Chapter 03 - Getting Up (Patreon)

"He's in Japan," I said.

Yamazaki tipped his head to one side, like a bird listening for something under the ground. "Japan. Long way."

"He'll be back in a week. You can come back then."

"A week." He seemed to think about it. Then he started laughing again, that high wet giggle, and kept laughing while he walked along the edge of the mat toward the cubbies, trailing the fingers of his long right hand along the wall. He stopped under the sign and looked up at it.

It's a plank of cedar about three feet long, with PHOENIX DOJO carved into it by hand and the grooves painted red. My dad made it the month I was born. He carved it in the backyard on a pair of sawhorses, and my mom says he cut himself four times doing it and bled on the wood and wouldn't let her sand the stains out, because he said blood was good luck. Most of the letters are straight. The N in this one faces the right way. He'd had sixteen years to get that wrong on the roll-up door instead.

"In a week," Yamazaki said, "maybe I'm bored of it. Maybe I'm in jail. Maybe I'm dead. Tonight I want it." He looked back at me over his shoulder. "You know how it works, kid? The old way?"

"I know how it works."

"So tell me no. Say come back when Daddy's home." He grinned with all his teeth. "Then I go away, and everybody in South Town hears Paul Phoenix's son told Yamazaki to wait for his father. That's okay too. That's fun for me also."

I stood in the middle of the mat with the spray bottle still in my hand.

My dad had said it that morning, in the kitchen, with his hand on the back of my neck. You don't have to take the challenge. Nobody sensible would think less of you. I could call Terry. I knew where Pao Pao was, and Richard would know how to find him. I could call Marshall, who lived twelve minutes away and would be here in eight. Any of those would have been the smart thing, and I knew it, and I knew my dad would have meant it when he said nobody would think less of me.

I also knew that by Monday the parents of eleven kids would hear the story the way Yamazaki would tell it, and so would everyone at Pier Nine, and everyone who'd watched Billy Kane walk out of our door on Monday. And Yamazaki was standing under my father's sign with his hand on the wall a foot away from it, and he'd come through a door I'd locked twice.

I put the spray bottle down on the edge of the mat.

Then I walked to the front of the room and stood where my dad stands at the start of a class, and bowed to the sign, and turned around and bowed to Yamazaki.

"The master of this dojo is away," I said. "I'm teaching tonight. I accept your challenge."

Yamazaki stopped laughing. He looked at me for a long moment with no expression on his face at all. Then he took his left hand back out of his pocket, and pulled a folding knife out of the back of his waistband with it, and opened it with his thumb.

"Good boy," he said.

Before I did anything else, I stopped the world.

It took effort. I don't know why. Usually it's like flipping a switch, and this time it was like pushing a heavy door, and when the grey came down over everything it came down slowly and the edges of it shook. The music was playing in my head, low strings and a single drum. Yamazaki was frozen halfway into a step, with the knife held low and loose in his left hand and his right arm hanging at his side.

I looked at him for thirty seconds and I could not tell what he was going to do.

That had never happened before. Every fight since January, the stopped world had shown me where things were going. Scar's punch had been obvious. Boxcar's hook had been obvious once I knew where to look. Even Terry, who I couldn't do anything about, had been obvious: the fist, the bent light, the floor. Yamazaki's body didn't point anywhere. His weight was on both feet and neither foot. His right shoulder was loose in a way that didn't look human, as though the arm was hung on a hook instead of a joint. The knife could have been for my face or my stomach or nothing, a decoy. When I tried to picture what would happen, I got five or six versions and none of them felt more likely than the others.

The ninety-five percent felt like about sixty.

I spent the end of the thirty seconds making the only decision I could, which was to close the distance, because that long arm wanted me far away.

Time came back. I went forward.

His right arm moved. I didn't see it start. One moment it was hanging by his thigh, and the next his fist was in my face from eight feet away, snapping out and back like a whip being cracked, and my nose broke. I heard it. I tasted blood before I'd finished my second step.

I kept going anyway. The arm came again and I got the shield up, and it caught the punch and cracked like a dropped plate. I was inside his reach now, close enough to smell him, hair oil and cigarettes and something sour under it. I planted my front foot and drove a punch into his short ribs, the straight right my dad has been making me throw into the makiwara every morning since I was eleven, with the hip turned all the way through it.

It landed perfectly. I felt it go in. On anybody I'd ever fought, it would have folded them in half.

Yamazaki looked down at my fist in his side and giggled.

Then he headbutted me.

I don't remember the next minute in order.

I remember the mat coming up into my face, and the smell of the cleaning spray I'd been using on it. I remember getting up, and the knife going across my forearm when I put my arm up, a long hot line from wrist to elbow. I remember throwing him, or trying to: I got his sleeve and his collar and turned my hips in, the hip throw I've done ten thousand times, and it was like trying to throw a coat rack. He went over and landed on his feet. He was laughing the whole time.

