East is East (29 page)

She turned to him, put her hands on his shoulders and pecked another of her airy kisses in the direction of his cheek. “It's all set,” she said. “Day after tomorrow. Sax is going out after his pygmy fish and I'm taking Septima's car to Savannah—clothes shopping.”

It took him a moment. “You mean—?”

She looked up at him, beaming.

“Rusu,” he said, and he couldn't contain himself, joy and discovery lighting him up like a rocket. He clutched her in his arms—he was getting out of here, he was on his way, his life was starting all over—but then he felt her body pressed to his and a sudden sharp sense of loss deflated him. She would take him to the city and he would walk away from her, one mutt more in a mob of them. He would never see her again.

“So,” she said, pulling back to study his face, her lips stretched in a grin, “are you happy?”

He didn't know what to say. He was groping for the words—happy,
yes, but unhappy too—when a violent hissing clatter burst on them out of the night. It startled them both. Hiro thought of a blowout on the highway, a truck tire reduced to tatters, but the racket of it went on and on, an explosion of ratcheting and hissing that was like nothing he'd ever experienced. Ruth's eyes leapt. His face felt dead.

“A snake,” she whispered, gripping his arm. “It's a rattlesnake.” And then: “Someone must be coming up the path.”

Rattlesnake.
The flat wicked head rose up from some deep place inside him, the cold lifeless eyes. He was a boy again, clutching his
ob
ā
san's
hand and staring with grim fascination into the venom-flecked glass of the reptile house at the Tokyo Zoo.

“You've got to hide.” Ruth's face was aflame. “Out there, in back.”

The flat wicked head, the flickering tongue. Did she think he was crazy? He wasn't going anywhere.

“Now!” Her voice was harsh, toneless. “Go!”

Her hands were on him, she was pushing him, the screen door wrenching open and snapping shut behind him like a set of jaws. He stood there on the doorstep, peering into the throat of the night, wondering if he couldn't just crouch there on the porch till the overactive reptile and all its flat-headed cousins crawled back into their holes. He caught his breath and held it. All was quiet. No snakes, no intruders. But he remembered the last time, remembered Ruth and her
b
ō
ifurendo
thrashing on the rough planks of the porch, and he slunk over the rail and hid himself in the shadows alongside the house.

Just in case.

In the morning, he was up at first light. Something had wakened him, a ripple of sound at the periphery of consciousness. His eyes fell open on the familiar overhead beams, tired wood, dead wood, and the sick greenish light that hung over the place like a miasma. He blinked twice, wondering at the noise that had
awakened him. The birds were going at it, cursing one another in the trees, and there was the flatulent whoop of a frog or lizard or something and the chittering intermittent screech of a monkey—or did they even have monkeys here? But it was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing different from what he'd been hearing day and night since he'd jumped ship. Nature, that's what it was. All those seething little lives, toads and caterpillars and all the rest… what he wouldn't give for the squall of a good disco, voices raised over the din of the drum machine, snatches of laughter and shouts from the bar, the stuttering roar of the big Hondas and Kawasakis pulling up out front … but there, there it was again. A sort of pant or wheeze, as of a dog on a choke collar or an old man with emphysema laboring up a flight of stairs.

He heard that wheeze, and lying there, half awake, he thought of his grandfather. He'd slept in the same room as the old man when he was a boy in Kyoto, before his grandfather died and his
ob
ā
san
moved back to Yokohama to be near her people. Hiro was afraid at night, afraid of the moving shadows on the wall and his grandfather's labored breathing, and of intangible things too, of vampires and werewolves and white-boned demons, and of the fox that took human form. His
ojisan
was retired then, from Kubota Tractor, and he had a good pension and a plot reserved in the company cemetery, but still
ob
ā
san
went out to work the night-shift at the glassworks. Sometimes, when he got so frightened he thought he would burst open like a sausage, he would wake his grandfather and the old man would catch his breath and wrap him in his spindly arms. “Don't be frightened,” he would whisper,
“inu ga wan—wan hoeyoru wai,
the dogs are barking, woof-woof.” Barking, that's all.

And then, incredibly, the wheeze that had woken him turned to a bark—a real bark, distinct and unmistakable, and he thought for a moment his
ojisan
was there with him, woofing softly in his whistling old voice. But then a second possibility occurred to him and he sat bolt upright with the shock of it: it
was
a dog. A police
dog. The sheriff's dog. And it wouldn't just bark: oh, no, this dog would bite.

Two hours earlier and no more than a mile and a half away, Eulonia White Pettigru's boy had wakened to the thin trill of his clock radio and the distant pinched thump of drum and guitar. Royal flicked off the radio and sat up, the dark clenched round him like a fist. He'd slept despite himself, though he knew he'd have to be awake and dressed by four—four, that's what Jason Arms had said—or he'd miss the whole thing. Now he was awake, smelling the world and hearing it too—every least sound, the mice in the kitchen, the bats in the air, even the faintest rasp of the earthworms coupling in the grass outside the window. Breathing deep, trying to fight down the little wheel racing inside his chest, he caught a scent of it: the whole world smelled fresh, new-created out of the dregs of the night, as sweet and charged and piquant as a stick of Big Red gum still in the wrapper.

