East is East (2 page)

Ruth was seated in front, still watching the shadow of the distant
swimmer. “He looked”—she didn't yet know what she wanted to say, didn't yet realize what it was about him that had struck her—“he looked different somehow.”

“Yeah,” Saxby grunted as the engine whined to life, “Chinese or something.” And then he goosed the throttle, the boat swung round on its axis and they shot off in the swimmer's wake.

The breeze caught Ruth's hair as she wriggled into her shorts. Her heart was pounding. She was confused. What had happened? What were they doing? There was no time to think. The waves thumped under her, she clutched at the seat and felt the spray in her face. They were closing fast on the thrashing swimmer when she twisted round and cried out to Saxby.

She was afraid suddenly, afraid of Saxby for the first time in all the months she'd known him. He was decent, kind, easy-going, she knew that, a guy who drank Campari and soda and felt self-conscious about the size of his feet, and yet there was no telling what he'd do in a situation like this. “Son of a bitch,” he spat, and she could see him gritting his teeth in the cold light, and for an instant she pictured the hapless swimmer pounded flat beneath the smooth glistening fist of the hull. “No!” she cried, but he cut the throttle just as they pulled even with the dark twisting shape in the water.

“Let me get a look at this shithead,” Saxby said, and the beam of his flashlight came to life.

For the first time she saw the intruder clearly. There he was, struggling in the wash of the boat, no more than five feet from her. She saw a drift of reddish hair, his odd distorted features, the unfathomable eyes that threw back the light in alarm, and then he was kicking away from the boat, frantic, as Saxby swung the tiller to stay with him. He was panicking, this man in the water, flailing and gasping, fighting at the life buoy under his arm, and all at once she knew he was going to drown. “He's drowning, Sax,” she cried, “he fell off a ship or something.” The engine sang, throttle up, throttle down. The waves slapped at the hull. “We've got to save him.”

She turned to Saxby. His anger was gone now, his face composed, contrite even. “Yeah,” he said, “you're right. Yeah, of course,” and he rose to his feet, rocking back and forth with the motion of the boat, holding his flashlight as if the strength of its beam could hoist the drowning man aboard.

“Throw him a line,” she urged. “Hurry.”

The man in the water, thrashing and blind, reminded her of the little two-foot alligator Saxby had gigged one night in the beam of a flashlight on the pond out back of the big house. The thing was floating, inert, no more animate than a stick or a clump of weed but for the fire its eyes gave back in the light, and then Saxby struck and it folded up like a pocketknife, gone, sucked down into the matted depths, only to come back at them like a switchblade, mad and stung and toothy and dying. “You grab him, grab his arm,” Saxby said, forcing the boat in tight.

But the drowning man didn't want his arm grabbed. He stopped dead, flung the life buoy from him and shouted up at her, shouted in her face, shouted till she could see the glint of gold in his teeth. “Go 'way!” he cried. “Go 'way!” And then he vanished beneath the boat.

And then there was nothing. No sound, no movement. The motor sputtered, the boat drifted. Exhaust washed over them, bitter and metallic.

“He's a nutcase,” Saxby said. “Must of broke out of Milledgeville or something.”

She didn't respond. Her knuckles were drained of blood, her fingers seared into the pale chipped wood of the gunwale. She'd never seen anyone die before, never seen anyone dead, not even her grandmother, who'd had the good sense to pass on while she was in Europe. Something rose in her throat, a deep wad of sorrow and regret. The world was crazy. A moment ago she'd been wrapped in her lover's arms, still and serene, the night spread over them like a blanket … and now someone was dead. “Sax,” she turned to him, pleading, “can't you do something? Can't you dive in and save him?”

Saxby's face was inscrutable. She knew every fiber of him, knew where to hurt him and where to make him feel good, knew how to snip out his soul, wring it in her hands and hang it out like a hankie to dry. But this was something new. She'd never seen him like this before. “Shit,” he said finally, and he looked scared now, that was all right, that was a mode she recognized, “I can't see a damn thing. How can I dive in if I can't see him?”

She watched the beam of the flashlight play dully over the surface, and then she heard something, a faint splash, the sweet allision of breaking water. “Over there!” she shouted and Saxby swung the light. For a moment they saw nothing, and then the shore, with its close dark beard of Spartina grass, leaped into view like a slide clapped into a projector. “There!” she cried, and it was him, the swimmer, standing now, the sea lapping at his belt loops, a limp white shirt hanging from him like a rag.

