East is East

by T. C. Boyle

  The music swelled to greet him, and as he turned the corner into the sunstruck parlor, he caught a glimpse of the morning maid, Dolly, darting out of sight like an insect. If the other one, Verneda, was physical and suspicious, Dolly was her opposite: slight and neurasthenic, afraid to make eye contact, her hair a topiary marvel, her skin the buttery tan of the blazer Hiro had worn to school as a boy. She disappeared into the dining room, leaving Hiro to bow deeply to his host and hostess, who were seated at the breakfast table in the bay window overlooking the sea. The glass was pregnant with light. Gulls hung over their heads. Somewhere, beneath the rush of violins, the ocean pounded the shore.

  “Seiji!” the old lady cried, giving him a cagey look, her head tilted to one side, a smear of lipstick blotting her crooked smile. He could see that she was holding back, biting her lip, fighting to dam up the torrent of banality that lashed her tongue like a whip across her palate, teeth and lips through her every waking moment. “Ohayō,” she said, greeting him in Japanese and struggling with her tongue, her very eyes bulging with the effort to hold it all in.

  He bowed again. “Ohayō gozaimasu,” he returned, and bowed to the husband too. But the husband wouldn’t have known that, since he was blind and deaf, propped up in his wheelchair like a man of rags propped up on a broomstick.

  On the table were rashers, eggs, toast, butter, coffee, fried tomatoes and marmalade. It wasn’t the sort of breakfast he preferred—he liked ochazuke himself, a bit of cold rice warmed with green tea—but he couldn’t complain. Not after his exile in the wilderness, not after the crabs and grasshoppers and the hopeless spoon-licking repast he’d made of coffee crystals, nondairy creamer and artificial sweetener. But still, the Americans made such a mess of their food—just served it in a heap, with no thought of grace or proportion, as if eating were a shameful thing—and if he weren’t starving, he would have turned up his nose at it. He pulled back the chair to sit down.

  “Well, don’t you notice anything?” the old lady asked, trembling with the effort to contain all those slips of meaning, that rush of words and syllables and phrases.

  He paused over the chair, bewildered.

  “The music,” she said. “The music, Seiji—” and then she caught herself. She was grinning now, her teeth dead and gray, cracked, yellow, too big for her mouth.

  And then he understood. The music. It was a routine she’d impressed on him. It meant nothing to him—he liked American music, personally, disco and soul, Michael Jackson, Donna Summer, Little Anthony and the Imperials—but he knew what she wanted. And he needed time here and she was kind to him and he didn’t mind, didn’t mind at all. He released the chair, stepped back a pace, composed himself, and began, as best he could and with the sweeping muscular movements of the long-distance swimmer, to conduct.

  Later, after Barton had been fed and changed and wheeled out into the shade for some air; after Dolly had appeared and vanished again like a domestic ghost, only the faintest click of plate and cutlery giving her away; and after Ambly Wooster had spilled her continents, her oceans, her worlds of breath and gone up to take her afternoon nap, Hiro strolled out to sit beside the pool and grow strong again.

  He felt safe here, the space enclosed and cultivated in a proper and proportionate way. And the water—it had been milky the first day, but he’d found the chemicals, the chlorine and acid, and stirred them in, and overnight it had become pellucid—the water soothed him. Throughout the afternoon, as the sun mounted in the sky and the heat rose, he plunged in and out of the pool in the swimming trunks Ambly Wooster had provided for him, frolicking like a seal. And each time he entered the pool, he felt that much cleaner, that much more human, that much further removed from the swamp. He lay back, drying in the sun, and watched the gulls sail across the sky, and when Dolly, eyes averted, slipped up on him with a plate of sandwiches and fruit, he ate with quiet satisfaction and with a deep and abiding gratitude.

