East is East (23 page)

Ina sipped white wine with an ice cube in it. Her voice was breathy and small, considering the size of her frame. “I wish they'd just leave the poor man alone—I mean, just look at him”—and she bent forward to tap the paper with one lacquered nail—“does he look dangerous to you?”

Ruth was reading about Sheriff Peagler and how he'd vowed to put an end to this lawlessness one way or another—the fugitive wasn't even an American citizen, didn't even belong in this country—and no, he wouldn't rule out shooting the expletive-deleted on sight.

“Get these hog farmers stirred up …” Ina trailed off.

“Uh-huh, that's what I mean,” Sandy said, “it's going to be like something out of
The Chase.”
He paused to sip at his screwdriver. “You know that movie? Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford?”

Ruth looked up at him for the first time. “Yeah,” she said, “I mean no. Listen, you mind if I take this, the paper, I mean?”

Ruth skipped dinner that night. She paid a quick visit to the kitchen, where Rico was scurrying around under the supervision of the head chef (Armand de Bouchette, the man who'd made Thanatopsis preeminent among artists' colonies—so far as cuisine was concerned, at any rate), and she filled a pair of insulated lunch buckets with
pompano en papillote, articbauts au beurre noir,
steamed baby eggplant, French bread and potatoes in their own essence. “A romantic evening for two, eh?” De Bouchette was standing over her, the toque cocked back on his head, eyebrows lifted in amusement.
He was in his late fifties, on the run from a string of bad marriages, a man who liked to sip cognac and spread his hand casually across the buttocks of the female colonists. “You and Saxbee? Or have you maybe been up to something you don't tell us about?”

Ruth kept her head down, busy with the lunch buckets. “Working late, that's all, Armand. Sax is going to join me later—
if
he gets back in time. Real romantic.” Then she turned her full-force smile on him, slipped a bottle of wine from the rack above the counter, and left him groping after her retreating flank.

It was nearly seven when she got back to the cabin. The sun was sinking. A breeze drifted in off the ocean. Everything was still. Hiro wouldn't be expecting her till morning, and as she approached the clearing, she wondered how to announce her presence without startling him. She thought of calling out to him from a safe distance—“Hiro, I'm back!” or “It's me, Ruth!”—but if anyone were within earshot, the consequences could be fatal. On the other hand, if she didn't warn him somehow, the minute her foot touched the steps he'd shoot through the roof like a Saturn rocket. She was halfway across the clearing when she hit on a solution—she would start singing, burst into song, and if anyone heard her they would think she was drunk or jubilant or crazed—it was all the same to her. And so, cradling the newspaper and the thermal containers to her chest, she strode across the clearing, singing in a high pure glee-club soprano, belting out the first thing that came into her head: “Oh, where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? / Oh, where have you been, charming Billy? / I have been to seek a wife, / She's the—”

She caught herself in midphrase—Hiro's head had sprung up in the window like a jack-in-the-box. His face was a mask of pure terror, the face of a man awakening to aerial bombardment, tracers, the mushroom-headed thing itself. But then she caught his eye and saw that he recognized her, and it was all right.

“I brought food,” she said, hoping to pacify him with the noun as she pushed through the door, “and this.” She set down the silver canisters and held up the newspaper.

Hiro stared numbly at the newsprint stretched taut as a sheet before him. She watched as his eyes fastened on the headline.

“You read English?” she asked.

He did. Of course he did. And he was proud of the accomplishment. Americans, with their big feet and blustering condescension to the rest of the world, knew no language but their own. But the Japanese, the most literate people on earth, learned to read English in their schools, from the elementary grades on. Of course, since there were few native speakers in Japan, and since the Japanese system relied on rote learning, the comprehensive skills of the average Japanese were far more highly developed than the conversational.

Hiro looked up from the newspaper. “We learn in school,” he said simply.

Ruth folded the paper and handed it to him. He bowed his head and gave her a hangdog look. “They're really after you now,” she said. “What on earth did you do to them down there?”

He shrugged. “Nothing, Rusu. Eat food. Listen old lady talk, talk, talk. She never shut up.”

He tried a smile on her, the smile of a schoolboy caught out at some prank. There was more to the Tupelo Shores incident than he was letting on—of that she was certain. “Speaking of food,” she said, “I hope you like fish.”

Over dinner—they sat together at her desk after she pushed aside the typewriter and the clutter of scrawled-over pages that were about to jell into her first novella—he gave her the whole story. He told her of Ambly Wooster's confusion and how she insisted on his spending the night, told her of his joy at having a shower, clean sheets and three meals a day, and of his shock and horror at Olmstead White's unprovoked attack. “No warning, Rusu, nussing—and he has a sword, a
kend
ō
sword, I sink. He wants to cut me, Rusu, make me bleed.”

Olmstead White was dead, and Ruth wondered about the legal ramifications of that. “You didn't touch him, did you?”

Hiro looked away. His face flushed. “I run,” he said.

