East is East

Ruth held the steaming mug in both hands and looked up into his strange tan eyes. “My pleasure,” she said, and then, seeing his puzzled look, she gave him the textbook reply, enunciating each word as if she needed time to chew and digest it: “You-are-very-welcome.”

He seemed to brighten at this, and he held out his hand, smiling hugely. His front teeth were misaligned, overlapping, and the effect was just a little, well, goofy. Was this the first time she’d seen him smile? She couldn’t remember. But she smiled back, and she couldn’t imagine what all the uproar was about—Abercorn, Turco, Sheriff Peagler, all the old biddies of the island. He was harmless, maybe even a little pitiful—if she’d ever had any doubts, she was sure of that now.

The smile suddenly faded and he began to shift his feet and cast his gaze round the room. “I am called Hiro,” he suddenly blurted, and extended his hand. “Hiro Tanaka.”

Ruth took his hand and bowed with him, as if they were at the very beginning of a minuet. “I’m Ruth,” she said, “Ruth Dershowitz.”

“Yes,” he said, and the smile returned, blooming with teeth. “Rusu, I am very please to meet you.”

The Other Half

Seven days earlier, hiro tanaka had stood poised on the shoulder of the tar-bubbled blacktop road that promised him release, the road that would lead to the swift clean highway and all the anonymous cities beyond it. He hesitated, looking first to the right and then to the left, the road raveling out into emptiness in either direction. It looked pretty bleak, he had to admit it. The secretary and her lunchbox lay behind him now, buried in swamp and scrub, while directly across from him the waning sun pointed the way west, where a wild continent and a wilder ocean lay between him and the place he’d turned his back on forever—though he ached for it now. What he wouldn’t give for the yawning boredom of the corner noodle shop, where nothing ever happened, except to the noodles. Or the tranquillity of the tiny twenty-mat park across from his grandmother’s apartment, where nature consisted of pruned bushes and cultivated flowers, a trickle of water pumped over a glaze of cemented stones. He remembered sitting on the bench there as a boy, reading comics or the latest bēsubōru magazine, the murmur of the water lifting him out of himself for hours at a time.

But there was no sense in thinking that way—all that was lost to him now. Now he was in America, where nature was primeval, seething, a cauldron of snapping reptiles, insects and filth, where half-crazed Negroes and homicidal whites lurked behind every tree—now he was in America, and he had a new life ahead of him. And what he wanted was to turn right, to the north—that was where the great mongrel cities lay, that much he knew—but he’d traveled that road already, to the Coca-Cola store, with its subhuman proprietors and deranged customers, and he hadn’t thought much of the experience. And so he turned to his left, and headed south.

This time he strode along the shoulder of the road, defiant, angry. If they came for him, he’d fight. Screw them all, the long-nosed bastards. He was wearing clean clothes for the first time in weeks—hakujin

clothes—and he’d be damned if he’d plunge into the cesspool alongside the road like a scared rabbit. He’d had it. He was fed up. He was going to walk all the way to the City of Brotherly Love. On his own two feet. And god help anyone who got in his way.

He walked, one foot in front of the other, the sun sinking, the mosquitoes massing, and the road never changed. Tree and bush, creeper and vine, stem and leaf and twig. Birds wheeled overhead; insects danced in his eyes. He looked down, and the corpses of lizards and snakes, wafer-thin and baked to leather, stained the surface of the road. He looked up, and something slithered across the pavement. Before long, the canvas of the tennis shoes began to chafe at his ankles.

And then he heard it, behind him: the ticking smooth suck of an automobile engine, the hiss of tires. He hunched his shoulders, set his teeth. Sons of bitches. Hakujin scum. He wouldn’t turn his head, wouldn’t look. The ticking of the engine drew nearer, the tires beating at the pavement, his heart in his mouth … and then it was past him, a whoosh of air, rusted bumper, children’s faces pressed to the rear window. Good, he thought, good, though he was slick with sweat and his hands were trembling.