In the next moment she stood face to face with Turco and Abercorn. Ruth felt Saxby tense beside her, but she clung to him and he held back. Abercorn stepped forward, his patchy face and artificial hair hidden beneath the brim of the most ridiculous hat she’d ever seen outside of a circus. He stood a head taller than anyone else in the crowd. “Glad you could make it,” he said, and there was nothing friendly about it. “The boat’s this way.” She pecked Sax a kiss, a kiss recorded by the click of lenses and the pop of flashbulbs from beyond the police line, and then she went off with him.
After that, it was the swamp. With a vengeance. There was the stink of it, first of all—the whole place smelled like the alley out back of a fish market. Then there were the bugs, legions of them, of every known species and appetite, not to mention the snakes in the trees or the blistered scum on the water. She looked out over the matted surface to the ghostly trees beyond and to the trees that shadowed them and so on all the way to the horizon and thought of a diorama she’d once seen depicting the dinosaurs in their heyday. But then the diorama was in a cool, dark, antiseptic museum, and the trees were painted on.
And then a man she hadn’t noticed till that moment was helping her into the boat—he was clean-shaven, neither young nor old, and he wore a baseball cap with a pair of fold-down sunglasses attached to the visor. She sat up front beside a pair of loudspeakers—the sort of arrangement local politicians favor as they Doppler up and down the streets—while the man in the cap climbed into the rear and busied himself with the engine. It was a big boat, long, wide and flat-bottomed, and reassuringly stable. She looked straight ahead as Abercorn stationed himself in the middle and Turco, in his jungle fighter’s costume, crouched down just behind her. The motor coughed, sputtered and then roared to life, and they were off.
By eleven o’clock she was hoarse, thirsty, sweat-soaked and sunburned, and bitten in all the key regions of her anatomy. Every time she paused to catch her breath or take a sip of water Turco’s nasty little voice was there to fill the void, urging her on: “Come on, come on, keep it up—I tell you it’s going to work, I know these people, I know them.” It didn’t take her long to realize that this was his idea, yet another demented variation on the boom box and the designer clothes. She wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t speak to him, wouldn’t so much as turn her head, but she kept it up—for Saxby’s sake, for Septima’s sake, for her own sake and Hiro’s—kept it up till she had no voice left.
It must have been about four when the sky clouded over and the storm came up on them. Abercorn and the man in the cap—his name was Watt-Something and he was one of the sheriff’s men—wanted to go in, but Turco wouldn’t hear of it. He was clenched like a fist, his face dark and angry. His tone was pathology itself. “I can smell him,” he hissed. “He’s out there, I know it.” And then to Ruth: “Keep it up, goddamn it, keep it up.”
She held the microphone to her lips and called out Hiro’s name, over and over, though she knew it was absurd, hopeless, as asinine as serenading the bugs with Donna Summer. “Hiro!” she bellowed to the tree toads and tuitles, to the birds and bears and the mute identical trees, “Hiro!,” and the gnats swarmed down her throat and up her nose. She was still at it when the storm broke and the rain lashed them like a whip, windblown and harsh. And then all of a sudden Turco was pinching her arm and shushing her and there it was, thin and plaintive, the distant rain-washed bleat of subjection and defeat: “Haha! Haha! Haha!”
Hiro came to her arms, came running, awash in filth, bleeding from every pore, his clothes hanging in shreds, splashing through the sludge like a boy coming in off the playground. “Haha! Haha!” he cried, “Okāsan! Okāsan!” He was crazed, delirious, she could see that, could see it in his face and in the mad wide stare of his eyes. Turco crouched like an insect behind her and Hiro spread his arms wide, running, splashing, stumbling for her, and she felt in that instant that nothing mattered in the world but this poor tortured man, this sweet man, this man she’d kept and fed and loved, and she called out his name once more—”Hiro!”—and this time, for the first time, she meant it.
The rain drove down. The swamp festered and hummed. And then Turco was on him like some sort of parasite, choking him, forcing his face into the water, twisting his arms back till they went tight in the shoulders. They hauled him over the side like a fish and laid him face-up on the floor of the boat, and now his animation was gone—he looked half-dead lying there, his head thrown back and his sick tan eyes swimming in their sockets. They wouldn’t let her touch him. All she wanted was to cradle him, hold his head in her lap, but they wouldn’t let her. She lost control then, for just a moment, shoving at Turco, cursing him, and he came back at her with a ferocity that stopped her heart. He didn’t touch her, not this time, but the look on his face was a thing she would never forget—only the very thinnest single played-out strand of wire was holding him back. All the long way back to the dock she sat there, staring out on nothing, the rain beating at her, feeling helpless, feeling like an apostate, feeling violated.
That was the low point.
When they got back to the dock, when the crowd overwhelmed the thin line of police and pushed their way through to get a glimpse of Hiro Tanaka, the desperado, the jailbreaker, the foreigner, their plain sunburned faces and steady pale eyes prepared for any extreme of outrage and shock, when a kind of frenzy consumed the press and even the police were hard-pressed to clamp down on their wads of Redman and retain their equanimity, that’s when things began to turn. They were all over her, all over him. The police shouldered their way through, cleared a channel to the ambulance, the white arms and legs and sure hands of the paramedics, rain driving down and down and down. The lights flashed, the siren screamed and Hiro was gone, Ruth clinging dazedly to the picture of him laid out on the stretcher, Turco hanging over him like a vampire. They gave her five minutes, and in a fog she found her way to the ladies’ room at the tourist center and wiped the mash of insects and sweat from her face, tied her hair up in a scarf one of the park girls gave her, and stepped out into the lobby to face them.
It was then, only then, that she began to realize just how big a story this was. And how big a part she’d played in it. And what she alone knew that no one else did. Forget Jessica McClure and the woman in the surf, this was the story of the hour and she was at the center of it. They jabbed microphones at her, there were lights and flashbulbs, and she knew that she had a story here, not a short story, not some labored fiction that strove for some obscure artistic truth, but a real true tough hard and painful real-life story—and what’s more, she was the heroine of it. The realization hit her in a single glowing flash-lit moment of epiphany. She smiled for the cameras.
The following day, Jane had her accident.
Ruth was back at Thanatopsis, back in the good graces of Septima, back in the hive, the INS had their man and Saxby had his fish. She’d treated her inflamed epidermis to alternating hot and cold baths laced with Epsom salts, dabbed at each of her myriad swellings with alcohol and calamine lotion and slept till noon. Eating a very late breakfast on the patio—no one would have expected her to work after the ordeal she’d been through—she’d run into Irving Thalamus, who was nursing a hangover with the aid of a tall Calistoga and gin and the New York Review of Books. She had a long talk with Irving about her idea, about doing an extended magazine piece or even a book about the whole incident, and Irving had put her in touch with his agent, Marker McGill, of the venerable McGill Madden Agency. That was encouraging, but she was still feeling low over the disaster of her reading, though everyone assured her that it had gone off fine, even if it was a bit on the long side, and feeling lower yet over Hiro. She couldn’t get the shock of it out of her head, the way he’d looked with his fevered eyes and wasted limbs, his sunken cheeks and lacerated flesh—and the leeches, leeches all over him like sticking plaster—and the way he’d come to her. That made her feel lower than anything. He loved her. He trusted her. And she’d betrayed him. But then they hadn’t given her a choice. And in the long run it was for his own good—no jail could be worse than that swamp, and there was no question but that he would have died out there.