East is East (42 page)

Still, dying or not, this was nothing to rush into. He recalled the bug-eyed Negro fighting for his oysters, the girl in the Coca-Cola store, Ruth, who'd lulled him into submission only to turn on him and cut his heart out. He smelled the meat, saw the shelter, imagined what it would be like to dry himself, if only for a minute … but how could he approach these billies? What would he say? Pleading hunger was no good, as the Negro had taught him; the Clint Eastwood approach had backfired too, though he'd been satisfied with his curses, proud of them even. The only thing that had worked was dissimulation: Ambly Wooster had believed he was someone called Seiji, and if she'd believed him, maybe these people would too. But he had to be cautious. Living out here—he still couldn't believe it—they had to be primitive and depraved. What was that movie, with the city dwellers in canoes and the hillbillies attacking them from the cliffs?

But now they'd seen him. The lightning flashed, the rain drove at him. There was a man standing there on the platform, wearing a dazed and frightened expression—it looked bad already—and he was yelling something and the other two—a woman and a boy—froze. What was he saying? Oh, yes. Yes. The
hakujin
war cry: “Can we help you?”

Hiro stared at them and then glanced round him at the rain-washed swamp. He was beaten, starved, swollen with insect bites,
filthy, saturated, anemic with loss of blood—and it seemed as if it had been going on all his life. He took a chance. Let them shoot him, let them string him up and nail him to a cross, flay the skin from his bones, devour him: he didn't care. Ruth had betrayed him. The City of Brotherly Love was a fraud. There was the swamp, only the swamp. “Toor-ist!” he called, echoing the girl in the store. “Fall out of boat!”

Nothing. No reaction. The two smaller faces flanked the larger and the three pairs of rinsed-out eyes fastened on him like pincers. The wind screamed. The trees danced. “Toor-ist!” Hiro repeated, cupping his hands to his mouth.

What followed was as astonishing as anything that had happened since he'd taken the plunge from the wingdeck of the
Tokachi-maru:
they believed him. “Hold on!” the man called as he might have called to a drowning child, and in the next moment he was down off the platform and splashing toward him through the mire. It was nothing short of a rescue. The man threw Hiro's arm over his shoulder as if he were a casualty of war, as if the rain were a shower of bullets and hot shrapnel, and scuttled back with him to the shelter, where the woman and boy were in motion too, hastily hanging some sort of dropcloth as a protection against the elements. Within minutes the fire was snapping, he was toweling his hair dry and the man was offering him a sleeping bag to wrap himself up in. Then the kettle sang out and a Styrofoam cup of hot instant noodles was thrust into his hand and he was eating while the three fed the fire, stopped the holes in the roof and watched him with bleeding eyes. “More?” the man asked after Hiro had finished, and when he nodded yes, a second Cup O'Noodles appeared as if he'd conjured it.

“You'll need dry clothes,” the man said, and before he could even communicate the need to the woman, she was digging through a backpack crammed with shirts, shorts, towels and socks. Backpack? Were they campers, then? And if they were, why weren't they camping out on the clean sweet dry expanse of the open prairie instead of in this sewer?
Gaijin:
he would never understand them,
not if he lived to be a hundred and four. They offered him clothing—a T-shirt that bore a huge childish drawing of a smiling face and the legend WORLD'S GREATEST DAD, a pair of too-tight underwear and cut-off blue jeans that would never have fit him if he hadn't suffered so much privation of the
hara.
Hiro went off into the far corner to dress, all the while bowing and asserting his gratitude, calculating
on
and giving thanks so profuse he could have raised a shrine to them. Did he want more to eat? He did. And then it was meat snapping on the grill, potato chips, hard-boiled eggs, carrot sticks, cabbage salad and pound cake.
“D
ō
mo”
he said, over and over,
“d
ō
mo arigat
ō
.”

