Tom Boyle - East is East

“Hey, La D., Ruthie,” Irving boomed, enfolding her in his arms, “that was some stuff. You’re great, babes.” She could see Sandy standing behind him, smiling weakly, a preambulatory Brie clutching at him for support. And beyond them, she saw Jane Shine rise from the couch to stretch and yawn theatrically, yawing the mass of her hair this way and that and exchanging some nasty little witticism with Mignonette Teitelbaum and the gaping, blinking, eye-rubbing, nose-blowing form of Orlando Seezers. The three of them shared a laugh that was like shredding metal and then Jane swept back her hair so Ruth could get a look at her pajamas.

Ruth felt a sudden hot stab at her insides. These weren’t lounging pajamas, this wasn’t a tunic or a djellabah, this was no fashion statement—no, Jane Shine was wearing a put-down, a slap in the face, the decisive killing counterthrust to Ruth’s feeble parry: she was in her nightdress. It was that simple: Jane had come prepared for bed.

Ruth looked away, but the damage was done. The night was a disaster, she was careening from the Thanatopsian heavens, burned to a cinder like a poor extinguished meteor, and all she could think of was the billiard room and how they would slaughter her over this.

They left, the Jeffcoats, the way they had come, on a shimmer of light. Hiro watched them till they were out of sight, till the moving paddles, the glistening hull and the strong square rhythmically working shoulders were swallowed up in the merciless bank of green. They were heading back to the dock, back to where the flame-faced hakujin crouched over their catch and the sheriffs and park rangers fingered their weapons beneath the wide brims of their hats. They were on a mission of mercy, violating the sanctity of their itinerary and scrapping their schedule for him, Seiji Chiba, the Chinese tourist attacked by crocodiles.

Hiro felt light-headed. He sat heavily on the platform beside the bundle of food they’d left him and languished a doleful look on the bend round which they’d disappeared. In an hour they would hate him. They would glide into the dock with their wide-open faces and confident eyes, gee-whizzing and gollying at the sheriff’s convention awaiting them, at the baying dogs, revving engines and jaws set with hate. There’s a man in trouble out there, they’d say. Where? the sheriffs would bark, where is be? Red trail platform, Jeff Jeffcoat would answer, but what’s the problem? Jail break, the sheriffs would spit. A Jap, and a arsonist into the bargain. Assaulted some people, migbta killed a poor innocent old black man. But no, Jeff Jeffcoat would say, you’ve got it all wrong, this man’s a tourist, be lost his boat. For Christ’s sake, Jeff Jeffcoat would say, he’s Chinese.

They’d be after him soon, homing in on this very platform like heat-seeking missiles, like avenging angels. He had to get up. Had to slosh back off into the muck and neck-deep water, had to crawl back up the orifice of America the Primitive. But he felt enervated, weak, felt as if all the fight had been drained out of him and Jōchō reduced to the mad gibbering irrelevant monk he was. He was sick, that’s what it was. He raised a hand to his brow and felt the fever burning there. And then it was in his guts, tearing at him like Mishima’s sword, and he doubled over and vomited up the corned beef hash, the ketchup and coffee and eggs, the Cup O’Noodles, the potato chips and pound cake, vomited till he tasted the deep bitter purple-black berries and the gall of his bile. For a long while he lay there, unable to move, tiny iridescent flies settling on the mess even as it dripped through the slats of the platform to feed the massed and waiting mouths below. But then the pain tore at him again and he rose shakily and fumbled his way into the rough-wood cubicle of the toilet.

The flies greeted him. They rose from the chemical mouth of the thing, the crapper, in a miasma of dancing gnats and the reek of chemicals and human waste. He tore down his pants, the knife in his guts, the black steaming odor of shit—American shit, Julie Jeffcoat’s shit—stabbing at his nostrils. “Amerikajin” he cursed aloud as his guts exploded beneath him, the filth of them, flinging themselves down on plastic seats where a thousand others have flung themselves down before them, taking the dirt of the bowels to the table with them, sitting there over their food, as bland as stones, their buttocks and shoes reeking from the toilet. God, he thought, clutching at himself to keep from passing out with the pain of it, they were beasts, they were, and he hated them.

He didn’t know how long he sat there—he must have dozed—but he woke to something boring at his ankle and the sick corrupt reek of his own bowels. A film of cold sweat clung to his temples. He was sick—yellow fever, dysentery, encephalitis, hookworm, malaria, the dirty diseases of a dirty place—and he needed medicine, a bed, his obasan. But no, not his obasan —his mother, his dead mother, his mom. “Haha!” he cried out like an infant, his voice strained and odd in his own ears, “Mama!” And then he dozed again, seated there on that plastic throne where Julie Jeffcoat had sat and Jeff Jeffcoat and Jeffie and the legion of nameless butter-tinkers before them, white faces that crowded into his dream like a conquering army.

When he woke again he felt better. He wondered briefly where he was, and then he knew and the fear of the hakujin and of the chase seized him. They were here, they were sure to be here, and he was trapped. He thought of Musashi, the legendary samurai who’d once hidden from his enemies in a latrine, buried in offal, with only a straw through which to breathe, and then he was in motion. He sprang up off the seat as if it were electrified, hastily fastening the cutoffs and peering breathlessly through the crack of the door. He expected demons, long-noses, ketō, the waking nightmare into which he’d plunged from the wingdeck of the Tokachi-maru, expected shotguns, bullhorns, the bared teeth and rending snarls of the dogs … but there was nothing. Nothing but the swamp, stultified with sun, the womb and grave of everything. He cracked the door. Edged out. And then the heat hit him and his head ached and his eyes swam with a fresh assault of the fever.

The door was shut behind him and the planks creaking under his feet before he realized how wrong he was. There was something there on the platform with him, unmistakable, too big to miss, something slow-blooded and antediluvian and muscular that even now was swiveling its long grinning snout to fix him with a cold eye. This was a thing that dwarfed the platform, the serrated tail and one clawed foot hanging over the far edge and dipping into the slough beyond it, the rippled belly stretching the length of the planks, and in the foreground, the hard pale lump of the jaw pinning down the sack of sandwiches and the rest with the weight of an anvil. Hiro looked at this thing and he felt the fever loosen its grip. His heart was hammering at his rib cage, there was an ache in his temples. He had to form the words in his head before he could understand: he was standing six feet from a crocodile the length of a canoe and it was looking at him and he was looking at it. This was not good. This was bad and dangerous. This was a situation that might have taxed Jōchō himself.

For a long while the thing merely regarded him out of the motionless eye, frozen in its length and mass, the statue of a crocodile, carved of stone. Hiro could smell it, its pores giving up a wild scent of the deepest bottom, of decay and solitude and the dark quiet seep of gas. He wondered, briefly lucid, if he should back into the latrine and pull the door shut, leap for the rafters and live out his life on the roof, fling himself off the far edge of the deck and sprint for the trees through the slurry of muck and water. None of the options really grabbed him. In the end, he stood there, sailing in and out of the port of consciousness, wanting one moment to reach out and stroke the thing, to ride it into the cool depths and share his lunch with it, and in the next, contemplating his death in its iron jaws, the rending of the flesh, the transfiguration and ultimate conversion to crocodile shit. Finally, as if it had had enough of the whole business, the bloated inert thing came to sudden life and slid off the dock and into the water with a swift surprising grace, inadvertently taking the sack of food with it.