by T. C. Boyle
She was a big woman, the maid, big as a sumo wrestler, with nasty little red-flecked eyes and a wiry pelt of hair bound tight to her skull in rows that showed the naked black scalp beneath. Her nose was flattened to her face and she carried a sickening odor with her, the odor of the hakujin, the meat-eaters and butter-stinkers—only worse. From the moment he’d stepped in the door with his ragged shoes and dangling Band-Aids and thrown himself at the dish of nuts on the coffee table, she’d regarded him with loathing, as if he were vermin, as if he were something she’d squash beneath her foot if only he weren’t under the protection of her dotty old mistress. She saw through him. He knew it. And now, as she came through the doorway, she caught his eye with an incendiary look, a look that said his time was coming, and that when it did there would be no holds barred. Hiro dropped his eyes.
“There’s nothing more practical than a futon, that’s what I’ve always said, and I was just saying to Barton the other day—he’s my husband, Barton, he’s an invalid—oh, thank you, Verneda—I was just saying to Barton, ’You know, Barton, all this furniture, all these gloomy old antiques, they’re just such a clutter, so inefficient, I mean the Japanese don’t even have bedrooms—’ ” And then the old lady paused a moment, a look of bewilderment surprising her all but immobile features. “But then, where do your sick and elderly lie up when they’re ailing? … I suppose in those excellent hospitals, best in the world, our medical profession certainly can’t touch them, what with the AMA and all their infighting, our own students having to attend medical school in Puerto Rico and Mexico and all those filthy, horrid, Third World places—”
With an angry snap of her wrist, the maid set the wooden bowl down before Hiro, and he wondered in that moment if he’d come far enough, if she recognized him, if she’d called the authorities and they were even then bearing down on him, but the thought flitted in and out of his head, all his attention focused on the insuperable bowl before him. Meat. Rice. He couldn’t hide his disappointment: the bowl was filled with salad greens.
Later, though, with time and patience and the bleary, head-nodding endurance of the conscripted, he was rewarded with yams, several dishes of pale green vegetables boiled beyond recognition, and meat—fresh succulent meat, ribs and all. It was the first hot meal he’d had since his dispute with Chiba aboard the Tokachi-maru, and he lashed into it like the indigent he was. The maid had set great heavy ceramic bowls of the stuff on the table, and his hostess, pausing in her monologue only to take a birdlike peck at a scrap of meat or mashed greens, urged him on like a solicitous mother (“Oh, do have a bite more of the okra, won’t you, Seiji? Heaven knows Barton and I could never—and the pork too, please, please—”). He filled his plate time and again, scraping the depths of the serving bowls and sucking methodically at the naked sticks of the bones that littered his plate, while the old lady rattled on about kimonos, cherry blossoms, public baths and the hairy Ainu. By the time the glowering maid brought coffee and peach cobbler, he was in a daze.
He no longer cared what was happening to him, no longer cared where he was or what the authorities might do to him if they caught up with him—this was all that mattered. To be here, inside, with rugs on the floors and paintings on the walls, to be here at the center of all this wonderful immensity, all this living space—this was paradise, this was America. In a trance, he followed his hostess from the dining room to the library, and while the maid cleaned up they sipped a sweet and fiery liqueur and filled their coffee cups from a gleaming silver carafe that might well have been bottomless.
At some point, he found himself stifling a yawn, and noticed the clock on the mantelpiece. It was past one in the morning. The maid had long since seen to the needs of the invalid upstairs, taken leave of her employer and departed for the night—to her home on the mainland, as Ambly Wooster informed him, in detail and at length. He’d had no problem with the old lady’s accent, really—her speech was carefully enunciated and precise, not at all like the barbaric yawp of the girl in the Coca-Cola store—but this term, mainrand, was new to him. For the past hour or so he’d merely leaned back in his chair, letting the liqueur massage him, and he hadn’t caught more than a snatch or two of the old lady’s ceaseless rant. In fact, if it weren’t for his in-bred courtesy, his compulsion to avoid giving offense, his samurai’s discipline, he would have drifted off long ago. But now, suddenly, the idea of this mainrand sprang up in his head like a sapling disburdened of snow, and he cut her off in the midst of a paean to kabuki theater. “Mainrand,” he said, “what is this, sank you?”