  America wasn’t so bad after all, he began to think. And he even entertained a brief fantasy of staying on here and becoming Seiji, whoever he was, and of looking up his father in the telephone directory and inviting him down. They could swim together, he and his father, and together, with concentration and patience, they could poke holes in Ambly Wooster’s breathless monologue and come up for air. But then he knew he was being unrealistic, dreaming, letting his mind drift, knew that they’d pin him down here sooner or later. He was on an island—an island, of all places—and he had to get off it. He thought of asking the old lady to drive him to the mainland in the back of her car, but of course there were problems with that. Just getting her to shut up long enough to put the proposition to her seemed an almost insurmountable obstacle, to begin with. And what would he tell her—that he was a criminal, an outlaw, a vandal? That he wasn’t Seiji after all? And where was this mainland? From the pool he could see only the open ocean, serene, endless, blue, ocean that rolled over the hump of the world and slapped the shores of Africa. And from the far side of the house he saw another house, and beyond that another house, and then the marsh.

  A boat, he thought. Perhaps he could beg a rowboat or a little catamaran, a Sunfish, anything. How far could the mainland be? He was thinking about this theoretical boat, the chance of the waves and the stinking festering cesspool of a marsh that was sure to form a barrier round this elusive mainland, when he became aware that someone was staring at him. He looked up and there he was, the last man in the world he wanted to see.

  But no: it was a bad dream. He was hallucinating. It couldn’t be. But then the hallucination moved, and he saw that he wasn’t dreaming at all, and that the Negro, the cannibal, the madman who’d fired on him with a gun when he was defenseless and hungry and half dead from drowning, was as palpable as the sun in the sky. And worse: that he had a weapon in his hand—a kendō sword—and that he was coming at him, eyes rolled back in his head, his mouth a black pit that drained his face. Hiro was awestruck. Terrified. The man didn’t look human—he was possessed, hellish—and he was writhing and gasping and choking out a curse in the thick wadded language of the shaman and the witch doctor.

  Hiro shot to his feet. There was nothing in all the pages of Jōchō to prepare him for this. He took one look at the transmogrified Negro, raging and kicking and tearing at the earth now, and he had his clothes bundled in his arms and he was leaping the fence like a high-hurdler. He never looked back—as far as he knew his feet never touched the ground. Three bounds and he was out of the yard, over another fence and into the adjoining yard, where a woman whose nose was smeared with some sort of obscene plaster leaped up out of a lawnchair with a shriek that cut through him like a whirling tomahawk, and then he was in the next yard over, fighting off a swarm of dogs the size of stuffed toys. He kept going. Through a clutter of lawn furniture, across patios, leaping pickets, brickwork and chain-link as if he’d been born to it. People shouted at him, but he ignored them. Dogs tore out of the shadows to intercept him, their heads low, and the neighborhood suddenly resounded with their barks and snarls and their mad distracted howls. He kept going.

  At some point, breathless, panicked, taking a landscaped slope and bursting headlong through a stand of ornamental pine, he heard the first distant chilling cry of the sirens. They were coming for him. Crouched low, staying with the cover of the trees, he gained the top of the slope and found his retreat cut off by the high rough plane of a stucco wall, an American wall, big but shoddy, the surface peeling in great skinlike patches. It must have been ten feet high, at least. He flattened himself to the abrasive surface, trying to catch his breath, the pandemonium of the neighborhood beating in his ears till it drowned out the distant roar of the surf. He felt naked. Vulnerable. Lost. There was nothing for it but to scale the wall and hope for the best.

  It was a small matter. He scaled the wall. Dropping down on the far side, he found himself in a garden: luxurious, overgrown, deserted. There was a pool, and a cabana. In the distance: shouts, barking, the wail of sirens. Slyly, silent
ly, with the stealthy sure athletic tread of the samurai, he crossed the flagstone border of the pool, eased open the door of the cabana, and hid himself in the slatted darkness within.

  Later—much later—when the night was a presence and there was no sound but the susurrus of the crickets from beyond the walls and a drowsy hum from the house that commanded the yard, the garden, the pool and cabana, Hiro emerged. Noiselessly—not a ripple escaped him—he bathed himself in the pool, washing away the evidence of his flight, the grass stains, the smudges of dirt and grease. Then he sat in the dark till he was dry, the beat of his heart steady and slow. Carefully, fastidiously, as if it were a ritual, he pulled on the shorts, slipped the sweatshirt over his head, eased into the socks and leather hightops: he was in no hurry. He had a plan. A simple plan. A plan that began and ended with the cabin in the woods and his white-legged secretary. He saw her again—for the hundredth time—as she was that night in the boat, supine and unclothed, and he saw her at her desk, swiveling toward him, offering food and shelter. And then he pushed himself up, found the gate at the side of the house and stalked silently across the lawn. In the next moment, he smelled the tar and felt the hard flat surface of the road beneath his feet.

