East is East

end of the island.

It was a ten-mile ride, nearly all of it as flat as his kitchen table, and normally it was nothing for him—he could have gone twice as far and back again without even breathing hard. But he was a little out of sorts today— maybe it was the heat—and though he coasted whenever he could, each time he dug at the pedals he felt a tightness in his chest, as if somebody had slipped a noose under his arms. He’d start in pedaling and he could feel the noose cinch up on him, squeezing all the air out of his lungs, and he just couldn’t seem to draw his breath. His bad hip was acting up too, and his hand, blistered and raw beneath the clean white yard-and-a-half-long strip of gauze, burned as fiercely as it had the day that Chinaman had tried to deep-fry it. Three miles down the road, just past Cribbs’ store, he thought he’d turn around and go on back home, he was feeling that poorly, but then he thought of that helpless jabbering old white lady and her laid-up husband, and figured he was the better part of halfway there already, and he kept on going.

He felt better as he glided over the little bridge that spanned Pumpkin Hammock and saw the cooters and mud turtles lined up like dominoes on a log beneath him—he could have spit on them if he wanted to—and he thought of himself and Wheeler as boys spearing turtles with an old window hook and the taste of the soup and gumbo his mama would make and the way they nailed the hollow shells up along the south side of the house till the place was shingled with them. And then he was passing Hollieway’s Meadow, where the live oaks grew up in clusters out of the stumps of the old trees they’d taken down to build ships for the Confederate navy, his bony old knees pumping, and the noose eased up a notch or two.

He’d taken a pet screech owl out of one of those stumps when he was a boy, an unfledged chick, the runt out of a clutch of three. It was going to die anyway, trampled under by the spiky feet of its siblings, its head pecked till it was one big blister. He’d given it fish, which it didn’t like, and mice, which it did. He remembered his mama thinking he was crazy, dicing up a mouse with his daddy’s long knife, but he clipped that owl’s wings and it grew up to love him, till the dog got it, anyway. That must have been sixty years ago, and now, as he glided through the gates of Tupelo Shores Estates and turned left on Salt Air Drive, he wondered at the memory of it, at the power of human recollection that could take him off his bicycle and out of the heat and send him back through all those long worn-out years. But then he wobbled into the Woosters’ driveway and a swarm of greenhead flies came up on him out of nowhere and the noose tightened again and he was back in the here and now. He could taste the sweat at the corners of his mouth.

All right. He would squat and rest a minute in the shade where the grass was deep and cool, and then he’d have a long drink from the hose and get to work. No need to say anything to anybody. They’d see him outside the window, the machete flashing in the sun, and they’d hear him when he fired up the lawn machine, and they’d say, It’s Olmstead White out there working in this heat and maybe we’ll just get him a tall glass of lemonade with a finger of vodka in it the way he likes it.

He squatted, and the noose eased up a little. And then he bent to the hose and the cool water quickened him and he was ready for work, but there was that damn stab in the hip again, and the salt sweat was just like liquid fire on his hand. To hell with the doctor, he thought, and he held the bandage tight with his good hand and he let the water run over the burning one till the salt was gone and the sharpness of the pain fell off a bit. Then he unsheathed the machete and started nicking at the bushes with short quick drops of his wrist.

He must have been at it half an hour or more by the time he worked himself round to the ocean side of the house, where the pool stood behind a waist-high gate all overgrown with wisteria. There was somebody sitting out by the pool, and that surprised him—not just because of the heat, but because the old lady and her husband never paid any attention to the thing, except to let it go green as a duckpond between the pool man’s visits. It must be the grandson, he thought, visiting from college. He’d seen the boy now and again over the past few years, hanging round the house, waiting for the ferry, driving his red sports car hellbent-for-leather up and down the street to Cribbs’ store—a likable enough kid, even if his eyes were spaced too wide apart and he wore his hair as if it was 1950 still. Hell, and he had to chuckle at the thought, the kid wouldn’t know a MTV haircut if it grew up around his ears. The machete flicked and there was a splash and Olmstead White turned briefly to see the froth of the water, the slick kicking limbs, hair flattened out like an otter’s, but he thought no more about it.

