East is East

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.