East is East (6 page)

For Hiro, though, the
hara
took on an even more exaggerated importance, for he lived to eat. Harassed at school, tormented on the playground, he took solace in the pastry shop, the noodle emporium and ice cream stand, feeding his strength and determination even as he quieted the cravings of his gut. In time, eating became his sole sensual expression. Oh, he'd had the odd carnal encounter with bar hostesses and prostitutes, but he'd never enjoyed it much, never been in love—he was only twenty, after all—and life offered only work, sleep and food. And food was what he needed now. Desperately. But what could he do? He'd been in the water for eight hours, thrashing at the waves like a marathon swimmer, and now he was too exhausted even to hold his head up. He thought vaguely of chewing a bit of marsh grass to assuage the storm in his gut, and then he closed his eyes on the image of old Kuroda's shirt and the lingering loss of his last two balls of rice.

When he awoke again the sun was dipping into the treetops behind him. At first he was disoriented, the erasure of sleep giving way to color, movement and the reek of mud, but the water brought him back: he was in America, in the U.S. of A., starving to death, and the tide was coming in. He felt it warm against his chin, his shoulders, the swell of his abdomen. With an effort, he pushed himself up on his elbows. He was feeling dizzy. The girdle of black tape cut at his flesh and he felt a sharp throb in the shin of his left
leg—had he banged it against the underside of the boat when those butter-stinkers attacked him in the dark?

He didn't know. He didn't care. All he knew was that he had to get up. Had to move. Had to find a human habitation, slip through the window like a ghost and locate one of the towering ubiquitous refrigerators in which Americans keep the things they like to eat. He was conjuring up the image of that generic refrigerator stuffed with the dill pickles, Cracker Jack and sweating sacks of meat the Americans seemed to thrive on, when he became aware of a subtle but persistent pressure on the inside of his right thigh. He froze. There, perched on his torn pantleg and studying the sunburned flesh of his inner thigh with a gourmand's interest, was a small glistening purple-backed crab. It was, he saw, about the size of a mashed ball of rice.

He was going to eat that crab, he knew it.

For a long moment he watched it, afraid to move, his hand tensed at his side. The crab hunched there, unaware, water burbling through its lips—
were
those its lips?—and combing the stalks of its eyes with a single outsize claw. Hiro thought of the crab rolls his grandmother used to make, white flaking meat and rice and cucumber, and before he knew it he had the thing, a frenzy of snapping claws and kicking legs, and it was in his mouth. The shell was hard and unpleasant—it was like chewing plastic or the brittle opaque skin of fluorescent tubes—but there was moisture inside and there was the thin salty pulp of the flesh, and it invigorated him. He sucked the bits of shell, ground them between his teeth and swallowed them. Then he looked for another crab.

There was none in sight. But a grasshopper, green of back and with a fat yellow abdomen, made the mistake of alighting on his shirt. In a single motion he snatched it to his mouth and swallowed it, and even as he swallowed it, his
hara
screamed for more. Suddenly he was moving, stumbling through the stiff high grass, oblivious to the slashing blades that cut at his feet and shins, his hands and arms and face. He moved as if in a trance, the olfactory genius that had visited him at sea come back again with a vengeance.
Dictatorial and keen, it led him by the nose, led him across a snaking inlet and into the shadow of the moss-hung trees at the edge of the marsh. He smelled water there—old water, stale and dirty water, the standing water of swamps and drains and ditches—but water all the same … and way beyond it, at the periphery of his senses, he caught a single faint electrifying whiff of fat sizzling in the pan.