He trimmed the holly bushes square against the house and then he turned to the pool. He hadn’t got to the wisteria last time he was here, and now it was sending out snaking arms every which way and generally looking pretty shabby all the way round. Coming across the lawn, the machete hanging loose in his good hand, he was thinking of his mother, another trick of recollection, as if the day was filtered out of his head and all the past came swarming back to him in its odd and essential details. He was thinking of just this, just one thing, a picture frozen there in his brain: his mama at the stove and himself and Wheeler and his daddy sitting at the table, the mad hag’s shriek of a hurricane wind in their ears, windows rattling, claws on the roof, and his mama jiggling the cast-iron pan and flipping corn cakes as if nothing in the world was the matter. He was thinking about that and the tightness was gone, and then he glanced up and caught the grandson’s eye, and saw, for the first time, that the grandson was staring back at him as if he’d seen a ghost.

And that was it, the beginning of the end: recognition. This was no grandson—and the noose bit into him with a sudden savage jerk—this was, was … there were no words to form the thought, only rage crackling like grease in a hot frying pan. He took three steps forward, the machete poised over his head, and he saw those Chinese eyes, that Chinese nose and mouth and ears come back to haunt him. “Son of a bitch!” he cried—or tried to, the words sticking in his throat, choking him, the noose like a garrote, like two nooses, two garrotes … and then something was giving way inside of him and he plunged forward as if into a vast body of water and knew he would never be short of breath again.

* * *

Hiro had awakened that morning—his sixth under the Wooster roof—to the smell of eggs, bacon and fried tomatoes, and to the strains of some vaguely familiar symphonic music, some Russian or European thing. He dressed in his freshly laundered shorts—Ambly Wooster, rambling on about textiles, Taiwan, Korea and Jordache, had tried to give him a pair of her grandson’s blue jeans, but they’d been too tight to zip up—and then he pulled on the gray sweatshirt, thick cotton socks and Nike hightops that fit as if they’d been made for him, and sauntered downstairs to breakfast.

The music swelled to greet him, and as he turned the corner into the sunstruck parlor, he caught a glimpse of the morning maid, Dolly, darting out of sight like an insect. If the other one, Verneda, was physical and suspicious, Dolly was her opposite: slight and neurasthenic, afraid to make eye contact, her hair a topiary marvel, her skin the buttery tan of the blazer Hiro had worn to school as a boy. She disappeared into the dining room, leaving Hiro to bow deeply to his host and hostess, who were seated at the breakfast table in the bay window overlooking the sea. The glass was pregnant with light. Gulls hung over their heads. Somewhere, beneath the rush of violins, the ocean pounded the shore.

“Seiji!” the old lady cried, giving him a cagey look, her head tilted to one side, a smear of lipstick blotting her crooked smile. He could see that she was holding back, biting her lip, fighting to dam up the torrent of banality that lashed her tongue like a whip across her palate, teeth and lips through her every waking moment. “Ohayo,” she said, greeting him in Japanese and struggling with her tongue, her very eyes bulging with the effort to hold it all in.

He bowed again. “Ohayo gozaimasu,” he returned, and bowed to the husband too. But the husband wouldn’t have known that, since he was blind and deaf, propped up in his wheelchair like a man of rags propped up on a broomstick.

On the table were rashers, eggs, toast, butter, coffee, fried tomatoes and marmalade. It wasn’t the sort of breakfast he preferred—he liked ochazuke himself, a bit of cold rice warmed with green tea—but he couldn’t complain. Not after his exile in the wilderness, not after the crabs and grasshoppers and the hopeless spoon-licking repast he’d made of coffee crystals, nondairy creamer and artificial sweetener. But still, the Americans made such a mess of their food—just served it in a heap, with no thought of grace or proportion, as if eating were a shameful thing—and if he weren’t starving, he would have turned up his nose at it. He pulled back the chair to sit down.

“Well, don’t you notice anything?” the old lady asked, trembling with the effort to contain all those slips of meaning, that rush of words and syllables and phrases.

He paused over the chair, bewildered.

“The music,” she said. “The music, Seiji—” and then she caught herself. She was grinning now, her teeth dead and gray, cracked, yellow, too big for her mouth.