“Hey!” Saxby bellowed, angry again, enraged. “Hey, you! I'm talking to you, you jackass. What are you trying—?”

“Hush,” Ruth warned him, but it was too late: the intruder was gone again, already enveloped in vegetation, thrashing through the reeds like a gutshot deer, already anonymous. The sea lay flat beneath the beam of the flashlight. The picture was empty. It was then that the life buoy drifted into view, just beyond her reach, in a wash of reeds and plastic refuse. “Let me—” she grunted, stretching for it, but Saxby anticipated her and powered the boat forward. And then she had it, a prize fished out of the water and dripping in her lap.

She turned it over and there they were, the bold red ideographs that spelled out the name of the
Tokachi-maru.
She couldn't read them, of course, but they were a revelation nonetheless. Saxby hovered over her, peering down at the thing as if it were treasure. The light was in her lap, the breeze gave her a scent of the shore. “Yes,” she said finally, “Chinese.”

Hiro tanaka was no more chinese than she was. he was a Japanese, of the Yamato race—or at least on his mother's side he was, no one would question that—and he'd left the
Tokachi-maru
amid strained circumstances. The fact is, he jumped ship. Literally. This wasn't a case of cozying up to a barmaid or falling down dead drunk in some back alley while the ship weighed anchor; this was deliberate, death-defying, a leap into the infinite. Like his idol Yukio Mishima, and Mishima's idol before him, J
ō
ch
ō
Yamamoto, Hiro Tanaka was a man of decision. When
be
jumped ship, he didn't entangle himself in verbal niceties: no, he just jumped.

On the day in question, the
Tokachi-maru
was steaming north along the coast of Georgia, bound for Savannah with a load of tractor parts, DAT recorders and microwave ovens. It was a day like any other, the wind brisk, the sun baked into the sky, the 12,000-ton freighter ironing the waves as if they were wrinkles in a shirt. All but six of the forty-member crew sat straight-backed over their western-style lunches (corned beef hash, sardines in oil, scrambled eggs and home fries, all wedded in a single pot and seasoned with A. 1. sauce and Gulden's mustard). Captain Nishizawa was in his cabin, sleeping off his preprandial
sake;
Chief Mate Wakabayashi and Able Bodied Seaman Kuma were in the chart
room and at the helm, respectively; Ordinaries Uetto and Dorai were on watch; and Hiro was in the brig.

Actually, Hiro was in a storage closet on the third deck. It was sixty-four feet square, or about the size of the apartment he had occupied with his grandmother prior to signing on the
Tokachi-maru,
and it was illuminated by a single jittery 40-watt bulb. Hiro had been given a wooden bowl and a pair of chopsticks for his alimentary needs, a bucket in which to relieve himself and a futon to spread on the cold steel floor. There was no ventilation, and the little room stank of fumigant and the Bunker C fuel the huge steam turbines burned day and night. Twenty mops, twenty buckets and sixteen flat-headed brooms hung from hooks screwed into the walls. A scatter of odds and ends—paint scrapers, empty Sapporo boxes, a single Nike tennis shoe spattered with tar—lay where the last storm had strewn them. The door locked from the outside.

Though he was conscientious, well mannered and inoffensive, and so silent and circumspect as to be nearly invisible among his shipmates, Hiro found himself confined to this hateful steel room, his diet limited to two balls of white rice and one tin cup of water daily, because of an uncharacteristic act of defiance: he had disobeyed the direct order of an officer. The officer was Chief Mate Wakabayashi, a survivor of the Battle of Rarotonga who carried shrapnel in his lower back, legs, arms, feet and at the base of his skull, and whose temper consequently tended to be short. He had issued a direct order to Hiro to cease and desist constricting the windpipe of First Cook Hideo Chiba, who at the time lay thrashing on the galley floor beneath Hiro's full and outraged weight. And that was a good deal of weight: at five foot ten, Hiro, who was inordinately fond of eating, weighed close to two hundred pounds. Chiba, who was inordinately fond of drinking, weighed less than a wet mop.