The luminous hands of the clock radio showed 3:35. I
have more of a right than any of them to be there,
he thought, and his fingers trembled as he fastened the snaps of his spiked wristband. From the back room he could detect the soft stertor of his mother's breathing, the dip and rise of her feathery snores. The image of the granola bars in the kitchen (chocolate chip-peanut butter) came into his head, but only briefly and not very persuasively—he was too excited to eat.

Outside, the smell was stronger, sweeter, leaching through everything and killing all those habitual stinks of crab and hogs and the dog-run out back of the Arms place. Royal threw himself down on the front steps to lace his hightops, and then it came to him: he was smelling pipe tobacco, Yerdell Carter's special blend with cinnamon and rose hips all ground up in it. But then—and his hands froze on the laces—was he late, was he missing it? An undercurrent of waking life suddenly whispered to him out of the dark—the
distant snap of a match, a murmur of conspiratorial voices: everybody was in on the secret. A soft curse escaped him and the little wheel in his chest accelerated a notch. He was thinking of the coon hunters his father convoked each autumn under the big old live oak in the front yard, dogs whining, shadows milling, the spit of tobacco, soft truncated jokes caught somewhere between throat and lips. Royal jerked at the laces, the blood pounding in his ear—
more of a right than any of them
—and then he was down off the porch in a single covetous bound and tearing across the lawn to the Arms place.

Jason was up already, fussing over the dogs with a cup of coffee in his hand, looking important and old, though he was just two years, eight months and eleven days older than Royal. The porch light, a single dull 25-watt bulb, made a yellowish pocket in the night, and before he was halfway across the lawn, Royal could see the dark shapes of the men gathered there, eight or ten of them, squatting in the shadows and solemnly masticating the sandwiches Jason's mother had made up for them in the unlighted kitchen. His eyes told him what his nose already knew: Yerdell Carter was among them, his pipe softly glowing, a deer rifle propped up between his legs. The others (he recognized Jenkins, Butterton, Creed, friends of his father and coon hunters all) hunched over shotguns, embracing the dull gleam of the steel as casually as they might have embraced umbrellas on a day with a threat of rain.

The dew was heavy and Royal came up on them with a squeal of his sneakers. He was breathing hard. Too tall for sixteen, gangling, with the tapering long African shanks of his father and the carefully chopped dangle of his bleached and processed hair, he looked—well,
different
—and he knew somebody would have something smart to say about it. Yerdell Carter was the man. After crushing a mosquito with an audible slap, he grinned out of his ruined old face and asked Royal if he was going to catch himself a Chinaman.

Royal didn't answer. His father should have been there in his place, but his father was driving truck in Kansas or Wyoming or
some such windblown terminus Royal knew only from videos. His father was driving truck about two thirds of the time, and when he came home, he came home. Royal was sixteen and twenty pounds underweight, a loose gangle of gristle and bone. But where Jason and the dogs were going, he was going too. And nobody was going to stop him.

Jason looked up from his dead father's dogs and offered him a sandwich, white bread and bologna. “Uh-uh,” Royal said, shaking his head as if he'd just been offered the body and blood of Christ, the flesh warm still and palpitating. “Ain't hungry.”

The night before—six hours ago, that is—he and Jason and Rodney Cathcart had been watching
Rock
'
n
'
Roll High School
on Jason's VCR when Sheriff Peagler came to the door. Jason's mother was in bed already and the three of them just about shit blood when they saw who it was: they'd been smoking pot—all the roaches they'd saved over the course of the summer rolled into one thin miserable number—and the smell of it hung over the parlor like an evil ghost. But the sheriff wasn't interested in pot. He was interested in the two big coon hounds and the little yellow bitch Jason's dead father had paid a hundred and ten dollars for in Brunswick.

The sheriff was a bone-thin white man with deep creases in his face and two hard blue eyes that took hold of you like pincers. He'd been a high-school football star—a wide receiver—and he'd won a scholarship to some college up north, but dropped out after two seasons. He wore a hat and a badge, but he dressed in jeans, T-shirt and boots like anybody else. He knocked once and stuck his head in the door. “Jason,” he said, “would you step out here a minute?”

And that was it. That was why there were ten men (and now twelve and soon to be fifteen) gathered out front of the Arms place looking like the start of a coon hunt, and that was why Jason was acting so important and why Royal couldn't hold anything on his stomach: they'd found the son of a bitch of a Japanese Chinaman that had gone and killed his uncle. The sheriff wanted the dogs and he was paying Jason twenty-five dollars for the use of them and
himself as handler, but he'd warned Jason to keep it quiet. “I want to catch this malefactor and put him behind bars once and for all,” he'd told him, using one of his college words to drive the point home, “and I don't want half the island out there gettin' in my way, you follow me?” But Jason had to tell him and Rodney, what with the sheriff's pickup backing out of the driveway and the Ramones on the TV crunching chords in their black pipestem jeans, and Rodney had gone home and told his mother and maybe his three brothers and six sisters and his grandpa and his daddy too, and now, when the sheriff pulled up at four for Jason and the dogs, there was going to be a crowd.