East is East (30 page)

The voice was booming, thunderous, loosed from the clouds, and it sent him into a panic so absolute and immediate it made the fillings in his teeth ache and rendered J
ō
ch
ō
all but useless.
“Hyro Tanayka, you come own outta there now, nice and easy, and y'all put your bands up own top your bead where Ah kin see 'em.”
And behind that voice, the barking of the dogs—rabid, slavery; barking that choked on its own rage and saliva, the barking of killers and man-eaters. Strip the flesh from the bone.

The shorts were off the floor and girding his loins in a nanosecond, no time for the Nikes, and then he was clawing his way over Ruth's desk to get at the back window. Up went the sash, one foot on the desk, the other on the sill, and then he froze. His
hara
dropped, his heart turned to ash. What he saw there was Negroes, Negroes with guns and dogs. And
hakujin
too, with uniforms and badges and more guns and more dogs. He was surrounded. It was all up. It was over.

“Hyro Tanayka,”
the voice boomed from the front of the house,
“y'all have till a count of ten to come own outta there or Ah cannot hold myself accountable for the consequences! One. Two. Three …”

He knew them. They'd tried to run him down before he'd even set foot on their soil, they'd chased him out of Hog Hammock and Ambly Wooster's house too. They were Americans. Killers. Individualists
gone rampant. He hung his head and started for the door, defeated, crushed, expecting no mercy but the law of the jungle and of the mutt and half-breed. If he put his tail between his legs and his hands atop his head, then he could … could …

But all at once, magically, insidiously, the words of J
ō
ch
ō
whispered to him—
The Way of the Samurai is a mania for death; sometimes ten men cannot topple a man with such conviction
—and he was a Japanese all over again, not a mutt, not a
happa,
not half a
hakujin,
but a Japanese, and the strength came back to him, settling in a fiery ball in his gut. He came through the door—“Don't shoot!” he cried—with his hands atop his head, but with a gleam in his eye.

In that moment, all of them—the sheriff, the state troopers, the red-eyed Negroes, the gawk of a
hakujin
with the speckled face and the runt in fatigues Ruth had told him about—all of them relaxed their grip for the tiniest sliver of an instant. He was on the doorstep, he was on the porch, and they were all gaping at him as if they'd never seen a man with
hara
before. That was all it took, that sliver of an instant, the sheriff dropping the megaphone from his lips, the Negroes and troopers and poor white trash easing up on the trigger …

“Make my day!” Hiro suddenly shouted, diving for the floorboards as the astonished, outraged cannonade opened up all around him, shattering glass, splintering wood, ricocheting off Ruth's Olivetti and slicing through the trove of bamboo shoots and fried dace in deadly syncopation. And then, in the next sliver of an instant, in the space between the first round and the second, he bounded over the railing and ran headlong into the first man he encountered, an old Negro with a smoking gun and a pipe jammed between his teeth. The old Negro was a carpet, a rug, a piece of lint. He was gone and there was another, and then a white man, and Hiro ran through them as if they were made of paper, silly astonished faces, black and white, sailing back on their buttocks, guns and cigarettes and spectacles flying up into the air as in some miraculous feat of levitation.

The jungle embraced him. There was another barrage, an anguished
shout and a chorus of curses, and Hiro's bare broad feet pounded at the mud of a trail he knew as well as he knew the stairwell to his
ob
ā
san's
apartment. Then he heard the dogs, the savage joy of the multivoiced roar as they were set loose, but he was a samurai, a killer, a hero, and he was heading for a bog that would choke any sixty dogs … nor would he hesitate. He'd plunge headfirst into the muck, live it, breathe it, smear his naked body with it and dwell forever here in the wild, his home primeval, Tarzan the Ape Man, unconquerable and—

Suddenly the whirl of his thoughts choked to nothing. There before him, poised in the middle of the path and with his head and shoulders lowered for action, was a Negro. A boy. Hightops. Jeans. Hair like a New Guinea cannibal. Hiro was running, leaves in his face, a dazzle of sun through the trees, the path beneath his feet, and there was a Negro. He was startled—how had he gotten here?—but there was no time for introductions. Behind him the dogs bayed, guns blazed and hot high voices mounted one atop the other: Hiro lumbered down the path like a bull coming out of the gate.

