East is East

Hiro cradled the bread and nacho chips to his chest. He moved ponderously down the aisle, the wet overalls pinching his crotch, bowing automatically. He was moving toward the cooler, his tongue dry as chalk. Be cool, he told himself. Act natural.

The girl had set the baby down in its crib behind the counter and was leaning lazily over the cash register. “Y’all must be a toor-ist?” she said with rising inflection.

Toor-ist, toor-ist, Hiro thought, swinging open the door of the cooler, the miraculous refrigerated draft on his face, the six-pack of Coke in hand. What was she saying? He hadn’t a clue, but he knew he had to answer, knew he had to say something or he was doomed.

It was then that Bobby stepped out of the back room, wiping his hands on an apron. Bobby was nineteen, as fair and beautifully proportioned as an archangel, but with an IQ so low it prevented him from unfurling his wings. He had trouble with simple sums and he couldn’t read the newspaper or punch the cash register. His job was to stock the shelves and watch Bobby Jr. whenever Cara Mae had a customer. He stood there in the doorway, blinking at Hiro.

Say something, Hiro told himself, say something, and all at once he had an inspiration. Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood—what would they say? Americans began any exchange of pleasantries with a string of curses, anyone knew that—and even if he hadn’t known it, even if he were an innocent, he’d seen Eastwood in action. “Mothafucka,” he said, bowing to the girl as he shuffled forward to dump his booty on the counter. And to the bewildered boy, in the most amenable tone he could summon, he observed: “Cock-sucka, huh?”

The girl said nothing. She remained motionless behind the cash register, her jaws poised over a tiny pink wad of chewing gum. The boy blinked twice, then scurried across the room and snatched up the baby as if it were in danger. All the while, Hiro grabbed for Slim Jims, Twinkies, anything, and built a mound of cans and bottles and bright shiny packages on the counter before him.

The girl rang up the purchases. “Ten seventy-three,” she said, and her tone was icy.

“Shitcan,” Hiro said, grinning now and bowing again, as he produced the four bills and laid them out on the counter. “Toilet. Make my day, huh?”

The girl crushed the gum between her teeth. Her eyes had narrowed. Her voice hit him like a slap in the face. “This is only eight.”

“Only eight?” he repeated. He was bewildered.

She let an exasperated hiss of breath escape her. The baby, pressed to his father’s shoulder, began to fuss. From outside came the sound of squealing brakes, and Hiro glanced up to see a gleaming new oversized pickup nosing its way up to the store.

“Ah need two seventy-three,” she said, “more.”

All at once Hiro understood. The little green gaijin bills were insufficient. He’d have to part with something and he needed it all, needed everything in the store and more. Didn’t they realize? Couldn’t they see he was starving? Outside, the engine coughed and died. “Some,” he said, pushing away a package or two.

“Jesus,” the girl said. “Ah’ll be goddamned.”

And then the boy spoke for the first time. “You a foreigner or somethin’?” he said.

Someone had come into the store. Hiro could feel the heavy tread on the floorboards and he watched the girl’s face brighten. “Hi ya, Sax,” she said.

Hiro didn’t dare look up. It could have been the chief of police, the Coast Guard, one of the long-noses from Immigration Akio had told him about. Heart pounding, he concentrated on the girl’s hands as she separated his things, put some of them in a brown paper sack and held out three small coins to him. He took the coins and bowed again. “Thank you, thank you,” he said, and in his gratitude, his relief, his joy at the prospect of the feast awaiting him and his redemption from the slow death of the swamps, he slipped into Japanese. “Dōmo,” he said. “Dōmo sumimasen.”

The girl gaped at him. And then he turned, hurrying, and saw the tall gaijin with the colorless hair and cold ceramic eyes, the one who’d tried to run him down with his boat, and in the next instant he was out the door, tucking the package under his arm like a football and bolting for the woods in a mad desperate headlong flight. He never paused, never hesitated, though the butter-stinker was out in the lot behind him shouting, “Hey! Wait a minute! Come back here, will you? I don’t … I-just-want-to-help-you!”

Help me, Hiro thought, the blood singing in his ears as he flung himself into the ditch and staggered through the scum and into the waist-deep quagmire and the cover of the trees beyond, yes, sure, help me. He knew them. Americans. They killed each other over dinner, shot one another for sport, mugged old ladies in the street.

Help like that he didn’t need.

The Squarest People in the World