East is East

me.”

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “Guess who’s coming—for a six-weeks’ residency?”

She couldn’t guess.

Plates rattled in the kitchen, Bob took Ina’s hand and sauntered out the door, Sandy yawned, stretched and stood up. Irving Thalamus leaned toward her, his eyes bright, his grin as sharp as a watchdog’s. “Jane Shine,” he said. “Jane Shine’s coming. Can you believe it?

Fea Pure

I want to help you, she whispered as he stood there in the doorway, the lunch bucket clutched in his hand. They all wanted to help him. That’s why they blasted their shotguns at him and hunted him with their dogs, that’s why they played Donna Summer in the swamps and tried to run him down in their speedboats. It was this one’s lover, her boifurendo, the beef-eater and butter-stinker, naked and hairy and with his big dog’s prick hanging down like a sausage, who’d run the boat at him when he was half drowned and chased him out of the store when he was starving. He’d wanted to help too.

Still, there was something about her—he couldn’t say what it was, couldn’t find the word for it in English or in Japanese either. She was sitting at her desk, her back to him, and when she turned he saw her silken legs, long and slim, American legs, and he saw the movement of her breasts and the weight of them. He remembered those breasts from his night in the water, though he was terrified and exhausted and fighting for his life at the time. He was drowning, he was dying, and there were her breasts, naked and appealing under the pale glaze of moon and stars. The whiteness, that’s what he remembered, the whiteness of her there and below, skin like milk in a porcelain bowl. He stepped through the door.

He was terrified, though he had Jocho and Mishima to sustain him—he was sure she’d betray him, screech till her tonsils fell out, rouse up every sweating hakujin cowboy and kinky-haired Negro in the county—but then he caught the look in her eyes and saw that she was afraid of him. For a long moment he just stood there inside the door, watching her eyes. And then, when he saw them soften, when he watched the smile play across her lips and heard her laugh, he shuffled into the room and squatted in the corner. “Arigato,” he whispered, “sank you, sank you so much.” And then he opened up the lunch bucket and he ate.

She offered him more—apples, dates, crackers—and he took it, took it greedily, though he was humiliated. He crouched there like an animal, filthier than he’d ever been in his life, bleeding in a hundred places, stinking like a hog. And in rags. Stolen rags. Negro rags. Jocho would have despised him; Mishima would have turned his back. He recalled the words of Jocho on the importance of grooming and personal appearance—life was a dress rehearsal for death, and you always had to be prepared for it, right down to the smallest detail of your toilet, your underwear, your pedicure, your hands and teeth and the color in your cheeks—and he felt humiliated to the depths of his being. He was polluted. Degraded. Impure. Lower than a dog.

“I’ll get you clothes,” she said.

He was nothing. He stank. He loathed himself. “Domo arigato,” he said, and though he was already squatting, he bowed from the waist.

Then she stood. Stood on those lovely slim ghostly white legs and crossed the room to him. She didn’t speak. She hovered over him, her eyes lush and consolatory, and held out her hand. “Here,” she said, the voice caught low in her throat, and when he took her hand she pulled him to his feet. “Come, lie down,” and she offered him the couch. He gave up then and let her lead him like a child, let her tuck the pillow beneath his head and whisper to him in her sacramental tones until his muscles went loose and he felt himself tumble through the wicker, the wood, the earth itself, and into a realm where nothing mattered, nothing at all.

His dream was of baseball—besuboru—the game that was his whole life until he discovered Jocho. He was with his grandmother, his obasan, and she was having a sake and he a hotto dogu and the players on the field were swinging their bats and the pitcher was pounding the ball into the dark secret pocket of the catcher’s mitt. And then suddenly he was down there amongst them, standing at the plate and swinging … not a bat, but the hotto dogu, chili, mustard and all… swinging it till it began to swell and grow and he felt he could do anything, clout a homer with every swing, soar into the air like a bird or rocket. He turned to wave at his obasan, but she was gone, replaced by a girl with a baby at her breast… but no, it wasn’t just a single girl, there were hundreds, thousands of them, and every one with a suckling infant and every one with breasts as pure and white as … breasts … an avalanche of breasts …

He woke slowly, gradually, a diver rising to the surface of a murky lagoon, and the sleep clung to him like water. It took him a moment, disoriented by his exhaustion and all that had happened to him—he was home in bed, safe in his bunk on the Tokachi-maru, nodding off over a lecture at the maritime academy—and then all at once he knew where he was and his eyes locked open. He saw the crosshatching of the wicker, shellacked and faded, and he saw the flowered pillowcase and his own filthy and battered hand. He heard nothing, not a sound. In the next instant he was up and off the couch, cursing himself, cursing her, and then he tore open the door and ran for the woods, his breath coming in torn ragged gasps. How could he have trusted her, he thought, oblivious to slash of palmetto and tug of briar, his adrenaline surging, expecting at any moment to hear the first startled bellow of the sheriff’s hounds at his back. The bitch, the false deceptive white-legged hakujin bitch: how could he have been so stupid?

This wasn’t fair play—fea pure—not at all. This wasn’t how the game was played. This was cheating. She’d caught him with his defenses down, caught him when he was ready to pack it all in, to give up and die of shame and ignominy, and she’d seduced him with her voice and eyes and her pure white body and then stabbed him in the back. But he’d escaped her. Oh, yes. And he would never yield again, never—he would be as ruthless and crafty as the high-noses themselves. No more fea pure for him. Nice guys finish last—Leo Durocher, the great Amerikajin manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers had said that, and Jocho had said it too.

He tore at creeper and twig, splashed through a scum-coated channel and startled something in the shallows. Finally, winded, he threw himself down in the red muck to consider the situation. For a long moment he held his breath, listening—they came at you with dogs, bloodhounds, he knew that. Give them a sock, a sandal, a cigarette butt, and they could track you to the ends of the earth. He was too frightened yet to be miserable, too exhausted to think straight. But when he calmed down, when the sun dropped below the rim of the world and left the trees in haunted gloom and the birds of the night screeched overhead, he was fully miserable once again, and he began to wonder if he hadn’t been just a bit rash.

Perhaps she had meant to help him after all. She said she was going to get him clothes. He couldn’t very well expect her to have a suit of men’s clothes in her cabin, could he? She didn’t live there, he knew that much. She came in the morning and left in the evening. He supposed she was a secretary of some sort and that the cabin was her office—and if that was the case, well then perhaps she had gone to get him clothes … and food, more food, the meat paste sandwiches and hard vegetables and fruit he’d discovered in the lunch pail, the little cheeses wrapped in foil and a wedge of frosted cake. His hara announced itself then and he rose itching from the muck, a lingering sour troubled taste in his mouth, and struggled back in the direction from which he’d come.

It wasn’t easy. The shadows deepened; the trees stood in ranks, linked arm to arm, as alike as blades of grass; things swift and unseen whipped through the scrub at his feet. Twice he toppled headlong into the bushes, the dirty gauze of cobweb and spider silk caught in his mouth and nostrils, mosquitoes harassing him in all their legions. He’d almost given up hope when the tangle of trees released him to the brief remission of the yard.

He froze. It was full dark now, the night clear and moonless. Not twenty feet away stood the cabin, an absence of definition, a shadow that drew in all the shadows around it. Nothing moved. He listened to the chirr of crickets, the hum of mosquitoes, the violent thump and wheeze of his own internal machinery as it went about the business of keeping him alive. What if they were waiting in there for him? What if they were watching him even now, their dogs at heel, guns drawn, fingers twitching over their searchlights?