“Get 'way!” he shouted, swiping at the boy with a jerk of his arm. In the next instant he felt the impact, flesh on flesh, the boy's hands like claws fastening at his waist, his feet slipping out from under him, and then he was face down in the mud, gasping for breath. Before he knew what had happened the boy was on top of him, flailing at him with fists that were hard little sacks of bone. “You gook son of a bitch,” the boy cried, and Hiro could smell the sweat of him as he tried to fend off the blows and get to his feet, could hear the dogs closing now, swarming at him, the boy's voice rising to a howl, a shriek, an assault of high piercing syllables that cut through him like bullets: “You killed my uncle!”

She was in trouble, deep trouble, and she knew it the minute Saxby stepped in the door. For one thing he was supposed to be gone by now, long gone, off to the Okefenokee to dip his nets and scare up his fishes. And then there was the expression on his face—grim and disappointed, the look of a man revising his options, altering his world view, the look of the outraged moralist, the inquisitor, the hanging judge. A tiny chill of recognition brought her back to the previous night. He'd been waiting for her in the billiard room when she got back late from the cabin, and though they'd sat up for an hour and then made love, he'd seemed morose, preoccupied, he'd seemed distant and untouchable. All this rushed on her in the moment of waking as he slipped in the door and pushed it shut behind him.

The room was dark still—she'd drawn the shades before going to bed, thinking to sleep late—but the light of day, hard and uncompromising, assaulted her even as he shut it out with the wedge of the door. Brightness trembled at the corners of the windowframe, the sun insinuated itself under the door. It was Sunday. The clock read 7:15. “Saxby?” she murmured, awake already, awake instantly. “Is anything wrong?”

Of course there was something wrong—he should have been two
hours gone by now. Saxby said nothing. Just stood there, his back to the door. And then he was moving suddenly, crossing the room in two angry strides to jerk open the shade. Ruth felt the light explode in the room, her eyes pinched tight, squinted—it was an ache, an assault. “They got him,” he said. “He's in jail.”

She couldn't help herself. He'd caught her off guard and she fell back on her natural defenses. She sat up, pressing the sheet to her breast. Her mouth was small, her eyes big. “Who?” she said.

He looked angry, dangerous, looked as if he'd been gored. “Don't be coy, Ruth. You know who I'm talking about. Your pet. Your houseboy. Or was he more than that, huh? ‘I just want to try something different,' you said, isn't that what you said. Huh? Something different?”

“Sax,” she said.

He was standing over her now, his muscles cut, backlit against the window. She could see the veins standing out in his arms. “Don't 'Sax' me,” he said. “I was there, Ruth. Last night. I saw him.”

She shifted her weight, tucked the sheet up under her arms. “Okay,” she said, reaching for a cigarette, “all right. I helped him. But it's not what you think.” She paused to strike a match, inhale, shake it out and deposit the spent curl of it in the ashtray on the night table. “I felt sorry for him, you know? Like with a stray dog or something. Everybody was after him and he was—he's just this kid, and besides, I needed him—I mean, not at first—but I needed him for this story I'm writing …”

Saxby held himself rigid. He was the man in the boat on Peagler Sound, focused and invincible, beyond her control. “How long?” he demanded. “Two weeks? Three? A month? It's a big joke, isn't it? On all of us. Abercorn and that little peckerwood Marine or whatever he is, Thalamus, Regina, Jane—my mother even. But what really burns my ass is you put it over on me too. What, you couldn't trust me with it? Answer me, goddamn it!”

