirlwind, larger than life, a Pecos Bill or a Paul Bunyan. He was a flushed face over dinner, a set of tweed shoulders to ride on, a lover of trains and odd jokes.
Saxby,
he would say, in his rich deep Southern Gentleman's tones,
you see that dog out there?,
and he'd point to a shepherd or beagle cavorting across the lawn and Saxby would nod.
That dog's from Ohio, Saxby,
he would say, and no matter how many times he'd heard the joke—and he never got it, not till his father was long dead and gone—Saxby would say,
How do you know?,
and his father, in the tone of a professor addressing a room of veterinary students, would reply,
Why, because he has an O under his tail.

And then later, just before he locked himself in the back pantry of the big gray-and-white Victorian overlooking the Hudson, he would wander in and out of rooms, an antic gleam in his eye, and announce, no matter the situation or the company or how many times he'd announced it already, that “cunt was cunt.” That was his formula. He'd look up from his soup, glance cannily round at
the guests and clap his hands together.
You know what I say,
he'd announce, pausing to look Septima in the eye,
cunt's cunt, that's what I say.
And then he locked himself in the back pantry when Saxby and his mother were out shopping and the maid had gone home, locked himself up with a bottle of the cheap whiskey he manufactured for the cheap drunks of this great country and enough Seconal to put his board of directors to sleep for a month.

Saxby was nine at the time. Though his mother had been born in Macon and gone to college at Marietta, she stayed on in the big empty house in Ossining rather than return to the big empty house on Tupelo Island. In her grief and bewilderment, she turned back to poetry—the poetry that had been the romantic bulwark of her youth—and she found solace in it. Six months later, she returned to Tupelo Island and founded Thanatopsis House, “that mysterious realm, where each shall take/His chamber in the silent halls … ,” a palace of art sprung up from the ashes of her husband's death. Saxby spent three years with her there, and then, because the local educational system was “nothing but white trash and niggers,” she sent him north again, to Groton. After Groton, it was the string of colleges that entangled him for years before finally setting him loose in California, another Yankee bastion. And so, Saxby had a foreign accent. He was a Southerner, all right, no doubt about that—but only part-time.

It was a long story. To make it short, he rolled his eyes for Abercorn and thickened his accent till it dripped: “Well, Massa Abacoan, Ah sweah Ah jest doan know—Ah'm jest folks like anybody else.”

Abercorn responded with a startled bray of a laugh. “That's good. That's really good.” Then he capped his Uni-Ball pen, stuck it in his shirt pocket and gave a little speech about how he'd never been out off the Georgia coast and how he was wondering if maybe Saxby'd mind if he tagged along—since he was in the boat already and everything.

Saxby studied him a moment—the long jaw and glistening teeth,
the toneless skin and unnatural hair—and shrugged. “Why not?” he said, and fired up the engine.

The first week of august was as slow and silken and sweet as any Saxby could remember, and he fell into the embrace of it—of home, of Ruth, of his mother—with an inevitability that was like a force of nature. He was up late each night with Ruth—hoisting cocktails and dining with poets, painters and sculptors, letting his mind drift over the earnest declarations of the evening's poetry or fiction reading, joining in the clubby chitchat of the billiard room till the close lingering heat gave way to something just a breath cooler coming in off the ocean. He slept late, through the relative cool of the morning, took his breakfast with Septima and contemplated the vacant perfection of his aquarium. In the afternoons, he fished, snorkeled, swam. In the evenings, there was Ruth, and the day started again.

She was something to watch, Ruth. She worked the cocktail hour, dinner and the ceaseless ebb and flow of billiard-room dynamics like a politician—or maybe a guerrilla. There was a little joke or routine for everyone, from the unapproachable Laura Grobian to the chummy Thalamus and the lesser lights too. She was amazing. Body signals, pursed lips, an arched eyebrow or nod of the head that meant worlds: every time he looked up she was holding a dialogue with somebody. One minute she'd be having a cocktail hour tête-à-tête with Peter Anserine and two of his skinny solemn attendants, and the next she'd be across the room, laughing with Clara Kleinschmidt till they both had tears in their eyes—and all the while mugging for Sandy or Regina or Bob Penick or for him—she never forgot him, no matter how wound up she got—and she would give him a look that passed like electricity between them.

