Rationally, I was through. But I was operating with something else. I saw his sword wind up for the finishing blow and a strange part of me welcomed it. I shot in on a tangent. His attack took place simultaneously. We were moving so quickly that he was still focused on the mental image of me as a target. But he was focused on a place where I was no longer standing.
Because I had slid into his dead angle. I grabbed his collar with my left hand. I had stretched my right hand across his throat. His forward momentum carried his legs forward; my arm jerked his chin back and to one side. I pivoted and sent him crashing to the floor. He lay there stunned for a second, and I stood above him, panting. The he scrambled to his feet and came at me. And I was ready.
“Yame!” The order came to stop.
We backed warily away from each other, but the sensei had seen enough. At the command, we all lined up again to bow out. I took my helmet off and I’ll bet you could see steam rising off my head. After the formal ending, I got to thank each person I had crossed swords with, sitting and bowing to everyone in turn. There was a faint roaring in my ears.
With his helmet off, I saw that my last opponent was a young man. His blonde hair was dark with sweat, but he had the square jaw and pale eyes, the good looks that I associated with high school athletes and actors. He smiled, and his teeth looked even and white. But the expression didn’t touch his eyes. They were still burning with the desire to take the match to a real finish.
The hold of discipline is strong, however. We bowed, hands flat on the floor, torsos lowered over them. “Burke,” I said.
He sat up from his bow and looked at me silently for a few seconds, without expression. Then the smile came again. It had a hard edge to it, tinged with a curious type of self-satisfaction.
“Stark,” he said. “Travis Stark.”
I watched him get up and move away. Slowly, the room and its details began to swim back into my awareness. Students were tying up their armor and congratulating each other. Asa and Yamashita were inking promotion certificates at a table.
By the door, two men entered and spoke to a student. They flashed police badges and looked around in that universally suspicious way policemen have. Both had bristly mustaches. The one with sandy hair was bigger and thicker. The other cop was smaller, thinner, and crankier looking, although they both had their professional cop faces on.
My teacher saw them and stood up quickly. He made a gesture at the cops as if trying to shoo them away. They paused. Then the two swordsmen came out from behind the table.
Yamashita and Asa sat down in the formal position and gestured for me to do the same. Then, Asa formally promoted me to the fourth dan—black belt rank—in kendo. I received the certificate he proffered, taking it in both hands as a sign of respect. Asa bowed to me and to my teacher, then rose and left without another word. Yamashita looked at me and then glanced at the cops, who were heading our way.
I held the certificate in my lap, silent. My hands trembled slightly. You might think it was muscle fatigue; in reality, it takes a while to bleed off the psychic energy of a match like that.
Yamashita nodded slightly to me. “So. An interesting performance. But it was not decisive. Perhaps if we had let it go on… one of you certainly would have won.”
“It would have been me,” I said. My voice was flat, but I gave him a look that said there wasn’t any argument.
“So?” he said, and broke into a smile. “I would expect no less. And now you see the point of the exercise.” He bowed in dismissal and left me in a smooth, silent glide.
I could hear bits of the quiet conversation the two cops were having as they approached me. “I’m telling you,” the bigger one was saying, “there’s a stylistic link here. These costumes make these guys look like Darth Vader.”
His partner didn’t reply. He had a white streak in his hair and a disgusted look on his face. They hovered about me and I got up to meet them.
“Well?” I asked them expectantly. My tone wasn’t the friendliest. This guy with the streak in his hair had bugged me way before he had started to go gray. He was my older brother Micky.
He smirked at me. “You look like shit,” my brother the cop said. “But I think we need you.”
I held a hand up to my ear. “What was that?”
“Stop dickin’ around,” Micky said.
I gestured with my hand at my ear again. “Huh?”
“We need you,” he said, biting the words off one by one.
His partner, Art, was a bigger man. He smiled at me. He also enjoyed needling Micky. It was part of a very complex relationship.
“I’ll bet it hurt you to say that,” I commented to my brother, and winked at Art.
“Oh, yeah,” Art said happily, nodding. Micky was silent.
I gathered up my gear and changed. My muscles felt loose and disconnected. People talk about a “runner’s high” after exercise. But in the martial arts world of Yamashita Sensei, you often just emerged stunned, bruised, and trembling. I’ve been at this for a while, however. Aside from the distant ache of new bruises I just felt slightly relaxed.
But I wasn’t going to stay that way. When I came outside, the two policemen were waiting for me. We were heading for a place where the violence was less contained and all the bloodshed was real.
They argued about who would drive. “You sure you’re up to it?” my brother Micky asked.
His partner, Art, is pretty good-natured, but questions like this bother him. “Hey, get off my case,” he snapped. “What, you think I’m not up to it?”
Micky held up his hands in mock surrender. “Just asking. You don’t want to tax things.” He went to the passenger door. Art moved past him, grumbling, and got behind the wheel.
I sat in silence in the back and let the flow of the trip calm them down. This crabby exchange was typical and the tense atmosphere didn’t last long. Eventually, Art started to talk again. “So we say to ourselves,” he began saying to me as we drove crosstown toward the East River, “why not share the wealth?”
“Hey, asshole,” my brother Micky said, “you want to drive so badly, how about using two hands?” Now he was cranky.
Art was driving with his right hand and waving the other one around. It made me worry. Not too long ago, someone had sliced his right hand off with a sword. They had bagged it in ice and stuck it on the gurney when they wheeled Art away. No one paid much attention. The guy with the sword had done other damage and everyone expected Art to die.
He hung on. Micky and I tracked the swordsman down. Eventually, it came to a head on a steamy night in midtown Manhattan. I don’t like to think about it too much. The only good thing was that, at the end of it all, I didn’t die.
Neither did Art.
He spent quite a bit of time in ICU, hooked up to machines. I wonder if the doctors felt left out from the start and reattached the hand immediately just