Ambly Wooster looked startled, as if she’d wakened from a dream. Hiro saw now just how old she was, older than his obāsan, older than the bird that laid the thousand-year-old egg, older than anything. “Why, the shore,” she said, “the Georgia coast. This is an island we’re on. Tupelo Island.” She paused a moment, blinking at him out of her watery old eyes. “What did you say your name was?”
An island. All the warmth went out of him like air from a balloon. So he was trapped, and the highway went nowhere. He cleared his throat. “Seiji,” he said.
The old lady studied him a long moment, silent for the first time in the past six hours. “Seiji,” she repeated finally, regarding him with a cold eye, as if she’d never seen him before, as if she were wondering how he’d ever come to invade her house, her dining room, the sanctum of her library.
Was there a bridge? he wondered. A ferry? Could he swim to shore? He held her eyes, trying his best to look humble, thankful, needful, all the while certain that she was about to order him out of the house, call the police, have him bound and manacled and flung into that dark foul gaijin cell that was his destiny. But then an evil thought crept into his head: what could she do, after all, old as she was and alone in the house with an invalid husband and the deep pulsating silence of the night?
“You’ll need a towel,” she said suddenly, pushing herself up from the chair to gaze serenely on him, her blue-veined hands dangling at her sides. And then she smiled. “So rude of me—here I’ve kept you till all hours chattering away like an old mynah bird—what you must think of me, poor man.” Then she turned and started out of the room. “Well, come on, then,” she said, pausing at the threshold, “I’ll show you to your room.”
He followed her through the softly glowing house, up the stairs and down a long carpeted corridor, in the middle of which she paused to glance over her shoulder and put a finger to her lips. “Shhhh,” she whispered, pointing to a closed door, “Barton.” He nodded, vaguely aware of a smell of medication and the soft suck and rattle of labored breathing, and then they were moving again, noiselessly, the old woman’s narrow shoulder blades working beneath the thin fabric of her blouse. “Here,” she said, swinging back a varnished door at the end of the corridor and stepping aside for him.
At first he thought she was having a little joke—this couldn’t be the room; it was huge, the size of a dormitory, big enough for racquetball, gymnastics, a swimming pool. And for all her talk of futons, it was dominated by a huge canopied bed that seemed to float over the carpet like a ship under sail. There was an overstuffed couch too, and an armchair. He could see a bathroom beyond it, a TV, air conditioner, windows that gave onto the sea. Twin reading lamps on either side of the bed bathed the room in a rich golden light. He hesitated, but she took him by the arm and ushered him in. “Sleep tight,” she said, handing him a towel, “and if there’s anything you need, you just let me know. Nightie-night.” And the door clicked shut behind him.
He felt drunk. Exhilarated. So pleased with himself he laughed aloud. The bed—it was amazing, stupendous, big enough to sleep the entire crew of the Tokachi-maru and Captain Nishizawa too. He tumbled into it, kicking up his heels, bouncing high off the springs, all the while giggling like a child on a trampoline. In the next moment he was in the gleaming bathroom—as big itself as the entire apartment he’d shared with his obāsan—and he was rifling the drawers: soap, shampoo, cologne, an electric razor, aftershave. I
t was too much. He was dreaming. And then all at once he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror and the elation went out of him.
It made him catch his breath. Made him look again.
But no, it couldn’t be. This wasn’t Hiro Tanaka staring back at him—not this raggedy bum, not this derelict with the matted hair and sunken cheeks, with the fingernails like a grave digger’s and a patchwork of filthy bandages hanging from him like so much sloughed skin. He was twenty years old and he looked sixty—this was what America had done for him. Suddenly he was frightened. He saw himself through the changeless weary succession of weeks and months and years to come, running, hiding, begging, living like a Burakumin—an untouchable—in the anonymous streets of an alien world, too hopeless to get a job, too degraded, too filthy. He’d fallen from grace, and the muddied earth had rushed up to engulf him.
