East is East

was someone—or something—there with him.

He moved like a man coming out of a coma, like Br’er Rabbit stuck to the tarbaby, his hands trembling as he remembered Varner Arms and how he was found dead in his own kitchen, blood spattered on the walls and hag’s hair—wild black hanks of it—scattered across the linoleum like a greeting from the darkest pit. His shoulders were rigid, his neck like a flagpole planted deep in the earth. But slowly, ever so slowly, he swiveled his gray-bristling chin till he presented his profile and one wild eye to whatever or whoever stood in the doorway behind him.

What he saw there, through the contracting lens of that one wild eye, froze his heart. What he saw was Wheeler, his brother Wheeler, risen from the grave and with his skin gone the color of leaf mulch, Wheeler, wearing the red cotton button-up shirt and denim overalls he’d left draped over the hard slab of the tombstone not three days ago. “Wheeler!” he cried, jerking around awkwardly and throwing up his arms in extenuation, “I didden mean it, I didden, I never should of called you them low mizzable things on the day you done pass on, but I—” and then he stopped cold. This wasn’t Wheeler standing there in his kitchen with a look on his face like he’d just gone and taken a dump in his own pants … this wasn’t Wheeler with the overalls pinched round the gut and stuck halfway up his shins and the slanting eyes and iron-straight hair hanging in his face … this was, this was some kind of Chinaman or something. But what was a Chinaman doing in Olmstead White’s kitchen in Hog Hammock on Tupelo Island? It mystified him. It baffled him. In the end, it upset him more than any six hags and apparitions could ever have. “Who you be?” he roared.

For his part, Hiro was no less shocked than the black man who stood twitching and jerking before him. In a delirium he’d staggered out of the salt marsh and up onto solid ground, his dead mother and his lost father dancing round him like fairies, root beer floats and slurpies and stone jugs of cold sake in their fluttering hands, and he’d found a rain puddle there, nothing more than diluted mud really, and he’d buried his face in it. By then the smell of cooking fat was overpowering and near and he pushed himself up and went for it at a trot. That was when he’d found the gravestones—crude rock slabs poking up out of the weeds like something he’d seen in a spaghetti Western. The first of the markers caught him in the shin; the second grazed the side of his face as he went down. When he untangled his feet and pushed himself up, he saw the shirt and pants, an overturned plate, a string of dried peppers and a weathered deck of cards. He didn’t think, couldn’t think, the smell of deep-fried fish— oysters, yes, oysters—driving all else before it, and in half a minute he’d exchanged his torn and filthy clothes for the shirt and overalls. He was hopping, actually hopping as if in some child’s game, as if he were in a sack race, as he shrugged into the overalls and slashed through the garden toward that supreme and dictatorial smell.

But now, here he was, in strange stolen clothes in a stranger’s house and the stranger was shouting at him. Worse: the stranger was a black man, a Negro, and he knew, as every Japanese does, that Negroes were depraved and vicious, hairier, sweatier and even more potent than their white counterparts, the hakujin. They were violent and physical, they were addicted to drugs and they thought only with their sexual organs. He’d seen one once, in the streets of Tokyo, a besuboru player named Clarence Hawkins, first baseman for the Hiroshima Carp. An awesome man, like a walking statue. But he had no heart—no hara—and he wasn’t a team player. Here was a man who could have hit a home run with every swing of the bat and yet he refused to take practice with the others, refused the calisthenics and the drill of the thousand fungoes and running in the outfield and the cold baths that demonstrated team spirit and a will to win and guts and determination. The pitchers gave him nothing to hit and the umpires called everything a strike, even if it bounced, and within the year he was back in America. That was a Negro. And here was another, shouting at him in his incomprehensible gibberish.

“Shipwreck!” Hiro shouted back, waving his arms in imitation of the gaijin. “I am starving. Please, I beg you, give me something to eat!”

Olmstead White heard him, but for all the good it did, Hiro might as well have been talking Japanese. “Somesing eat” was all that came through, and even that didn’t register, so alien was Hiro’s accent—and even if it had, the sequel would have been no different. Feeling trapped in his own kitchen, feeling scared and embarrassed and angry, delivered from the haunts and hags and into the hands of a stranger—an Asiotic Chinaman, no less— Olmstead White reacted in the only way he could. Before him, on the table, lay the butcher knife, the one he kept honed for punching through the stiff bristle of his Christmas hog and the soft underbelly of opossum and deer. He looked at Hiro, looked at the knife, and snatched it up.

