East is East

T. C. Boyle

For Georges and Anne Borchardt

Those who wish to live horribly and die horribly are choosing a beautiful way of life.

—Yukio Mishima, The Way of the Samurai

“Bred and bawn in de briar patch, Br’er Fox, bred and bawn.”

—Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus

Contents

Part I: Tupelo Island

Small Matters

The Tokachi-maru

Thanatopsis House

Hog Hammock

The Squarest People in the World

Queen Bee

Fea Purē

Behind a Wall of Glass

Rusu

The Other Half

Still at Large

Parfait in Chrome

The Dogs Are Barking, Woof-Woof

Part II: The Okefenokee

Everybody’s Secret

Four Walls

The Whiteness of the Fish

A Jungle

Where the Earth Trembles

Tender Sproats

Cheap Thrills

The Power of the Human Voice

Haha

Part III: Port of Savannah

Journalism

The City of Brotherly Love

Acknowledgments

A Note on the Author

Also available by T. C. Boyle

By the Same Author

Part I

Tupelo Island

Small Matters

He was swimming, rotating from front to back, thrashing his arms and legs and puffing out his cheeks, and it seemed as if he’d been swimming forever. He did the crawl, the breaststroke, the Yokohama kick. Tiring, he clung to the cork life ring like some shapeless creature of the depths, a pale certificate of flesh. Sometime during the fifth hour, he began to think of soup. Miso-shiru, rice chowder, the thin sea-stinking broth his grandmother would make of fish heads and eel. And then he thought of beer—bottles like amber jewels in a bed of ice—and finally he thought of water, only water.

When the sun went down, taking all the color with it and leaving behind a surface as hard and cold as hammered pewter, his tongue was swollen in his throat and the deepest yearnings of his gut gnawed at him like imperious little animals. His hands were bloated and raw, the life ring chafed at his arms, gulls swooped close to appraise him with their professional eyes. He might have given up. Might have eased into the dream of bed and supper and home, slipping into the broth of the sea centimeter by centimeter until the ring floated free and the anonymous waves closed over him. But he resisted. He thought of Mishima and Jōchō and the book he’d taped round his chest, beneath the now limp and sodden turtleneck. Enfolded in a panoply of Ziploc bags, bound to him with black electrical tape and repository of four odd green little American bills, it tugged at the place where his heart beat.

One should take important considerations lightly, Jōchō said. Small matters should be taken seriously. Yes. Of course. What did it matter if he lived or died, if he washed ashore and discovered a simmering pot of noodles with pork and green onion or if the sharks nibbled his toes, his feet, his shins and thighs? What mattered was, was … the moon. Yes: the small slip of a perfect moon cut like a parenthesis into the darkening horizon. It was rising, white and pristine, delicate as a fingernail paring. He forgot his hunger, his thirst, forgot the teeming teeth of the sea, and made the moon his own.

Of course, at the same time, he knew he would make it, which made Jōchō’s advice a lot easier to stomach. It wasn’t only the birds—the pelicans and cormorants and gulls beating west to their roosts—but the smell of the shore that told him as much. Sailors talk of the sweet wafting odor of the landfall that awakens them thirty miles out to sea, but on this, his maiden voyage, he’d never noticed it. Not on board the Tokachi-maru, anyway. It was here, fixed to the surface, the twenty short years of his life raveling out like the threads of a frayed cord, that it struck him. Suddenly his nose was an instrument of vigorous and minutely calibrated sensitivity, houndlike and true: he could discern the individual blades of grass on the black shore that lay somewhere ahead of him, and he knew that there were people there, Americans, with their butter-stink and their pots of ketchup and mayonnaise and all the rest, and that beneath them there was dead dry sand and mud seething with crabs and nematodes and all the unseeable particles of decay that it comprises. And more, much more: the musk of wild animals, the healthy domestic stench of dogs and cats and parrots, the metallic odor of spray paint and fuel oil, the faintly sweet scent of the exhaust of outboard engines, the perfume—so rich and potent it made him want to sob—of night-blooming flowers, of jasmine and honeysuckle and a thousand things he’d never smelled before.

He’d been ready to die, and now he was going to make it.

He was close. He knew it. He stirred his legs in the darkening waters.

“Shouldn’t we have a light or something?”

“Hm?” His voice was a warm murmur at her throat. He was half asleep.

“Running lights,” Ruth said, her own voice pitched low, almost a whisper. “Isn’t that what they call them?”