East is East (21 page)

An island. All the warmth went out of him like air from a balloon. So he was trapped, and the highway went nowhere. He cleared his throat. “Seiji,” he said.

The old lady studied him a long moment, silent for the first time in the past six hours. “Seiji,” she repeated finally, regarding him with a cold eye, as if she'd never seen him before, as if she were wondering how he'd ever come to invade her house, her dining room, the sanctum of her library.

Was there a bridge? he wondered. A ferry? Could he swim to shore? He held her eyes, trying his best to look humble, thankful, needful, all the while certain that she was about to order him out of the house, call the police, have him bound and manacled and flung into that dark foul
gaijin
cell that was his destiny. But then an evil thought crept into his head: what could she do, after all, old as she was and alone in the house with an invalid husband and the deep pulsating silence of the night?

“You'll need a towel,” she said suddenly, pushing herself up from the chair to gaze serenely on him, her blue-veined hands dangling at her sides. And then she smiled. “So rude of me—here I've kept you till all hours chattering away like an old mynah bird—what you must think of me, poor man.” Then she turned and started out of the room. “Well, come on, then,” she said, pausing at the threshold, “I'll show you to your room.”

He followed her through the softly glowing house, up the stairs and down a long carpeted corridor, in the middle of which she paused to glance over her shoulder and put a finger to her lips. “Shhhh,” she whispered, pointing to a closed door, “Barton.” He nodded, vaguely aware of a smell of medication and the soft suck and rattle of labored breathing, and then they were moving again, noiselessly, the old woman's narrow shoulder blades working
beneath the thin fabric of her blouse. “Here,” she said, swinging back a varnished door at the end of the corridor and stepping aside for him.

At first he thought she was having a little joke—this couldn't be the room; it was huge, the size of a dormitory, big enough for racquetball, gymnastics, a swimming pool. And for all her talk of futons, it was dominated by a huge canopied bed that seemed to float over the carpet like a ship under sail. There was an overstuffed couch too, and an armchair. He could see a bathroom beyond it, a TV, air conditioner, windows that gave onto the sea. Twin reading lamps on either side of the bed bathed the room in a rich golden light. He hesitated, but she took him by the arm and ushered him in. “Sleep tight,” she said, handing him a towel, “and if there's anything you need, you just let me know. Nightie-night.” And the door clicked shut behind him.

He felt drunk. Exhilarated. So pleased with himself he laughed aloud. The bed—it was amazing, stupendous, big enough to sleep the entire crew of the
Tokachi-maru
and Captain Nishizawa too. He tumbled into it, kicking up his heels, bouncing high off the springs, all the while giggling like a child on a trampoline. In the next moment he was in the gleaming bathroom—as big itself as the entire apartment he'd shared with his
ob
ā
san
—and he was rifling the drawers: soap, shampoo, cologne, an electric razor, aftershave. It was too much. He was dreaming. And then all at once he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and the elation went out of him.

It made him catch his breath. Made him look again.

But no, it couldn't be. This wasn't Hiro Tanaka staring back at him—not this raggedy bum, not this derelict with the matted hair and sunken cheeks, with the fingernails like a grave digger's and a patchwork of filthy bandages hanging from him like so much sloughed skin. He was twenty years old and he looked sixty—this was what America had done for him. Suddenly he was frightened. He saw himself through the changeless weary succession of weeks and months and years to come, running, hiding, begging, living like a
Burakumin
—an untouchable—in the anonymous streets of an
alien world, too hopeless to get a job, too degraded, too filthy. He'd fallen from grace, and the muddied earth had rushed up to engulf him.

He stared into the mirror and despair overwhelmed him, but then, after a period, he glanced at the shower. It was the first shower he'd seen in over a month. He paused a moment to examine it dispassionately, as if he were a student of showers. He slid back the glass door, studied the gleaming controls, the soap dish, the pale scented bar of French soap that made the whole room smell like an orchard. And he examined the tub beneath it, too—the tub in which you could soak a blistered, aching body for hours at a time. Before he knew what he was doing, he was stripping off the filthy bandages, the ludicrous shorts and sweat-stained T-shirt, and he began to feel better. When he turned the knobs experimentally, water thundered from the showerhead, and the sound of it, the smell of it, made him feel better still. And then, wholly converted, he stepped into the tub and let the water wash over him, and it was cleansing, pure, redemptive and sweet.

The day was terrifically hot, a real slap-in-the-face, dog-under-the-house sort of day, the sort of day when a man just wanted to kick back with a cold beer and a plate of crab and listen to the Braves sweat their sorry asses round the diamond. The thing was, he'd promised those Tupelo Shores people he'd do the lawn and trim the shrubs, and he needed the money. Not for himself—he had his chew, his garden, all the crab and oyster and fat pink mullet his traps could hold—but for his nephew. Royal wanted one of those spike-studded wristbands they all wore on MTV, and Olmstead White was planning to surprise him on his birthday. But then, on second thought, maybe he
could
use a little cash for himself too—he'd managed to save most of his things from the fire, the necessities anyway, and he'd been able to move into the reconverted chicken coop out back without any real hardship—but there were a few things he could use. Like some towels and toilet articles—he
liked his eau de cologne and his bay rum, liked to smell nice for the ladies, and all those bottles had gone up like firecrackers on him. And so, heat or no heat, after a lunch of black beans and rice with a chopped onion and a dash of the hot sauce he'd made himself from dried cherry peppers and garlic, he looped his machete round the handlebars of his bicycle, swung a leg over, and started down the hard black frying-pan of the road for the big estates at the other end of the island.

