East is East

by T. C. Boyle

  EAST IS EAST

  T. C. Boyle

  For Georges and Anne Borchardt

  Those who wish to live horribly and die horribly are choosing a beautiful way of life.

  —Yukio Mishima, The Way of the Samurai

  “Bred and bawn in de briar patch, Br’er Fox, bred and bawn.”

  —Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus

  Contents

  Part I: Tupelo Island

  Small Matters

  The Tokachi-maru

  Thanatopsis House

  Hog Hammock

  The Squarest People in the World

  Queen Bee

  Fea Purē

  Behind a Wall of Glass

  Rusu

  The Other Half

  Still at Large

  Parfait in Chrome

  The Dogs Are Barking, Woof-Woof

  Part II: The Okefenokee

  Everybody’s Secret

  Four Walls

  The Whiteness of the Fish

  A Jungle

  Where the Earth Trembles

  Tender Sproats

  Cheap Thrills

  The Power of the Human Voice

  Haha

  Part III: Port of Savannah

  Journalism

  The City of Brotherly Love

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  Also available by T. C. Boyle

  By the Same Author

  Part I

  Tupelo Island

  Small Matters

  He was swimming, rotating from front to back, thrashing his arms and legs and puffing out his cheeks, and it seemed as if he’d been swimming forever. He did the crawl, the breaststroke, the Yokohama kick. Tiring, he clung to the cork life ring like some shapeless creature of the depths, a pale certificate of flesh. Sometime during the fifth hour, he began to think of soup. Miso-shiru, rice chowder, the thin sea-stinking broth his grandmother would make of fish heads and eel. And then he thought of beer—bottles like amber jewels in a bed of ice—and finally he thought of water, only water.

  When the sun went down, taking all the color with it and leaving behind a surface as hard and cold as hammered pewter, his tongue was swollen in his throat and the deepest yearnings of his gut gnawed at him like imperious little animals. His hands were bloated and raw, the life ring chafed at his arms, gulls swooped close to appraise him with their professional eyes. He might have given up. Might have eased into the dream of bed and supper and home, slipping into the broth of the sea centimeter by centimeter until the ring floated free and the anonymous waves closed over him. But he resisted. He thought of Mishima and Jōchō and the book he’d taped round his chest, beneath the now limp and sodden turtleneck. Enfolded in a panoply of Ziploc bags, bound to him with black electrical tape and repository of four odd green little American bills, it tugged at the place where his heart beat.

  One should take important considerations lightly, Jōchō said. Small matters should be taken seriously. Yes. Of course. What did it matter if he lived or died, if he washed ashore and discovered a simmering pot of noodles with pork and green onion or if the sharks nibbled his toes, his feet, his shins and thighs? What mattered was, was … the moon. Yes: the small slip of a perfect moon cut like a parenthesis into the darkening horizon. It was rising, white and pristine, delicate as a fingernail paring. He forgot his hunger, his thirst, forgot the teeming teeth of the sea, and made the moon his own.

  Of course, at the same time, he knew he would make it, which made Jōchō’s advice a lot easier to stomach. It wasn’t only the birds—the pelicans and cormorants and gulls beating west to their roosts—but the smell of the shore that told him as much. Sailors talk of the sweet wafting odor of the landfall that awakens them thirty miles out to sea, but on this, his maiden voyage, he’d never noticed it. Not on board the Tokachi-maru, anyway. It was here, fixed to the surface, the twenty short years of his life raveling out like the threads of a frayed cord, that it struck him. Suddenly his nose was an instrument of vigorous and minutely calibrated sensitivity, houndlike and true: he could discern the individual blades of grass on the black shore that lay somewhere ahead of him, and he knew that there were people there, Americans, with their butter-stink and their pots of ketchup and mayonnaise and all the rest, and that beneath them there was dead dry sand and mud seething with crabs and nematodes and all the unseeable particles of decay that it comprises. And more, much more: the musk of wild animals, the healthy domestic stench of dogs and cats and parrots, the metallic odor of spray paint and fuel oil, the faintly sweet scent of the exhaust of outboard engines, the perfume—so rich and potent it made him want to sob—of night-blooming flowers, of jasmine and honeysuckle and a thousand things he’d never smelled before.

