East is East (7 page)

It looked bad. It did. Hiro should have turned and fled, he knew that, and he knew too that the blade was sharp and the old man tenacious, a wild beast surprised in its lair. But the oysters exerted their influence, and he recalled the words of J
ō
ch
ō
:
A true samurai must never seem to flag or lose heart. He must push on courageously as though sure to come out on top. Otherwise he is utterly useless.
“Somesing eat,” he repeated.

What happened next came as a surprise to them both. Untended, the oysters smoldered, calcified, approached critical mass; in the next instant they burst into flame with a sudden startling rush of air while a thick black plume of smoke billowed up from the pan, growing thicker and blacker even as it rose. Instinctively, both antagonists went for the pan. In the process, Hiro, who despite the loss of twenty pounds was still a broad-beamed young man,
jostled the elderly Olmstead White, and Olmstead White, suffering from a touch of arthritis in his right hip, lost his balance, and in losing his balance, thrust out a hand to brace himself. Unfortunately, that hand didn't make contact with the tabletop or the corner of the stove. Instead, it came down squarely in the center of the pan of flaming grease and incinerated oysters, and Olmstead White let out a howl that would have unraveled the topknot of even the staunchest of samurai. The pan tottered a moment on the edge of the stove and then slammed to the floor in an explosion of flame.

In an instant, the shack was ablaze. Jaws of flame chewed at the floorboards, the walls, devoured the dirty yellow curtains. Hiro took to his feet. He was out the door, across the porch and into the crude graveyard before he caught himself. What was he doing? Had he gone mad? He couldn't leave the old Negro in there to burn to death, could he? He turned, J
ō
ch
ō
's injunction on his lips—you had to act, without hesitation, or you were lost, disgraced, a coward—and started back for the house. It was then that the Negro appeared in the smoke-shrouded doorway, his hair singed, his right hand the color of steamed lobster. Hiro stopped again. What stopped him this time, what deflated the balloon of his resolve and rendered J
ō
ch
ō
meaningless, was the object cradled in the old man's good arm. For Olmstead White stood there on the porch, the shack an inferno behind him, fumbling with a double-barreled shotgun and a box of bright yellow shells.

And then Hiro was running again, running from the thunder of the shotgun and the hiss of the flames and the shouts and cries of the aroused neighborhood. All at once there were people everywhere, screaming, running, crying, scrambling over one another like ants pouring out of an anthill. He dodged a fat old woman with a face like a N
ō
mask and veered away from a pair of startled boys in dirty shorts, and then he was cutting through a dusty yard, scattering chickens and hogs and howling brown babies in white plastic diapers. Running, he glanced over his shoulder and saw the flaming shack in the distance above a sea of black faces and gyrating limbs. It was a scene that made him catch his breath, a scene of
utter horror and depravity, dusky faces and sharp white teeth, the cannibals of his boyhood picture books dancing round their hideous cookfire. Hiro ran, no hunger worth this, ran into the deepening shadows and through the muck and puddles and the strange tropical vegetation, ran till at long last the shouts and the curses and the barking of the dogs fell away from him like so much sloughed skin.

All the next day he crouched in the bushes, chewing roots and leaves and the odd handful of sour berries, while voices flared round him and dogs whined and grunted at the leash. Vicious, vengeful, outraged, they were hunting him, these black men of the bush, looking to flush him out, settle the score, lynch him as they were lynched by the
hakujin.
At daybreak a grim-looking Negro with red-flecked eyes came within five paces of where he lay trembling in a thicket of holly and palmetto. The man had a gun, and he was so close Hiro could have reached out and unlaced his shoes. He was terrified. He was miserable. He was hungry. Day bled into night and he fumbled through the dark bush, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the porch lights and barking dogs.

The truth is, he didn't know where he was or where he was going. All he knew was that he was starving and that the
gaijin
authorities would be after him and that if they caught him he'd be imprisoned and sent home in disgrace. He wandered aimlessly, his feet battered and bleeding, mosquitoes and ticks and chiggers and gnats drawing yet more blood, venomous reptiles lying in wait for him. He was a city kid, an urban dweller, raised by his grandmother in the serried flats of Yokohama. Of the forests and mountains of Japan he knew little, and he knew even less about the wilderness of America. He knew only that it was vast and untamed and seething with bear, lion, wolf and crocodile. Unseen wings beat round his head in the darkness. Shrill voices screeched through the hollows of the night. Something bellowed in the swamp.

On the third day—or was it the fourth?; he'd lost count—he
staggered out of the woods in a swirl of mosquitoes, the too-tight shirt and overalls tattered and stiff with dried mud, and found himself on a blacktop road. It was a miracle. Pavement. The smell of it alone reassured him. If he followed it, he reasoned, the road would lead him to civilization, to some tidy little farmhouse where he could risk showing himself and beg for food in exchange for doing odd jobs, maybe sleep in the barn like in those black-and-white movies with the clanking jalopies and the smiling long-nosed old ladies in bonnets and dresses that hung to the floor. Or he could find a diner or a McDonald's like the ones in Tokyo—he thought of the little green bills he'd tucked away in J
ō
ch
ō
's book, buried deep now in the deep pocket of the Negro's overalls—and he could purchase a meal, fries and a Big Mac, Chicken McNuggets and a shake. But he couldn't just stroll on down the road as if he were shopping for shoes in the Ginza. They'd catch him in a minute, the Negroes, the police, and how could he explain what had happened in that shack and what the smell of those oysters could do to a desperate man?

