East is East

by Tom Coraghessan Boyle

  If he was disappointed, he didn’t have time to dwell on it, because at that moment the outside bolt slid back with a screech of protest and a low rumble of voices startled him to his feet. He looked wildly around him. The chairs lay crippled on the floor, the window gaped in the most obvious and incriminating way, and the bars—the bars were still clutched in his hands! Think fast: isn’t that what the Americans say? They throw you a live hand grenade and say, Think fast. But Hiro, in that moment, leaped beyond thought and into the realm of pure reaction: even as the door pushed open, he slipped the cold iron bars into the rear waistband of his shorts and sat heavily in the bowed lawnchair, simultaneously booting its mate back into the corner with a discreet jerk of his foot. And then the heat from outdoors hit him like a fist and there they were, the sheriff and the two government men, edging warily into the cell.

  For a long moment the three of them stood there in the doorway, watching him as they might have watched a tethered animal, as if trying to gauge how dangerous he might be and how far and suddenly he might leap. Hiro sat there on his iron bars and watched them watching him. The tall one, the spatterface, had the eyes of a rodent, pink and inflamed, the strangest eyes Hiro had ever seen in a member of his own species. Those eyes fastened on him with a look of wonder and bafflement. The sheriff’s eyes were the eyes of a white-boned demon, as hard and sharp and blue as the edge of a blade. The little man—and it struck him in that moment how much he resembled the photo of Doggo, with his long blond hair and beard, a hippie for all his military trappings—the little man looked bemused. If the tall one regarded him with awe, as if he’d just dropped down to earth from another planet, and if the sheriff gave him that implacable look of gaijin hate, the little man’s eyes said I’ve seen it all before. The moment lingered. No one spoke, and though it shrieked for attention, though it hovered over them like a great flapping bird, no one seemed to notice the window.

  “Here,” the little man said finally, shoving something at him—a paper bag, a white paper bag with the legend HARDEE’S printed on it in bright roman letters.

  Hiro took the bag and cradled it stiffly in his lap. The little man held out a Styrofoam cup. Hiro reached for it, smelling coffee, and bowed his head reflexively in acknowledgment of the gesture. He felt the heavy pitted bars dig into his hams and his heart began to race.

  Then the tall one spoke, his face spattered with the strange paint of his skin. “Sheriff Peagler,” he said, his voice officious and cold, the voice of the prosecutor calling in the evidence, and the sheriff reached out to pull the door closed. “Thank you,” he murmured, and he turned to Hiro, the look of wonder replaced now by something harder, more professional. “We’d like to ask you a few questions,” he said.

  Hiro nodded. He concentrated on their shoes—the sheriff’s steel-toed cowboy boots, the tall one’s gleaming impatient loafers, the scuffed suede hiking boots that embraced the little man’s delicate feet. The shoes edged closer. Outside, beyond the heavy door, a bird called out in a high mocking voice. And then the three of them started in on him, insinuating, badgering, hectoring, and they didn’t let up for nearly four hours.

  Was he familiar with the Red Brigades? Did the name Abu Nidal mean anything to him? Where had he learned to swim like that? Was he aware of the penalties for entering the country illegally? What was his full name? What had he hoped to gain by attacking the late Olmstead White? Was it a burglary? An assault? How long had he known Ruth Dershowitz?

  The heat rose steadily. Hiro crouched over the paper bag and clung to the Styrofoam cup till the black liquid grew tepid. His hara rumbled, the iron bars cut into his backside like files. And yet he didn’t dare move, not even to sip the coffee—the slightest agitation could collapse the chair, send him reeling in a clatter of iron and aluminum, the bars he’d pried from the window exposed to his inquisitors’ eyes, and then where would he be? He held himself as rigid as a statue.

  His interrogators were insatiable. They wanted to know everything, from what school he’d attended to his grandmother’s maiden name and what each of Ruth’s lunches contained, right on down to the number of seeds in the pomegranate, and yet, rapacious as their curiosity was, never once did they glance up and discover the naked evidence hovering over their heads. For the first half hour or so they remained standing, circling him, punching their questions at him with quick jabs of their fingers and fists—what time? what day? what hour? why? how? when?—riding a current of body English and cold hakujin rage; but then, starting with the tall one, they began to succumb to the heat, and they settled in on the narrow bench beneath the window, buttock to buttock, firing questions in a synchronized barrage and jotting notes in the little black pads they produced from their shirt pockets.