  He’d been ready to die, and now he was going to make it.

  He was close. He knew it. He stirred his legs in the darkening waters.

  “Shouldn’t we have a light or something?”

  “Hm?” His voice was a warm murmur at her throat. He was half asleep.

  “Running lights,” Ruth said, her own voice pitched low, almost a whisper. “Isn’t that what they call them?”

  The boat rocked softly on the swells, serene and stable, rocked like a cradle, like the big lumpy bed with the Magic Fingers massage in the motel they’d stumbled across her first night in Georgia. There was a breeze too, salt and sweet at the same time, gentle, but just strong enough to keep the mosquitoes at bay. The only sound was of the water caressing the hull, soothing, rhythmic, a run and trickle that played in her head with the strains of a folk song she’d forgotten ten years ago. The stars were alive and conscious. The champagne was cold. He didn’t answer.

  Ruth Dershowitz was lying naked in the bow of Saxby Lights’s eighteen-foot runabout. (Actually, the boat belonged to his mother, as did everything else in and attached to the big house on Tupelo Island.) Saxby was stretched out beside her, the drowsy flat of his cheek pressed to the swell of her breast. Each time the boat dipped beneath her, the friction of his fashionable stubble sent small fires burning all the way down to her toes. Five minutes earlier Saxby had knelt before her, adjusted her hips on the broad, flat plank of the seat, stroked open her thighs and moved himself into her. Ten minutes before that she’d watched him grow hard in the dimming light as he sat across from her and tried, unsuccessfully, to inflate a plastic air mattress to cushion them. She’d watched him, bemused and excited, until finally she’d whispered, “Forget it, Sax—just come over here.” Now he was asleep.

  For a while she listened to the water and thought nothing. And then the image of Jane Shine, her enemy, rose up before her and she banished it with a vision of her own inevitable triumph, her own inchoate stories jelling into art, conquering magazines and astonishing the world, and then she was thinking about the big house, thinking about her fellow writers, the sculptors and painters and the single walleyed composer whose music sounded like slow death in the metronome factory. She’d been among them for a week now, one week of an indefinite stay—a succession of months that came alive in her mind, months with little gremlin faces and hunched shoulders, leapfrogging into the glorious, limitless, sunlit and rent-free future. No more waitressing, no more hack work, no more restaurant reviews, Parade banalities or Cosmo dreck on safe sex, sex in the shower or waking up at his house. She could stay as long as she pleased. Stay forever.

  She had connections.

  The thought lulled her, and before she knew it she was drifting off, drawn down into the murk of the unconscious by the champagne, the blanket of the night and the luxurious undulations of the boat, and soon the streaking white forms of sea creatures moved through her dream. She was in the water, floating, and a dozen pallid shapes rushed at her like torpedoes and she cried out … but it
was all right, she was in Saxby’s boat and the stars were alive and she was awake—for an instant—before she fell back into her dream. Porpoises, they were only porpoises, she saw now, and they frolicked with her, poked their bottle snouts between her legs and hoisted her onto their slick and streamlined shoulders … but then something went wrong and she was alone in the water again and there was something else there, a shadow rising from the depths, sinister and quick, and it hit her, hard, with a thump that woke her. “Sax?” she said, and at first she thought a boat had run into them because of the lights, because of the lack of lights—she wasn’t thinking clearly—“Sax? Did you feel that?”

  Saxby was a heavy sleeper. She’d been with him once in California when he slept through three blasts of the clock radio, an earthquake severe enough to knock the pictures off the wall and a practice session the university marching band had held on the field behind his apartment. “Wha’?” he said, “huh?” and his head slowly lifted itself from her chest. “Feel what?”

  And then all at once Saxby froze. She was lying back, watching him, when she felt his muscles go tense and heard his grunt of surprise—“What in hell?”—and then she looked up and locked eyes with an apparition. A face, ghostly and astonishing in the blanched light of the moon, hovered over the stern; beneath it, a pair of impossible hands clung to the engine mount. It took her a moment, but then she understood: there was a man there. Clinging to their boat, at night, in the middle of Peagler Sound. She saw him, yes, hair in his eyes, something odd about his features, saw the look of fuddlement and exhaustion on his face, and watched as it turned, as if in slow motion, to one of horror. He gave a yelp—a yelp that transcended the puny limitations of language and culture—and then, before she had time even to recollect her own nakedness, he was gone.

