East is East

undercurrent of waking life suddenly whispered to him out of the dark—the distant snap of a match, a murmur of conspiratorial voices: everybody was in on the secret. A soft curse escaped him and the little wheel in his chest accelerated a notch. He was thinking of the coon hunters his father convoked each autumn under the big old live oak in the front yard, dogs whining, shadows milling, the spit of tobacco, soft truncated jokes caught somewhere between throat and lips. Royal jerked at the laces, the blood pounding in his ear—more of a right than any of them—and then he was down off the porch in a single covetous bound and tearing across the lawn to the Arms place.

Jason was up already, fussing over the dogs with a cup of coffee in his hand, looking important and old, though he was just two years, eight months and eleven days older than Royal. The porch light, a single dull 25-watt bulb, made a yellowish pocket in the night, and before he was halfway across the lawn, Royal could see the dark shapes of the men gathered there, eight or ten of them, squatting in the shadows and solemnly masticating the sandwiches Jason’s mother had made up for them in the unlighted kitchen. His eyes told him what his nose already knew: Yerdell Carter was among them, his pipe softly glowing, a deer rifle propped up between his legs. The others (he recognized Jenkins, Butterton, Creed, friends of his father and coon hunters all) hunched over shotguns, embracing the dull gleam of the steel as casually as they might have embraced umbrellas on a day with a threat of rain.

The dew was heavy and Royal came up on them with a squeal of his sneakers. He was breathing hard. Too tall for sixteen, gangling, with the tapering long African shanks of his father and the carefully chopped dangle of his bleached and processed hair, he looked—well, different—and he knew somebody would have something smart to say about it. Yerdell Carter was the man. After crushing a mosquito with an audible slap, he grinned out of his ruined old face and asked Royal if he was going to catch himself a Chinaman.

Royal didn’t answer. His father should have been there in his place, but his father was driving truck in Kansas or Wyoming or some such windblown terminus Royal knew only from videos. His father was driving truck about two thirds of the time, and when he came home, he came home. Royal was sixteen and twenty pounds underweight, a loose gangle of gristle and bone. But where Jason and the dogs were going, he was going too. And nobody was going to stop him.

Jason looked up from his dead father’s dogs and offered him a sandwich, white bread and bologna. “Uh-uh,” Royal said, shaking his head as if he’d just been offered the body and blood of Christ, the flesh warm still and palpitating. “Ain’t hungry.”

The night before—six hours ago, that is—he and Jason and Rodney Cathcart had been watching Rock’n’Roll High School on Jason’s VCR when Sheriff Peagler came to the door. Jason’s mother was in bed already and the three of them just about shit blood when they saw who it was: they’d been smoking pot—all the roaches they’d saved over the course of the summer rolled into one thin miserable number—and the smell of it hung over the parlor like an evil ghost. But the sheriff wasn’t interested in pot. He was interested in the two big coon hounds and the little yellow bitch Jason’s dead father had paid a hundred and ten dollars for in Brunswick.

The sheriff was a bone-thin white man with deep creases in his face and two hard blue eyes that took hold of you like pincers. He’d been a high-school football star—a wide receiver—and he’d won a scholarship to some college up north, but dropped out after two seasons. He wore a hat and a badge, but he dressed in jeans, T-shirt and boots like anybody else. He knocked once and stuck his head in the door. “Jason,” he said, “would you step out here a minute?”

And that was it. That was why there were ten men (and now twelve and soon to be fifteen) gathered out front of the Arms place looking like the start of a coon hunt, and that was why Jason was acting so important and why Royal couldn’t hold anything on his stomach: they’d found the son of a bitch of a Japanese Chinaman that had gone and killed his uncle. The sheriff wanted the dogs and he was paying Jason twenty-five dollars for the use of them and himself as handler, but he’d warned Jason to keep it quiet. “I want to catch this malefactor and put him behind bars once and for all,” he’d told him, using one of his college words to drive the point home, “and I don’t want half the island out there gettin’ in my way, you follow me?” But Jason had to tell him and Rodney, what with the sheriff’s pickup backing out of the driveway and the Ramones on the TV crunching chords in their black pipestem jeans, and Rodney had gone home and told his mother and maybe his three brothers and six sisters and his grandpa and his daddy too, and now, when the sheriff pulled up at four for Jason and the dogs, there was going to be a crowd.

