East is East

He was a Japanese male in the full flower of Japanese manhood, solid and unyielding, and he came home from the office in the small hours and tore at her kimono. The children were asleep, the Sony silent, the tiny apartment polished like a knife. Michiko went wet at the first touch of him. There was whiskey on his breath, imported whiskey, the whiskey he drank each night at the hostess bar, and the smell of it excited her. She loved him for the moon of his face and the proud hard knot of his belly as it pressed against hers, and for his teeth, especially for his teeth. They overlapped like joy and sorrow, the path to his smile as tortuous as a trail torn across the face of Mount Fuji.

He forced himself into her and a cry escaped her lips. “Hiro,” she moaned, clinging to him, holding fast as if she were drowning, “Hiro, Hiro, Hiro!”

Hiro glanced up from the page. The room looked strange to him suddenly, looked like a cage, the walls closing in on him, the lamplight cinching his wrists. He didn’t have the heart to read on.

“When?’ he demanded.

She was unpacking groceries, groceries enough for an army, for a siege, enough to keep an animal sleek in its pen for a month at least. “I told you: Sax’s car is a pickup. I need a car with a trunk, to hide you.” Her elbows jumped; the cans mounted on the table. “His mother’s car is what I’m thinking of. I just have to come up with an excuse to borrow it.”

“You stall, Rusu. You want to keep me here. You want to make me a prisoner.”

The light, the jungle light, was in her hair, slicing at her eyes. She dug into the backpack for another tin of fish. “You prefer it out there?”

“When, Rusu?” he repeated.

She rattled the bag and turned her head to look at him. “I don’t want to keep you here against your will—really, Hiro, I don’t. Think of the risk I’m running just by harboring you. I like you, I do. I want to see you get out of here … it’s just—it’s not that easy, that’s all I’m saying. You don’t want to get caught, do you?”

He stood there looming over her, hands on his hips. He didn’t answer.

“She’s got an old Mercedes with a trunk the size of the Grand Canyon. It’d be ideal.” She showed him her perfect pink gums and irreproachable eyes, and suddenly the fight went out of him.

“Okay,” he said, dropping his eyes. “Soon, yes?”

“Soon,” she said.

And then, two nights later, she staggered up the steps with another load of canned goods, and he couldn’t help noticing her cryptic little smile. “I have a surprise for you,” she gasped, thumping across the room to fling herself at the desk and wriggle out of her backpack. She threw out her chest, narrowed her shoulders and eased the straps down her arms. He could smell her, a rich dark scent, perfume and sweat commingled.

“Surprise?” He edged closer, watching her hands as she loosed the string at the neck of the bag. He was expecting a treat—a wedge of cake or a Mars Bar maybe; she knew he loved Mars Bars—but she dug yet another can of fried dace and a cellophane package of withered roots from the depths of the bag. His face fell. How she’d ever got the idea that this—this stuff— would appeal to him was a mystery. Dried fishheads, bark shavings in plastic envelopes, flat black mushrooms like patches of sloughed skin, can after can of bamboo shoots—what did she think he was, some barefoot hick from Tohoku or something? Dried fishheads? He would have preferred practically anything—Chef Boyardee, Hamburger Helper, Dinty Moore—but it was too awkward to ask. Beggars couldn’t be choosy.

She turned to him, put her hands on his shoulders and pecked another of her airy kisses in the direction of his cheek. “It’s all set,” she said. “Day after tomorrow. Sax is going out after his pygmy fish and I’m taking Septima’s car to Savannah—clothes shopping.”

It took him a moment. “You mean—?”

She looked up at him, beaming.

“Rusu,” he said, and he couldn’t contain himself, joy and discovery lighting him up like a rocket. He clutched her in his arms—he was getting out of here, he was on his way, his life was starting all over—but then he felt her body pressed to his and a sudden sharp sense of loss deflated him. She would take him to the city and he would walk away from her, one mutt more in a mob of them. He would never see her again.

“So,” she said, pulling back to study his face, her lips stretched in a grin, “are you happy?”

He didn’t know what to say. He was groping for the words—happy, yes, but unhappy too—when a violent hissing clatter burst on them out of the night. It startled them both. Hiro thought of a blowout on the highway, a truck tire reduced to tatters, but the racket of it went on and on, an explosion of ratcheting and hissing that was like nothing he’d ever experienced. Ruth’s eyes leapt. His face felt dead.

“A snake,” she whispered, gripping his arm. “It’s a rattlesnake.” And then: “Someone must be coming up the path.”