East is East

Ambly Wooster. There was no hate in their eyes, only health and confidence. How could he steal from them, how could he abandon them to their fate out here in the howling wilderness?

How? Easily. They were hakujin, after all, hakujin like all the others, and after they found out who he was they’d lock him up themselves, twist the handcuffs tight with the cracked porcelain gleam of righteousness in their eyes. He was a Japanese. A samurai. To be ruthless was his only hope.

He was about to make his move, about to slip out of the wet blanket and stir himself to betrayal, when the boy began to moan in his sleep. The sound was incongruous and devastating in the dead black night. “Uhhhhhh,” the boy groaned, swallowed up in his dreams, “uhhhhhh.” In the space of that groan Hiro was plunged back into his own boyhood, awakened to the demons that haunted his nights and the birdlike embrace of his grandfather, and then a figure rose up in the dark—the father, the boy’s father—and Hiro heard the gentle shushing, the susurras of comfort and security. Father, mother, son: this was a family. He let the apprehension wash over him until it became palpable, undeniable, until he knew that the canoe, his only hope, would stay where it was.

He woke to the smell of corned beef hash and eggs. It was an unusual smell—aside from the slop Chiba concocted, he’d had little experience of foreign foods—but he recognized the habitual hakujin odor of incinerated meat. “Seiji!” a voice chirped at him the moment he opened his eyes. It was Julie Jeffcoat. She was in shorts and a shell top that emphasized her breasts, motherly and sexy all at once. “Sleep well?” she asked, crossing the platform to hand him a cup of simmering black coffee. The sun was up. It was hot already. Jeff Jr. perched at the edge of the platform, methodically flicking a lure from the tip of his rod to the far edge of the pond and then drawing it back again, while his father bent over the canoe, stowing away their gear in tight precise little bundles. He whistled while he worked. “Well,” he boomed, glancing over his shoulder at Hiro, “ready for some breakfast, pardner?”

Dazed by the assault of cheer and energy, Hiro could only nod his assent. He was feeling a bit queasy—but then why wouldn’t he, with all he’d been through—and he hoped the food would help steady him.

Jeff Jeffcoat turned back to his work. Jeff Jr.’s line sizzled through the guys and there was a distant splash. Hiro sat up to blow at his coffee and Julie Jeffcoat presented him with a plastic plate heaped with eggs, hashed meat, puffed potatoes and fruit cocktail from a can. It looked like something Chiba would whip up for one of his western-style lunches. “Ketchup?” Julie asked, and when he nodded, she squirted a red paste over everything.

“Denver omelet, yes?” Hiro said.

Julie Jeffcoat smiled, and it was a beautiful Amerikajin smile, uncomplicated and frank, a smile that belonged on the cover of a magazine. “Sort of,” she said.

Half an hour later, Hiro watched Jeff Jeffcoat steady the canoe as first Jeff Jr. and then Julie eased themselves into the narrow trembling envelope of the vessel. It was heaped to the gunwales with the neatly stowed paraphernalia of their adventure in the wilderness, with their cooler, their charcoal and starter fluid, their binoculars and fishing rods and mess kit, their tents and sleeping bags and changes of clothing, their paperback books, flashlights, lip balm and licorice. There was no room for Hiro. Jeff Jeffcoat had assured him that they would paddle straight back to the boat launch and get a ranger to come rescue him. He looked pained—he was pained—because they couldn’t take Hiro with them. But Hiro—or Seiji, as they knew him—wouldn’t be forgotten, he had Jeff’s word on that.

Before he shoved off, Jeff Jeffcoat had impulsively sprung from the canoe to shuck his loafers and hand them to Hiro. “Here,” he said, “I’ve got another two pairs in my backpack, and you’re going to need these more than I do.” Hiro accepted the shoes with a bow. They were Top-Siders, the sort of shoes the blond surfers wore in the beer commercials on Japanese television. Hiro slipped them on, feeling like a surfer himself in the cutoffs and oversized T-shirt, as Jeff Jeffcoat eased back into the canoe and shoved off with a mighty thrust of the paddle. “So long,” he called, “and don’t worry: they’ll be here to get you by noon. I promise.”

“ ’Bye!” Jeff Jr. cried, shrill as a bird.

