East is East

by T. C. Boyle

  Just in case.

  In the morning, he was up at first light. Something had wakened him, a ripple of sound at the periphery of consciousness. His eyes fell open on the familiar overhead beams, tired wood, dead wood, and the sick greenish light that hung over the place like a miasma. He blinked twice, wondering at the noise that had awakened him. The birds were going at it, cursing one another in the trees, and there was the flatulent whoop of a frog or lizard or something and the chittering intermittent screech of a monkey—or did they even have monkeys here? But it was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing different from what he’d been hearing day and night since he’d jumped ship. Nature, that’s what it was. All those seething little lives, toads and caterpillars and all the rest… what he wouldn’t give for the squall of a good disco, voices raised over the din of the drum machine, snatches of laughter and shouts from the bar, the stuttering roar of the big Hondas and Kawasakis pulling up out front … but there, there it was again. A sort of pant or wheeze, as of a dog on a choke collar or an old man with emphysema laboring up a flight of stairs.

  He heard that wheeze, and lying there, half awake, he thought of his grandfather. He’d slept in the same room as the old man when he was a boy in Kyoto, before his grandfather died and his obāsan moved back to Yokohama to be near her people. Hiro was afraid at night, afraid of the moving shadows on the wall and his grandfather’s labored breathing, and of intangible things too, of vampires and werewolves and white-boned demons, and of the fox that took human form. His ojisan was retired then, from Kubota Tractor, and he had a good pension and a plot reserved in the company cemetery, but still obāsan went out to work the night-shift at the glassworks. Sometimes, when he got so frightened he thought he would burst open like a sausage, he would wake his grandfather and the old man would catch his breath and wrap him in his spindly arms. “Don’t be frightened,” he would whisper, “inu ga wan—wan hoeyoru wai, the dogs are barking, woof-woof.” Barking, that’s all.

  And then, incredibly, the wheeze that had woken him turned to a bark—a real bark, distinct and unmistakable, and he thought for a moment his ojisan was there with him, woofing softly in his whistling old voice. But then a second possibility occurred to him and he sat bolt upright with the shock of it: it was a dog. A police dog. The sheriff’s dog. And it wouldn’t just bark: oh, no, this dog would bite.

  Two hours earlier and no more than a mile and a half away, Eulonia White Pettigru’s boy had wakened to the thin trill of his clock radio and the distant pinched thump of drum and guitar. Royal flicked off the radio and sat up, the dark clenched round him like a fist. He’d slept despite himself, though he knew he’d have to be awake and dressed by four—four, that’s what Jason Arms had said—or he’d miss the whole thing. Now he was awake, smelling the world and hearing it too—every least sound, the mice in the kitchen, the bats in the air, even the faintest rasp of the earthworms coupling in the grass outside the window. Breathing deep, trying to fight down the little wheel racing inside his chest, he caught a scent of it: the whole world smelled fresh, new-created out of the dregs of the night, as sweet and charged and piquant as a stick of Big Red gum still in the wrapper.

  The luminous hands of the clock radio showed 3:35. I have more of a right than any of them to be there, he thought, and his fingers trembled as he fastened the snaps of his spiked wristband. From the back room he could detect the soft stertor of his mother’s breathing, the dip and rise of her feathery snores. The image of the granola bars in the kitchen (chocolate chip-peanut butter) came into his head, but only briefly and not very persuasively—he was too excited to eat.

  Outside, the smell was stronger, sweeter, leaching through everything and killing all those habitual stinks of crab and hogs and the dog-run out back of the Arms place. Royal threw himself down on the front steps to lace his hightops, and then it came to him: he was smelling pipe tobacco, Yerdell Carter’s special blend with cinnamon and rose hips all ground up in it. But then—and his hands froze on the laces—was he late, was he missing it? An undercurrent of waking life suddenly whispered to him out of the dark—the distant snap of a match, a murmur of conspiratorial voices: everybody was in on the secret. A soft curse escaped him and the little wheel in his chest accelerated a notch. He was thinking of the coon hunters his father convoked each autumn under the big old live oak in the front yard, dogs whining, shadows milling, the spit of tobacco, soft truncated jokes caught somewhere between throat and lips. Royal jerked at the laces, the blood pounding in his ear—more of a right than any of them—and then he was down off the porch in a single covetous bound and tearing across the lawn to the Arms place.