Hiro could sense that the situation had deteriorated. The veins stood out in the Negro’s neck and the whites of his eyes were swollen. He kept shouting and there were flecks of spittle on his lips. It was obvious that he hadn’t understood a word. And now he had a knife in his hand, the blade ugly with use. Behind him, the oysters sent up their ambrosial aroma.

It looked bad. It did. Hiro should have turned and fled, he knew that, and he knew too that the blade was sharp and the old man tenacious, a wild beast surprised in its lair. But the oysters exerted their influence, and he recalled the words of Jocho: A true samurai must never seem to flag or lose heart. He must push on courageously as though sure to come out on top. Otherwise he is utterly useless. “Somesing eat,” he repeated.

What happened next came as a surprise to them both. Untended, the oysters smoldered, calcified, approached critical mass; in the next instant they burst into flame with a sudden startling rush of air while a thick black plume of smoke billowed up from the pan, growing thicker and blacker even as it rose. Instinctively, both antagonists went for the pan. In the process, Hiro, who despite the loss of twenty pounds was still a broad-beamed young man, jostled the elderly Olmstead White, and Olmstead White, suffering from a touch of arthritis in his right hip, lost his balance, and in losing his balance, thrust out a hand to brace himself. Unfortunately, that hand didn’t make contact with the tabletop or the corner of the stove. Instead, it came down squarely in the center of the pan of flaming grease and incinerated oysters, and Olmstead White let out a howl that would have unraveled the topknot of even the staunchest of samurai. The pan tottered a moment on the edge of the stove and then slammed to the floor in an explosion of flame.

In an instant, the shack was ablaze. Jaws of flame chewed at the floorboards, the walls, devoured the dirty yellow curtains. Hiro took to his feet. He was out the door, across the porch and into the crude graveyard before he caught himself. What was he doing? Had he gone mad? He couldn’t leave the old Negro in there to burn to death, could he? He turned, Jocho’s injunction on his lips—you had to act, without hesitation, or you were lost, disgraced, a coward—and started back for the house. It was then that the Negro appeared in the smoke-shrouded doorway, his hair singed, his right hand the color of steamed lobster. Hiro stopped again. What stopped him this time, what deflated the balloon of his resolve and rendered Jocho meaningless, was the object cradled in the old man’s good arm. For Olmstead White stood there on the porch, the shack an inferno behind him, fumbling with a double- barreled shotgun and a box of bright yellow shells.

And then Hiro was running again, running from the thunder of the shotgun and the hiss of the flames and the shouts and cries of the aroused neighborhood. All at once there were people everywhere, screaming, running, crying, scrambling over one another like ants pouring out of an anthill. He dodged a fat old woman with a face like a No mask and veered away from a pair of startled boys in dirty shorts, and then he was cutting through a dusty yard, scattering chickens and hogs and howling brown babies in white plastic diapers. Running, he glanced over his shoulder and saw the flaming shack in the distance above a sea of black faces and gyrating limbs. It was a scene that made him catch his breath, a scene of utter horror and depravity, dusky faces and sharp white teeth, the cannibals of his boyhood picture books dancing round their hideous cookfire. Hiro ran, no hunger worth this, ran into the deepening shadows and through the muck and puddles and the strange tropical vegetation, ran till at long last the shouts and the curses and the barking of the dogs fell away from him like so much sloughed skin.

* * *

All the next day he crouched in the bushes, chewing roots and leaves and the odd handful of sour berries, while voices flared round him and dogs whined and grunted at the leash. Vicious, vengeful, outraged, they were hunting him, these black men of the bush, looking to flush him out, settle the score, lynch him as they were lynched by the hakujin. At daybreak a grim-looking Negro with red-flecked eyes came within five paces of where he lay trembling in a thicket of holly and palmetto. The man had a gun, and he was so close Hiro could have reached out and unlaced his shoes. He was terrified. He was miserable. He was hungry. Day bled into night and he fumbled through the dark bush, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the porch lights and barking dogs.

The truth is, he didn’t know where he was or where he was going. All he knew was that he was starving and that the gaijin authorities would be after him and that if they caught him he’d be