He woke slowly, gradually, a diver rising to the surface of a murky lagoon, and the sleep clung to him like water. It took him a moment, disoriented by his exhaustion and all that had happened to him—he was home in bed, safe in his bunk on the Tokachi-maru, nodding off over a lecture at the maritime academy—and then all at once he knew where he was and his eyes locked open. He saw the crosshatching of the wicker, shellacked and faded, and he saw the flowered pillowcase and his own filthy and battered hand. He heard nothing, not a sound. In the next instant he was up and off the couch, cursing himself, cursing her, and then he tore open the door and ran for the woods, his breath coming in torn ragged gasps. How could he have trusted her, he thought, oblivious to slash of palmetto and tug of briar, his adrenaline surging, expecting at any moment to hear the first startled bellow of the sheriff’s hounds at his back. The bitch, the false deceptive white-legged hakujin bitch: how could he have been so stupid?
This wasn’t fair play—fea purē—not at all. This wasn’t how the game was played. This was cheating. She’d caught him with his defenses down, caught him when he was ready to pack it all in, to give up and die of shame and ignominy, and she’d seduced him with her voice and eyes and her pure white body and then stabbed him in the back. But he’d escaped her. Oh, yes. And he would never yield again, never—he would be as ruthless and crafty as the high-noses themselves. No more fea purē for him. Nice guys finish last—Leo Durocher, the great Amerikajin manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers had said that, and Jōchō had said it too.
He tore at creeper and twig, splashed through a scum-coated channel and startled something in the shallows. Finally, winded, he threw himself down in the red muck to consider the situation. For a long moment he held his breath, listening—they came at you with dogs, bloodhounds, he knew that. Give them a sock, a sandal, a cigarette butt, and they could track you to the ends of the earth. He was too frightened yet to be miserable, too exhausted to think straight. But when he calmed down, when the sun dropped below the rim of the world and left the trees in haunted gloom and the birds of the night screeched overhead, he was fully miserable once again, and he began to wonder if he hadn’t been just a bit rash.
Perhaps she had meant to help him after all. She said she was going to get him clothes. He couldn’t very well expect her to have a suit of men’s clothes in her cabin, could he? She didn’t live there, he knew that much. She came in the morning and left in the evening. He supposed she was a secretary of some sort and that the cabin was her office—and if that was the case, well then perhaps she had gone to get him clothes … and food, more food, the meat paste sandwiches and hard vegetables and fruit he’d discovered in the lunch pail, the little cheeses wrapped in foil and a wedge of frosted cake. His hara announced itself then and he rose itching from the muck, a lingering sour troubled taste in his mouth, and struggled back in the direction from which he’d come.
It wasn’t easy. The shadows deepened; the trees stood in ranks, linked arm to arm, as alike as blades of grass; things swift and unseen whipped through the scrub at his feet. Twice he toppled headlong into the bushes, the dirty gauze of cobweb and spider silk caught in his mouth and nostrils, mosquitoes harassing him in all their legions. He’d almost given up hope when the tangle of trees released him to the brief remission of the yard.
He froze. It was full dark now, the night clear and moonless. Not twenty feet away stood the cabin, an absence of definition, a shadow that drew in all the shadows around it. Nothing moved. He listened to the chirr of crickets, the hum of mosquitoes, the violent thump and wheeze of his own internal machinery as it went about the business of keeping him alive. What if they were waiting in there for him? What if they were watching him even now, their dogs at heel, guns drawn, fingers twitching over their searchlights?
Step by tottering step, he approached the mass of shadow that was the cabin. Going to school, living with his obāsan, swabbing the galley of the Tokachi-maru, he’d almost forgotten his own physicality, and here he was, playing another children’s game: red light, green light. He took a step and then froze. Two steps. And then another. When he was close, when he could distinguish the horizontal bar of the porch railing from the clot of shadows behind it, he felt a surge of joy. The clothes: there they were! He reached out to the material, the white T-shirt palely glowing. She’d been true to him after all—she was his ally, his friend, his comfort and support, and she did play by the rules, she did, though he must have been as strange to her as she was to him. In that moment, he loved her.
