Read Online East is East by T. C. Boyle - Free Book Online Page A

rate—was not one of his strong suits. He did know that the Port of Savannah was in Georgia and that Georgia was in the South where the Negroes harvested cotton and the
hakujin
made them use separate toilets and drinking fountains, but he had no ideawhere he was in relation to Beantown or the Windy City, and he didn’t have even a clue that he was stranded on an island and that the only way off it was via Ray Manzanar’s ferry and that Ray Manzanar was related to half the people on the island and knew the other half as well as he knew his own kith and kin. Mercifully oblivious, faint with hunger and too weak even to lift a hand to brush away the horde of mosquitoes that settled on him like a second skin, Hiro forged on.
    After a time, the thicket ahead began to brighten with sun, and the tangle of branches became noticeably thinner. He paused, up to his ankles in the standing water of the ditch, and peered through a chink in the wall of vegetation. There was something unnatural, something red, just ahead of him and to the left, something bright and comforting and familiar. He moved closer. What he saw made his heart leap up. There, in the window of a freshly painted clapboard building just off the road, a bewitching and seductive red neon sign spoke to him in a universal tongue: COCA-COLA, it announced, COCA-COLA, and he went faint with gastric epiphany.
    He lurched forward, as overcome as he’d been by the scent of the Negro’s fateful oysters, beyond all sense and caring, till at the last moment he caught himself. All at once he dropped down with a grunt and hunkered low in the water. He was a mess. The stolen clothes were in tatters, he reeked as if he’d been dead a week, he was filthy and cut and torn in a hundred places. And his face—he was a Japanese, or half a Japanese—and they’d see that in a second and they’d know who he was and what he’d done and then the police would come and he’d be thrown in jail and brutalized by the half-breeds and child molesters and patricides that infested the dark
gaijin
cells like mold, COCA-COLA, flashed the sign, COCA-COLA. But what could he do?
    Cautiously, he emerged from the ditch and sat heavily in a clump of waist-high grass. There was no one in sight, not a car in the gravel lot, and from this angle he could see that the door of the shop stood wide open. He had to get cleaned up, had to disguise himself somehow, had to get in there and buy out the store beforesomeone showed up. Yes. All right. He would wash the mud from his clothes as best he could, and from his feet too. But when he glanced down at his feet and calves he saw that they were nearly black with some sort of clinging shapeless things—sea slugs, they looked like. He had never encountered leeches and didn’t know that they were sucking his blood—or rather that they secreted an anticoagulant so that his heart pumped blood into them, as if they were extensions of his own veins and arteries—nor did he realize that in casually peeling them off he risked dislodging their mouth parts and causing an infection that could suppurate, turn gangrenous and threaten the limb itself. No, he merely pulled them off, wistfully regarding the plump writhing morsels of their compact bodies—he’d always had a weakness for sea slugs—before dropping them back into the ditch. He didn’t need them. Food—real food—was in sight.
    Next, he stripped off his clothing and attempted to wash the overalls in the ditch. The red shirt was beyond hope, and so he tore off a strip of it and wrapped it around his head, Ninja style, hoping it would help disguise him. Then he wrung the overalls out, shrugged back into them (no mean feat—it was like pulling on a wetsuit six sizes too small), and turned to the pages of J ō ch ō . The bills were still there, along with the cracked and bleached photo of his father. He smoothed them out, wondering at the