as tough as a bowl of cherry Jell-O.
I made coffee, and when I had a steaming cup in hand, I went into the garden, thinking my martial arts trainer would give me a break from training today. Mike’s savage attack cry promptly disabused me of the notion.
“Haieeeeyaaaa!” he screamed.
My every muscle tensed. I knew what was coming next. Nevertheless, as the stimulant-dependant occidental that I was, I managed to take a slurp of my treasured caffeine before going into defense mode. Not only because my sluggish brain desperately needed it, but because it made Mike mad.
As a former Buddhist monk, he’d prefer I ate no meat, drank no caffeine, engaged in no sex and slept on a straw mat. He wanted me to live like a…well, a monk. It was my lifelong determination to prove to him that I could be every bit the fighter he was even while maintaining my status on the top of the carnivorous, lecherous and indulgent food chain.
I saw a tornado of sienna-colored robes rounding a bank of blooming pink azaleas.
“Aaiiiyeeee!” he cried again, every tendon straining as he squatted and assumed a pose of steel.
“Oh, hell.” He was opening with the iron buffalo ploughs the field. That classic Shaolin kung fu move was enough to make me want to dig a foxhole. I took one last slurp of coffee and tossed my mug into the grass. “Hey, Mike, can we talk about this?”
His typically enigmatic Oriental expression, boyish for his thirty years of age, was distorted into a mask of savagery. Boy, he wasn’t kidding around. My dalliances with Bogie always pissed him off. Mike believed compubots could suck the chi out of you for days. He was trying to teach me a lesson. But while I was sporting the just-laid look, I had more energy than he suspected. The question was, what move?
I cleared all thoughts as Mike had taught me, making way for instinct. He blazed toward me—jumping, squatting, rolling on the ground and flailing. But just before he downed me with a blue dragon tail-wag move, I leaped and grabbed the twisted tree branch that was shading a bed of hostas and pulled myself up with catlike grace. Squatting barefoot on the branch, and wearing nothing more than a tank top and boy-short briefs, I pounced down on him—now the tiger—and flattened him.
“Ha!” I cried out when he sank back in defeat. I stood on my adrenaline-pumped legs. “I told you never to do that before I’ve had at least two cups of coffee.”
He sat up, not the least the worse for wear, and smoothed a hand over his shaved head. “I make sure you are awake.”
“Well, it worked. But I lost a perfectly good cup of coffee. And I’m going to have more,” I said emphatically as I combed through my sprigs of platinum hair and headed back to the kitchen.
“Wait, Baker.”
His somber request stopped me cold. It was more his tone than the words that worried me. He always called me Baker. Ever since I’d rescued him from a prison camp in Joliet, Illinois, he’d called me by my last name, thinking it was my first. The Chinese put their last names first. His was Pu Yun. Yun would be his first name, except he’d taken a classic American nickname.
“What is it, Mike? Can’t it wait for another cup of java?”
His long pause worried me. But finally he nodded. Reluctantly.
With a steaming cup of joe, I joined him in his shed at the end of the long, fenced-in garden. I always called it a shed, but it was much more than that. Mike lived in a cozy twenty-by-fifteen-foot renovated coach house. With a bare wooden floor, it was insulated but not well heated, so we had put in a potbellied stove.
In accordance with the principles of feng shui, a water pond coated with green lilies and stocked with white and red carp sat serenely outside his door. Inside, colorful painted images of a dragon, a red bird and a tortoise adorned differing walls.
I glanced around and noticed the place was unusually cluttered—Taoist amulets and talismans scrawled on red and yellow strips of paper were pinned here and there, his bag of I Ching tablets lay in the corner, incense burned before a small statue of the Buddha, and he’d been working at his suitcase-size desk on a purple astrology chart. Fact was, Mike was superstitious, as were most Chinese who’d grown up in the old country.
“I have very bad luck,” he’d said when I first brought him here five years ago. His wrists had been scarred from being chained after numerous attempts to escape from the work camp. He was skinny and looked like a concentration camp victim. “My father…his grave is in a bad place near Shanghai. Pointing east. We are all cursed, my family, because of this.”
Not if you’re one of the elite Shaolin monks, I’d thought at the time, which he was. The monks and their kung fu style of martial arts had first come to the attention of Westerners in the 1970s because of a television show. When the Chinese communist government realized they could make money off of the monks, the Shaolin Temple north of the Shaoshi Mountain opened to tourists. While Mike had made a name for himself at the Shaolin temple, he had come to America in search of social freedom.
Whether it was because of bad luck or naiveté, he had arranged his trip through a crafty travel agency sponsored by the Mongolian mafia. Mike unwittingly ended up in a prison work camp operated by the mafia on the outskirts of Chicago. He’d slaved in Illinois’s legalized opium fields for two years before I’d rescued him while taking a tour of the camp, a spontaneous act of mercy on my part.
After his escape, Mike could have returned to the Shaolin temple, but he’d felt that his imprisonment was such a bad omen that he had brought dishonor to his fellow monks. So he stayed with me, employing his fighting skills on my behalf, teaching me the kung fu style of martial arts. I’d been studying tae kwon do, the Korean style, since I was a kid.
So while Mike was a fighter, he still had the heart of a monk and often spat out cryptic sayings and insightful diatribes that had vaguely ominous, spiritual overtones.
“I had a dream,” he said darkly.
I swallowed. “Oh?”
“While you slept with that thing, I dreamed your fate.”
“Look, Mike, I didn’t ask you to do that, and he is not a thing. Bogie is a…a…” My voice trailed away. I rubbed my forehead. I didn’t even know what to call him. Truth was, I should be making love with a real man. Maybe Lola was right. I heaved a sigh. “So what happened in the dream?”
“A blue dragon…she rose out of water and…”
“Yeah?” I prodded when he frowned down at the astrology chart. “So?”
“You are so impatient, Baker!” he snapped.
I was stunned into silence. I’d never heard Mike lose his temper before. I slowly put my cup down on the table. “I’m sorry.”
He frowned and nodded, not looking at me. “Blue dragon must fight two-headed eagle.”
I waited, afraid to interrupt.
“Something has happened, Baker. A storm gathers. Our time together may be at an end.”
He looked at me as if for the last time. I shivered with foreboding. A sudden wind blew up, rare in the north side of the city. The skies opened and warm rain descended unannounced. Big, fat dollops hit the roof, the sidewalk, cleansing them,