It was a ten-mile ride, nearly all of it as flat as his kitchen table, and normally it was nothing for him—he could have gone twice as far and back again without even breathing hard. But he was a little out of sorts today—maybe it was the heat—and though he coasted whenever he could, each time he dug at the pedals he felt a tightness in his chest, as if somebody had slipped a noose under his arms. He'd start in pedaling and he could feel the noose cinch up on him, squeezing all the air out of his lungs, and he just couldn't seem to draw his breath. His bad hip was acting up too, and his hand, blistered and raw beneath the clean white yard-and-a-half-long strip of gauze, burned as fiercely as it had the day that Chinaman had tried to deep-fry it. Three miles down the road, just past Cribbs' store, he thought he'd turn around and go on back home, he was feeling that poorly, but then he thought of that helpless jabbering old white lady and her laid-up husband, and figured he was the better part of halfway there already, and he kept on going.

He felt better as he glided over the little bridge that spanned Pumpkin Hammock and saw the cooters and mud turtles lined up like dominoes on a log beneath him—he could have spit on them if he wanted to—and he thought of himself and Wheeler as boys spearing turtles with an old window hook and the taste of the soup and gumbo his mama would make and the way they nailed the hollow shells up along the south side of the house till the place was shingled with them. And then he was passing Hollieway's Meadow, where the live oaks grew up in clusters out of the stumps of the old trees they'd taken down to build ships for the Confederate
navy, his bony old knees pumping, and the noose eased up a notch or two.

He'd taken a pet screech owl out of one of those stumps when he was a boy, an unfledged chick, the runt out of a clutch of three. It was going to die anyway, trampled under by the spiky feet of its siblings, its head pecked till it was one big blister. He'd given it fish, which it didn't like, and mice, which it did. He remembered his mama thinking he was crazy, dicing up a mouse with his daddy's long knife, but he clipped that owl's wings and it grew up to love him, till the dog got it, anyway. That must have been sixty years ago, and now, as he glided through the gates of Tupelo Shores Estates and turned left on Salt Air Drive, he wondered at the memory of it, at the power of human recollection that could take him off his bicycle and out of the heat and send him back through all those long worn-out years. But then he wobbled into the Woosters' driveway and a swarm of greenhead flies came up on him out of nowhere and the noose tightened again and he was back in the here and now. He could taste the sweat at the corners of his mouth.

All right. He would squat and rest a minute in the shade where the grass was deep and cool, and then he'd have a long drink from the hose and get to work. No need to say anything to anybody. They'd see him outside the window, the machete flashing in the sun, and they'd hear him when he fired up the lawn machine, and they'd say,
It's Olmstead White out there working in this heat and maybe we'll just get him a tall glass of lemonade with a finger of vodka in it the way he likes it.

He squatted, and the noose eased up a little. And then he bent to the hose and the cool water quickened him and he was ready for work, but there was that damn stab in the hip again, and the salt sweat was just like liquid fire on his hand. To hell with the doctor, he thought, and he held the bandage tight with his good hand and he let the water run over the burning one till the salt was gone and the sharpness of the pain fell off a bit. Then he unsheathed the machete and started nicking at the bushes with short quick drops of his wrist.

He must have been at it half an hour or more by the time he worked himself round to the ocean side of the house, where the pool stood behind a waist-high gate all overgrown with wisteria. There was somebody sitting out by the pool, and that surprised him—not just because of the heat, but because the old lady and her husband never paid any attention to the thing, except to let it go green as a duckpond between the pool man's visits. It must be the grandson, he thought, visiting from college. He'd seen the boy now and again over the past few years, hanging round the house, waiting for the ferry, driving his red sports car hellbent-for-leather up and down the street to Cribbs' store—a likable enough kid, even if his eyes were spaced too wide apart and he wore his hair as if it was 1950 still. Hell, and he had to chuckle at the thought, the kid wouldn't know a MTV haircut if it grew up around his ears. The machete flicked and there was a splash and Olmstead White turned briefly to see the froth of the water, the slick kicking limbs, hair flattened out like an otter's, but he thought no more about it.

He trimmed the holly bushes square against the house and then he turned to the pool. He hadn't got to the wisteria last time he was here, and now it was sending out snaking arms every which way and generally looking pretty shabby all the way round. Coming across the lawn, the machete hanging loose in his good hand, he was thinking of his mother, another trick of recollection, as if the day was filtered out of his head and all the past came swarming back to him in its odd and essential details. He was thinking of just this, just one thing, a picture frozen there in his brain: his mama at the stove and himself and Wheeler and his daddy sitting at the table, the mad hag's shriek of a hurricane wind in their ears, windows rattling, claws on the roof, and his mama jiggling the cast-iron pan and flipping corn cakes as if nothing in the world was the matter. He was thinking about that and the tightness was gone, and then he glanced up and caught the grandson's eye, and saw, for the first time, that the grandson was staring back at him as if he'd seen a ghost.

And that was it, the beginning of the end: recognition. This was
no grandson—and the noose bit into him with a sudden savage jerk—this was, was … there were no words to form the thought, only rage crackling like grease in a hot frying pan. He took three steps forward, the machete poised over his head, and he saw those Chinese eyes, that Chinese nose and mouth and ears come back to haunt him. “Son of a bitch!” he cried—or tried to, the words sticking in his throat, choking him, the noose like a garrote, like two nooses, two garrotes … and then something was giving way inside of him and he plunged forward as if into a vast body of water and knew he would never be short of breath again.