East Is East

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  He tried the title out on himself—Saxby Lights, father of the albino pygmy sunfish—and then he put on a tape—Albinoni, one of his mother’s favorites—and settled into the easy chair with the latest National Geographic. He tried to read an article about the declining resilience of beards among Pacific Coast mussels and its implications for the future of the shellfish industry, but he couldn’t concentrate. He was restless. There was a reading that night—Bob Penick was previewing some new poems—but Saxby really didn’t have much use for poetry and would have gone only to please Ruth—and Ruth wasn’t back yet. A shadow fell over the house, and he reached to turn on the lamp: it was coming on to dusk.

  And then suddenly he was out of the chair, his mind made up in an instant—damn it, he didn’t care what the rules were, he was going out there to surprise Ruth. She’d been working for twelve hours straight, for Christ’s sake—she could have written War and Peace backwards and forwards by now. Enough was enough. If he fractured her creative bubble, so much the worse, but she could reconstruct it tomorrow. He was tired of waiting.

  Red dirt, green gone to gray: the path lay before him like a coil of smoke. He hurried along, sandflies giving way to mosquitoes, anoles rustling through the deepening clots of undergrowth. Up ahead, he heard the soft chuck and plaintive sobbing wills-widow of the night-flying bird whose call gives rise to its name, and the branches above him were filled with the roosting chatter of the day birds. It was the hour of evening when the diamondback extracts itself from a hole in the ground, drawn to the scurrying warmth of the quick-blooded mammals on which it preys. Saxby stepped lightly.

  And then, as he was coming down the final stretch to the cottage, a shadow settled into the path before him. Thick, furtive, dark with the shades of night. It was probably just a cornsnake, but he and Ruth would be coming back up this path in a few minutes, and he didn’t want any surprises. Ten feet from the thing—it was a snake, all right, coiling itself like a lariat, dead center in the middle of the path—Saxby bent for a stick. Crouching, one foot extended and the stick outstretched like a foil, he inched toward the thing and felt his heart freeze within him when it struck at the stick and thrashed its rattles all in the same instant. The chirring was explosive, grating, loud as castanets. But it subsided almost immediately, and the shadow of the snake melted into the undergrowth with the faintest crepitation of leaf and twig.

  Saxby dropped the stick and moved on up the path, blood pounding in his ears. Always fun playing with snakes, he thought, setting one foot down after the other with the exaggerated care of a man wading through wet cement. Night was settling in as he came round the final loop in the path, and he cursed himself for having forgotten his flashlight. But Ruth would have one—and if she didn’t, they’d cut a stick and sweep the path before them, as he used to do when he was a boy coming home late from some adventure on the other end of the marsh. He was thinking of Ruth, a comical version of the snake encounter already taking shape in his mind, when the cottage came into view.

  There was no light.

  That was a surprise. At first he thought he’d missed her somehow, but then he remembered his last postprandial stroll out to the cabin and how he’d found her sitting there in the dark. He was going to call out, but something made him stop. She was talking to someone, her voice a murmur, indistinct, a current of admonition or urgency to it, as if she were scolding a child. And then the screen door wheezed open, slapped shut. Saxby froze. There was someone on the porch, and it wasn’t Ruth.

  The Dogs are Barking, Woof-Woof

  When ruth came to him out of the night, he was dreaming of his mother, his haha, his okāsan, the soft-smiling girl in the miniskirt who’d brought him into the world and suckled him and looked deep into his eyes. It was a dream of the cradle, an oneiric memory, idealized and distilled from the stack of photographs his grandmother kept in the bottom drawer of her dresser. The photos flapped through his dream like a riffled deck of cards and he saw his mother standing outside a cram school with her guitar and the strong heavy legs and handsome wide face he’d inherited from her; saw her on the futon, thinner now, eyes fixed on the kicking infant framed by the crook of her arm; saw her alone in a crowded bar, bottles winking like stars behind her. And then her face pulled back and rose like the moon into the sky above him and she was Chieko, the wide-hipped girl he’d met in a dive in the Yoshiwara District, her arms around him, lips tugging at his own like sentient things. …

  Then the door rattled and he knew the police had come for him with their Negroes and their dogs.