The sun arced over the road before him. He looked to his left, expecting barns and silos, rowhouses, streetlights, taxicabs, and there was nothing but blacktop and trees; he looked to his right and saw more blacktop and more trees. For a long moment he stood there, rooted to the spot with indecision. And then he flipped an imaginary coin and began working his way up the road to the right, not daring to walk along the blacktop itself, but tearing through the brambles and kudzu in the ditch that paralleled it. He had no plan, really, had never had one, not since he'd run afoul of Chiba and Unagi, anyway. He thought vaguely of heading inland, to New York or Miami or San Francisco, where he could lose himself among the mobs of
gaijin
mutts, where he could be, for the first time in his life, like anyone else. But geography—the geography of the West, at any rate—was not one of his strong suits. He did know that the Port of Savannah was in Georgia and that Georgia was in the South where the Negroes harvested cotton and the
hakujin
made them use separate toilets and drinking fountains, but he had no idea
where he was in relation to Beantown or the Windy City, and he didn't have even a clue that he was stranded on an island and that the only way off it was via Ray Manzanar's ferry and that Ray Manzanar was related to half the people on the island and knew the other half as well as he knew his own kith and kin. Mercifully oblivious, faint with hunger and too weak even to lift a hand to brush away the horde of mosquitoes that settled on him like a second skin, Hiro forged on.

After a time, the thicket ahead began to brighten with sun, and the tangle of branches became noticeably thinner. He paused, up to his ankles in the standing water of the ditch, and peered through a chink in the wall of vegetation. There was something unnatural, something red, just ahead of him and to the left, something bright and comforting and familiar. He moved closer. What he saw made his heart leap up. There, in the window of a freshly painted clapboard building just off the road, a bewitching and seductive red neon sign spoke to him in a universal tongue: COCA-COLA, it announced, COCA-COLA, and he went faint with gastric epiphany.

He lurched forward, as overcome as he'd been by the scent of the Negro's fateful oysters, beyond all sense and caring, till at the last moment he caught himself. All at once he dropped down with a grunt and hunkered low in the water. He was a mess. The stolen clothes were in tatters, he reeked as if he'd been dead a week, he was filthy and cut and torn in a hundred places. And his face—he was a Japanese, or half a Japanese—and they'd see that in a second and they'd know who he was and what he'd done and then the police would come and he'd be thrown in jail and brutalized by the half-breeds and child molesters and patricides that infested the dark
gaijin
cells like mold, COCA-COLA, flashed the sign, COCA-COLA. But what could he do?

Cautiously, he emerged from the ditch and sat heavily in a clump of waist-high grass. There was no one in sight, not a car in the gravel lot, and from this angle he could see that the door of the shop stood wide open. He had to get cleaned up, had to disguise himself somehow, had to get in there and buy out the store before
someone showed up. Yes. All right. He would wash the mud from his clothes as best he could, and from his feet too. But when he glanced down at his feet and calves he saw that they were nearly black with some sort of clinging shapeless things—sea slugs, they looked like. He had never encountered leeches and didn't know that they were sucking his blood—or rather that they secreted an anticoagulant so that his heart pumped blood into them, as if they were extensions of his own veins and arteries—nor did he realize that in casually peeling them off he risked dislodging their mouth parts and causing an infection that could suppurate, turn gangrenous and threaten the limb itself. No, he merely pulled them off, wistfully regarding the plump writhing morsels of their compact bodies—he'd always had a weakness for sea slugs—before dropping them back into the ditch. He didn't need them. Food—real food—was in sight.

Next, he stripped off his clothing and attempted to wash the overalls in the ditch. The red shirt was beyond hope, and so he tore off a strip of it and wrapped it around his head, Ninja style, hoping it would help disguise him. Then he wrung the overalls out, shrugged back into them (no mean feat—it was like pulling on a wetsuit six sizes too small), and turned to the pages of J
ō
ch
ō
. The bills were still there, along with the cracked and bleached photo of his father. He smoothed them out, wondering at the arcane codes and symbols—a pyramid? wasn't that supposed to be Egyptian?—only half believing that this was the real article. It was so—so whimsical, like the play money of a children's game. There was a picture of a man in a wig on three of the notes, and he was wearing a high collar and a benign expression, THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE, Hiro read. FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE. THE UNITED STATUS OF AMARICA.

He shrugged. Akio Ajioka, the BR aboard ship and his only friend in the world, had traded him the bills in exchange for two bottles of Suntory whiskey and a stack of thumbed-over
manga.
“This is the real thing, mate,” Akio had said with a grin, “this is what they use in Times Square, Broadway and Miami Beach.”
Akio wouldn't lie to him, he knew that. After a moment he stood and smoothed out the wrinkles in his pants. Clutching the bills in one hand and J
ō
ch
ō
in the other, he crossed the gravel lot to the store.

Inside, it was cool and fresh-smelling, lit only by the sunlight filtering through the windows. Hiro saw racks of food, junk food mostly, in garish plastic packages and brightly colored cans. There was a freezer, and against the back wall, two glowing huge coolers full of beer and soda, a shrine to thirst. Behind the cash register, a young woman—very young, sixteen, seventeen maybe—sat nursing a baby and watching him out of a pair of wide green eyes. “Kin Ah help y'all?” she said.

Food. Hiro wanted food. And drink. But he didn't know how to respond.
Kinahhelpyall
didn't compute, not at all, but he wanted desperately to ingratiate himself, get through the exchange and then bow his way out the door, vanish into the bushes and gorge himself till he burst. He knew he had to have his wits about him, had to demonstrate his savoir-faire, convince her that he was all right, that he belonged and knew the ways of the
gaijin
as well as they knew them themselves. Already the pressure was killing him. He was sweating. He couldn't seem to control his facial muscles. “Somesing eat,” he said, trying to sound casual, and he snatched a loaf of bread and a bag of nacho chips from the shelf, all the while bowing and bowing again.