The voice was booming, thunderous, loosed from the clouds, and it sent him into a panic so absolute and immediate it made the fillings in his teeth ache and rendered Jocho all but useless. “Hyro Tanayka, you come own outta there now, nice and easy, and y’all put your bands up own top your bead where Ah kin see ’em.” And behind that voice, the barking of the dogs—rabid, slavery; barking that choked on its own rage and saliva, the barking of killers and man-eaters. Strip the flesh from the bone.

The shorts were off the floor and girding his loins in a nanosecond, no time for the Nikes, and then he was clawing his way over Ruth’s desk to get at the back window. Up went the sash, one foot on the desk, the other on the sill, and then he froze. His hara dropped, his heart turned to ash. What he saw there was Negroes, Negroes with guns and dogs. And hakujin too, with uniforms and badges and more guns and more dogs. He was surrounded. It was all up. It was over.

“Hyro Tanayka,” the voice boomed from the front of the house, “y’all have till a count of ten to come own outta there or Ah cannot hold myself accountable for the consequences! One. Two. Three …”

He knew them. They’d tried to run him down before he’d even set foot on their soil, they’d chased him out of Hog Hammock and Ambly Wooster’s house too. They were Americans. Killers. Individualists gone rampant. He hung his head and started for the door, defeated, crushed, expecting no mercy but the law of the jungle and of the mutt and half-breed. If he put his tail between his legs and his hands atop his head, then he could … could …

But all at once, magically, insidiously, the words of Jocho whispered to him—The Way of the Samurai is a mania for death; sometimes ten men cannot topple a man with such conviction—and he was a Japanese all over again, not a mutt, not a happa, not half a hakujin, but a Japanese, and the strength came back to him, settling in a fiery ball in his gut. He came through the door—“Don’t shoot!” he cried—with his hands atop his head, but with a gleam in his eye.

In that moment, all of them—the sheriff, the state troopers, the red-eyed Negroes, the gawk of a hakujin with the speckled face and the runt in fatigues Ruth had told him about—all of them relaxed their grip for the tiniest sliver of an instant. He was on the doorstep, he was on the porch, and they were all gaping at him as if they’d never seen a man with hara before. That was all it took, that sliver of an instant, the sheriff dropping the megaphone from his lips, the Negroes and troopers and poor white trash easing up on the trigger …

“Make my day!” Hiro suddenly shouted, diving for the floorboards as the astonished, outraged cannonade opened up all around him, shattering glass, splintering wood, ricocheting off Ruth’s Olivetti and slicing through the trove of bamboo shoots and fried dace in deadly syncopation. And then, in the next sliver of an instant, in the space between the first round and the second, he bounded over the railing and ran headlong into the first man he encountered, an old Negro with a smoking gun and a pipe jammed between his teeth. The old Negro was a carpet, a rug, a piece of lint. He was gone and there was another, and then a white man, and Hiro ran through them as if they were made of paper, silly astonished faces, black and white, sailing back on their buttocks, guns and cigarettes and spectacles flying up into the air as in some miraculous feat of levitation.

The jungle embraced him. There was another barrage, an anguished shout and a chorus of curses, and Hiro’s bare broad feet pounded at the mud of a trail he knew as well as he knew the stairwell to his obasan’s apartment. Then he heard the dogs, the savage joy of the multivoiced roar as they were set loose, but he was a samurai, a killer, a hero, and he was heading for a bog that would choke any sixty dogs … nor would he hesitate. He’d plunge headfirst into the muck, live it, breathe it, smear his naked body with it and dwell forever here in the wild, his home primeval, Tarzan the Ape Man, unconquerable and—

Suddenly the whirl of his thoughts choked to nothing. There before him, poised in the middle of the path and with his head and shoulders lowered for action, was a Negro. A boy. Hightops. Jeans. Hair like a New Guinea