  But no: it was Ruth’s voice coming to him out of the shadows. Ruth’s voice. Fumbling for his shorts, the latch, was something wrong? No. Did she want him to turn on the light? No. She was wearing some sort of musk, a scent that came from a bottle and brought him back to his dream, to Chieko and the scintillating lights of the Yoshiwara.

  Ruth kissed him, her lips cool on his own, and he felt her tongue in his mouth. Her dress was chiffon, electric against his skin. He didn’t understand—they were friends, she’d told him, only friends, and the big butter-stinker with the hair like rice paper and the leaping pale eyes, he was her lover. But her dress fell to the floor as if tugged down by invisible hands and she held him, her flesh pressed to his, the pure white long-legged puzzle of her involved in him now, and he didn’t try to understand, didn’t want to, didn’t care.

  In the morning, in the fullness of the light, she raised her head from his chest and looked into his eyes. He felt her there, poised against him, and he listened to the soft murmur of life awakening in the trees and held on to that cool gray gaze with a prick of emotion that must have showed in every line of his face. She seemed to be deciding something, sizing him up, reviewing the night and the moment and the sudden flurry of her options. “Only friends,” he murmured, and it was the right thing to say. She smiled, opening up, blossoming, and then she kissed him and everything fell into place.

  She went back to her other house, the big house, before the sun was out of the trees, and later she brought him rolls and fruit and meat cut in strips. While he ate, she sat down at her typewriter and began hammering away at the keys with a furious racket. After an hour or so, during one of the long pauses in which she stared out the window and murmured to herself in a faraway voice, he cleared his throat and asked her what it was she was writing.

  “A story,” she said, without looking up.

  “Thriller?”

  “No.”

  “Love story?”

  She turned in her chair to look at him. He was sprawled in the loveseat, thumbing through a news magazine—crack, AIDS, children gunned down in the schoolyard—bored to the very roots of his hair. “It’s a tragedy,” she said, “very sad,” and she pantomimed the emotion with a downturned mouth.

  He thought about that for a moment as she went back to her typing. A tragedy. Of course. What else? Life was a tragedy. “About what?” he asked, though he knew he was keeping her from her work and he felt guilty about it.

  “A Japanese,” she said, without turning her head. “In America.”

  This was a surprise, and before he had a chance to absorb it, he blurted, “Like me?”

  Now she turned. “Like you,” she said, and then she was typing again.

  At lunchtime he went outside and crouched in the bushes until the hakujin with the stiff back and wirebrush hair had hung the lunch bucket on its hook and marched back up the path and out of sight. Ruth wouldn’t touch the food at first—little sandwiches of cucumber and sausage, with fresh-cut vegetables and raspberries in cream for dessert—but he insisted. He was half crazed with hunger, but he felt so guilty and he owed her so much—and so much more after last night—that he couldn’t see her deprived. She was so skinny, and all because of him. “We share,” he said, going down on his knees before her and touching his forehead to the floor, “please.”

  She laughed when she saw him prostrate himself, and finally she gave in, pushing her typewriter aside and cleari
ng a place on her worktable. They ate in silence, but he saw, with gratitude, with love, that she left him the lion’s share. While he was clearing up and she lingered over a cigarette, he broke the silence with a question that suddenly and unaccountably popped into his head: “Rusu, please and forgive me: how old are you?”

  She threw back her head to draw at the cigarette, exhaling the answer: “Twenty-nine.”

  “You divorce?”

  She shook her head. “Never married.”

  He took a moment with this, brushing crumbs from the table, crossing the room to lean out the door and replace the lunch bucket on its hook. “In Japan,” he said, “a woman is married at twenty-four. For a man, twenty-eight.”

