East is East

by Tom Coraghessan Boyle

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice thick with disgust and self-pity, “but what about me?”

  She was angry suddenly. She was in trouble—deep trouble—and he’d put her there. “No,” she said, stabbing the cigarette at him for emphasis, “what about me?” Here he was, her lover, her confidant, the sweet funny guy with the big feet, and he’d betrayed her. “You turned him in, didn’t you?” she said, taking the offensive.

  His face changed. She loved him, she did, but he was weak inside, and now she had him. “You, you never told me,” he stammered. “I see him there on your porch and I’m thinking about all those cans of fried dace and bamboo shoots—what do you expect me to do? I mean, at least you could have told me.”

  “You shit, Sax.” Now she was crying. Her shoulders quaked a bit and the sheet slipped to her waist. She reached for it, to cover her breasts, but then she let it fall away again. She could see herself as through the lens of a camera, sobbing in the morning light, in bed, naked to the waist, betrayed by her man and at the mercy of the authorities. It was a poignant moment, just like real life. She glanced up at Saxby. He was struck dumb.

  “Don’t you ever think?” she gasped. “Don’t you know what this means? They’re going to come after me now, they’re going to want to question me—they could arrest me, Sax.” She’d worked herself up now. The bed was trembling, her breast heaving. She was feeling scared, angry, feeling sorry for herself.

  Saxby came to her. She felt him ease down on the bed, reach out to stroke her arm. “Hush,” he said. “You know I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  “I’m scared,” she said, and she was holding him. “He was just—it was like a stray dog or something,” and then she was sobbing all over again.

  * * *

  Sheriff Peagler stopped by around noon, a grim-looking Abercorn and grimmer-looking Turco flanking him. There was no Sunday morning ferry, so they’d put Hiro in an old slave-holding cell for safekeeping till Ray Manzanar made his eight o’clock run to the mainland and back. (There was an earlier ferry, at six, but as the sheriff was to inform Ruth with an executioner’s grin, they were going to need all the daylight they had to comb over the scene for evidence.) Ruth knew the cell—it was out back of John Berryman, the closest of the studios to the big house, and currently occupied by Patsy Arena. Saxby had showed her the cell the day they arrived: it was the sort of thing tourists liked to look at. Actually, there were two cells, stone and crumbling plaster, big oaken doors with sliding bolts and a barred window twelve feet off the ground. The planters would immure a new slave in the one—wild-eyed, feverish, fresh from Goree or Dakar and the scarifying trip across the pitching wild sea—and in the other, a long-broken docile doddering old fatherly type, and the old slave would sweet-talk the new one, calm his fears, indoctrinate him. The cells were in an outbuilding behind the studio. If it weren’t for the trees, you could have seen it from the big house.

  Ruth had had four hours to compose herself, though all Than-atopsis was abuzz with the news. She’d posted Saxby at the door—Irving had been by, Sandy, Bob, Ina, Regina, even Clara and Patsy, but Saxby wouldn’t let them in. She’d hear the knock, watch Saxby rise, pull back the door and step into the hallway, and then she’d strain to hear the whispered colloquy that followed. At eleven, Septima herself, regal in a blue silk dress with lace trim and pearls, huffed her way up the stairs. Saxby couldn’t deny his own mother, and he helped her into the room. Ruth was in bed still, feeling like an invalid, though she’d pulled on a blouse and shorts. “I really don’t know whatever this is all about,” Septima began in her breathy old patrician’s tones, “but I do suspect that you are entirely innocent of any wrongdoin’, Ruthie—isn’t that right?”

  Ruth assured her that it was. “If he was in there, Septima—and it burns me to think of all that beautiful old paneling all shot full of holes, and god knows what they did to my typewriter and the manuscript I’ve been slaving over for the last six weeks—if he was there, you have to know it was totally without my knowledge or consent. He snuck in at night, I guess. Who’s to stop him?”

  Septima sniffed. She trained her watery gray eyes on something outside the window. “And you never noticed anythin’ amiss, Ruthie? Nothin’ out of place?”