I remember his right fist hitting the shield three times in a row, and the third time the shield wasn't there.

At some point I was on my back looking up at the fluorescent lights. One of them had a dead moth in the plastic cover. I'd noticed that moth during a hundred classes, and I thought about it now with total calm, as if it was the most important thing in the room. Then Yamazaki's face came between me and the light, upside down, and he crouched over me with his knees on either side of my head and held the knife where I could see it.

"Where's the scroll?" he said.

My mouth was full of blood. I swallowed it. "What?"

"The scroll. From the mountain. Everybody's talking. Paul Phoenix's kid goes up in the snow and comes back down with a scroll." He turned the knife slowly so the light ran along the edge. "I collect scrolls, kid. I'm looking a long time for some special ones. Old ones. Chinese. I think, maybe this is one of them, maybe not. So you show me, and I take it, and I take the sign too, for fun. Everybody's happy."

"There's no scroll."

He looked at me. Then he put the tip of the knife against my cheek, just under my left eye, and pressed until it went in a little.

"Everybody says there's a scroll," he said.

"Everybody's wrong."

He laughed and got up off me and walked away a few steps, and I rolled over and got onto my hands and knees and then onto my feet.

I shouldn't have been able to. I knew that the way you know which way is down. My nose was broken, my forearm was opened up, my ribs from Boxcar had cracked again, and there was something wrong with my left knee that made it want to fold sideways. I'd lost a lot of blood. There was a lot of it on the mat. I stood there swaying and watched the place in me where the hurt should have been, the place where it should have knocked me back down, and the hurt came up against that wall again and stopped. My body kept deciding it would deal with all of it later.

Yamazaki turned around and saw me standing, and his grin got wider.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, you're one of those."

He came again, and I went down again.

He came again, and I got up. That time I hit him with the bell, the shoulder strike off the stamping step, and he went backward three steps and put his hand on the wall to stop himself. He looked surprised for about a second. Then he cut me across the chest, a shallow one, and kicked my bad knee, and I went down.

I got up.

I don't know how many times. I stopped counting after four. Every time I got up, he looked a little less amused and a little more interested, the way a cat gets interested when a mouse it's been batting around keeps running. He stopped talking. He stopped giggling. Somewhere in there he put the knife away, and I understood without wanting to that it was because he didn't want to finish it fast anymore.

The music had stopped. I don't remember when. I could hear the fluorescent lights humming and my own breathing, which sounded wet and wrong, and the soft sound his shoes made on the mat.

The last time I got up, I couldn't get my hands all the way into a guard. My left arm wouldn't come up past my chest. I stood there with my right fist at my jaw and my left hand hanging, and Yamazaki stood about six feet away and looked at me with his long arm hanging by his side.

"Why?" he said. He sounded actually curious. "It's a piece of wood, kid. Your father makes another one."

I didn't answer him. I didn't have anything left to answer with.

He came in.

I don't know exactly what happened next. I know what it felt like, and I've worked out the rest from what Billy Kane told me afterward, and from what my mother found on the mat.

It felt like the heat from the scroll, the pressure low in my stomach that had been working on me since Wednesday night, all coming up at once. Whatever it had been doing slowly, a few hours at a time, it did all at once. It came up from a place a couple of inches under my navel that I'd never felt before and went out through my whole body like water soaking into dry ground. The hurt stayed where it was. The empty, scraped-out feeling of having nothing left drained away, as if somebody had filled me back up from the bottom, and my lungs opened, and my left arm came up into my guard. My right arm was shaking with it. When I looked down, the air around my fist was moving, bending, the way it bends over a road in August.

Behind me, the cold came off me the way it had at Pier Nine, only bigger. It felt like something standing up at my back that was taller than the room.

Yamazaki was coming in with his right arm already drawn back, and he saw the air bending around my fist, and his face changed.

I threw the Deathfist.

That's what my father calls it. It's the only punch he's ever named. It's a straight right from the rear hand with everything behind it, the stamping step and the hips and the back, all of it arriving at once in a fist. My dad can put a hole in a door with it. I've been throwing it at the makiwara since I was eleven, and it has never once felt like anything special when I did it. It's just the thing you do when you have one punch left.

I had one punch left. I threw it into the middle of his chest.

There was a sound like a car hitting a wall. Two of the fluorescent tubes over the mat burst at once and glass came down like snow. Yamazaki was gone from in front of me. I heard him hit the shoe cubbies on the far wall, and the cubbies broke under him, and eleven kids' worth of spare sandals came down on top of him.

The lights flickered and came back.

I was still standing. I didn't know why. My right arm hung at my side, numb to the shoulder, and the knuckles of that hand were split to the bone. The sleeve of my gi had torn open along the seam from the elbow down.