  In the next instant she and Saxby were on their feet, fumbling to get into their clothes and tangling their limbs as the boat lurched and heaved beneath them. “Goddamn it!” Saxby cursed, clutching his shorts in one hand and tearing at the anchor rope with the other, “you sorry son of a bitch! Come back here!”

  Whoever he was—ghost, voyeur, prankster, errant surfer or castaway—he had no intention of doing anything of the kind. Just the opposite: he was in full flight. Ruth could hear him flailing in the water, and now, sitting heavily and groping for her T-shirt, she could just barely make him out: the dark wedge of his head driving against the black water, a flash of something white—a life jacket? a boogie board?—and the foam, phosphorescent with plankton, trailing behind him like a chimerical tail.

  Cursing, Saxby raked the anchor over the side and flung it to the bottom of the boat. The smell of the mud, fecal and corrupt, rose to her nostrils. “What’s with this jerk, anyway?” Saxby muttered, and his hands were shaking as he pulled the starter cord. “Is he some kind of pervert, or what?”

  Ruth was seated in front, still watching the shadow of the distant swimmer. “He looked”—she didn’t yet know what she wanted to say, didn’t yet realize what it was about him that had struck her—“he looked different somehow.”

  “Yeah,” Saxby grunted as the engine whined to life, “Chinese or something.” And then he goosed the throttle, the boat swung round on its axis and they shot off in the swimmer’s wake.

  The breeze caught Ruth’s hair as she wriggled into her shorts. Her heart was pounding. She was confused. What had happened? What were they doing? There was no time to think. The waves thumped under her, she clutched at the seat and felt the spray in her face. They were closing fast on the thrashing swimmer when she twisted round and cried out to Saxby.

  She was afraid suddenly, afraid of Saxby for the first time in all the months she’d known him. He was decent, kind, easy-going, she knew that, a guy who drank Campari and soda and felt self-conscious about the size of his feet, and yet there was no telling what he’d do in a situation like this. “Son of a bitch,” he spat, and she could see him gritting his teeth in the cold light, and for an instant she pictured the hapless swimmer pounded flat beneath the smooth glistening fist of the hull. “No!” she cried, but he cut the throttle just as they pulled even with the dark twisting shape in the water.

  “Let me get a look at this shithead,” Saxby said, and the beam of his flashlight came to life.

  For the first time she saw the intruder clearly. There he was, struggling in the wash of the boat, no more than five feet from her. She saw a drift of reddish hair, his odd distorted features, the unfathomable eyes that threw back the light in alarm, and then he was kicking away from the boat, frantic, as Saxby swung the tiller to stay with him. He was panicking, this man in the water, flailing and gasping, fighting at the life buoy under his arm, and all at once she knew he was going to drown. “He’s drowning, Sax,” she cried, “he fell off a ship or something.” The engine sang, throttle up, throttle down. The waves slapped at the hull. “We’ve got to save him.”

  She turned to Saxby. His anger was gone now, his face composed, contrite even. “Yeah,” he said, “you’re right. Yeah, of course,” and he rose to his feet, rocking back and forth with the motion of the boat, holding his flashlight as if the strength of its beam could hoist the drowning man aboard.

  “Throw him a line,” she urged. “Hurry.”

  The man in the water, thrashing and blind, reminded her of the little two-foot alligator Saxby had gigged one night in the beam of a flashlight on the pond out back of the big house. The thing was floating, inert, no more animate than a stick or a clump of weed but for the fire its eyes gave back in the light, and then Saxby struck and it folded up like a pocketknife, gone, sucked down into the matted depths, only to come back at them like a switchblade, mad and stung and toothy and dying. “You grab him, grab his arm,” Saxby said, forcing the boat in tight.