  Ruth was ready for this one. She forced a smile, and she shrugged. “I’m embarrassed to say it,” she said, indicating the room, which was a festival of strewn underwear, tops, socks, shoes, spine-crushed books, rolls of toilet paper and tattered magazines, “but you know, I’ve never been much at keeping things up. It’s my artistic temperament, I guess.” She looked up at Sax. He looked away. “Sax can tell you: where it drops, it stays.”

  Sheriff Peagler wanted to know the same thing.

  It was noon. They were in the front parlor—she and Saxby, Peagler, Abercorn and Turco—and the door was shut behind them. It was hot—stifling—and though the windows were open wide, there wasn’t even the hint of a breeze. The house was quiet. The diehards among the colonists were dispersed in their studios, typing, painting, molding clay and poring over scores; the others were sailing, fishing, taking the air in Savannah.

  Sheriff Peagler—Theron Peagler, college-educated and cold as a snake—leaned toward her. He was sitting in a leather wing chair and he held an untouched glass of ice water in his hand. In a minute he would ask Saxby to leave the room. Rut now he leaned forward to ask Ruth if she’d ever noticed anything out of place in the studio—the furniture moved around, the windows up, anything.

  Ruth had spent some time on her makeup, marshaling all the weapons in her arsenal. She had a feeling she was going to need them. She’d glanced at Abercorn when they stepped into the room, but that was it—she really couldn’t look him in the eye. Not yet, anyway. She took a minute. Smoothed her skirt. Composed herself. “Septima—Mrs. Lights—asked me the same thing. But you must have seen the place, I mean, even before they started shooting it up”—a dig, a tiny dig—“and it’s a real mess. I’m sorry. I’m just not much for housekeeping. I mean, I don’t notice things.”

  This was the point at which the sheriff glanced up at Saxby and asked if he wouldn’t mind leaving the room.

  Saxby looked at Ruth, and then at the sheriff, and finally he heaved himself up out of the chair and strode across the floor. Ruth counted his footsteps—eight, nine, ten—and listened to the gentle, well-oiled click of the heavy walnut door as it shut behind him. She felt hot and cold suddenly and her heart was singing in her ears. She could hear them breathing on either side of her. There was no other noise.

  No one said a word. Hot and cold. Ruth stared at the carpet and for a moment she considered going faint with the heat, but she rejected the notion as soon as it entered her head—it would only incriminate her. They were toying with her, she realized, toying with her, the little pricks. She felt Abercorn’s eyes on her, and she lifted her head.

  The blotted skin, pink eyes, hair like false whiskers: how could she ever have considered him even remotely attractive? He was trying to stare her down, a crease of rage between his hard pink bunny’s eyes. Let him stare. She gave it right back to him.

  “Miss Dershowitz.” The sheriff was addressing her. She held Abercorn’s gaze a second longer than she had to, and then turned to look at the leathery little man in the jeans, workshirt and badge. He looked sly, insidious, a man who’d heard all the alibis and knew all the answers. Her courage failed her. She would break down, that’s it. Break down and admit it all.

  “About the food. We found—what do you call it—Oriental food stuffs on the premises, seaweed and dried roots and suchnot. How do you explain that?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Her own voice sounded strange to her, distant. “Maybe he brought the stuff in at night. I don’t eat dried roots.”

  “Cut the shit, lady.” Turco’s voice came at her like a kick in the side, and she shot her eyes at him; he was perched on the edge of the chair, mouth working in his beard, a little homunculus, the gnome that violates the virgin in the
fairy tale. “Just cut it, will you? You been jerking us around here for six weeks now.”

  Ruth turned away from him. She would break down, yes, but prettily, and in her own good time.

  “Enough,” Abercorn spat, and Ruth was shocked at the rage in his voice. He was big, powerful in a lank and sinewy way, an athlete: perhaps she’d underestimated him. She felt something stir in her, though the timing was inappropriate, to say the least. “Ruth, listen,” and his voice softened just perceptibly, from a snarl to a growl, “we’ve got enough on you right now to book you as an accessory to manslaughter in the death of Olmstead White, arson in Hog Hammock, harboring a fugitive from justice and giving false information to an agent of the federal government.” He paused to let the terminology have its effect. “Make it easy on yourself, will you? I mean, Sheriff Peagler can put the cuffs on you right now, if that’s what you want. But there’s no need for anybody to get nasty here. We just want to know the facts, that’s all.”

