East is East

But then he gazed up at that dim high window, and then down at the lawnchairs and back up again, and a picture came to him of a pair of jugglers he’d seen on TV as a boy, one balancing atop a stack of stage chairs while the other offered him a whirl of knives, Indian clubs and flaming torches to spin over his head. If he stacked those chairs on the bench and if he could manage to climb atop them, he could reach the window—and if he could reach the window he could find out what was on the other side and see if one of the bars wasn’t maybe just a tiny bit loose. But then why would it be loose? he thought, sitting there still, aching with a dull persistence. And yet, why not? The building was old and disused, a relic of the times when the Negroes were shackled and the red Indians butchered. And this cell—this must have been where the hakujin

kept their Negroes before they dragged them out to whip and lynch and burn them.

The thought lifted him to his feet.

He stood a moment at the door—a slab of oak, featureless, solid as rock—and then he noiselessly crossed the cell and took up the lawnchairs. They were frayed and dirty and their joints were locked with rust, but he managed to unfold them nonetheless. What followed bore less resemblance to a feat of skill performed in the center ring than an elaborate pratfall. The first attempt landed him on the stone floor and jammed that tough little appendage of bone at the nether end of his spine right up into his mouth. The second attempt twisted a knee, traumatized an elbow and put a permanent bow in the frame of one of the chairs. There was noise, of course—the stiff applause of the chairs clattering from bench to floor, the thump of perspiring flesh against unyielding stone, the small astonished grunts and gasps of pain—but no one came to the door as he lay there panting and writhing. For this, he was thankful.

He stacked the chairs again and again, balancing, teetering, clutching and falling, until finally, on his eighth attempt, as the chairs shot perversely out from under him and his arms flew up over his head, he made a wild snatch at the highflown bars and to his amazement caught hold of them—two of them, that is. For a moment he hung there, gratified, till the bars gave way and he dropped back into the cell, grazing the bench on the way down and reopening the gash on his shin as surely as if he’d been aiming for it. When he recovered, he found that he was still clutching the pitted iron bars as if they were a pair of dumbbells. Above him, the window gaped like a damaged mouth: four bars remained where a moment before there had been six. Better yet, numbers 2 and 3 were in his hands and the gap they left was easily wide enough to squeeze through. On the down side, his brief glimpse beyond the window had revealed a second cell, identical to his own, but for the lawnchairs. Clinging there, poised in the moment between hoisting himself up and lurching back from the window in a storm of dust and mortar pellets, he discovered a familiar bench, a scatter of refuse, and a heavy ancient solid-core door, firmly shut and for all he knew as immovable as the one behind him.

If he was disappointed, he didn’t have time to dwell on it, because at that moment the outside bolt slid back with a screech of protest and a low rumble of voices startled him to his feet. He looked wildly around him. The chairs lay crippled on the floor, the window gaped in the most obvious and incriminating way, and the bars—the bars were still clutched in his hands! Think fast: isn’t that what the Americans say? They throw you a live hand grenade and say, Think fast. But Hiro, in that moment, leaped beyond thought and into the realm of pure reaction: even as the door pushed open, he slipped the cold iron bars into the rear waistband of his shorts and sat heavily in the bowed lawnchair, simultaneously booting its mate back into the corner with a discreet jerk of his foot. And then the heat from outdoors hit him like a fist and there they were, the sheriff and the two government men, edging warily into the cell.