East is East

Turco didn’t respond. He’d shouldered the pack and taken the parcel of food from the woman, and now he was studying Abercorn with a cagey look. “Jesus,” he said finally, “what happened to you, man—napalm, car wreck or what? Don’t tell me you were born with that?”

Abercorn stiffened. He’d heard it all his life and all his life he’d been touchy about it—who wouldn’t be? He was a good-looking guy, good bone structure, strong nose and chin, hair as thick as a teenager’s. But he knew what Turco meant, knew what he’d had the bad grace to bring up—most people, anybody with any sensitivity, anyway, would have left it alone. What Turco was referring to were the white patches on his face and hands—a lot of people thought it was scar tissue or eczema or something, but it wasn’t. There was nothing wrong with him, nothing at all, just that he had less pigment than normal, less melanin in his skin and hair. He’d been born an albino. Or part albino. His coloring was fair to begin with, but the albinism—or vitiligo, as the doctors called it—manifested itself in dead-white patches that mottled his entire body—even his hair. He’d been able to dye his hair, of course, but there was nothing he could do about his skin. And even that wouldn’t have been so bad, but for his face. He’d got used to it now, but as a kid it used to drive him crazy—he looked as if he’d been splashed with paint. A rough oval, two inches across, framed his right eye and six paper-white blotches dribbled across his jaw, bleached the bridge of his nose and made his left ear glow in the dark. And his eyes, his eyes weren’t blue or gray or green or brown: they were pink, like the eyes of a white rat or a guinea pig. “Beagle Boy,” they called him in elementary school, and later, when he got taller and stronger and knocked them down with his big-league curveball, they called him “Whitey.” But now he was an adult, and no one, ever, called him anything but Detlef.

He felt the eyes of the Vietnamese on him and the blood rose to his face. “What’s it to you,” he said, holding Turco’s eyes, “I’m part albino, okay?”

Turco stood his ground, smiling now, smiling up at him with the serenity of a man who’s never made a mistake in his life. He was taking his time. “Hey, no offense intended, man. It’s like I’ve seen a couple dudes over there that caught it, their own people dropping the shit on them—typical fuck-up—it’s like this jellied gasoline, right? Sticks to you like glue. But hey, if I’d known you were so sensitive about it—”

“I am not sensitive,” Abercorn said, but even as he said it his voice rose to give him away.

In the car, while the wipers beat uselessly at the smear of rain and they settled in for the seventy-minute drive down to Tupelo Island, Abercorn, not yet realizing that they’d have to wait three hours for the next ferry and that there were no motels on the island and never had been, began to soften a bit. He had to work with this guy, after all. And Turco was going to do all the grunt work while he, Abercorn, sat in the motel and coordinated things. “Listen,” he said after a while, the tinny strains of some moronic country song whining through the speakers, “this Japanese guy. I mean, in L.A. we never had to deal with the Japanese. What do you think?”

Turco was chewing a stick of whatever it was the woman had given him. It was black and hard and had a forbidding alien smell to it. “Piece of cake,” he said, chewing. “What you got to realize about the Nips is they’re the squarest people in the world, I mean the hokiest, bar none. Shit, even the paddy Burmese are downtown compared to the Japs. They’re all part of this big team, this like Eagle Scout thing where everybody fits in and works real hard and makes this perfect and totally unique society. Because they’re superior to everybody else, they’re purer—that’s what they think. Nobody but Japanese in Japan. You fuck up, you let the whole race down.”

Rain beat at the windshield. Turco gestured with the pungent black stick of whatever it was. “Even the far-out types, the rebels, the punks with the orange hair and the leather jackets—and there are precious few of them, believe me—even they can’t break the mold. You know how they get down, you know how they really thumb their nose at society and show what bad characters they are?”

Abercorn didn’t know.

“They all go down to Yoyogi Park in Tokyo on Saturday afternoon from one to three and turn up their boom boxes and dance. That’s it. They dance. All of them. Squarest people in the world.”