East is East

by T. C. Boyle

  The girl took the baby from her breast—he saw the little fists clench, the feet kick, caught a glimpse of the pink wet nipple and the pink wet puckered mouth. “Bobby,” she called toward the back, “we got a customer.”

  Hiro cradled the bread and nacho chips to his chest. He moved ponderously down the aisle, the wet overalls pinching his crotch, bowing automatically. He was moving toward the cooler, his tongue dry as chalk. Be cool, he told himself. Act natural.

  The girl had set the baby down in its crib behind the counter and was leaning lazily over the cash register. “Y’all must be a toor-ist?” she said with rising inflection.

  Toor-ist, toor-ist, Hiro thought, swinging open the door of the cooler, the miraculous refrigerated draft on his face, the six-pack of Coke in hand. What was she saying? He hadn’t a clue, but he knew he had to answer, knew he had to say something or he was doomed.

  It was then that Bobby stepped out of the back room, wiping his hands on an apron. Bobby was nineteen, as fair and beautifully proportioned as an archangel, but with an IQ so low it prevented him from unfurling his wings. He had trouble with simple sums and he couldn’t read the newspaper or punch the cash register. His job was to stock the shelves and watch Bobby Jr. whenever Cara Mae had a customer. He stood there in the doorway, blinking at Hiro.

  Say something, Hiro told himself, say something, and all at once he had an inspiration. Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood—what would they say? Americans began any exchange of pleasantries with a string of curses, anyone knew that—and even if he hadn’t known it, even if he were an innocent, he’d seen Eastwood in action. “Mothafucka,” he said, bowing to the girl as he shuffled forward to dump his booty on the counter. And to the bewildered boy, in the most amenable tone he could summon, he observed: “Cock-sucka, huh?”

  The girl said nothing. She remained motionless behind the cash register, her jaws poised over a tiny pink wad of chewing gum. The boy blinked twice, then scurried across the room and snatched up the baby as if it were in danger. All the while, Hiro grabbed for Slim Jims, Twinkies, anything, and built a mound of cans and bottles and bright shiny packages on the counter before him.

  The girl rang up the purchases. “Ten seventy-three,” she said, and her tone was icy.

  “Shitcan,” Hiro said, grinning now and bowing again, as he produced the four bills and laid them out on the counter. “Toilet. Make my day, huh?”

  The girl crushed the gum between her teeth. Her eyes had narrowed. Her voice hit him like a slap in the face. “This is only eight.”

  “Only eight?” he repeated. He was bewildered.

  She let an exasperated hiss of breath escape her. The baby, pressed to his father’s shoulder, began to fuss. From outside came the sound of squealing brakes, and Hiro glanced up to see a gleaming new oversized pickup nosing its way up to the store.

  “Ah need two seventy-three,” she said, “more.”

  All at once Hiro understood. The little green gaijin bills were insufficient. He’d have to part with something and he needed it all, needed everything in the store and more. Didn’t they realize? Couldn’t they see he was starving? Outside, the engine coughed and died. “Some,” he said, pushing away a package or two.

  “Jesus,” the girl said. “Ah’ll be goddamned.”

  And then the boy spoke for the first time. “You a foreigner or somethin’?” he said.

  Someone had come into the store. Hiro could feel the heavy tread on the floorboards and he watched the girl’s face brighten. “Hi ya, Sax,” she said.

  Hiro didn’t dare look up. It could have been the chief of police, the Coast Guard, one of the long-noses from Immigration Akio had told him about. Heart pounding, he concentrated on the girl’s hands as she separated his things, put some of them in a brown paper sack and held out three small coins to him. He took the coins and bowed again. “Thank you, thank you,” he said, and in his gratitude, his relief, his joy at the prospect of the feast awaiting him and his redemption from the slow death of the swamps, he slipped into Japanese. “Dōmo,” he said. “Dōmo sumimasen.”

  The girl gaped at him. And then he turned, hurrying, and saw the tall gaijin with the colorless hair and cold ceramic eyes, the one who’d tried to run him down with his boat, and in the next instant he was out the door, tucking the package under his arm like a football and bolting for the woods in a mad desperate headlong flight. He never paused, never hesitated, though the butter-stinker was out in the lot behind him shouting, “Hey! Wait a minute! Come back here, will you? I don’t … I-just-want-to-help-you!”

  Help me, Hiro thought, the blood singing in his ears as he flung himself into the ditch and staggered through the scum and into the waist-deep quagmire and the cover of the trees beyond, yes, sure, help me. He knew them. Americans. They killed each other over dinner, shot one another for sport, mugged old ladies in the street.

  Help like that he didn’t need.