Ruth poured the wine and they drank and talked till the cabin fell into shadow and all the familiar objects of the place—her typewriter, the hot plate and coffee things, her pitcher plants and the Hockney poster she'd tacked up on the wall to brighten the place up—began to lose definition in the deepening gloom of evening. She told Hiro of her girlhood in Santa Monica—Were there Japanese there? he wanted to know; were there Negroes? Mexicans?—and he told her of his American hippie father, his mother's disgrace, the epithets that had trailed him since he was old enough to walk. She leaned toward him as he spoke: so that was it. His hair, his eyes, the size of him—he was half an American.

Later, she spoke of her writing—She was an author?; the idea seemed to surprise him, though he'd sat there all day watching her at work—and of Jane Shine, and how she'd come to Thanatopsis to usurp her place. He sympathized. “Very bad sitration, Rusu—don't let her push you in a circle.” And then he told her of Chiba and Unagi and of his dream of the City of Brotherly Love.

In summer, darkness comes quickly on the islands. The sun pales, the dense green of the vegetation washes to gray, and night drops like a curtain. They ate, they talked, and before long fireflies perforated the darkness beyond the windows and Ruth could no longer make out Hiro's features. “I'll help you if I can,” she said finally. “I suppose that makes me an accessory or something, but I'll think of some way of getting you off the island and on a train or a bus going north.” She paused to light a cigarette, the match flaring briefly in the darkness. “You might not find the City of Brotherly Love, but at least in New York you can disappear—that much I know.”

Hiro's voice was low and troubled and it came to her out of the darkness. “I can never repay my debt to you, not in a hundred lifetimes.”

“Forget it,” she said, “you would do the same for me—anybody would.” She didn't know exactly what she meant by that, but she could feel his embarrassment, some sort of macho Japanese thing,
she supposed, and she was just talking to cover it. To change the subject, she asked him if he wanted a cigarette.

“No, sank you too much,” he said. His voice dropped even lower. “But how, Rusu, can you get me off this island?”

She didn't have a clue. She didn't have a car either, and judging from the look on Sax's face that night on the sound, she couldn't very well let him in on the secret. Or could she? “I don't know,” she said, and she realized in that moment that she didn't really want to get him to the mainland, not for a while yet, anyway. “But you can't risk leaving here—the cabin, I mean. Do you understand? They're after you—everybody on the island. And those two men—you remember the disco?—they'll be back, I know they will.”

The words were barely out of her mouth when Hiro went rigid. “Shhhh, Rusu,” he said, “what was that?”

“What?” she whispered.

“Shhhh. Listen.”

And then she heard it: the snap of a twig, footsteps on the path. Suddenly a light played over the front of the house, and Hiro was on the floor.

“Ruth? You in there?”

Saxby.

She was on her feet in an instant—“Yes, yes, I'm here,” she called, trying to sound nonchalant, though her heart was boring a hole in her—and then she was at the door, intercepting him at the threshold.

He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and his hair had fallen across his eyes. He held the flashlight in one hand, angling the beam so it caught the side of her face. “I looked all over the place for you,” he said.

Her circuits were jammed. She couldn't think. “I was here,” she said.

“What are you doing?” he said. “Sitting here in the dark? Were you talking to somebody?”

“I was working,” she said.

“In the dark?”

“I was thinking. Thinking out loud.”

He said nothing, but after a moment he lowered the flashlight and let the huskiness creep into his voice: “Hey,” he said, “you're really weird, you know that, Ruth Dershowitz?” And then he took hold of her, the screen door gaping on its hinges, the beam of the flashlight playing crazily off the ceiling. “That's what I like about you.”

She wrestled with him a bit, let him kiss her, held him. “Let's go, Sax,” she said, whispering into his shoulder. “Let's go back to the house.” Pause. “Somehow, I just don't feel like working anymore.”

He kissed her again, hard and urgent. “Time for play,” he said, and his hand was on her breast.

“Not here,” she said.

“On the couch,” he whispered, and the flashlight clicked off and dropped with a thump to the weathered planks of the porch. He was struggling with her top, trying to pin her against the doorframe, lift her off her feet and find her mouth with his tongue—all at the same time.

“No,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Out here, then. On the porch.” He had the top up around her armpits, a hand on her hip; she could feel his tongue wet on her nipples. “Out here,” she breathed, “under the stars.”

And then she swung away from him, caught at his belt and tugged him out of the doorway. In the next moment she was down on the rough planks of the porch and he was on her, breathing hard, and she was making room for him, giddy and hot and beyond caring, the screen door slamming behind them with a sudden sharp slap of punctuation.
He's in there,
she thought, moving beneath Saxby,
in there listening,
and then she was over the top and thinking nothing, nothing at all.

She brought breakfast for him the next morning, and neither of them mentioned Saxby or what had happened the night before. Not right away, at any rate. He was awake when she got there, but he seemed withdrawn, insular, wrapped up in himself like a cat, and his eyes had a dull bludgeoned look to them. The light blanket she'd given him lay balled up in one corner of the loveseat, while he was hunched at the other, dressed only in his lurid shorts—he hadn't bothered to pull on the sweatshirt or socks. And the place smelled of him—for the first time she was aware of that, of his smell—though the odor wasn't unpleasant, not at all. Just different. There'd been a smell of old wood about the place, of fungus and moss and earth—a smell she could only describe as “woodsy”—but he'd replaced it with his own smell. A body inhabited this place now: his body.