  Ruth was smiling, a sly sardonic look in her eye, and he had a sudden vision of her in the Big Apple, in a townhouse with a bathtub the size of his obāsan’s apartment, pictures on the walls, chrome and leather furniture and the ubiquitous deep-pile rug, and he saw himself coming home to her there, a salaryman in suit and tie and carrying a neat calfskin briefcase. “And how old are you?” she asked.

  He was twenty. Just. But he looked older, he knew he did, and he didn’t want to disappoint her with the disparity in their ages. “Thirty-one,” he said.

  Her eyebrows lifted. Twin plumes of smoke escaped her nostrils. “Really?” she said. “Three years past the limit. I’m surprised at you, Hiro—you ought to be married yourself.”

  She spent nearly all of the next few days with him, returning to the big house only to sleep at night. He didn’t ask her about that, about the sleeping arrangements, and he was still tentative around her. He wanted her, and he tried to tell her that with his eyes or by casually brushing against her as she rose from her desk. At one point, after watching her work through all the interminable hours of the day, he came up behind her and laid a hand on her shoulder. “Not now,” she said, pulling him to her for one of those quick pecking kisses the Americans are so fond of, “I’m still working.” Later, when she came back from the big house with dinner for them both, he made a mute appeal—a movement of the hands, a slow melt of the eyes—and she saw it, and acknowledged it, but she told him she wasn’t feeling very well. “The heat,” she said, and she deflected the whole subject of their involvement with a question about Japan: was it this hot over there?

  And then one evening she went back to the big house for cocktails and she didn’t return. It was seven and his stomach was growling. It was eight and the sun was gone and he began to give up hope. But then maybe—just maybe—she’d be back in the night. He waited for hours, brooding. What did she want with him, anyway? Was it all a game to her, a joke? And when was she going to fulfill her promise, when was she going to get him out of this stinkhole? He felt bitter sitting there in the dark without her—bitter, and though he wouldn’t admit it to himself, jealous too—and he forgot all about his gratitude and the debt he owed her, and he got up from the rocker and flicked on the light over her desk.

  There it was: her story. One page in the typewriter, the others scattered across the desk as if they’d been dropped there by a sudden gust of wind, pages x’d out, scrawled over, stained with coffee and ink. How many times had he straightened them up for her, how many times had he arranged her pens and pencils and rinsed her coffee cup? He’d never looked at a word. Not because he wasn’t curious, but because he was ashamed to. How could he violate her privacy like that after all she’d done for him? That’s how he thought, that’s how his obāsan had raised him. But now, having sat and brooded in the dark and with the jealousy of the lover on him, he thought differently. He didn’t give a damn for her privacy. He sat down, shuffled the pages, and began to read:

  He was a Japanese male in the full flower of Japanese manhood, solid and unyielding, and he came home from the office in the small hours and tore at her kimono. The children were asleep, the Sony silent, the tiny apartment polished like a knife. Michiko went wet at the first touch of him. There was whiskey on his breath, imported whiskey, the whiskey he drank each night at the hostess bar, and the smell of it excited her. She loved him for the moon of his face and the proud hard knot of his belly as it pressed against hers, and for his teeth, especially for his teeth. They overlapped like joy and sorrow, the path to his smile as tortuous as a trail torn across the face of Mount Fuji.

  He forced himself into her and a cry escaped her lips. “Hiro,” she moaned, clinging to him, holding fast as if she were drowning, “Hiro, Hiro, Hiro!”

  Hiro glanced up from the page. The room looked strange to him suddenly, looked like a cage, the walls closing in on him, the lamplight cinching his wrists. He didn’t have the heart to read on.

  “When?’ he demanded.

  She was unpacking groceries, groceries enough for an army, for a siege, enough to keep an animal sleek in its pen for a month at least. “I told you: Sax’s car is a pickup. I need a car with a trunk, to hide you.” Her elbows jumped; the cans mounted on the table. “His mother’s car is what I’m thinking of. I just have to come up with an excuse to borrow it.”

  “You stall, Rusu. You want to keep me here. You want to make me a prisoner.”

  The light, the jungle light, was in her hair, slicing at her eyes. She dug into the backpack for another tin of fish. “You prefer it out there?”