  Jason was up already, fussing over the dogs with a cup of coffee in his hand, looking important and old, though he was just two years, eight months and eleven days older than Royal. The porch light, a single dull 25-watt bulb, made a yellowish pocket in the night, and before he was halfway across the lawn, Royal could see the dark shapes of the men gathered there, eight or ten of them, squatting in the shadows and solemnly masticating the sandwiches Jason’s mother had made up for them in the unlighted kitchen. His eyes told him what his nose already knew: Yerdell Carter was among them, his pipe softly glowing, a deer rifle propped up between his legs. The others (he recognized Jenkins, Butterton, Creed, friends of his father and coon hunters all) hunched over shotguns, embracing the dull gleam of the steel as casually as they might have embraced umbrellas on a day with a threat of rain.

  The dew was heavy and Royal came up on them with a squeal of his sneakers. He was breathing hard. Too tall for sixteen, gangling, with the tapering long African shanks of his father and the carefully chopped dangle of his bleached and processed hair, he looked—well, different—and he knew somebody would have something smart to say about it. Yerdell Carter was the man. After crushing a mosquito with an audible slap, he grinned out of his ruined old face and asked Royal if he was going to catch himself a Chinaman.

  Royal didn’t answer. His father should have been there in his place, but his father was driving truck in Kansas or Wyoming or some such windblown terminus Royal knew only from videos. His father was driving truck about two thirds of the time, and when he came home, he came home. Royal was sixteen and twenty pounds underweight, a loose gangle of gristle and bone. But where Jason and the dogs were going, he was going too. And nobody was going to stop him.

  Jason looked up from his dead father’s dogs and offered him a sandwich, white bread and bologna. “Uh-uh,” Royal said, shaking his head as if he’d just been offered the body and blood of Christ, the flesh warm still and palpitating. “Ain’t hungry.”

  The night before—six hours ago, that is—he and Jason and Rodney Cathcart had been watching Rock’n’Roll High School on Jason’s VCR when Sheriff Peagler came to the door. Jason’s mother was in bed already and the three of them just about shit blood when they saw who it was: they’d been smoking pot—all the roaches they’d saved over the course of the summer rolled into one thin miserable number—and the smell of it hung over the parlor like an evil ghost. But the sheriff wasn’t interested in pot. He was interested in the two big coon hounds and the little yellow bitch Jason’s dead father had paid a hundred and ten dollars for in Brunswick.

  The sheriff was a bone-thin white man with deep creases in his face and two hard blue eyes that took hold of you like pincers. He’d been a high-school football star—a wide receiver—and he’d won a scholarship to some college up north, but dropped out after two seasons. He wore a hat and a badge, but he dressed in jeans, T-shirt and boots like anybody else. He knocked once and stuck his head in the door. “Jason,” he said, “would you step out here a minute?”

  And that was it. That was why there were ten men (and now twelve and soon to be fifteen) gathered out front of the Arms place looking like the start of a coon hunt, and that was why Jason was acting so important and why Royal couldn’t hold anything on his stomach: they’d found the son of a bitch of a Japanese Chinaman that had gone and killed his uncle.
The sheriff wanted the dogs and he was paying Jason twenty-five dollars for the use of them and himself as handler, but he’d warned Jason to keep it quiet. “I want to catch this malefactor and put him behind bars once and for all,” he’d told him, using one of his college words to drive the point home, “and I don’t want half the island out there gettin’ in my way, you follow me?” But Jason had to tell him and Rodney, what with the sheriff’s pickup backing out of the driveway and the Ramones on the TV crunching chords in their black pipestem jeans, and Rodney had gone home and told his mother and maybe his three brothers and six sisters and his grandpa and his daddy too, and now, when the sheriff pulled up at four for Jason and the dogs, there was going to be a crowd.