The moment was chaotic. Second Cook Moronobu Unagi, who had once parboiled the face of an OS in a dispute over a bottle of Suntory, was screeching like a parrot: “He's killing him! Murder, murder, murder!”; the Chief Engineer, an intense silent man in his
seventies, with bad feet and ill-fitting dentures, tugged ineffectively at Hiro's shoulders; and half a dozen deckhands stood around jeering. Chief Mate Wakabayashi, in his pristine white uniform, scurried up to where the combatants lay entangled on the galley floor, delivered his stentorian order, and was immediately flung into a pot of clear broth as the ship chose that moment to plunge into a trough. Soup—it was a twenty-gallon pot—cascaded onto the floor, searing Hiro's back and permeating Chiba, who already stank enough for three men, with the essence of reduced fish. Through it all, Hiro held his grip.

And what had driven so mild a man to so desperate a pass?

The immediate cause was a pan of hard-cooked eggs. Hiro, who'd signed on the
Tokachi-maru
as Third Cook, beneath the drunken and foul-smelling Chiba and the drunken, leering and unctuous Unagi, was preparing a dish of
nishiki tamago
as an appetizer for the evening meal. The task consisted of shelling a hundred hard-boiled eggs, carefully separating the yolks from the whites, very finely chopping and seasoning each, and finally reuniting them—tenderly—in half-inch layers in a succession of stainless-steel pans. Hiro had learned the recipe from his grandmother—and he knew some thirty others by heart—and yet this was the first time in the six weeks since the ship had left Yokohama that he'd been allowed to prepare the dish himself. More usually, he acted as
sous chef,
errand boy and galley slave, scrubbing pans, polishing the gas ranges, cleaning mountains of defrosted squid, cuttlefish and bonito, chopping seaweed and peeling grapes till his fingers went numb. On this particular afternoon, however, Chiba and Unagi were indisposed. They had been drinking
sake
since breakfast in celebration of
O-bon,
the Buddhist festival of ancestral spirits, and Hiro had been left to himself while they strove to commune with the shades of the departed. He worked hard. Worked with pride and concentration. Eight trays lay before him, exquisitely prepared. As a finishing touch, he sprinkled the dishes with black sesame seed, just as his grandmother had taught him.

It was a mistake. Because at that moment, just as he held the
shaker inverted over the last tray, Chiba and Unagi staggered into the galley. “Idiot!” Chiba screeched, slapping the shaker from his hand. The shaker clattered off the gas range. Hiro averted his face and hung his head. Through his sandals, deep in the soles of his feet, he could feel the
ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum
of the screws churning through the sour green waves beneath them. “Never,” Chiba seethed, his sunken chest and fleshless arms trembling, “never use black sesame on
nishiki tamago.”
He turned to Unagi. “Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

Unagi's eyes were slits. He rubbed his hands together as if in anticipation of some rare treat, and he bowed his head with a quick snap. “Never,” he breathed, waiting, waiting, “except maybe among foreigners. Among
gaijin.”

Now Hiro looked up. The underlying cause of his explosion, the cause of all his torment in life, was about to surface.

Chiba leaned into him, his monkey face twisted with hatred, flecks of spittle on his upper lip.
“Gaijin”
he spat. “Long-nose.
Ket
ō
. Bata-kusai.”
And then he unfolded his clenched fist, studied the palm of his hand for an instant, and without warning struck a savage blow to the bridge of Hiro's nose. Then he turned to the pans of
nishiki tamago.
Raging, in a mad flurry of skinny wrists and snapping elbows, he overturned them on the floor, one after another. “Offal!” he shouted. “Dog shit! Fit for pigs!” Through it all, Unagi regarded Hiro through half-closed eyes, grinning.

This is the point at which Hiro lost control. Or rather, he didn't lose control exactly, but attacked his tormentor in what Mishima would call “an explosion of pure action.” The
nishiki tamago
was on the floor, the twenty-gallon kettle rattling its lid, Unagi grinning and Chiba spouting invective, the moment suspended as the tintinnabulation of the last pan hung in the air, and then the First Cook was swimming in chopped egg and Hiro's fingers were locked on his throat. Chiba gasped, the turkey flesh of his neck turning red under Hiro's white, white fingers. Unagi screamed: “Murder! Murder! Murder!” And all the while Hiro hung on, ignoring the jeers, the scalding soup, Chiba's hot foul breath and the face that
swelled beneath him like a blood blister, oblivious to Wakabayashi and the Chief Engineer, fighting like a rabid dog against the pull of the eight men it took to separate him from his tormentor. He was beyond caring, beyond pain, the words of J
ō
ch
ō
pounding in his head:
One cannot accomplish feats of greatness in a normal frame of mind. One must turn fanatic and develop a mania for dying.