  “When, Rusu?” he repeated.

  She rattled the bag and turned her head to look at him. “I don’t want to keep you here against your will—really, Hiro, I don’t. Think of the risk I’m running just by harboring you. I like you, I do. I want to see you get out of here … it’s just—it’s not that easy, that’s all I’m saying. You don’t want to get caught, do you?”

  He stood there looming over her, hands on his hips. He didn’t answer.

  “She’s got an old Mercedes with a trunk the size of the Grand Canyon. It’d be ideal.” She showed him her perfect pink gums and irreproachable eyes, and suddenly the fight went out of him.

  “Okay,” he said, dropping his eyes. “Soon, yes?”

  “Soon,” she said.

  And then, two nights later, she staggered up the steps with another load of canned goods, and he couldn’t help noticing her cryptic little smile. “I have a surprise for you,” she gasped, thumping across the room to fling herself at the desk and wriggle out of her backpack. She threw out her chest, narrowed her shoulders and eased the straps down her arms. He could smell her, a rich dark scent, perfume and sweat commingled.

  “Surprise?” He edged closer, watching her hands as she loosed the string at the neck of the bag. He was expecting a treat—a wedge of cake or a Mars Bar maybe; she knew he loved Mars Bars—but she dug yet another can of fried dace and a cellophane package of withered roots from the depths of the bag. His face fell. How she’d ever got the idea that this—this stuff— would appeal to him was a mystery. Dried fishheads, bark shavings in plastic envelopes, flat black mushrooms like patches of sloughed skin, can after can of bamboo shoots—what did she think he was, some barefoot hick from Tohoku or something? Dried fishheads? He would have preferred practically anything—Chef Boyardee, Hamburger Helper, Dinty Moore—but it was too awkward to ask. Beggars couldn’t be choosy.

  She turned to him, put her hands on his shoulders and pecked another of her airy kisses in the direction of his cheek. “It’s all set,” she said. “Day after tomorrow. Sax is going out after his pygmy fish and I’m taking Septima’s car to Savannah—clothes shopping.”

  It took him a moment. “You mean—?”

  She looked up at him, beaming.

  “Rusu,” he said, and he couldn’t contain himself, joy and discovery lighting him up like a rocket. He clutched her in his arms—he was getting out of here, he was on his way, his life was starting all over—but then he felt her body pressed to his and a sudden sharp sense of loss deflated him. She would take him to the city and he would walk away from her, one mutt more in a mob of them. He would never see her again.

  “So,” she said, pulling back to study his face, her lips stretched
in a grin, “are you happy?”

  He didn’t know what to say. He was groping for the words—happy, yes, but unhappy too—when a violent hissing clatter burst on them out of the night. It startled them both. Hiro thought of a blowout on the highway, a truck tire reduced to tatters, but the racket of it went on and on, an explosion of ratcheting and hissing that was like nothing he’d ever experienced. Ruth’s eyes leapt. His face felt dead.

  “A snake,” she whispered, gripping his arm. “It’s a rattlesnake.” And then: “Someone must be coming up the path.”

  Rattlesnake. The flat wicked head rose up from some deep place inside him, the cold lifeless eyes. He was a boy again, clutching his obāsan’s hand and staring with grim fascination into the venom-flecked glass of the reptile house at the Tokyo Zoo.

  “You’ve got to hide.” Ruth’s face was aflame. “Out there, in back.”

  The flat wicked head, the flickering tongue. Did she think he was crazy? He wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Now!” Her voice was harsh, toneless. “Go!”

  Her hands were on him, she was pushing him, the screen door wrenching open and snapping shut behind him like a set of jaws. He stood there on the doorstep, peering into the throat of the night, wondering if he couldn’t just crouch there on the porch till the overactive reptile and all its flat-headed cousins crawled back into their holes. He caught his breath and held it. All was quiet. No snakes, no intruders. But he remembered the last time, remembered Ruth and her bōifurendo thrashing on the rough planks of the porch, and he slunk over the rail and hid himself in the shadows alongside the house.