They were watching him. Sitting there in a semicircle before him, hands clasped to their knees, eyes aglow with charity and fellow-feeling. They watched him eat as a doting young mother might watch her baby spooning up his mashed peas and carrots, hanging on every bite. Inevitably, though, now that they'd rescued and fed him, the questions began. “You're a Filipino?” the man asked as Hiro fed a wedge of pound cake into his mouth.

Careful, careful. He'd decided that the best policy—the only policy—was to lie. “Chinese,” he said.

Their faces showed nothing. The smoke swirled. Hiro reached for the last piece of pound cake. “And you were out here on a day trip?” the man persisted.

Day trip, day trip: what was he talking about? “Excuse and forgive me, but what is this 'day trip'?”

“In the swamp. As a tourist—like us.” For some reason the man laughed at this, a hearty, beautifully formed laugh that bespoke ease and health and success in business, and which burst from an orthodontic marvel of a mouth. “I mean, did your boat overturn, was anyone hurt? Were you alone?”

“Alone,” Hiro said, leaping at the answer provided for him. He felt that a smile would be helpful at this juncture, and so he gave them one, misaligned teeth and all. This lying business wasn't so hard really. It was the American way, he saw that now. He was amazed that he'd had such trouble with it at Ambly Wooster's.

They were the Jeffcoats, from Atlanta, Georgia. From New York, actually. Jeff, Julie and Jeff Jr. (The boy blushed when his father introduced him.) Hiro bowed to each in turn. And then they were watching him again, but with a look of expectation now. What? he wanted to ask them. What is it?

“And you are—?” the man prompted.

“Oh!” Hiro let a little gasp of embarrassed surprise escape him. “How silly. Forgetful. I am—” and then he stopped cold. Who was he? He'd told them he was Chinese, hadn't he? Chinese, Chinese: what did the Chinese call themselves? Lee, Chan, Wong? There was a place called Yee Mee Loo two blocks from his
ob
ā
san's
apartment, but the name was ridiculous—he, Hiro Tanaka, standard-bearer for Mishima and J
ō
ch
ō
before him, couldn't be a Yee Mee Loo. Never.

“Yes?” They were leaning forward, smiling like zombies, all three of them, absolutely delighted to be out here in this drizzling hellhole exchanging pleasantries with a mud-smeared Chinaman. Rain dripped from the timbers overhead, fell like shot on the surface of the water before them.

“I am called … Seiji,” he decided finally—what would they know, Americans; how would they know a Chinese from an Ugandan?—“Seiji … Chiba.”

And then, feeling expansive, dry and warm and wrapped in a down blanket, his stomach full for the first time in days, he told them the pathetic story of his misadventures in the swamp. His boat had overturned, yes, two days ago—it was a crocodile that attacked him. It dropped from the trees on him and he wresded with it, but the boat went under and he lost everything, all his bags of meat, his Cracker Jack, his Levi's and his surfboard. And so he wandered, on the verge of death, eating berries and drinking from the swamp, until they rescued him—and he ended by praising them for a full five minutes, in English and Japanese both.

When he was finished, there was a silence. The storm had let up and insects had begun to whine through the fevered air; something bellowed in the night. “Well,” the man said, clapping his
hands together like a referee, “I guess we all better turn in, huh? It's been quite a day.”

Sometime in the deep still vibrating hub of that night, when the chittering and hooting and screeching had subsided to a muted roar and the new generation of mosquitoes lay waiting to be born, Hiro awoke shivering and discovered that the rain had started up again. He knew where he was at once and knew too that the insulated blanket they'd given him—these
Amerikajin
seemed to have two of everything—was soaked through. The wind had shifted to the north and there was the unmistakable scent of autumn on it. But what month was it? August? September? October? He had no idea. He'd been gone so long, living like a bum on the street, like a barbarian in a cave, that he didn't even know what month it was, let alone what day or hour. Shivering, he thought about that, and began to feel very sorry for himself indeed.