  The Squarest People in the World

  There were no two ways about it: he was going to have to go down there. Not that he wanted to. Anything but. The thought of driving to Tupelo Island in this heat—and with a broken-down air conditioner no less—so he could stand around in the haze interrogating a bunch of snuff-dipping inbred cracker morons who could barely wheeze “uh-huh” or “naw” without growing roots and bark, was enough to make him wish he was back in L. A. Or almost.

  Detlef Abercorn stood at the window gazing out at the flat dead sky that hung over Savannah like an old dishrag. It was a gray humid high-summer morning, sunless but stifling. He hadn’t read the paper yet, had barely blown the steam off his first cup of coffee, and already his shirt was wet through. Ten minutes earlier he’d breezed into the office, blown a kiss to Ginger, the new receptionist with the freckled cleavage and congenitally parted lips, switched on his monitor, taken a perfectly innocent sip of coffee—and watched an IAADA alert claw its way across the screen.

  An IAADA—Illegal Alien, Armed, Dangerous and Amok—was the highest priority designation in the INS electronic mail file. In Los Angeles, the innermost circle of INS hell, IAADAs went out routinely, what with Guatemalans shooting at Salvadorans, Hmong tribesmen microwaving dogs, Turks and Iranians setting fire to carpet stores and the like—but here, in the mossy old somnolent backwater of Savannah, they were unheard of. The place wasn’t exactly a hotbed of international intrigue or even a semi-major port. Nothing ever happened here. Ever. That’s why he’d transferred.

  It was the Nip, of course—he corrected himself: the Japanese—who’d jumped ship the week before. He’d been monitoring the situation from the beginning—he’d interviewed the ship’s captain over the phone and obtained and filed a copy of the Coast Guard report—but it was no big deal. They’d classified the AWOL sailor as IA—Illegal Alien—and left it at that. If he made it to shore, the yokels would have him in the county jail before he could shit twice, and if he gave them any trouble they’d string him up and skin him like a rabbit. But then the report came in that he had made it to shore—there were eyewitnesses, a couple from the artists’ colony he’d attacked in Peagler Sound—and Abercorn had dug deeper. From the Chief Engineer of the Japanese ship—a desiccated old fart about a hundred and twelve years old who looked as if he’d been hatched from an egg—he learned that the man at large was armed with a knife and had attacked half the ship’s crew before throwing himself over the rail, and so he’d had the regional head upgrade the designation to IAAD, Armed and Dangerous. Still, it was no big deal. A Nip in Georgia? These people ate weasel, picked their teeth with their feet, grew right up out of the ground like weeds, like kudzu; the poor dumb Nip—Japanese—wouldn’t last a day, six hours even. Abercorn was sure of it. And then the weekend had intervened and he made the rounds of the discos, drank too much, got lucky, learned most of everything about a girl named Brenda who used blusher on her breasts, and forgot all about the AWOL Nip on Tupelo Island.

  But now things had gotten out of hand. An IAADA. He sighed. He’d been looking forw
ard to a long quiet morning with the new le Carré and a pot of fresh-dripped Folgers, with nothing, absolutely nothing to do, except listen to the girls in the main office type up the odd student visa and whisper about the scandalous sex lives of people they barely knew. Yes. And now this. He turned wearily to his desk, lit a cigarette and typed in a request for more information. The screen immediately began to fill:

  TANAKA HIRO. JAPANESE NATIONAL. BORN KYOTO 6/12/70. MOTHER TANAKA SAKURAKO DECEASED 12/24/70. FATHER UNKNOWN. LAST KNOWN RESIDENCE GRANDMOTHER TANAKA WAKAKO 74 YAMAZATO-CHO NAKA-KU YOKOHAMA. ARMED AND DANGEROUS AND AMOK TUPELO ISLAND MID-GEORGIA COAST ADVISE EXTREME CAUTION. ESCAPED BRIG AND ASSAULTED OFFICERS TOKACHI-MARU FREIGHTER JAPANESE REGISTRATION 1300 HOURS 20 JULY. UNPROVOKED ATTACKS ON EYEWITNESSES LIGHTS SAXBY DERSHOWITZ RUTH WHITE OLMSTEAD FIRST DEGREE BURNS ARSON HOUSE FIRE TOTAL LOSS.

  Jesus, was he setting fire to houses now? This was bad news. Worse than bad. The guy must be a psychopath, he thought, a terrorist, a Japanese Manson. And it got worse: he’d been at large a week and already the list of sightings filled the screen. He was everywhere, from Peagler Sound to Hog Hammock and Tupelo Shores Estates and back again, popping up out of the bushes like a jack-in-the-box, terrifying old ladies and stirring up the war veterans and coon hunters till gunfire crackled across the island in an unholy storm from morning till night. He’d cursed a bunch of people at the local grocery, filched three pairs of ladies’ undergarments from a clothesline at the artists’ colony and made off with a tin dish of dogfood the sheriff himself had set out on his back porch. It had to stop. Detlef Abercorn knew what was expected of him.