  Hiro answered them as best he could, head bowed, eyes lowered, responding with the restraint and humility his obāsan had instilled in him. He tried to tell them the truth, tried to tell them about Chiba and Unagi and how the Negro had attacked him and how he’d tried to save the old man when the fire exploded round them, but they wouldn’t listen, didn’t care, caught the vaguest glimmer of what he was saying and shouted him down. “You went there to steal, didn’t you?” the spatterface cried. “You attacked an officer aboard your own ship, took advantage of a senile old lady and her crippled husband, set fire to an innocent man’s house when he resisted you—isn’t that right?” Hiro never had a chance to respond. The little man was on him. Then the sheriff. And then it was back to the spatterface and on and on and on.

  “You’re a thief.”

  “A liar.”

  “An arsonist.”

  They knew all the answers: all they needed was confirmation.

  What seemed to interest them most, though, what aroused even the increasingly sleepy-eyed sheriff, was Ruth. They wanted to implicate her, and as the morning wore on, it seemed to be all they cared about. Hiro was already packaged, already wrapped up and condemned—he was history. But Ruth, Ruth was an unknown quantity, and they converged on the mention of her like sharks on a blood spoor. Had she given him food, clothing, money, sex, drugs, alcohol? Had she harbored him, tucked him in at night, was she planning to help him escape from the island and evade the law? Had she fondled him, kneaded his flesh, conjoined her lips and her private parts with his own? Was she a communist, a scofflaw, a loose woman? Was she a folksinger, did she wear huaraches, attend rallies, eat lox and bagels? Was she a Jew? She was, wasn’t she?

  No, he said, no. No to every question. “She doesn’t know me,” he said. “I take her food, sleep when she go away.”

  The tall one was particularly aroused. “You’re lying,” he mocked, glaring like a big spattered rodent. “She harbored you all along, she shared her bed with you, brought you groceries and clothing.”

  “No. She doesn’t.” Hiro ached in every joint from holding himself erect. He wanted to tear open the bag and fall on the food, wanted to moisten his lips with the tepid coffee, but he didn’t dare. The iron bars were part of him now. The chair creaked when he spoke. The window gaped.

  “All right,” the tall one said finally, rising and consulting his wristwatch. He looked at the sheriff. “It’s noon now. I’m going to want him alone—just me and Turco, after we’ve talked to her.”

  The sheriff rose. He stretched and rolled his head back on the axis of his neck, rubbing the cords and muscles there. “Sure. You do what you need to. It’s you fellas that’re going to have to handle this anyway—it’s way out of our league.” He sighed, cracked his knuckles and gave Hiro the sort of look he might have given a twoheaded snake preserved in a jar. “I’ve heard about all I want to hear.”

  Then the little man stood too, and the three of them shuffled their feet in unison as if it were part of an elaborate soft-shoe routine, and then they were out the door and the door slammed shut behind them. Hiro felt the thump of that door in his very marrow, and all at once he found he could breathe again. Gingerly, he lifted first one leg and then the other and eased the adamantine bars
away from his flesh, which seemed by now to have incorporated them as a living tree incorporates a rusted spike or the abandoned chain of a dog long dead. He dropped the bars to the floor and worked himself out of the chair, wincing, cup and bag still clutched in his hand. His legs were raw, cramped, bloodless, his buttocks inert, and he felt as if he’d been hoisting sumo wrestlers up on his shoulders, one after another, for whole days and nights, for weeks and months and years … but then he looked up at the window and broke out in a grin.

  Ha! he exulted. Ha! The fools. They were so stupid it was incredible. Four hours they’d sat there, and never once did they glance up at the window. It was the American nature. They were oafs, drugged and violent and overfed, and they didn’t pay attention to detail. That’s why the factories had shut down, that’s why the automakers had gone belly up, that’s why three professional investigators could sit in an eight-by-ten-foot cell for four hours and never notice that two of the bars had been pried from the window. Hiro wanted to laugh out loud with the joy of it.

  And then, still standing, he turned his attention to the paper bag. Inside there were two rock-hard biscuits, each wrapped around a sliver of congealed egg and a pink tongue of what might once have been ham. It never ceased to amaze him how the Americans could eat this stuff—it wasn’t even food, really. Food consisted of rice, fish, meat, vegetables, and this was … biscuits. No matter: he was so hungry he scarcely used his teeth. He bolted the biscuits, which tasted of salt and grit and grease so ancient it could have been the mother of all grease, and he washed it down with the cold coffee.