He stared into the mirror and despair overwhelmed him, but then, after a period, he glanced at the shower. It was the first shower he’d seen in over a month. He paused a moment to examine it dispassionately, as if he were a student of showers. He slid back the glass door, studied the gleaming controls, the soap dish, the pale scented bar of French soap that made the whole room smell like an orchard. And he examined the tub beneath it, too—the tub in which you could soak a blistered, aching body for hours at a time. Before he knew what he was doing, he was stripping off the filthy bandages, the ludicrous shorts and sweat-stained T-shirt, and he began to feel better. When he turned the knobs experimentally, water thundered from the showerhead, and the sound of it, the smell of it, made him feel better still. And then, wholly converted, he stepped into the tub and let the water wash over him, and it was cleansing, pure, redemptive and sweet.
The day was terrifically hot, a real slap-in-the-face, dog-under-the-house sort of day, the sort of day when a man just wanted to kick back with a cold beer and a plate of crab and listen to the Braves sweat their sorry asses round the diamond. The thing was, he’d promised those Tupelo Shores people he’d do the lawn and trim the shrubs, and he needed the money. Not for himself—he had his chew, his garden, all the crab and oyster and fat pink mullet his traps could hold—but for his nephew. Royal wanted one of those spike-studded wristbands they all wore on MTV, and Olmstead White was planning to surprise him on his birthday. But then, on second thought, maybe he could use a little cash for himself too—he’d managed to save most of his things from the fire, the necessities anyway, and he’d been able to move into the reconverted chicken coop out back without any real hardship—but there were a few things he could use. Like some towels and toilet articles—he liked his eau de cologne and his bay rum, liked to smell nice for the ladies, and all those bottles had gone up like firecrackers on him. And so, heat or no heat, after a lunch of black beans and rice with a chopped onion and a dash of the hot sauce he’d made himself from dried cherry peppers and garlic, he looped his machete round the handlebars of his bicycle, swung a leg over, and started down the hard black frying-pan of the road for the big estates at the other end of the island.
It was a ten-mile ride, nearly all of it as flat as his kitchen table, and normally it was nothing for him—he could have gone twice as far and back again without even breathing hard. But he was a little out of sorts today—maybe it was the heat—and though he coasted whenever he could, each time he dug at the pedals he felt a tightness in his chest, as if somebody had slipped a noose under his arms. He’d start in pedaling and he could feel the noose cinch up on him, squeezing all the air out of his lungs, and he just couldn’t seem to draw his breath. His bad hip was acting up too, and his hand, blistered and raw beneath the clean white yard-and-a-half-long strip of gauze, burned as fiercely as it had the day that Chinaman had tried to deep-fry it. Three miles down the road, just past Cribbs’ store, he thought he’d turn around and go on back home, he was feeling that poorly, but then he thought of that helpless jabbering old white lady and her laid-up husband, and figured he was the better part of halfway there already, and he kept on going.
He felt better as he glided over the little bridge that spanned Pumpkin Hammock and saw the cooters and mud turtles lined up like dominoes on a log beneath him—he could have spit on them if he wanted to—and he thought of himself and Wheeler as boys spearing turtles with an old window hook and the taste of the soup and gumbo his mama would make and the way they nailed the hollow shells up along the south side of the house till the place was shingled with them. And then he was passing Hollieway’s Meadow, where the live oaks grew up in clusters out of the stumps of the old trees they’d taken down to build ships for the Confederate navy, his bony old knees pumping, and the noose eased up a notch or two.
He’d taken a pet screech owl out of one of those stumps when he was a boy, an unfledged chick, the runt out of a clutch of three. It was going to die anyway, trampled under by the spiky feet of its siblings, its head pecked till it was one big blister. He’d given it fish, which it didn’t like, and mice, which it did. He remembered his mama thinking he was crazy, dicing up a mouse with his daddy’s long knife, but he clipped that owl’s wings and it grew up to love him, till the dog got it, anyway. That must have been sixty years ago, and now, as he glided through the gates of Tupelo Shores Estates and turned left on Salt Air Drive, he wondered at the memory of it, at the power of human recollection that could take him off his bicycle and out of the heat and send him back through all those long worn-out years. But then he wobbled into the Woosters’ driveway and a swarm of greenhead flies came up on him out of nowhere and the noose tightened again and he was back in the here and now. He could taste the sweat at the corners of his mouth.