Julie turned to wave. “Bye-bye,” she called, and her voice was like Ruth’s, and for a moment it stirred him. “You take care now.”

They’d left him food, of course—six sandwiches, a Ziploc bag crammed with marshmallows, three plums, two pears and a sack of tortilla chips the size of a laundry bag, not to mention the two-liter bottle of orange soda with which to wash it all down. “Sank you,” Hiro called, “sank you so much,” wondering if on could be calculated in the negative, for what wasn’t done as well as what was. He owed them a debt, an enormous debt—but then they owed him too. He hadn’t bludgeoned them to death, hadn’t stolen their food, their canoe, their paddles and fishing rods and charcoal briquettes. When you came right down to it, he’d sacrificed himself for them —and wasn’t that something?

He stood there on the platform a long while, watching them as they threaded their way up the narrow channel, paddles flashing in perfect harmony, father, mother, son.

Tender Sproats

There were two motels in ciceroville, “gateway to the Okefenokee Wilderness,” and both were on the order of refugee camps as far as Detlef Abercorn was concerned. The first, Lila’s Sleepy Z, featured a miniature golf course in the middle of the parking lot and a cafe with a hand-lettered sign in the window offering breakfast for 990, with unlimited refills of coffee and grits. It was booked solid. The other place, the Tender Sproats, enticed the weary traveler with a swimming pool filled to the coping with what appeared to be split pea soup. Abercorn thought of all those billboards along Interstate 80 touting homemade split pea soup, as if anyone in any condition would ever actually want split pea soup beyond the first spoonful. This was an improvement: here you got to swim in it. He shrugged and pulled into the lot.

It wasn’t as if he was planning to spend much time in the swimming pool anyway. His job was on the line here—his whole career. Forget the le Carre, the six-pack and the air-conditioned room alive only to the soothing flicker of the color TV; from here on out it was more like James M. Cain, a cup of piss-water doused with iodine, sweat, sunburn and aching joints. He’d had a call early that morning from Nathaniel Carteret Bluestone, the regional head in Atlanta. Real early. Six-thirty A.M. early. He was never at his best at 6:30 A.M., but he’d been out past two tramping all over the island with Turco and the sheriff and about six hundred yapping dogs on the lukewarm trail of Hiro Tanaka and when he picked up the phone he was so exhausted he could barely think.

N. Carteret Bluestone had wanted to know why Special Agent Abercorn was bent on making a mockery of the INS. Had he seen the morning papers? No? Well, perhaps he’d find them instructive. The Nip—Japanese, Bluestone corrected himself—was front-page news all of a sudden. Abercorn tried to explain that the papers were a day late at Thanatopsis House, but Bluestone talked right over him, quoting the headlines in an acidic tone: “‘At Large 6 Weeks, In Jail 6 Hours’; ‘Score 1 for the Japanese, 0 for the INS’; ’Jailbreak on Tupelo Island: Alien Makes It Look Easy.’ ” And what was this about Lewis Turco attacking some woman and making wild—and litigious—accusations? It was a mighty sorry way to run an investigation, mighty sorry.

Abercorn couldn’t argue with him there, except maybe to add that “sorry” was far too tame an adjective. He could have offered excuses—it was the sheriff’s people who’d let the suspect go; be hadn’t attacked anybody and couldn’t answer for Turco; everybody down here talked like Barney Fife and had an IQ to match—but he didn’t. All he said was, “I’ll do my best, sir.”

Bluestone opined that his best seemed to fall short of the mark. Far short.

“I’ll do my damnedest, sir,” Abercorn said.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “You do that,” Bluestone said finally. “And this time, handcuff the suspect to your own goddamned wrist. And do me a favor—”

“Yes?”

“Swallow the key, will you, so it comes out with the rest of your shit.”

News of the second call, the one from Roy Dotson, didn’t reach him till nearly four in the afternoon. And why not? Because he was out in the boondocks, sifting through the mudholes of Tupelo Island, as if anybody believed it would do any good. If they were looking for frogs they would have been in heaven. Or mosquitoes. The temperature was up around a hundred, the sun had ground to a halt directly overhead and he thought he was just about to die from the stink when one of Peagler’s deputies came sloshing toward them with the news that they were wasting their time. The suspect had fled the island. And where was he? In a sharecropper’s shack? Hitchhiking to