  The voice was booming, thunderous, loosed from the clouds, and it sent him into a panic so absolute and immediate it made the fillings in his teeth ache and rendered Jōchō all but useless. “Hyro Tanayka, you come own outta there now, nice and easy, and y’all put your bands up own top your bead where Ah kin see ’em.” And behind that voice, the barking of the dogs—rabid, slavery; barking that choked on its own rage and saliva, the barking of killers and man-eaters. Strip the flesh from the bone.

  The shorts were off the floor and girding his loins in a nanosecond, no time for the Nikes, and then he was clawing his way over Ruth’s desk to get at the back window. Up went the sash, one foot on the desk, the other on the sill, and then he froze. His hara dropped, his heart turned to ash. What he saw there was Negroes, Negroes with guns and dogs. And hakujin too, with uniforms and badges and more guns and more dogs. He was surrounded. It was all up. It was over.

  “Hyro Tanayka,” the voice boomed from the front of the house, “y’all have till a count of ten to come own outta there or Ah cannot hold myself accountable for the consequences! One. Two. Three …”

  He knew them. They’d tried to run him down before he’d even set foot on their soil, they’d chased him out of Hog Hammock and Ambly Wooster’s house too. They were Americans. Killers. Individualists gone rampant. He hung his head and started for the door, defeated, crushed, expecting no mercy but the law of the jungle and of the mutt and half-breed. If he put his tail between his legs and his hands atop his head, then he could … could …

  But all at once, magically, insidiously, the words of Jōchō whispered to him—The Way of the Samurai is a mania for death; sometimes ten men cannot topple a man with such conviction—and he was a Japanese all over again, not a mutt, not a happa, not half a hakujin, but a Japanese, and the strength came back to him, settling in a fiery ball in his gut. He came through the door—“Don’t shoot!” he cried—with his hands atop his head, but with a gleam in his eye.

  In that moment, all of them—the sheriff, the state troopers, the red-eyed Negroes, the gawk of a hakujin with the speckled face and the runt in fatigues Ruth had told him about—all of them relaxed their grip for the tiniest sliver of an instant. He was on the doorstep, he was on the porch, and they were all gaping at him as if they’d never seen a man with hara before. That was all it took, that sliver of an instant, the sheriff dropping the megaphone from his lips, the Negroes and troopers and poor white trash easing up on the trigger …

  “Make my day!” Hiro suddenly shouted, diving for the floorboards as the astonished, outraged cannonade opened up all around him, shattering glass, splintering wood, ricocheting off Ruth’s Olivetti and slicing through the trove of bamboo shoots and fried dace in deadly syncopation. And then, in the next sliver of an instant, in the space between the first round and the second, he bounded over the railing and ran headlong into the first man he encountered, an old Negro with a smoking gun and a pipe jammed between his teeth. The old Negro was a carpet, a rug, a piece of lint. He was gone and there was another, and then a white man, and Hiro ran through them as if they were made of paper, silly astonished faces, black and white, sailing back on their buttocks, guns and cigarettes and spectacles flying up into the air as in some miraculous feat of levitation.

  The jungle embraced him. There was another barrage, an anguished shout and a chorus of curses, and Hiro’s bare broad feet pounded at the mud of a trail he knew as well as he knew the stairwell to his obāsan’s apartment. Then he heard the dogs, the savage joy of the multivoiced roar as they were set loose, but he was a samurai, a killer, a hero, and he was heading for a bog that would choke any sixty dogs … nor would he hesitate. He’d plunge headfirst into the muck, live it, breathe it, smear his naked body with it and dwell forever here in the wild, his home primeval, Tarzan the Ape Man, unconquerable and—

  Suddenly the whirl of his thoughts choked to nothing. There before him, poised in the middle of the path and with his head and shoulders lowered for action, was a Negro. A boy. Hightops. Jeans. Hair like a New Guinea cannibal. Hiro was running, leaves in his face, a dazzle of sun through the trees, the path beneath his feet, and there was a Negro. He was startled—how had he gotten here?—but there was no time for introductions. Behind him the dogs bayed, guns blazed and hot high voices mounted one atop the other: Hiro lumbered down the path like a bull coming out of the gate.