All right. He would squat and rest a minute in the shade where the grass was deep and cool, and then he’d have a long drink from the hose and get to work. No need to say anything to anybody. They’d see him outside the window, the machete flashing in the sun, and they’d hear him when he fired up the lawn machine, and they’d say, It’s Olmstead White out there working in this heat and maybe we’ll just get him a tall glass of lemonade with a finger of vodka in it the way he likes it.
He squatted, and the noose eased up a little. And then he bent to the hose and the cool water quickened him and he was ready for work, but there was that damn stab in the hip again, and the salt sweat was just like liquid fire on his hand. To hell with the doctor, he thought, and he held the bandage tight with his good hand and he let the water run over the burning one till the salt was gone and the sharpness of the pain fell off a bit. Then he unsheathed the machete and started nicking at the bushes with short quick drops of his wrist.
He must have been at it half an hour or more by the time he worked himself round to the ocean side of the house, where the pool stood behind a waist-high gate all overgrown with wisteria. There was somebody sitting out by the pool, and that surprised him—not just because of the heat, but because the old lady and her husband never paid any attention to the thing, except to let it go green as a duckpond between the pool man’s visits. It must be the grandson, he thought, visiting from college. He’d seen the boy now and again over the past few years, hanging round the house, waiting for the ferry, driving his red sports car hellbent-for-leather up and down the street to Cribbs’ store—a likable enough kid, even if his eyes were spaced too wide apart and he wore his hair as if it was 1950 still. Hell, and he had to chuckle at the thought, the kid wouldn’t know a MTV haircut if it grew up around his ears. The machete flicked and there was a splash and Olmstead White turned briefly to see the froth of the water, the slick kicking limbs, hair flattened out like an otter’s, but he thought no more about it.
He trimmed the holly bushes square against the house and then he turned to the pool. He hadn’t got to the wisteria last time he was here, and now it was sending out snaking arms every which way and generally looking pretty shabby all the way round. Coming across the lawn, the machete hanging loose in his good hand, he was thinking of his mother, another trick of recollection, as if the day was filtered out of his head and a
ll the past came swarming back to him in its odd and essential details. He was thinking of just this, just one thing, a picture frozen there in his brain: his mama at the stove and himself and Wheeler and his daddy sitting at the table, the mad hag’s shriek of a hurricane wind in their ears, windows rattling, claws on the roof, and his mama jiggling the cast-iron pan and flipping corn cakes as if nothing in the world was the matter. He was thinking about that and the tightness was gone, and then he glanced up and caught the grandson’s eye, and saw, for the first time, that the grandson was staring back at him as if he’d seen a ghost.
And that was it, the beginning of the end: recognition. This was no grandson—and the noose bit into him with a sudden savage jerk—this was, was … there were no words to form the thought, only rage crackling like grease in a hot frying pan. He took three steps forward, the machete poised over his head, and he saw those Chinese eyes, that Chinese nose and mouth and ears come back to haunt him. “Son of a bitch!” he cried—or tried to, the words sticking in his throat, choking him, the noose like a garrote, like two nooses, two garrotes … and then something was giving way inside of him and he plunged forward as if into a vast body of water and knew he would never be short of breath again.
Hiro had awakened that morning—his sixth under the Wooster roof—to the smell of eggs, bacon and fried tomatoes, and to the strains of some vaguely familiar symphonic music, some Russian or European thing. He dressed in his freshly laundered shorts—Ambly Wooster, rambling on about textiles, Taiwan, Korea and Jordache, had tried to give him a pair of her grandson’s blue jeans, but they’d been too tight to zip up—and then he pulled on the gray sweatshirt, thick cotton socks and Nike hightops that fit as if they’d been made for him, and sauntered downstairs to breakfast.