  The thing was, he’d had no experience with anything like this. He’d spent his twelve years in L.A. raiding sweatshops in Eagle Rock and chasing skinny busboys around tofu-spattered kitchens in Chinatown. What did he know about swamps and hollows—what did he know about Georgia, for that matter? Sure, it was up to the local authorities to make the nab, but he was supposed to be the expert, he was supposed to cast the net, advise them—advise them, what a joke: he could barely make out a word they said down here. Even worse, he’d never had a problem, not that he could remember, with the Japanese. Tongans, yes. Ecuadorians, Tibetans and Liberians, Bantu, Pakistanis and Sea Dyak, everybody and anybody. But not Japanese. They never entered the country illegally. Didn’t want to. They figured they had it all and more over there, so why bother? Plenty of them came in to run factories and open banks and whatnot, but all that was done at the highest levels. And Detlef Abercorn didn’t work at the highest levels.

  No matter. An illegal was an illegal, and it would be his ass if he didn’t catch him.

  It was raining by the time he reached the parking lot. Of course, he thought, what else? The tires on his old battered turd-brown Datsun were bald as melons and the wipers were so frayed they might as well have been bottle brushes for all the good they did. It was going to be a rough trip.

  Before it began, though, he had to swing by the apartment, cram his overnight bag with underwear, dental floss, SPF 30 maximum protection sunscreen, calamine lotion and a snakebite kit, dig his hip waders and rain slicker out of the trunk in the storage cage downstairs, and then find a Vietnamese grocery—the Vietnamese grocery, probably the only Vietnamese grocery in the whole slow-talking, tobacco-spitting, godforsaken state—on De Lesseps off Skidaway. He was going to rendezvous there with Lewis Turco, an ex-LURP and part-time special agent who’d lived in Borneo, Okinawa and the Pribilof Islands, and he was going to take Turco with him to help sniff out the amok Nip on Tupelo Island. Or rather, he would let Turco do the sniffing while he sequestered himself in the local motel with a couple six packs, John le Carré and the prospect of the upcoming four-game series between the Dodgers and the Braves.

  The shirt didn’t matter—it was sweat-soaked anyway—but still he wasn’t prepared for the typhoon that hit him as he dashed across the lot to the car. By the time he got the door open he was wet right on through to the elastic band of his BVDs. There was no sense in even starting the car—he couldn’t go anywhere till it eased up, not with these wipers—and he didn’t relish the idea of bolting back to the office, where he’d just look ridiculous in front of Ginger and the other girls, not to mention the button-down types who saw to the main business of the place. They’d always looked at him as if he were a freak anyway, a kind of subspecies not much higher on the social scale than the odd refugee applying for a green card. So he just sat there, not daring even to turn on the radio for fear of running down the battery, fuming over this crazed, inconsiderate, raging pain in the ass of a Japanese Nip—he hated the son of a bitch already, hoped they tarred and feathered him and sent him home to Nagasaki or wherever in a box—and listening to the thousand tiny frustrated fists of the rain as they beat at the roof of the car.

  In the end, he was over an hour late to pick up Turco, whom he’d never met and had only that morning spoken to for the first time on the phone. What complicated matters, after the rain had eased up and he’d gone home to pack his bag and dig out his waders, tape recorder, notebooks and the rest, was that he couldn’t find the place. He’d only been in Savannah six months and he’d always been lousy with maps. There were all these one-way streets and this endless succession of old squares that you had to drive all the way around, each one, one after another, and they all looked alike. He finally found De Lesseps, but he couldn’t locate the store, which, as it turned out, was stuck up in the ass end of an alley anyway. After he’d gone up and down the street twenty times he finally pulled up alongside a red-faced yokel at a stoplight and motioned for him to crank down his window. There was a strong, faintly astringent smell of freshly shucked oysters on the air, of sea sludge and fish scales and worse; the rain pattered down. “Tran Van Due’s Grocery,” he shouted, “you have any idea where it is?”

  The red-faced man leaned toward him. He was wearing a suit and his wispy blond hair was parted in the middle. He was fat, Abercorn saw now, bulbous, an elephant seal heaved up out of the sea and wedged, as a joke, into the impossibly narrow confines of the cab of his mini-truck. He mumbled something in a heavy accent that sounded like “Roy’s hair” or “rye chair.”

  “I’m sorry,” Abercorn said, trying his best to control his winning smile, the smile he wore like a necktie when he needed to, “but I didn’t—rye chair?”