  In the next moment he was scaling the wall again. It took him only two tries this time, his arms flailing, the chairs swaying wildly beneath him. He found toeholds in the rough masonry, and for a long while he clung to the ledge, dangling like a pendant. When he’d finally caught his breath, he was able to replace the two bars he’d removed from the window, even going so far as to mold neat little plugs of masonry crumbs at their base. He knew that the Amerikajin agents would be back in the afternoon, and he didn’t want to press his luck. He knew too that they planned to take him to the ferry in the evening and thence to the mysterious mainrand, where a modern cell awaited him. And why wouldn’t he know? They’d discussed their plans right there in front of him, as if he were deaf and blind, as if English had suddenly become impenetrable to him despite the fact that they’d just got done asking him about six thousand questions in that very same language. Oh, they were sloppy. Sloppy and arrogant.

  Hiro, however, had no intention of winding up in that mainland cell—or in any other, for that matter. When they were finished with him, when they were hunkered down over their chili beans and barbecue and generic beer, when the hypnotic voice of the TV murmured from every porch and window and even the dogs grew drowsy and stuporous, that was when he would make his move. That was when he would scale the wall one last time and drop catlike into the adjoining cell to try his luck on the outer door, all the while praying that it wouldn’t be locked. And it wouldn’t be. He knew that already. Knew it as positively and absolutely as he’d ever known anything in his life, knew it even as he let his exhaustion catch up to him and he drifted off to sleep. It was just the sort of detail the butter-stinkers would overlook.

  * * *

  He woke to a sharp thrust of light and a sudden escalation of heat as withering as the blast of an oven. His sleep had been deep and anonymous and they took him by surprise, the tall one with the rodent’s eyes and his runt of a companion. It must have been late in the afternoon, shadows lengthening in the barn that enclosed the cell, a flash of electric green just perceptible in the moment the door swung open to reveal the great gaping wagonhigh entranceway to the barn itself. Hiro sat up. His clothes were wet through, his throat parched. “Water,” he croaked.

  The tall one shut the door and the day was gone. The little man laughed. He had something in his hand—a tape player, Hiro saw now, Japanese-made and big as a suitcase—and he maneuvered round Hiro to set it beside him on the wooden bench. The little man’s smile had changed—it was a cruel smile, unstable, no longer bemused. Were they going to force a confession out of him as the police did in Japan? Were they going to tape it and edit out the groans and screams and cries for mercy? Hiro edged away from the thing. But then, flexing the muscles of his neck and shoulders, the little man reached out to depress a button atop the machine and immediately the cell swelled with music, disco. Hiro recognized the tune. It was—

  “Donna Summer,” the little man said, flexing and grinning. “You like it?”

  This time, they questioned him for what seemed like days, but what actually must have been closer to two hours, Hiro later realized. They asked him the same questions they’d asked him earlier, over and over again. Questions about his politics, about Honda and Sony and Nissan, about Ruth and Ambly Wooster and the old Negro and the accident at the shack. And all the while the disco beat drummed in his head and his voice cracked around the parched kernel of his throat. They held out the promise of water as a bargaining chip—if he cooperated he would be rewarded; if not, they’d watch him die of thirst and never lift a finger. He cooperated. He told them, over and over again, about Chiba and Unagi and Ruth and her lunches and everything else he’d told them a hundred times over, only this time he told it with Donna Summer and Michael Jackson for accompaniment. Every once in a while he would say something that struck the little man and the little man would interrupt him to give the tall one a look and say, “See? What’d I tell you? Squarest in the world.” They left him a Tupperware pitcher of tepid water and another Hardee’s bag, this one filled to the grease-spattered neck with twists of cold greasy potato and two geometrically perfect hamburgers.

  Hiro forced himself to eat. And he drank down the water too, every drop: he didn’t know when—or if—he’d see more. There were two deputies outside the door—he’d seen them when his inquisitors had let themselves in and out of the cell. He could hear the soft murmur of their voices, smell the flare of their tobacco. Twenty minutes. He would give them twenty minutes to eat their corn dogs and piccalilli and butterscotch ripple ice cream, twenty minutes to stupefy themselves with gin and whiskey and beer. Then he would make his break.