She was busy with her cigarette. It was all she could do to keep from grinning, grinning with guilt and shame and defiance, and
that would only make it worse. And she needed Sax on her side, now more than ever. If he knew—and the thought made her stomach clench—then they all knew, and they wouldn't find it very funny. She was an accessory, an aider and abettor. She could go to jail. “I wanted to tell you, Sax—I was going to—” she began, and then she trailed off. The light heightened. The room was silent. “Look, Sax: it was a game. Something I knew that none of them did—not Peter Anserine or Laura Grobian or Irving Thalamus either. I was insecure here, you know that. And this was something I could hold on to, something of my own—”

“Yeah,” he said, his voice thick with disgust and self-pity, “but what about me?”

She was angry suddenly. She was in trouble—deep trouble—and he'd put her there. “No,” she said, stabbing the cigarette at him for emphasis, “what about
me?”
Here he was, her lover, her confidant, the sweet funny guy with the big feet, and he'd betrayed her. “You turned him in, didn't you?” she said, taking the offensive.

His face changed. She loved him, she did, but he was weak inside, and now she had him. “You, you never told me,” he stammered. “I see him there on your porch and I'm thinking about all those cans of fried dace and bamboo shoots—what do you expect me to do? I mean, at least you could have told me.”

“You shit, Sax.” Now she was crying. Her shoulders quaked a bit and the sheet slipped to her waist. She reached for it, to cover her breasts, but then she let it fall away again. She could see herself as through the lens of a camera, sobbing in the morning light, in bed, naked to the waist, betrayed by her man and at the mercy of the authorities. It was a poignant moment, just like real life. She glanced up at Saxby. He was struck dumb.

“Don't you ever think?” she gasped. “Don't you know what this means? They're going to come after
me
now, they're going to want to question
me
—they could arrest me, Sax.” She'd worked herself up now. The bed was trembling, her breast heaving. She was feeling scared, angry, feeling sorry for herself.

Saxby came to her. She felt him ease down on the bed, reach
out to stroke her arm. “Hush,” he said. “You know I won't let anything happen to you.”

“I'm scared,” she said, and she was holding him. “He was just—it was like a stray dog or something,” and then she was sobbing all over again.

Sheriff peagler stopped by around noon, a grim-looking abercorn and grimmer-looking Turco flanking him. There was no Sunday morning ferry, so they'd put Hiro in an old slave-holding cell for safekeeping till Ray Manzanar made his eight o'clock run to the mainland and back. (There was an earlier ferry, at six, but as the sheriff was to inform Ruth with an executioner's grin, they were going to need all the daylight they had to comb over the scene for evidence.) Ruth knew the cell—it was out back of John Berryman, the closest of the studios to the big house, and currently occupied by Patsy Arena. Saxby had showed her the cell the day they arrived: it was the sort of thing tourists liked to look at. Actually, there were two cells, stone and crumbling plaster, big oaken doors with sliding bolts and a barred window twelve feet off the ground. The planters would immure a new slave in the one—wild-eyed, feverish, fresh from Goree or Dakar and the scarifying trip across the pitching wild sea—and in the other, a long-broken docile doddering old fatherly type, and the old slave would sweet-talk the new one, calm his fears, indoctrinate him. The cells were in an outbuilding behind the studio. If it weren't for the trees, you could have seen it from the big house.

Ruth had had four hours to compose herself, though all Than-atopsis was abuzz with the news. She'd posted Saxby at the door—Irving had been by, Sandy, Bob, Ina, Regina, even Clara and Patsy, but Saxby wouldn't let them in. She'd hear the knock, watch Saxby rise, pull back the door and step into the hallway, and then she'd strain to hear the whispered colloquy that followed. At eleven, Septima herself, regal in a blue silk dress with lace trim and pearls, huffed her way up the stairs. Saxby couldn't deny his own mother,
and he helped her into the room. Ruth was in bed still, feeling like an invalid, though she'd pulled on a blouse and shorts. “I really don't know whatever this is all about,” Septima began in her breathy old patrician's tones, “but I do suspect that you are entirely innocent of any wrongdoin', Ruthie—isn't that right?”