East is East

disparity in their ages. “Thirty-one,” he said.

Her eyebrows lifted. Twin plumes of smoke escaped her nostrils. “Really?” she said. “Three years past the limit. I’m surprised at you, Hiro—you ought to be married yourself.”

* * *

She spent nearly all of the next few days with him, returning to the big house only to sleep at night. He didn’t ask her about that, about the sleeping arrangements, and he was still tentative around her. He wanted her, and he tried to tell her that with his eyes or by casually brushing against her as she rose from her desk. At one point, after watching her work through all the interminable hours of the day, he came up behind her and laid a hand on her shoulder. “Not now,” she said, pulling him to her for one of those quick pecking kisses the Americans are so fond of, “I’m still working.” Later, when she came back from the big house with dinner for them both, he made a mute appeal—a movement of the hands, a slow melt of the eyes—and she saw it, and acknowledged it, but she told him she wasn’t feeling very well. “The heat,” she said, and she deflected the whole subject of their involvement with a question about Japan: was it this hot over there?

And then one evening she went back to the big house for cocktails and she didn’t return. It was seven and his stomach was growling. It was eight and the sun was gone and he began to give up hope. But then maybe—just maybe—she’d be back in the night. He waited for hours, brooding. What did she want with him, anyway? Was it all a game to her, a joke? And when was she going to fulfill her promise, when was she going to get him out of this stinkhole? He felt bitter sitting there in the dark without her—bitter, and though he wouldn’t admit it to himself, jealous too—and he forgot all about his gratitude and the debt he owed her, and he got up from the rocker and flicked on the light over her desk.

There it was: her story. One page in the typewriter, the others scattered across the desk as if they’d been dropped there by a sudden gust of wind, pages x’d out, scrawled over, stained with coffee and ink. How many times had he straightened them up for her, how many times had he arranged her pens and pencils and rinsed her coffee cup? He’d never looked at a word. Not because he wasn’t curious, but because he was ashamed to. How could he violate her privacy like that after all she’d done for him? That’s how he thought, that’s how his obasan had raised him. But now, having sat and brooded in the dark and with the jealousy of the lover on him, he thought differently. He didn’t give a damn for her privacy. He sat down, shuffled the pages, and began to read:

He was a Japanese male in the full flower of Japanese manhood, solid and unyielding, and he came home from the office in the small hours and tore at her kimono. The children were asleep, the Sony silent, the tiny apartment polished like a knife. Michiko went wet at the first touch of him. There was whiskey on his breath, imported whiskey, the whiskey he drank each night at the hostess bar, and the smell of it excited her. She loved him for the moon of his face and the proud hard knot of his belly as it pressed against hers, and for his teeth, especially for his teeth. They overlapped like joy and sorrow, the path to his smile as tortuous as a trail torn across the face of Mount Fuji.

He forced himself into her and a cry escaped her lips. “Hiro,” she moaned, clinging to him, holding fast as if she were drowning, “Hiro, Hiro, Hiro!”

Hiro glanced up from the page. The room looked strange to him suddenly, looked like a cage, the walls closing in on him, the lamplight cinching his wrists. He didn’t have the heart to read on.

* * *

“When?” he demanded.

She was unpacking groceries, groceries enough for an army, for a siege, enough to keep an animal sleek in its pen for a month at least. “I told you: Sax’s car is a pickup. I need a car with a trunk, to hide you.” Her elbows jumped; the cans mounted on the table. “His mother’s car is what I’m thinking of. I just have to come up with an excuse to borrow it.”

“You stall, Rusu. You want to keep me here. You want to make me a prisoner.”

The light, the jungle light, was in her hair, slicing at her eyes. She dug into the backpack for another tin of fish. “You prefer it out there?”

“When, Rusu?” he repeated.

She rattled the bag and turned her head to look at him. “I don’t want to keep you here against your will— really, Hiro, I don’t. Think of the risk I’m running just by harboring you. I like you, I do. I want to see you get out of here … it’s just—it’s not that easy, that’s all I’m saying. You don’t want to get caught, do you?”

He stood there looming over her, hands on his hips. He didn’t answer.

“She’s got an old Mercedes with a trunk the size of the Grand Canyon. It’d be ideal.” She showed him her perfect pink gums and irreproachable eyes, and suddenly the fight went out of him.

“Okay,” he said, dropping his eyes. “Soon, yes?”

“Soon,” she said.

And then, two nights later, she staggered up the steps with another load of canned goods, and he couldn’t help noticing her cryptic little smile. “I have a surprise for you,” she gasped, thumping across the room to fling herself at the desk and wriggle out of her backpack. She threw out her chest, narrowed her shoulders and eased the straps down her arms. He could smell her, a rich dark scent, perfume and sweat commingled.

“Surprise?” He edged closer, watching her hands as she loosed the string at the neck of the bag. He was expecting a treat—a wedge of cake or a Mars Bar maybe; she knew he loved Mars Bars—but she dug yet another can of fried dace and a cellophane package of withered roots from the depths of the bag. His face fell. How she’d ever got the idea that this—this stuff— would appeal to him was a mystery. Dried fishheads, bark shavings in plastic envelopes, flat black mushrooms like patches of sloughed skin, can after can of bamboo shoots—what did she think he was, some barefoot hick from Tohoku or something? Dried fishheads? He would have preferred practically anything—Chef Boyardee, Hamburger Helper, Dinty Moore—but it was too awkward to ask. Beggars couldn’t be choosy.

She turned to him, put her hands on his shoulders and pecked another of her airy kisses in the direction of his cheek. “It’s all set,” she said. “Day after tomorrow. Sax is going out after his pygmy fish and I’m taking Septima’s car to Savannah—clothes shopping.”

It took him a moment. “You mean—?”

She looked up at him, beaming.

“Rusu,” he said, and he couldn’t contain himself, joy and discovery lighting him up like a rocket. He clutched her in his arms—he was getting out of here, he was on his way, his life was starting all over—but then he felt her body pressed to his and a sudden sharp sense of loss deflated him. She would take him to the city and he would walk away from her, one mutt more in a mob of them. He would never see her again.

“So,” she said, pulling back to study his face, her lips stretched in a grin, “are you happy?”

He didn’t know what to say. He was groping for the words—happy, yes, but unhappy too—when a violent hissing clatter burst on them out of the night. It startled them both. Hiro thought of a blowout on the highway, a truck tire reduced to tatters, but the racket of it went on and on, an explosion of ratcheting and hissing that was like nothing he’d ever experienced. Ruth’s eyes leapt. His face felt dead.

“A snake,” she whispered, gripping his arm. “It’s a rattlesnake.” And then: “Someone must be coming up the path.”

Rattlesnake. The flat wicked head rose up from some deep place inside him, the cold lifeless eyes. He was a boy again, clutching his obasan’s hand and staring with grim fascination into the venom-flecked glass of the reptile house at the Tokyo Zoo.

“You’ve got to hide.” Ruth’s face was aflame. “Out there, in back.”

The flat wicked head, the flickering tongue. Did she think he was crazy? He wasn’t going anywhere.

“Now!” Her voice was harsh, toneless. “Go!”

Her hands were on him, she was pushing him, the screen door wrenching open and snapping shut behind him like a set of jaws. He stood there on the doorstep, peering into the throat of the night, wondering if he couldn’t just crouch there on the porch till the overactive reptile and all its flat-headed cousins crawled back into their holes. He caught his breath and held it. All was quiet. No snakes, no intruders. But he remembered the last time, remembered Ruth and her boifurendo thrashing on the rough planks of the porch, and he slunk over the rail and hid himself in the shadows alongside the house.

Just in case.

* * *