Boyle Coraghessan - East is East

“Jesus,” the girl said. “Ah’ll be goddamned.”

And then the boy spoke for the first time. “You a foreigner or somethin’?” he said.

Someone had come into the store. Hiro could feel the heavy tread on the floorboards and he watched the girl’s face brighten. “Hi ya, Sax,” she said.

Hiro didn’t dare look up. It could have been the chief of police, the Coast Guard, one of the long-noses from Immigration Akio had told him about. Heart pounding, he concentrated on the girl’s hands as she separated his things, put some of them in a brown paper sack and held out three small coins to him. He took the coins and bowed again. “Thank you, thank you,” he said, and in his gratitude, his relief, his joy at the prospect of the feast awaiting him and his redemption from the slow death of the swamps, he slipped into Japanese. “Dōmo,” he said. “Dōmo sumimasen.”

The girl gaped at him. And then he turned, hurrying, and saw the tall gaijin with the colorless hair and cold ceramic eyes, the one who’d tried to run him down with his boat, and in the next instant he was out the door, tucking the package under his arm like a football and bolting for the woods in a mad desperate headlong flight. He never paused, never hesitated, though the butter-stinker was out in the lot behind him shouting, “Hey! Wait a minute! Come back here, will you? I don’t … I-just-want-to-help-you!”

Help me, Hiro thought, the blood singing in his ears as he flung himself into the ditch and staggered through the scum and into the waist-deep quagmire and the cover of the trees beyond, yes, sure, help me. He knew them. Americans. They killed each other over dinner, shot one another for sport, mugged old ladies in the street.

Help like that he didn’t need.

The Squarest People in the World

There were no two ways about it: he was going to have to go down there. Not that he wanted to. Anything but. The thought of driving to Tupelo Island in this heat—and with a broken-down air conditioner no less—so he could stand around in the haze interrogating a bunch of snuff-dipping inbred cracker morons who could barely wheeze “uh-huh” or “naw” without growing roots and bark, was enough to make him wish he was back in L. A. Or almost.

Detlef Abercorn stood at the window gazing out at the flat dead sky that hung over Savannah like an old dishrag. It was a gray humid high-summer morning, sunless but stifling. He hadn’t read the paper yet, had barely blown the steam off his first cup of coffee, and already his shirt was wet through. Ten minutes earlier he’d breezed into the office, blown a kiss to Ginger, the new receptionist with the freckled cleavage and congenitally parted lips, switched on his monitor, taken a perfectly innocent sip of coffee—and watched an IAADA alert claw its way across the screen.

An IAADA—Illegal Alien, Armed, Dangerous and Amok—was the highest priority designation in the INS electronic mail file. In Los Angeles, the innermost circle of INS hell, IAADAs went out routinely, what with Guatemalans shooting at Salvadorans, Hmong tribesmen microwaving dogs, Turks and Iranians setting fire to carpet stores and the like—but here, in the mossy old somnolent backwater of Savannah, they were unheard of. The place wasn’t exactly a hotbed of international intrigue or even a semi-major port. Nothing ever happened here. Ever. That’s why he’d transferred.

It was the Nip, of course—he corrected himself: the Japanese—who’d jumped ship the week before. He’d been monitoring the situation from the beginning—he’d interviewed the ship’s captain over the phone and obtained and filed a copy of the Coast Guard report—but it was no big deal. They’d classified the AWOL sailor as IA—Illegal Alien—and left it at that. If he made it to shore, the yokels would have him in the county jail before he could shit twice, and if he gave them any trouble they’d string him up and skin him like a rabbit. But then the report came in that he had made it to shore—there were eyewitnesses, a couple from the artists’ colony he’d attacked in Peagler Sound—and Abercorn had dug deeper. From the Chief Engineer of the Japanese ship—a desiccated old fart about a hundred and twelve years old who looked as if he’d been hatched from an egg—he learned that the man at large was armed with a knife and had attacked half the ship’s crew before throwing himself over the rail, and so he’d had the regional head upgrade the designation to IAAD, Armed and Dangerous. Still, it was no big deal. A Nip in Georgia? These people ate weasel, picked their teeth with their feet, grew right up out of the ground like weeds, like kudzu; the poor dumb Nip—Japanese—wouldn’t last a day, six hours even. Abercorn was sure of it. And then the weekend had intervened and he made the rounds of the discos, drank too much, got lucky, learned most of everything about a girl named Brenda who used blusher on her breasts, and forgot all about the AWOL Nip on Tupelo Island.

But now things had gotten out of hand. An IAADA. He sighed. He’d been looking forward to a long quiet morning with the new le Carré and a pot of fresh-dripped Folgers, with nothing, absolutely nothing to do, except listen to the girls in the main office type up the odd student visa and whisper about the scandalous sex lives of people they barely knew. Yes. And now this. He turned wearily to his desk, lit a cigarette and typed in a request for more information. The screen immediately began to fill:

TANAKA HIRO. JAPANESE NATIONAL. BORN KYOTO 6/12/70. MOTHER TANAKA SAKURAKO DECEASED 12/24/70. FATHER UNKNOWN. LAST KNOWN RESIDENCE GRANDMOTHER TANAKA WAKAKO 74 YAMAZATO-CHO NAKA-KU YOKOHAMA. ARMED AND DANGEROUS AND AMOK TUPELO ISLAND MID-GEORGIA COAST ADVISE EXTREME CAUTION. ESCAPED BRIG AND ASSAULTED OFFICERS TOKACHI-MARU FREIGHTER JAPANESE REGISTRATION 1300 HOURS 20 JULY. UNPROVOKED ATTACKS ON EYEWITNESSES LIGHTS SAXBY DERSHOWITZ RUTH WHITE OLMSTEAD FIRST DEGREE BURNS ARSON HOUSE FIRE TOTAL LOSS.

Jesus, was he setting fire to houses now? This was bad news. Worse than bad. The guy must be a psychopath, he thought, a terrorist, a Japanese Manson. And it got worse: he’d been at large a week and already the list of sightings filled the screen. He was everywhere, from Peagler Sound to Hog Hammock and Tupelo Shores Estates and back again, popping up out of the bushes like a jack-in-the-box, terrifying old ladies and stirring up the war veterans and coon hunters till gunfire crackled across the island in an unholy storm from morning till night. He’d cursed a bunch of people at the local grocery, filched three pairs of ladies’ undergarments from a clothesline at the artists’ colony and made off with a tin dish of dogfood the sheriff himself had set out on his back porch. It had to stop. Detlef Abercorn knew what was expected of him.

The thing was, he’d had no experience with anything like this. He’d spent his twelve years in L.A. raiding sweatshops in Eagle Rock and chasing skinny busboys around tofu-spattered kitchens in Chinatown. What did he know about swamps and hollows—what did he know about Georgia, for that matter? Sure, it was up to the local authorities to make the nab, but he was supposed to be the expert, he was supposed to cast the net, advise them—advise them, what a joke: he could barely make out a word they said down here. Even worse, he’d never had a problem, not that he could remember, with the Japanese. Tongans, yes. Ecuadorians, Tibetans and Liberians, Bantu, Pakistanis and Sea Dyak, everybody and anybody. But not Japanese. They never entered the country illegally. Didn’t want to. They figured they had it all and more over there, so why bother? Plenty of them came in to run factories and open banks and whatnot, but all that was done at the highest levels. And Detlef Abercorn didn’t work at the highest levels.