  The man looked away in exasperation. Mist rose from the pavement. “Rye chair,” the man repeated, turning back to Abercorn and pointing a thick finger to the towering, unmistakable, aniline red-on-yellow sign—TRAN VAN DUC—that hovered over the alley not fifteen paces from them. Then the light changed, and the man was gone.

  The store was tiny, a central aisle of loosely stacked cans and two low wall-length freezers, and it smelled worse than the fish-stinking pavement outside. Abercorn pulled the door shut behind him and took in the entire place at a glance: a pair of shrunken ageless Asian faces staring up at him in horror, the cans of pickled this and salted that, the strange little fishes in frozen plastic envelopes, the dried spices and chilies and sauces no one would ever buy. He’d raided a hundred places just like it in Arcadia and Pacoima and San Pedro, and he knew that the two behind the counter had residence permits but the twenty in the basement didn’t and he knew too that they had to be bringing in more than fish sauce to survive, but that was somebody else’s problem. “I’m looking for Lewis Turco,” he said.

  Nothing. No reaction. He might just as well have been talking to himself, humming, singing, gargling, he might as well have been a dog or a monkey. The couple behind the counter—a man and a woman, he saw now—didn’t flinch. They were holding their breath, controlling their heartbeat—their eyes didn’t even blink. “Lewis Turco,” he repeated, lingering over the syllables, “I-look-for-Lew-is-Tur-co.”

  “Yo,” said a voice behind him, and a man in fatigues stepped out from behind the bead curtain at the back of the store. He was short—five-five or so, Abercorn guessed—and he wore a noncommital expression. His shoulders wer
e too wide for his height and he had a weight lifter’s build, strong in the chest and upper arms. He wore a beard and his long flat greasy blond hair was tied back with a leather thong. “Abercorn, right?” he said.

  Detlef Abercorn was six-five, he wore his hair short, and at thirty-four he preserved the same lanky narrow-hipped build he’d grown into as the pitching ace of his high-school baseball team in Thousand Oaks, California. “Yes,” he said, smiling, “and you’re Lewis Turco.”

  Turco wasn’t smiling. He sauntered up the aisle like a cowboy, each stride too long, too wide, sauntered as if he were sprinting up the side of a hill in slow motion, and then he halted abruptly at the counter, wheeled on the wooden couple and said something in a burst of what Abercorn took to be Vietnamese. They came to sudden life, as if they were wired, and the man ducked behind the counter to produce a tightly bound and visibly swollen Army-issue backpack, from the frame of which dangled an entrenching tool, a baton, a pair of handcuffs and several esoteric-looking devices Abercorn didn’t recognize, while the woman handed over a cellophane package that appeared to contain some sort of foodstuff—dried meat or roots or something.

  Just to hear himself, Abercorn said, “It’s a bitch, huh?”—meaning the rain, Georgia, the INS and the rat-crazy, house-burning, Japanese son of a bitch holed up with the slugs and centipedes on funky, dripping, hopeless Tupelo Island.

  Turco didn’t respond. He’d shouldered the pack and taken the parcel of food from the woman, and now he was studying Abercorn with a cagey look. “Jesus,” he said finally, “what happened to you, man—napalm, car wreck or what? Don’t tell me you were born with that?”

  Abercorn stiffened. He’d heard it all his life and all his life he’d been touchy about it—who wouldn’t be? He was a good-looking guy, good bone structure, strong nose and chin, hair as thick as a teenager’s. But he knew what Turco meant, knew what he’d had the bad grace to bring up—most people, anybody with any sensitivity, anyway, would have left it alone. What Turco was referring to were the white patches on his face and hands—a lot of people thought it was scar tissue or eczema or something, but it wasn’t. There was nothing wrong with him, nothing at all, just that he had less pigment than normal, less melanin in his skin and hair. He’d been born an albino. Or part albino. His coloring was fair to begin with, but the albinism—or vitiligo, as the doctors called it—manifested itself in dead-white patches that mottled his entire body—even his hair. He’d been able to dye his hair, of course, but there was nothing he could do about his skin. And even that wouldn’t have been so bad, but for his face. He’d got used to it now, but as a kid it used to drive him crazy—he looked as if he’d been splashed with paint. A rough oval, two inches across, framed his right eye and six paper-white blotches dribbled across his jaw, bleached the bridge of his nose and made his left ear glow in the dark. And his eyes, his eyes weren’t blue or gray or green or brown: they were pink, like the eyes of a white rat or a guinea pig. “Beagle Boy,” they called him in elementary school, and later, when he got taller and stronger and knocked them down with his big-league curveball, they called him “Whitey.” But now he was an adult, and no one, ever, called him anything but Detlef.