It was the golden hour of the day, the sun gone soft as A big dab of butter, and Olmstead White, the grandson of the son of a slave who was the son of a slave who was a free man of the Ibo tribe in West Africa, was fixing supper. He was sixty-eight years old, his limbs as dry and sinewy as jerky, his face baked hard by the morning sun flashing off the sea. He'd been born, raised and schooled on Tupelo Island, and in all his life he hadn't been to the mainland more than two dozen times. His garden stood tall with corn and staked tomato plants, he raised hogs, fished and crabbed and shrimped and oystered, and he did odd jobs for the white people at Tupelo Shores Estates when he needed a bit of pocket money for a chew or a drink or a new battery for the vanilla-colored transistor radio that brought him the Braves games in the cool of the evening. His brother, Wheeler, with whom he'd lived through all the mornings, afternoons and evenings of all his bachelor days, lay six months buried in the family plot out back of the garden.

On this evening, while the Braves game whispered huskily through the tinny speaker, Olmstead White sliced a cucumber and tomato, fixed a side dish of poke greens and was deep-frying a dozen sweet fresh oysters, shucked and floured and dipped in corn-meal and cayenne pepper. He wasn't thinking of Wheeler particularly, or of his nephew Royal, Eulonia's boy, with whom he sometimes watched the hilarious antics of MTV late into the night—oh, the haircuts, he loved the haircuts—nor was he paying much attention to the announcer's dead and buried voice as the Braves blew yet another one. He was thinking nothing, really, his mind in a state of suspended animation as the grease crackled, the
birds called in the trees and the screens glowed with the sun. As usual, and without thinking, he prepared a small plate for Wheeler. Later, in the twilight, when Gant and Murphy and Thomas and the rest of the bush leaguers had rolled over and played dead against the indestructible New York Mets, he would set the dish on his brother's grave and retrieve the empty one from the night before.

Like his friends and neighbors at Hog Hammock, Olmstead White spoke in the Gullah dialect of his ancestors, a dialect rich in borrowings from the Hausa, Wolof, Kimbundu and Ibo of West Africa. Along with the dialect came the dim linguistic memory of that faraway continent and the tribal rites and superstitions that had bloomed there in the eternal days. Olmstead White was deeply superstitious, as who wouldn't be in a world without reason or explanation, a world seething with spirits and hexes and voices in the night? He believed in haunts and specters, believed in hoodoo and juju and spells and curses and hags who put the mouth on you and made you wilt like a stalk of celery left out in the sun. He did his best to placate Wheeler's spirit with gifts of clothing, a deck of cards, the odd magazine and a choice bit of his evening meal, each and every night. The plate was always on the ground the next morning, and it was always licked clean. Was it the raccoons, the opossums, the hogs, the hounds, the crows that gorged on that food? Maybe so. But only Wheeler knew for sure.

Well, the bacon fat sizzled and popped and the sweet oyster smell made a fancy Charleston kind of potted-palm restaurant out of the two-room clapboard shack—painted blue and with a blue pyramid slashed on the chimney to ward off hags—and Olmstead White thought nothing and the stirring fork moved in his hand as if by its own volition. The room was hushed. A fly buzzed at the screen. It was then, as the fly struggled and the world slowed down like a worn old carousel, that he came to himself and sensed another presence inhabiting the hazy space of the room. His back was to the door, his hand stirring, the radio whispering and Dale Murphy going down on strikes and nothing had changed, nothing at all, but
as sure as he knew he was alive and breathing he knew there was someone—or something—there with him.

He moved like a man coming out of a coma, like Br'er Rabbit stuck to the tarbaby, his hands trembling as he remembered Varner Arms and how he was found dead in his own kitchen, blood spattered on the walls and hag's hair—wild black hanks of it—scattered across the linoleum like a greeting from the darkest pit. His shoulders were rigid, his neck like a flagpole planted deep in the earth. But slowly, ever so slowly, he swiveled his gray-bristling chin till he presented his profile and one wild eye to whatever or whoever stood in the doorway behind him.