  He counted out each of those interminable minutes, second by second—one a thousand, two a thousand, three—and he heard the faint but distinctive hiss of pop-tops, and there was the smell of hot grease and more tobacco, and then the murmur of voices faded away to silence. The time had come. The time for action. The time when a man of action must make up his mind within the space of seven breaths. Hiro only needed one. He sprang for the wall, clambering up the slick stones like a lizard, removed the false bars and squeezed through into the adjoining cell. Head first, then shoulders and torso and the right leg, then reverse position and drop lightly to the bench below. His blood was singing. He was moving, acting, in control of his own destiny once again—and the door? His fingers were on the rusted handle, his thumb poised over the latch—it was the moment of truth, the moment on which all the rest depended. He pressed: it gave. Ha!

  Rusty hinges. Open a crack. Look. There, leaning back in a chair propped against the door of the first cell, was a deputy, red hakujin face and wheat-colored mustache, pointy nose and slivered lips. His head was thrown back, the cigarette smoking between his fingers, the can of beer and grease-stained bag at his side, and his breathing was deep and regular, somnolent, breath caught in the pit of the larynx and released again with the faintest stertor. Yes: the long-nosed idiot was asleep!

  Hiro almost swaggered when he realized it: asleep! But he contained himself—discipline, discipline—and slipped out the door like a shadow, a ninja, the nimblest assassin ever to float over two feet. But what of the other guard? What of him? He was nowhere to be seen. Stealthy, stealthy. The red cheeks and flaming nose, the air sucked down the tubes and vomited out again: Hiro couldn’t resist. He bent over the sleeping deputy and slipped the cigarette from between his fingers, justifying it to hi
mself as a precaution: it was only a matter of a minute or two before the fool singed himself awake. But the chicken—it was chicken, breaded and fried, wings, drumsticks and thighs, in the grease-stained bag—the chicken was another matter. Casually—as casually as Yojimbo hiking up his yukata or Dirty Harry scratching his stubble—Hiro leaned forward to pluck a drumstick from the bag, savoring the moistness of it as he eased along the inner wall, looking for a door that would give onto the yard out back.

  And what was here? A shadowy vastness, rafters and crossbeams, a smell of urine, fungus, the body functions of animals dead a hundred years. He moved to his left, away from the deputy and the glaring high double doors of the barn’s main entrance, flattening himself against the cool stone wall. The place was deserted: an ancient pitchfork against the damp wall, the stalls where livestock had once been kept, the odd strands, like fallen hair, of antediluvian hay. Something stirred in the rafters overhead and he looked up into the slatted shadows to see a pair of swallows beating through the gloom. And the other deputy? Hiro was light on his feet, invisible, a ghost in the place of ghosts. At the end of the line of stalls a weak light leaked round the corner and down a hallway. Hiro made for it.

  He turned down the hallway to his right, proud and scornful and ready for anything—he was escaping, escaping again!—and the light swelled to embrace him. There was a doorway there, vacant and bleeding light—a doorless doorway, the wooden slab with its latch and handle apparently lost to some ancient hakujin cataclysm. Beyond the doorway he saw green—the virescent glow of freedom in all its seething jungle urgency—and he hurried for it.

  But it wasn’t as easy as all that.

  He paused in the crude stone doorframe, glanced right and left—a driveway, cars, shrubs, trees, lawn—and then made his break, bolting for the band of vegetation that rose up at the far end of the lawn, thick and reclusive and no more than a hundred feet away. He was bent low and scurrying like a crab, already ten steps out of hiding and exposed for all the world to see, when suddenly he froze. There was a dog there, right in front of him, lifting its leg against a tree. A dog. Better than forty dogs, better than the snarling seething pack that had closed in on him at Ruth’s, but a dog nonetheless—and no lap dog either, but a big raw-boned gangling shepherd sort of thing that looked as if it had been put together with spare parts. The dog finished its business in that moment and Hiro saw its eyes leap with something like recognition as it loped toward him, a woof—a tiny grandfatherly woof—rippling from its throat. Hiro was planted, rooted, he’d grown up out of the ground like a native shrub, hopeless and immobile. The woof would become a concatenation of woofs, an improvisatory riff of woofing, followed by bared teeth and the bloodcurdling howls and the angry voices of discovery, while through it all the clink of handcuffs played in counterpoint. Was this it? Was it over already?