They would be after him soon, he knew that. The
b
ō
ifurendo
would go to the police and the tired pointy-nosed little sheriff would round up his Negroes and dogs and take a flotilla into the swamp, speedboats and pontoon boats, canoes and dinghies and floating jail cells. The spatterface and his hard little companion would be there, Ruth, Captain Nishizawa—they'd batter the trees with helicopters, tear open the sky with their sirens and the long-drawn-out bloodthirsty howls of the dogs. If they hated him two days ago, they loathed him now to the depths of their being. He'd made fools of them. And they would come after him with everything they had.

It was a shame. It was. If that Mercedes had belonged to anyone but the chief butter-stinker himself, if it had belonged to an itinerant peddler, an encyclopedia salesman, a hit man, Hiro could have been a thousand miles away by now—in the Big Sky Country, in Motown or at the Golden Gate. But it hadn't, and he wasn't. What he needed, he realized with a jolt of intuition, was a boat. If he had a boat he could paddle his way to the edge of the swamp, strike out cross-country and find a road, and then—then what? More
double-dealing? More hate? More
hakujin
backstabbing and Negro viciousness? Yes, and what choice did he have—they were going to hunt him down like an animal. He lay there, wet and miserable, wrapped in his sheet of lies, and he hardened his heart. He knew where there was a boat. A canoe. Sleek and quick and provisioned for an army.

The Jeffcoats slept as one, the gentle stertor of their breathing synchronized, sleep a reward, their goods spread out round them like an emperor's ransom. The canoe lay there in the shadows at the edge of the platform, blackly bobbing. He could have spat in it from where he lay. But what was he thinking? They'd been kind to him, like Ambly Wooster. There was no hate in their eyes, only health and confidence. How could he steal from them, how could he abandon them to their fate out here in the howling wilderness?

How? Easily. They were
hakujin,
after all,
hakujin
like all the others, and after they found out who he was they'd lock him up themselves, twist the handcuffs tight with the cracked porcelain gleam of righteousness in their eyes. He was a Japanese. A samurai. To be ruthless was his only hope.

He was about to make his move, about to slip out of the wet blanket and stir himself to betrayal, when the boy began to moan in his sleep. The sound was incongruous and devastating in the dead black night. “Uhhhhhh,” the boy groaned, swallowed up in his dreams, “uhhhhhh.” In the space of that groan Hiro was plunged back into his own boyhood, awakened to the demons that haunted his nights and the birdlike embrace of his grandfather, and then a figure rose up in the dark—the father, the boy's father—and Hiro heard the gentle shushing, the susurras of comfort and security. Father, mother, son: this was a family. He let the apprehension wash over him until it became palpable, undeniable, until he knew that the canoe, his only hope, would stay where it was.

He woke to the smell of corned beef hash and eggs. It was an unusual smell—aside from the slop Chiba concocted, he'd had little experience of foreign foods—but he recognized the habitual
hakujin
odor of incinerated meat. “Seiji!” a voice chirped at him the moment
he opened his eyes. It was Julie Jeffcoat. She was in shorts and a shell top that emphasized her breasts, motherly and sexy all at once. “Sleep well?” she asked, crossing the platform to hand him a cup of simmering black coffee. The sun was up. It was hot already. Jeff Jr. perched at the edge of the platform, methodically flicking a lure from the tip of his rod to the far edge of the pond and then drawing it back again, while his father bent over the canoe, stowing away their gear in tight precise little bundles. He whistled while he worked. “Well,” he boomed, glancing over his shoulder at Hiro, “ready for some breakfast, pardner?”

Dazed by the assault of cheer and energy, Hiro could only nod his assent. He was feeling a bit queasy—but then why wouldn't he, with all he'd been through—and he hoped the food would help steady him.

Jeff Jeffcoat turned back to his work. Jeff Jr.'s line sizzled through the guys and there was a distant splash. Hiro sat up to blow at his coffee and Julie Jeffcoat presented him with a plastic plate heaped with eggs, hashed meat, puffed potatoes and fruit cocktail from a can. It looked like something Chiba would whip up for one of his western-style lunches. “Ketchup?” Julie asked, and when he nodded, she squirted a red paste over everything.