  On an impulse, he bent to touch it. It was still warm.

  Still at Large

  There was no question about it now: he was going to stay there with her, under her protection, and he was going to stay indefinitely. Or at least until things cooled down. He’d got himself into some trouble on the other end of the island, at Tupelo Shores Estates, and the locals were in an uproar again. The day after he’d come back to her there was a story on page 6 of the Savannah paper—not much on detail, really, but they hadn’t forgotten him: TUPELO ALIEN STILL AT LARGE, the headline read—and a buzz of apocalyptic gossip went round the island. Two days later, the Tupelo Island Breeze devoted its entire front page to him.

  Ruth might have missed the Breeze story altogether, but for Sandy De Haven. She’d spent the day with her exotic refugee—she hammering away at “Of Tears and the Tide,” he amusing himself with a paperback in Japanese hieroglyphs he’d produced from god knew where—and she’d come in just at the tail end of the cocktail hour. Sandy was behind the bar in the front parlor, mixing drinks. Bob the poet and Ina Soderbord were no longer a thing—Bob’s wife had come down for the weekend, and that was the end of that—and so Ina, white eyebrows fading into white bangs like a mirage, sat at the bar mooning over Sandy. Most of the others had already moved into the dining room, and for this small mercy Ruth was thankful: at least she’d be spared Jane Shine and that sickening little silvery laugh of hers.

  “La D.,” Sandy said, “what’s the poop?” He was already reaching for the vodka, the glass, the glistening bucket of ice.

  “Nothing much,” Ruth said with a shrug, “—working, that’s about it.” What was she going to say—that she was harboring a fugitive from justice? She smiled at Ina. Ina smiled back.

  “Straight, with a twist, right?”

  Ruth nodded, and Sandy handed her the drink. The windows were full of golden light, and for a time, she merely stood there, caught up in the richness of the moment. Saxby was off somewhere with his nets and traps and hip waders, but she’d see him before the night was out—he’d promised her—and Hiro was back at the cabin, lying low. Waiting for her. Depending on her. For the first time in days she felt good, felt like her old self. But then the chatter began to drift in from the dining room and she had to concentrate hard to filter out Jane Shine’s maddening titter. When she lifted the glass to her lips, the vodka had turned sour on her. The moment was gone.

  “You see this?” Sandy asked, easing a copy of the Breeze across the bar. She looked at it a moment before she saw it, and then she set the vodka down, ALIEN INVASION! the headline screamed in 24-point type, and beneath it there was a grainy picture of Hiro, looking sheepishly out from the page. Just under his chin, like some sort of growth, was a card bearing a series of mysterious ideographs and a seven-digit number. He looked lost and hopeless, and if she hadn’t known better, she would have guessed he was about twelve years old.

  “Pretty desperate-looking character, huh?” Sandy said with a grin.

  Ruth didn’t answer. She was scanning the columns of print, the boxed stories that set off the eyewitness accounts of Hiro’s rampage through the grottoes and flowerbeds of Tupelo Shores Estates. There was an interview with the woman who’d unwittingly harbored him; a statement from the next-door neighbor who claimed the fugitive had terrorized her by running unannounced through her yard; an account of the death, due to cardiac arrest, of one Olmstead White, who was overcome while confronting the suspect who’d attacked him in his home three weeks earlier.

  “This Japanese guy’s really up shit creek, huh?” Sandy was grinning still. He leaned across the bar, gazing up at Ruth from beneath the dangle of his bleached locks. This was high comedy.

  Ina sipped white wine with an ice cube in it. Her voice was breathy and small, considering the size of her frame. “I wish they’d just leave the poor man alone—I mean, just look at him”—and she bent forward to tap the paper with one lacquered nail—“does he look dangerous to you?”

