East is East

What he saw there, through the contracting lens of that one wild eye, froze his heart. What he saw was Wheeler, his brother Wheeler, risen from the grave and with his skin gone the color of leaf mulch, Wheeler, wearing the red cotton button-up shirt and denim overalls he’d left draped over the hard slab of the tombstone not three days ago. “Wheeler!” he cried, jerking around awkwardly and throwing up his arms in extenuation, “I didden mean it, I didden, I never should of called you them low mizzable things on the day you done pass on, but I—” and then he stopped cold. This wasn’t Wheeler standing there in his kitchen with a look on his face like he’d just gone and taken a dump in his own pants … this wasn’t Wheeler with the overalls pinched round the gut and stuck halfway up his shins and the slanting eyes and iron-straight hair hanging in his face … this was, this was some kind of Chinaman or something. But what was a Chinaman doing in Olmstead White’s kitchen in Hog Hammock on Tupelo Island? It mystified him. It baffled him. In the end, it upset him more than any six hags and apparitions could ever have. “Who you be?” he roared.

For his part, Hiro was no less shocked than the black man who stood twitching and jerking before him. In a delirium he’d staggered out of the salt marsh and up onto solid ground, his dead mother and his lost father dancing round him like fairies, root beer floats and slurpies and stone jugs of cold sake in their fluttering hands, and he’d found a rain puddle there, nothing more than diluted mud really, and he’d buried his face in it. By then the smell of cooking fat was overpowering and near and he pushed himself up and went for it at a trot. That was when he’d found the gravestones—crude rock slabs poking up out of the weeds like something he’d seen in a spaghetti Western. The first of the markers caught him in the shin; the second grazed the side of his face as he went down. When he untangled his feet and pushed himself up, he saw the shirt and pants, an overturned plate, a string of dried peppers and a weathered deck of cards. He didn’t think, couldn’t think, the smell of deep-fried fish—oysters, yes, oysters—driving all else before it, and in half a minute he’d exchanged his torn and filthy clothes for the shirt and overalls. He was hopping, actually hopping as if in some child’s game, as if he were in a sack race, as he shrugged into the overalls and slashed through the garden toward that supreme and dictatorial smell.

But now, here he was, in strange stolen clothes in a stranger’s house and the stranger was shouting at him. Worse: the stranger was a black man, a Negro, and he knew, as every Japanese does, that Negroes were depraved and vicious, hairier, sweatier and even more potent than their white counterparts, the hakujin.

They were violent and physical, they were addicted to drugs and they thought only with their sexual organs. He’d seen one once, in the streets of Tokyo, a bēsubōru player named Clarence Hawkins, first baseman for the Hiroshima Carp. An awesome man, like a walking statue. But he had no heart—no

hara—and he wasn’t a team player. Here was a man who could have hit a home run with every swing of the bat and yet he refused to take practice with the others, refused the calisthenics and the drill of the thousand fungoes and running in the outfield and the cold baths that demonstrated team spirit and a will to win and guts and determination. The pitchers gave him nothing to hit and the umpires called everything a strike, even if it bounced, and within the year he was back in America. That was a Negro. And here was another, shouting at him in his incomprehensible gibberish.

“Shipwreck!” Hiro shouted back, waving his arms in imitation of the gaijin.

“I am starving. Please, I beg you, give me something to eat!”

Olmstead White heard him, but for all the good it did, Hiro might as well have been talking Japanese. “Somesing eat” was all that came through, and even that didn’t register, so alien was Hiro’s accent—and even if it had, the sequel would have been no different. Feeling trapped in his own kitchen, feeling scared and embarrassed and angry, delivered from the haunts and hags and into the hands of a stranger—an Asiotic Chinaman, no less—Olmstead White reacted in the only way he could. Before him, on the table, lay the butcher knife, the one he kept honed for punching through the stiff bristle of his Christmas hog and the soft underbelly of opossum and deer. He looked at Hiro, looked at the knife, and snatched it up.

Hiro could sense that the situation had deteriorated. The veins stood out in the Negro’s neck and the whites of his eyes were swollen. He kept shouting and there were flecks of spittle on his lips. It was obvious that he hadn’t understood a word. And now he had a knife in his hand, the blade ugly with use. Behind him, the oysters sent up their ambrosial aroma.