  But the drowning man didn’t want his arm grabbed. He stopped dead, flung the life buoy from him and shouted up at her, shouted in her face, shouted till she could see the glint of gold in his teeth. “Go ’way!” he cried. “Go ’way!” And then he vanished beneath the boat.

  And then there was nothing. No sound, no movement. The motor sputtered, the boat drifted. Exhaust washed over them, bitter and metallic.

  “He’s a nutcase,” Saxby said. “Must of broke out of Milledgeville or something.”

  She didn’t respond. Her knuckles were drained of blood, her fingers seared into the pale chipped wood of the gunwale. She’d never seen anyone die before, never seen anyone dead, not even her grandmother, who’d had the good sense to pass on while she was in Europe. Something rose in her throat, a deep wad of sorrow and regret. The world was crazy. A moment ago she’d been wrapped in her lover’s arms, still and serene, the night spread over them like a blanket … and now someone was dead. “Sax,” she turned to him, pleading, “can’t you do something? Can’t you dive in and save him?”

  Saxby’s face was inscrutable. She knew every fiber of him, knew where to hurt him and where to make him feel good, knew how to snip out his soul, wring it in her hands and hang it out like a hankie to dry. But this was something new. She’d never seen him like this before. “Shit,” he said finally, and he looked scared now, that was all right, that was a mode she recognized, “I can’t see a damn thing. How can I dive in if I can’t see him?”

  She watched the beam of the flashlight play dully over the surface, and then she heard something, a faint splash, the sweet allision of breaking water. “Over there!” she shouted and Saxby swung the light. For a moment they saw nothing, and then the shore, with its close dark beard of Spartina grass, leaped into view like a slide clapped into a projector. “There!” she cried, and it was him, the swimmer, standing now, the sea lapping at his belt loops, a limp white shirt hanging from him like a rag.

  “Hey!” Saxby bellowed, angry again, enraged. “Hey, you! I’m talking to you, you jackass. What are you trying—?”

  “Hush,” Ruth warned him, but it was too late: the intruder was gone again, already enveloped in vegetation, thrashing through the reeds like a guts
hot deer, already anonymous. The sea lay flat beneath the beam of the flashlight. The picture was empty. It was then that the life buoy drifted into view, just beyond her reach, in a wash of reeds and plastic refuse. “Let me—” she grunted, stretching for it, but Saxby anticipated her and powered the boat forward. And then she had it, a prize fished out of the water and dripping in her lap.

  She turned it over and there they were, the bold red ideographs that spelled out the name of the Tokachi-maru. She couldn’t read them, of course, but they were a revelation nonetheless. Saxby hovered over her, peering down at the thing as if it were treasure. The light was in her lap, the breeze gave her a scent of the shore. “Yes,” she said finally, “Chinese.”

  The Tokachi-maru

  Hiro tanaka was no more chinese than she was. he was a Japanese, of the Yamato race—or at least on his mother’s side he was, no one would question that—and he’d left the Tokachi-maru amid strained circumstances. The fact is, he jumped ship. Literally. This wasn’t a case of cozying up to a barmaid or falling down dead drunk in some back alley while the ship weighed anchor; this was deliberate, death-defying, a leap into the infinite. Like his idol Yukio Mishima, and Mishima’s idol before him, Jōchō Yamamoto, Hiro Tanaka was a man of decision. When be jumped ship, he didn’t entangle himself in verbal niceties: no, he just jumped.

  On the day in question, the Tokachi-maru was steaming north along the coast of Georgia, bound for Savannah with a load of tractor parts, DAT recorders and microwave ovens. It was a day like any other, the wind brisk, the sun baked into the sky, the 12,000-ton freighter ironing the waves as if they were wrinkles in a shirt. All but six of the forty-member crew sat straight-backed over their western-style lunches (corned beef hash, sardines in oil, scrambled eggs and home fries, all wedded in a single pot and seasoned with A. 1. sauce and Gulden’s mustard). Captain Nishizawa was in his cabin, sleeping off his preprandial sake; Chief Mate Wakabayashi and Able Bodied Seaman Kuma were in the chart room and at the helm, respectively; Ordinaries Uetto and Dorai were on watch; and Hiro was in the brig.