And then she missed cocktails again one night and he stood around with a glass in his hand radiating his own brand of wit and charm, but all the while craning his neck to look for her. When she caught up with him—she slipped in beside him at the table
halfway through dinner—she was out of breath and her eyes were big with excitement. “What's up?” he'd asked, and she'd taken hold of his arm and pecked a kiss at him, all the while nodding and winking and grinning in asides to half the room. “Nothing,” she said, “just work, that's all. This story I'm working on's a killer. The best.” “Terrific,” he said, and meant it. She paused to slip a morsel of veal between her lips. “Listen,” she said, “can we drive into Darien tomorrow? I need to get some things.” “Sure,” he said, and she was eating, small quick bites, her teeth sharp and even. “Groceries. Crackers and cheese and whatnot—for my studio. You know,” she said, giving him a look, “a girl gets hungry out there.”

Hungry. All right. He whispered in her ear and when they kissed he tasted the meat on her lips and everyone was watching.

And then, at the end of the week—he couldn't put it off any longer, didn't want to—he had to make another collecting trip, this one in the hope of getting his project off the ground. He was going to collect the fish—the rare, almost legendary fish—that would make him his fortune—or rather, carve him his niche in the annals of the great aquarists: fortune he already had. Ruth didn't want to come with him. Not this time. She was working too well, going with the flow, and she couldn't risk it. She'd miss him—even if he'd only be gone overnight—and she'd come along with him next time. She promised.

He spent a full blazing bug-infested afternoon and the succeeding morning on the Okefenokee, casting nets, drawing seines, setting minnow traps, and he came up with a writhing grab bag of fascinating things—pirate perch, golden top minnow, needle-nosed gar, swamp darter and brook silverside—but not what he was looking for. It was a disappointment, but not a crushing one—certainly not a defeat. He'd hoped to get lucky, yes, but knew realistically that he might have to comb the swamp a hundred times before he scored. After all, Ahab hadn't found the white whale in a day, either. Still, he enjoyed the drive, enjoyed the day out in the wilderness, even enjoyed his solitary night in a motel in Ciceroville, where he watched the Atlanta Braves on a color TV bolted to the
wall. At noon on the second day he brought his rented boat in and dumped his catch over the side. (He was tempted, especially by the shimmering silver gar, to bring something back for the lifeless aquarium, but he resisted; he didn't want his little world defiled by just any tawdry thing that happened to catch his eye.) Then he headed back for Tupelo Island, hoping to make the afternoon ferry and cocktail hour.

It was early evening when he rounded the bend of the long sweeping drive and the big house came into view. There was movement on the south lawn, and Saxby saw that the colonists had gathered there for a picnic supper, the women's white summer dresses and men's light jackets like so many pale flowers in a field of saturate green. He caught a glimpse of his mother, straw bonnet with a chiffon veil, erect and regal in a wooden lawnchair, and he waved. Ruth would be there somewhere, and he slowed the pickup ever so briefly, but didn't see her, and then he was rumbling into the garage, a faint pink cloud of dust catching up with him as he killed the engine and swung open the driver's door.

He hadn't had a chance to clean up—his hands stank of perch and darter and of the rich fecal muck of the Okefenokee, and the thighs and backside of his jeans were stiff with the residue of his fish-handling—and Ruth took him by surprise. No sooner had he swung open the door and set his feet on the ground, than she was there, rushing into his arms in a strapless cocktail dress that showed off the flashing lines and tawny hollows of her throat and shoulders. “Sax,” she moaned, holding him, kissing him, fish-stink and all, “I'm so glad you're back.”