  Abercorn eased back in his chair, as if he were settling in for the first act of a play. “Now,” he said, his voice placid, complacent, the voice of a man who already has what he wants, “when did the suspect, Hiro Tanaka, first contact you?”

  * * *

  The rest of the afternoon was a thing that hovered at the windows and took the breath out of the air, bloated and interminable. Ruth sweated in places she’d never sweated before—between the toes, in the runnels of her ears—and in the usual places too. Her thighs met in a glutinous embrace, the elastic band of her panties became a towel, a sponge, her breasts lay heavy and wet against her ribcage. Abercorn had read her her rights, and that scared her, and she sweated all the more. In another context it would have been comical, like something out of Dragnet or Miami Vice, but here, now, it made her sick inside: this was one role she wanted no part of. When he offered her immunity from prosecution if she would tell him everything—and testify to it in court—she jumped at the chance. “After all, Ruth,” he’d said, the bunny eyes gone hard with malice, “nobody’s after you. Though I do want to emphasize just how serious your little, uh—prank, let’s call it—has been. Is. And what a dim view my office—not to mention my boss and his boss in Washington—takes of obstructing justice and aiding and abetting those elements that would enter the country illegally.” He paused to study his nails. “Especially when they commit criminal acts and mayhem.”

  More terminology.

  She bowed her head and agreed with him. He was wise, and she was penitent.

  In all, they kept her for nearly two hours. It was a classic grilling, right out of the INS handbook (if there was such a thing). Abercorn had settled down to play the pal, the protector, interceding for her against the grunts and curses and pained incoherent cries of Turco and the steady ferrety pursuit of Peagler, and she’d given him what he wanted. Mostly. She told him about Hiro making off with her lunch bucket and how she’d discovered it and took pity on him. And she admitted the business with the Oriental food—he was like a stray dog. Or cat. Didn’t they see that? It was like putting out a salt lick or a bird feeder. On the issue of harboring a fugitive, she was firm: she denied it outright. If he slept in her studio she knew nothing about it—there was no lock on the door, after all. As far as she knew he came only at lunchtime and took the food like a wild animal. And no, she’d never provided him with clothes or money or anything like that: it was just the food, and she left it there on the porch.

  And then there came a point at which the three of them fell silent. Flushed and greasy, her hair and makeup devastated, she studied her feet and felt their eyes on her. In that moment she realized she had a headache. A tiny whirring drill began to bore through her skull, front to back, back to front, over and over. “You’re free to go now, Miss Dershowitz,” the sheriff had said, and Ruth got up and left the room in a daze. Mercifully, the front hallway was deserted.

  She made her way to her room, shrugged out of her clothes and let the window fan dry the sweat from her skin. She took an aspirin and two short hits from the pint of bourbon she kept on the night table, and she began to feel better, if only marginally. It was then that she thought of Hiro. He was out there now in the infernal heat of that crumbling cell, awaiting prison, deportation and whatever the Japanese would do to him after that. She thought of the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, Alec Guinness emerging from the sweatbox in The Bridge on the River Kwai, and then she lay face down on the bed and began to massage her temples.

  Hiro. Poor Hiro. She had made love to him, after all—for the novelty, yes, and because the moment was right—but there was feeling there too. There was. And she ached for him in that parched and blistering cell, Abercorn and Turco hanging over him with their obscene and insatiable curiosity. She ached for him, she did, but she’d been through an ordeal herself, and now, as the afternoon settled in, she closed her eyes and drifted off into a sleep that was depthless and pure.

  She woke to a discreet, solicitous tapping at the door. It was five in the afternoon. There was a stale taste in her mouth, the residue of nicotine and bourbon. “Yes?” she called.

  It was Saxby, waking her for the second time that day. This time there were no recriminations. This time he was beaming, grinning, puffed up to the roots of his hair with boyish glee. “Ruth! Ruth!” he cried, and it sounded like a dog’s bark at the door, and then he was in the room, on the bed, snatching her hands up in his own.

