East is East

He woke to the smell of corned beef hash and eggs. It was an unusual smell—aside from the slop Chiba concocted, he’d had little experience of foreign foods—but he recognized the habitual hakujin odor of incinerated meat. “Seiji!” a voice chirped at him the moment he opened his eyes. It was Julie Jeffcoat. She was in shorts and a shell top that emphasized her breasts, motherly and sexy all at once. “Sleep well?” she asked, crossing the platform to hand him a cup of simmering black coffee. The sun was up. It was hot already. Jeff Jr. perched at the edge of the platform, methodically flicking a lure from the tip of his rod to the far edge of the pond and then drawing it back again, while his father bent over the canoe, stowing away their gear in tight precise little bundles. He whistled while he worked. “Well,” he boomed, glancing over his shoulder at Hiro, “ready for some breakfast, pardner?”

Dazed by the assault of cheer and energy, Hiro could only nod his assent. He was feeling a bit queasy—but then why wouldn’t he, with all he’d been through—and he hoped the food would help steady him.

Jeff Jeffcoat turned back to his work. Jeff Jr.’s line sizzled through the guys and there was a distant splash. Hiro sat up to blow at his coffee and Julie Jeffcoat presented him with a plastic plate heaped with eggs, hashed meat, puffed potatoes and fruit cocktail from a can. It looked like something Chiba would whip up for one of his western-style lunches. “Ketchup?” Julie asked, and when he nodded, she squirted a red paste over everything.

“Denver omelet, yes?” Hiro said.

Julie Jeffcoat smiled, and it was a beautiful Amerikajin

smile, uncomplicated and frank, a smile that belonged on the cover of a magazine. “Sort of,” she said.

Half an hour later, Hiro watched Jeff Jeffcoat steady the canoe as first Jeff Jr. and then Julie eased themselves into the narrow trembling envelope of the vessel. It was heaped to the gunwales with the neatly stowed paraphernalia of their adventure in the wilderness, with their cooler, their charcoal and starter fluid, their binoculars and fishing rods and mess kit, their tents and sleeping bags and changes of clothing, their paperback books, flashlights, lip balm and licorice. There was no room for Hiro. Jeff Jeffcoat had assured him that they would paddle straight back to the boat launch and get a ranger to come rescue him. He looked pained—he was pained—because they couldn’t take Hiro with them. But Hiro—or Seiji, as they knew him—wouldn’t be forgotten, he had Jeff’s word on that.

Before he shoved off, Jeff Jeffcoat had impulsively sprung from the canoe to shuck his loafers and hand them to Hiro. “Here,” he said, “I’ve got another two pairs in my backpack, and you’re going to need these more than I do.” Hiro accepted the shoes with a bow. They were Top-Siders, the sort of shoes the blond surfers wore in the beer commercials on Japanese television. Hiro slipped them on, feeling like a surfer himself in the cutoffs and oversized T-shirt, as Jeff Jeffcoat eased back into the canoe and shoved off with a mighty thrust of the paddle. “So long,” he called, “and don’t worry: they’ll be here to get you by noon. I promise.”

“ ’Bye!” Jeff Jr. cried, shrill as a bird.

Julie turned to wave. “Bye-bye,” she called, and her voice was like Ruth’s, and for a moment it stirred him. “You take care now.”

They’d left him food, of course—six sandwiches, a Ziploc bag crammed with marshmallows, three plums, two pears and a sack of tortilla chips the size of a laundry bag, not to mention the two-liter bottle of orange soda with which to wash it all down. “Sank you,” Hiro called, “sank you so much,” wondering if on

could be calculated in the negative, for what wasn’t done as well as what was. He owed them a debt, an enormous debt—but then they owed him too. He hadn’t bludgeoned them to death, hadn’t stolen their food, their canoe, their paddles and fishing rods and charcoal briquettes. When you came right down to it, he’d sacrificed himself for them—and wasn’t that something?

He stood there on the platform a long while, watching them as they threaded their way up the narrow channel, paddles flashing in perfect harmony, father, mother, son.

Tender Sproats