  Ruth was reading about Sheriff Peagler and how he’d vowed to put an end to this lawlessness one way or another—the fugitive wasn’t even an American citizen, didn’t even belong in this country—and no, he wouldn’t rule out shooting the expletive-deleted on sight.

  “Get these hog farmers stirred up …” Ina trailed off.

  “Uh-huh, that’s what I mean,” Sandy said, “it’s going to be like something out of The Chase.” He paused to sip at his screwdriver. “You know that movie? Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford?”

  Ruth looked up at him for the first time. “Yeah,” she said, “I mean no. Listen, you mind if I take this, the paper, I mean?”

  Ruth skipped dinner that night. She paid a quick visit to the kitchen, where Rico was scurrying around under the supervision of the head chef (Armand de Bouchette, the man who’d made Thanatopsis preeminent among artists’ colonies—so far as cuisine was concerned, at any rate), and she filled a pair of insulated lunch buckets with pompano en papillote, articbauts au beurre noir, steamed baby eggplant, French bread and potatoes in their own essence. “A romantic evening for two, eh?” De Bouchette was standing over her, the toque cocked back on his head, eyebrows lifted in amusement. He was in his late fifties, on the run from a string of bad marriages, a man who liked to sip cognac and spread his hand casually across the buttocks of the female colonists. “You and Saxbee? Or have you maybe been up to something you don’t tell us about?”

  Ruth kept her head down, busy with the lunch buckets. “Working late, that’s all, Armand. Sax is going to join me later—if he gets back in time. Real romantic.” Then she turned her full-force smile on him, slipped a bottle of wine from the rack above the counter, and left him groping after her retreating flank.

  It was nearly seven when she got back to the cabin. The sun was sinking. A breeze drifted in off the ocean. Everything was still. Hiro wouldn’t be expecting her till morning, and as she approached the clearing, she wondered how to announce her presence without startling him. She thought of calling out to him from a safe distance—“Hiro, I’m back!” or “It’s me, Ruth!”—but if anyone were within earshot, the consequences could be fatal. On the other hand, if she didn’t warn him somehow, the minute her foot touched the steps he’d shoot through the roof like a Saturn rocket. She was halfway across the clearing when she hit on a solution—she would start singing, burst into song, and if anyone heard her they would think she was drunk or jubilant or crazed—it was all the same to her. And so, cradling the newspaper and the thermal containers to her chest, she strode across the clearing, singing in a high pure glee-club soprano, belting out the first thing that came into her head: “Oh, where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? / Oh, where have you been, charming Billy? / I have been to seek a wife, / She’s the—”

/>   She caught herself in midphrase—Hiro’s head had sprung up in the window like a jack-in-the-box. His face was a mask of pure terror, the face of a man awakening to aerial bombardment, tracers, the mushroom-headed thing itself. But then she caught his eye and saw that he recognized her, and it was all right.

  “I brought food,” she said, hoping to pacify him with the noun as she pushed through the door, “and this.” She set down the silver canisters and held up the newspaper.

  Hiro stared numbly at the newsprint stretched taut as a sheet before him. She watched as his eyes fastened on the headline.

  “You read English?” she asked.

  He did. Of course he did. And he was proud of the accomplishment. Americans, with their big feet and blustering condescension to the rest of the world, knew no language but their own. But the Japanese, the most literate people on earth, learned to read English in their schools, from the elementary grades on. Of course, since there were few native speakers in Japan, and since the Japanese system relied on rote learning, the comprehensive skills of the average Japanese were far more highly developed than the conversational.

  Hiro looked up from the newspaper. “We learn in school,” he said simply.

  Ruth folded the paper and handed it to him. He bowed his head and gave her a hangdog look. “They’re really after you now,” she said. “What on earth did you do to them down there?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing, Rusu. Eat food. Listen old lady talk, talk, talk. She never shut up.”

  He tried a smile on her, the smile of a schoolboy caught out at some prank. There was more to the Tupelo Shores incident than he was letting on—of that she was certain. “Speaking of food,” she said, “I hope you like fish.”