East is East (50 page)

The flies greeted him. They rose from the chemical mouth of the thing, the crapper, in a miasma of dancing gnats and the reek of chemicals and human waste. He tore down his pants, the knife in his guts, the black steaming odor of shit—American shit, Julie Jeffcoat's shit—stabbing at his nostrils.
“Amerikajin”
he cursed aloud as his guts exploded beneath him, the filth of them, flinging themselves down on plastic seats where a thousand others have flung themselves down before them, taking the dirt of the bowels to the table with them, sitting there over their food, as bland as stones, their buttocks and shoes reeking from the toilet. God, he thought, clutching at himself to keep from passing out with the pain of it, they were beasts, they were, and he hated them.

He didn't know how long he sat there—he must have dozed—but he woke to something boring at his ankle and the sick corrupt reek of his own bowels. A film of cold sweat clung to his temples. He was sick—yellow fever, dysentery, encephalitis, hookworm,
malaria, the dirty diseases of a dirty place—and he needed medicine, a bed, his
obasan.
But no, not his
obasan
—his mother, his dead mother, his mom.
“Haha!”
he cried out like an infant, his voice strained and odd in his own ears, “Mama!” And then he dozed again, seated there on that plastic throne where Julie Jeffcoat had sat and Jeff Jeffcoat and Jeffie and the legion of nameless butter-tinkers before them, white faces that crowded into his dream like a conquering army.

When he woke again he felt better. He wondered briefly where he was, and then he knew and the fear of the
hakujin
and of the chase seized him. They were here, they were sure to be here, and he was trapped. He thought of Musashi, the legendary samurai who'd once hidden from his enemies in a latrine, buried in offal, with only a straw through which to breathe, and then he was in motion. He sprang up off the seat as if it were electrified, hastily fastening the cutoffs and peering breathlessly through the crack of the door. He expected demons, long-noses,
ket
ō
,
the waking nightmare into which he'd plunged from the wingdeck of the
Tokachi-maru,
expected shotguns, bullhorns, the bared teeth and rending snarls of the dogs … but there was nothing. Nothing but the swamp, stultified with sun, the womb and grave of everything. He cracked the door. Edged out. And then the heat hit him and his head ached and his eyes swam with a fresh assault of the fever.

The door was shut behind him and the planks creaking under his feet before he realized how wrong he was. There
was
something there on the platform with him, unmistakable, too big to miss, something slow-blooded and antediluvian and muscular that even now was swiveling its long grinning snout to fix him with a cold eye. This was a thing that dwarfed the platform, the serrated tail and one clawed foot hanging over the far edge and dipping into the slough beyond it, the rippled belly stretching the length of the planks, and in the foreground, the hard pale lump of the jaw pinning down the sack of sandwiches and the rest with the weight of an anvil. Hiro looked at this thing and he felt the fever loosen its grip. His heart was hammering at his rib cage, there was an ache in his
temples. He had to form the words in his head before he could understand: he was standing six feet from a crocodile the length of a canoe and it was looking at him and he was looking at it. This was not good. This was bad and dangerous. This was a situation that might have taxed J
ō
ch
ō
himself.

For a long while the thing merely regarded him out of the motionless eye, frozen in its length and mass, the statue of a crocodile, carved of stone. Hiro could smell it, its pores giving up a wild scent of the deepest bottom, of decay and solitude and the dark quiet seep of gas. He wondered, briefly lucid, if he should back into the latrine and pull the door shut, leap for the rafters and live out his life on the roof, fling himself off the far edge of the deck and sprint for the trees through the slurry of muck and water. None of the options really grabbed him. In the end, he stood there, sailing in and out of the port of consciousness, wanting one moment to reach out and stroke the thing, to ride it into the cool depths and share his lunch with it, and in the next, contemplating his death in its iron jaws, the rending of the flesh, the transfiguration and ultimate conversion to crocodile shit. Finally, as if it had had enough of the whole business, the bloated inert thing came to sudden life and slid off the dock and into the water with a swift surprising grace, inadvertently taking the sack of food with it.

No matter, Hiro thought. He wasn't hungry anyway.

The next time he came to himself he was lying on a mudbank somewhere, and the usual things were feeding on him. He glanced down at his feet and saw that he'd lost the Top-Siders, and saw too that his feet were bloated and raw, nicked in a hundred places. The small shapeless things, the things he'd pulled from his legs an eon ago outside the Coca-Cola store, clung thickly to his calves and thighs. He sat up and pulled them off, one by one, and each left a livid wet spot of blood to mark its forward progress. He made a nest of his intertwined fingers, too much a part of things now to
bother with the mosquitoes and green flies, and watched the clouds converge on the dying sun.

He had places to go, things to do: he knew that. But he felt light, not only in his head but in his bones too, felt drunk—gloriously, blissfully, rapturously drunk. Had he been drinking
sake?
Yes, he was in his bunk now and they were crossing the Pacific with its thick green skin and he and Ajioka-san had been drinking
sake
in the canteen and talking of America, the excitement of it, America with its movie stars and rock and roll and long-legged women and beef. Not to mention the exchange rate. An ordinary seaman, even a wiper, would be rich there. And there was so much room, the
Amerikajin
in their mansions with four bathrooms and their Cadillacs with whiskey bars in the back seat. The
sake
was hot because there was a blow and the wind had chilled him on his watch, and now he was drunk.

But it was wonderful. A whole circus passing before his eyes as he lay there, birds with feet bigger than their wings springing from lily pad to lily pad, the holy crane gangling overhead, frogs swelling and deflating all round him. He turned his cheek on its pillow of ooze and there was a frog right beside him, crouched big-bellied over its coiled legs. And then it inflated its
hara
magically and gave out with a booming eructation that startled all the other frogs for the briefest instant till they could inflate themselves in turn and belch back a response. It was funny. Hilarious. Better than a cartoon. He laughed till he felt the sword in his gut and then he sat up and struggled with his pants.