  “Ruth!” he cried again, as if she’d been lost for years. His eyes were swimming. He looked delirious. “Ruth!” he shouted, though he was right there, right on the bed beside her. He didn’t ask how she was feeling, how the interrogation had gone, whether they were going to shackle her to a bunch of spouse abusers on the chain gang or hang her by her thumbs—he just kept repeating her name, over and over. She wanted to know if he was drunk.

  “Drunk? Hell, no: Ruth!”—there it was again—“Ruth!”—and again—“Roy Dotson just called!”

  Yes? And so?

  “He’s found them. My albinos. I’m out the door this minute.” And then he was up from the bed, shuffling his big feet, jerking his limbs and tugging at his ears like one of the afflicted.

  “Really?” She was grinning back at him now, feeling good, feeling happy for him, though the fish business was an ongoing mystery to her. Why fish? she wanted to ask him. What was the attraction? Seals, she could see, otters, the purple gallinule, for Christ’s sake—but fish? They were cold-blooded, stupid, gaping mouths and cartoon eyes: she hated fish. Hated aquariums. Hated dip nets and seines, canoes, rivers, lakes, swamps, hated it all. But watching him there in the stippled shadows of the lace curtains, tasting his excitement, she was happy.

  Then he bent to kiss her, deep and hard—the kiss of an explorer leaving home, the kiss of a lepidopterist or spelunker—and he was out the door. But then he was back, poking his head round the doorframe. “Oh, yeah,” he said, hanging there, his motor revving, fish on the brain, “I almost forgot: How’d it go? With the sheriff and all?”

  The question brought her back, and for a moment she was afraid all over again, but then it passed. She was okay. She was in one piece. Hiro was in jail and her novella was shot full of holes—literally—but they weren’t going to do anything to her. She could write another novella, forget all about the Japanese and their weird rites and customs, let somebody else portray suicide in the surf and sex in kimonos. She had Sax and Septima and Thanatopsis House, she had Irving Thalamus and Laura Grobian—and Jane Shine was gone for the weekend. No, there was nothing to worry about, nothing at all.

  “How’d it go?” She repeated his question, reaching for a cigarette and feeling Olympian, impervious, unscathed, La Dershowitz ascendant. She took a minute with the response, Saxby hanging there in the doorway, the late shafts of the sun gilding the curtains till they seemed solid as pillars. “Fine,” she said. “Just fine.”

  * * *

  On Sundays, Armand served dinner at seven and sometimes a bit later, depending on his whim a
nd the mood of the colonists. Sunday was, after all, the day of rest, or so Septima reasoned, and long before she’d engaged her current chef she’d pushed back cocktails and dinner by an hour on the Lord’s Day, and it was now a Thanatopsis tradition. Sunday afternoons were long and languorous, and no one stirred before six, when the first sunburned and subdued clumps of artists began to gather on the patio or in the front parlor for cocktails. Sometimes there would be music—a poet would sit down at the piano or a biographer would reveal a hidden talent for the clarinet, ravishing the room with the adagio from Mozart’s concerto or a Gershwin medley—and the ice cubes would tumble into shaker or glass with a rhythmic click that was salvation itself for the sun-dazed and weary.

  It was close to seven when Ruth came down for dinner. She’d scrubbed and showered and scrubbed again, ridding herself of any vestige of the sweaty film that had clung to her earlier that afternoon, clogging her pores and making her feel dirty and vulnerable while Abercorn hung over her with his unfinished face and chummy questions. She was wearing a white Guatemalan peasant blouse embroidered with bright blue flowers and matching full skirt, and she descended the steps and crossed the front hallway feeling light, airy, lustral, feeling unconquerable all over again.

  When she entered the front parlor, Sandy was at the piano, stroking the petrosal keys as if they were flower petals, dripping his way through one syrupy Beatles tune after another. The melodies were perfect reconstructions of a thousand memories, syrupy or not, and with the help of their third or fourth cocktails, the colonists were in a mellow mood. Ruth stepped through the door and recognized them all, her friends and fellow artists, her community, her family, poised on sofas and ottomans, hovering over the bar, each and every one of them a joy and a solace.