What he saw there, through the contracting lens of that one wild eye, froze his heart. What he saw was Wheeler, his brother Wheeler, risen from the grave and with his skin gone the color of leaf mulch, Wheeler, wearing the red cotton button-up shirt and denim overalls he'd left draped over the hard slab of the tombstone not three days ago. “Wheeler!” he cried, jerking around awkwardly and throwing up his arms in extenuation, “I didden mean it, I didden, I never should of called you them low mizzable things on the day you done pass on, but I—” and then he stopped cold. This wasn't Wheeler standing there in his kitchen with a look on his face like he'd just gone and taken a dump in his own pants … this wasn't Wheeler with the overalls pinched round the gut and stuck halfway up his shins and the slanting eyes and iron-straight hair hanging in his face … this was, this was some kind of Chinaman or something. But what was a Chinaman doing in Olmstead White's kitchen in Hog Hammock on Tupelo Island? It mystified him. It baffled him. In the end, it upset him more than any six hags and apparitions could ever have. “Who you be?” he roared.

For his part, Hiro was no less shocked than the black man who stood twitching and jerking before him. In a delirium he'd staggered out of the salt marsh and up onto solid ground, his dead mother and his lost father dancing round him like fairies, root beer floats and slurpies and stone jugs of cold
sake
in their fluttering hands,
and he'd found a rain puddle there, nothing more than diluted mud really, and he'd buried his face in it. By then the smell of cooking fat was overpowering and near and he pushed himself up and went for it at a trot. That was when he'd found the gravestones—crude rock slabs poking up out of the weeds like something he'd seen in a spaghetti Western. The first of the markers caught him in the shin; the second grazed the side of his face as he went down. When he untangled his feet and pushed himself up, he saw the shirt and pants, an overturned plate, a string of dried peppers and a weathered deck of cards. He didn't think, couldn't think, the smell of deep-fried fish—oysters, yes, oysters—driving all else before it, and in half a minute he'd exchanged his torn and filthy clothes for the shirt and overalls. He was hopping, actually hopping as if in some child's game, as if he were in a sack race, as he shrugged into the overalls and slashed through the garden toward that supreme and dictatorial smell.

But now, here he was, in strange stolen clothes in a stranger's house and the stranger was shouting at him. Worse: the stranger was a black man, a Negro, and he knew, as every Japanese does, that Negroes were depraved and vicious, hairier, sweatier and even more potent than their white counterparts, the
hakujin.
They were violent and physical, they were addicted to drugs and they thought only with their sexual organs. He'd seen one once, in the streets of Tokyo, a
b
ē
sub
ō
ru
player named Clarence Hawkins, first baseman for the Hiroshima Carp. An awesome man, like a walking statue. But he had no heart—no
hara
—and he wasn't a team player. Here was a man who could have hit a home run with every swing of the bat and yet he refused to take practice with the others, refused the calisthenics and the drill of the thousand fungoes and running in the outfield and the cold baths that demonstrated team spirit and a will to win and guts and determination. The pitchers gave him nothing to hit and the umpires called everything a strike, even if it bounced, and within the year he was back in America. That was a Negro. And here was another, shouting at him in his incomprehensible gibberish.

“Shipwreck!” Hiro shouted back, waving his arms in imitation of the
gaijin.
“I am starving. Please, I beg you, give me something to eat!”

Olmstead White heard him, but for all the good it did, Hiro might as well have been talking Japanese. “Somesing eat” was all that came through, and even that didn't register, so alien was Hiro's accent—and even if it had, the sequel would have been no different. Feeling trapped in his own kitchen, feeling scared and embarrassed and angry, delivered from the haunts and hags and into the hands of a stranger—an Asiotic Chinaman, no less—Olmstead White reacted in the only way he could. Before him, on the table, lay the butcher knife, the one he kept honed for punching through the stiff bristle of his Christmas hog and the soft underbelly of opossum and deer. He looked at Hiro, looked at the knife, and snatched it up.

Hiro could sense that the situation had deteriorated. The veins stood out in the Negro's neck and the whites of his eyes were swollen. He kept shouting and there were flecks of spittle on his lips. It was obvious that he hadn't understood a word. And now he had a knife in his hand, the blade ugly with use. Behind him, the oysters sent up their ambrosial aroma.