  “Get ’way!” he shouted, swiping at the boy with a jerk of his arm. In the next instant he felt the impact, flesh on flesh, the boy’s hands like claws fastening at his waist, his feet slipping out from under him, and then he was face down in the mud, gasping for breath. Before he knew what had happened the boy was on top of him, flailing at him with fists that were hard little sacks of bone. “You gook son of a bitch,” the boy cried, and Hiro could smell the sweat of him as he tried to fend off the blows and get to his feet, could hear the dogs closing now, swarming at him, the boy’s voice rising to a howl, a shriek, an assault of high piercing syllables that cut through him like bullets: “You killed my uncle!”

  Part II

  The Okefenokee

  Everybody’s Secret

  She was in trouble, deep trouble, and she knew it the minute Saxby stepped in the door. For one thing he was supposed to be gone by now, long gone, off to the Okefenokee to dip his nets and scare up his fishes. And then there was the expression on his face—grim and disappointed, the look of a man revising his options, altering his world view, the look of the outraged moralist, the inquisitor, the hanging judge. A tiny chill of recognition brought her back to the previous night. He’d been waiting for her in the billiard room when she got back late from the cabin, and though they’d sat up for an hour and then made love, he’d seemed morose, preoccupied, he’d seemed distant and untouchable. All this rushed on her in the moment of waking as he slipped in the door and pushed it shut behind him.

  The room was dark still—she’d drawn the shades before going to bed, thinking to sleep late—but the light of day, hard and uncompromising, assaulted her even as he shut it out with the wedge of the door. Brightness trembled at the corners of the windowframe, the sun insinuated itself under the door. It was Sunday. The clock read 7:15. “Saxby?” she murmured, awake already, awake instantly. “Is anything wrong?”

  Of course there was something wrong—he should have been two hours gone by now. Saxby said nothing. Just stood there, his back to the door. And then he was moving suddenly, crossing the room in two angry strides to jerk open the shade. Ruth felt the light explode in the room, her eyes pinched tight, squinted—it was an ache, an assault. “They got him,” he said. “He’s in jail.”

  She couldn’t help herself. He’d caught her off guard and she fell back on her natural defenses. She sat up, pressing the sheet to her breast. Her mouth was small, her eyes big. “Who?” she said.

  He looked angry, dangerous, looked as if he’d been gored. “Don’t be coy, Ruth. You know who I’m talking about. Your pet. Your houseboy. Or was he more than that, huh? ‘I just want to try something different,’ you said, isn’t that what you said. Huh? Something different?”

  “Sax,” she said.

  He was standing over her now, his muscles cut, backlit against the window. She could see the veins standing out in his arms. “Don’t ’Sax’ me,�
� he said. “I was there, Ruth. Last night. I saw him.”

  She shifted her weight, tucked the sheet up under her arms. “Okay,” she said, reaching for a cigarette, “all right. I helped him. But it’s not what you think.” She paused to strike a match, inhale, shake it out and deposit the spent curl of it in the ashtray on the night table. “I felt sorry for him, you know? Like with a stray dog or something. Everybody was after him and he was—he’s just this kid, and besides, I needed him—I mean, not at first—but I needed him for this story I’m writing …”

  Saxby held himself rigid. He was the man in the boat on Peagler Sound, focused and invincible, beyond her control. “How long?” he demanded. “Two weeks? Three? A month? It’s a big joke, isn’t it? On all of us. Abercorn and that little peckerwood Marine or whatever he is, Thalamus, Regina, Jane—my mother even. But what really burns my ass is you put it over on me too. What, you couldn’t trust me with it? Answer me, goddamn it!”

  She was busy with her cigarette. It was all she could do to keep from grinning, grinning with guilt and shame and defiance, and that would only make it worse. And she needed Sax on her side, now more than ever. If he knew—and the thought made her stomach clench—then they all knew, and they wouldn’t find it very funny. She was an accessory, an aider and abettor. She could go to jail. “I wanted to tell you, Sax—I was going to—” she began, and then she trailed off. The light heightened. The room was silent. “Look, Sax: it was a game. Something I knew that none of them did—not Peter Anserine or Laura Grobian or Irving Thalamus either. I was insecure here, you know that. And this was something I could hold on to, something of my own—”