If the day was high comedy, the night was tragic. It closed in on him like a shroud and it was haunted and deadly. The cold settled in and the swamp rang with shrieks of protest while Hiro shivered in his wet T-shirt and his wet cutoffs. The insects feasted on him and he slapped at them now, but he was a pincushion, a blood bank, his skin swollen in its hills and valleys till it felt like a text in braille. Late, very late, when the moon was a frozen speck in the sky, a reptile, thick around as his ankle, nosed in beside him
for warmth. He felt it there, nosing at his armpit, his crotch, poking its bald face at his nostrils for the heat of his breath.

In the morning, he was worse. He shivered in his bed of muck till the sun rose to redeem him and then he lay there like a coldblooded thing, like an alligator hauled out on the bank, and the blood boiled in his veins. This time the fever took him back to Kyoto and he was a small boy clutching at his
ob
ā
san's
hand as they made their way through the festive Friday night crowd on Kawaramachi Street. There was a parade of neon, the smells of
gyoza, soba,
sweet broiled eel, people everywhere. His
ob
ā
san
was taking him to meet Grandfather for a night out in celebration of his birthday—his sixth. They were going to have
udon
and tempura at Auntie Okubo's and then they were going to the coffee shop round the corner to have American sweets, chocolate fudge sundae and banana split. His free hand, the left, was thrust snugly into the grip of a new fielder's mitt with Reggie Jackson's name etched into the leather in flowing American characters. A pachinko parlor:
“Ob
ā
san,
please, let me play, just one game,” and he tugged her arm and he was off balance and staggered into a passing woman, an old woman, dressed not in western-style clothes like everyone else but in kimono and
obi.
She looked at him hard.
“Sumimasen,”
he said, bowing deeply, “excuse me, please.”
Ob
ā
san
elaborated on the apology, but the old woman pinned him with her black hard eyes.
“Gaijin,”
she hissed finally and turned to go, but Hiro lost his head, the insult stinging like vinegar on an open wound, and he snatched at the wide flowing sleeve of her gown.
“Amerikajin desu,”
he said, “I'm an American.”

But he wasn't. And he isn't. He'd seen the hate in their eyes. He pushed himself up from the mudbank, the sweat burning at his temples, and thought of the orange soda the Jeffcoats had left him. And where was it? Crushed beneath the mute unthinking weight of the thing on the platform, the beast, the dinosaur that was America. He saw it then, orange fluid leaking from beneath the wattled belly like urine, like pale diluted blood. But it wasn't blood, it was orange soda, and he longed for it now. The sweat stung his
eyes and the fever blasted his throat: he could hardly breathe for thirst. He stood dazedly and saw the water all around him, an ocean, a planet of water. And then he bent to it, knowing he shouldn't, knowing it would only make matters worse, bent to it and drank till he could feel it coming up.

Sometime during the course of the afternoon the clouds began to bunch up in the west, bare knuckles of white shading to gray and blue-gray and black. The sky receded, the sun melted away. The wind came up then, moderate but steady and with a taste of the Gulf Coast on it. Aching in every joint, blistered and burned till he wondered if they'd mistake him for a Negro, Hiro lay there on his mudbank, and the mud accommodated him, molding itself to the cup of his head, the spoon of his shoulders and the ceaselessly working jackknife of his shrunken buttocks and wasted thighs. Rain was coming and another night of cold and wet, of shivers and fever and the sword in the gut, but Hiro didn't have the energy to move. And what would he do anyway? Put up his watertight tent and slip into a down bag? Fire up his hibachi and cook himself a cheeseburger—medium rare, hold the onion—over the glowing white coals of his charcoal briquettes? A dream, nothing but a dream. He watched the clouds bunch and spread and bunch again, and then he let his eyes fall shut.

He was back in Kyoto, eleven years old—a man, his
ojisan
said. His grandmother was at work, and he and Grandfather were watching TV, an American show in which a collie dog with
hora
saves a straw-haired boy from the dangers of ten lifetimes, week after week, in a neat half-hour format. “Grandfather,” Hiro asked, “tell me about my mother.” Grandfather's legs were thin as fence posts beneath the folds of his
yukata.
They were sitting side by side on the
tatami
floor. Dressers crammed with clothing, soap, thread, mirrors and combs and all the other odds and ends of a household mounted the walls, one atop the other. “Nothing to tell.” His grandfather shrugged.

“She died,” Hiro said.

Grandfather studied him. On the TV, a long snaking line of
bare-chested Aryan men stood on a beach, lifting mugs of Kirin draft to their lips in perfect synchronization. “She died,” he agreed. And then, because Hiro was a man now and because of the moving shadows the TV cast on the wall and because he was old and he needed to, Grandfather told him the story, and he spared nothing.

Sakurako was a failure. Some demon seed had got into her and she gave up her studies, the possibility of a decent marriage and family, the love and respect of her parents, for foreign music—and finally, a foreign husband. A hippie. An American. When he deserted her, as Grandfather knew he would, she sank into a shame worse than miscegenation, worse than the murder of her family. She became a bar hostess, “mama-san” to a hundred men. When she wheeled her bicycle through the old streets of Kyoto, her half-breed infant strapped to her back, people stopped to stare. She was doomed and she knew it. Worse: her child was doomed too. He was a
happa,
a
gaijin,
forever an outcast. Her only recourse was to go to America, to find Doggo and live there among the American hippies in a degradation that knew no hope or bottom. She had no money, no passport, no hope or knowledge of her hippie husband. She tried to come home. Grandfather barred the door.