East is East

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 himself 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?

It might have been, had not the sensory organs of his fingertips communicated a swift tactile message to him: he was holding a half-eaten drumstick. Holding meat. Chicken. Dripping and irresistible. And what did dogs eat? Dogs ate meat. “Here, boy,” he whispered, making a kissing noise with his lips, “good boy,” and then he was inserting greasy bone in woofless mouth. But even as he did so and even as the dog melted away from him in greedy preoccupation, he heard a ribald screech of laughter and looked up to see three hakujin—two men and a woman—emerge from the very line of trees into which he’d hoped to disappear. They were dressed in tennis whites and carrying racquets, and they hadn’t noticed him yet—or if they had they didn’t remark it, absorbed as they were in themselves. The woman leaned into the men with a bawdy whoop and all three doubled up, spastic with laughter.

Though in that moment he recalled the words of Jocho—A true samurai must never seem to flag or lose heart—Hiro found himself on the verge of panic, mental disintegration and physical collapse. He could not move. He was caught in a bad dream, powerless, his limbs as useless as a quadriplegic’s, and they were coming for him, coming to devour his flesh and crack his bones. His eyes flew to the points of the compass: there was the dog, happily frolicking with the scrap of chicken, and there was the line of trees that promised release—and there, interposed between him and his goal, were the tennis players, they who at any moment would look up in stunned surprise and raise a shout of horror and dismay. What to do? He hadn’t a clue. Move, and he was dead. Stand still, very still, and he was dead too. All at once the decision was made for him: a pair of stocky women in bonnets and tentlike sundresses suddenly rounded the far corner of the barn with a great booming shout. “If it isn’t McEnroe and Connors!” the smaller of the two bellowed in the direction of the tennis players. “And Chrissie Evert too!” the larger added in a stentorian shrill.

That was it. That was enough. Suddenly Hiro was moving, head down, back to them, walking with purpose and determination, as if he belonged here, just another artist out for a stroll on the grounds. Directly ahead of him was the parking lot, with its cars and pavement, shrubs and trees and flowers in plucked beds, the big house rising above it in the near distance: it wasn’t the direction he would have chosen. “Patsy!” a woman’s voice cried behind him, “Clara!” And then one of the men shouted, “Vodka and gin!” This was followed by a general roar and a spate of lubricious laughter.

“Just heading over ourselves!”

“Join us?”

“Join you? We’ll lead the way—better yet, we’ll race you!”