Over on the far side of the room, Yamazaki pushed a broken cubby off himself and sat up. His shirt was torn open in the middle of his chest, and under it the skin was already going dark in the shape of a fist. He looked down at it. He touched it with his fingertips. Then he looked up at me, and his face was split open in a smile so wide that it didn't look like a smile anymore.

He started laughing, louder and lower than the giggle, and it didn't stop, and while he was laughing he got up off the floor with his long right arm swinging, and his eyes had gone strange. I'd never seen anybody look the way he looked then.

He took the knife back out.

I couldn't lift my arms. I stood there, and he came across the mat toward me, laughing, and I thought, very clearly, that this was the time I wouldn't get up.

The staff came out of nowhere.

It was three sections of wood joined with metal rings, and it went past my left ear so close I felt the air move, and it caught Yamazaki's knife hand at the wrist. The knife went spinning into the dark corner behind the heavy bag. The second section of the staff swung around after the first and hit Yamazaki across the side of the head, and he stopped laughing.

Billy Kane stepped in front of me with the staff held across his body in both hands.

"Evening, Ryuji," he said.

Yamazaki stood very still. Blood ran down the side of his head from where the staff had caught him. He looked at Billy, and some of the strangeness went out of his eyes, slowly, like water draining out of a bath.

"Geese's dog," he said.

"That's me." Billy didn't move. "Mr. Howard didn't send you here."

"I don't need Geese to send me nowhere."

"No. But you're standing in a dojo Mr. Howard's taken an interest in, cutting up a boy Mr. Howard's taken an interest in, and he didn't send you." Billy said it calmly, as if he was reading out a bus timetable. "So now you can leave on your own, or I can call him and ask what he'd like me to do with you. Your choice, mate."

The two of them looked at each other for a long time. I stood behind Billy and swayed and tried not to fall over, and watched the blood run off the end of my fingers onto the mat.

Then Yamazaki laughed again, the old high giggle. He looked past Billy at me.

"Ki," he said. "Paul Phoenix doesn't do ki." He touched the bruise on his chest again. "Next time, kid. I'll find out what you found up there. Next time."

He walked to the door he'd come through, ducked out under it, and was gone. I heard his footsteps go across the parking lot. Then I didn't hear anything.

Billy stood there for a while with the staff still across his body, looking at the door. Then he lowered it and folded it up into three pieces and put it under his arm, and turned around and looked at me.

He looked at the blood, and the torn sleeve, and my split knuckles. He looked at the mat where I'd thrown the punch, where the blue vinyl had split in two places under my feet. He looked at the broken cubbies and the glass from the burst tubes. He looked at the sign on the wall, which was still there, not a scratch on it, the red letters bright under the lights that were left.

"Sit down before you fall down," he said.

My legs folded and I ended up sitting.

Billy crouched in front of me with his forearms on his knees. "How many times did he put you on the floor?"

"I don't know. I stopped counting."

"I was outside for the last three." He shook his head slowly. "Three that I saw. And you got up every time, with your leg like that." He nodded at my knee, which I hadn't looked at and didn't want to. "I've seen Ryuji Yamazaki put grown men in wheelchairs for looking at him. Men twice your size. He usually gets bored by the second time they go down."

"He didn't get bored."

"No," Billy said. "He didn't." He looked at me for a while without saying anything. "That was ki, at the end. Where'd that come from, blondie?"

"I don't know."

"Your dad can't do that."

"I know."

He waited, but I didn't say anything else, and after a while he nodded slowly, the same way Terry had nodded at Pao Pao when I'd said snow. He stood up.

"Mr. Howard would like to meet you," he said. "Sunday. He'll send a car at noon." He looked down at me. "That's an invitation, not a summons. You can say no. But I'd think about who walked through that door tonight, and who walked through it after him, before you do."

"Why did you come?"

Billy shrugged. "I've been parking across the street every night your dad's been gone. Mr. Howard's orders." He looked at the broken cubbies, and at the split mat, and at the sign. "Not all of them, mind. Tonight I'd have come anyway."

He went to the door. He stopped there with his hand on the frame, the same place he'd stood on Monday.

"Get to a hospital," he said. "Or your mum. Whichever's closer." Then he was gone too.

I sat on the mat under the sign for a long time.

I should have called someone. I knew that. My mom was at the hospital, and her shift ended at midnight, and the phone was in the office twenty feet away. I sat there and thought about getting up and walking twenty feet, and it seemed like a very long way.

So instead I closed my eyes and did the breathing, and went to the Dojo.

It was the same as always: the long floor, the eight walls of scrolls, and the dark at the far end of the hall where the walls I can't read are. The brazier in the middle was heaped with embers, much higher than I'd left it. I didn't count them right away. I stood beside it and looked at the fourth wall, where the Ki Recovery scroll hung with its paper blank, all the writing gone into me. Its gold band lay on the floor beneath it in two curled pieces, like a snapped ring. On the shelf by the brazier, the seventh book had gone cold.

Behind me, at the edge of the light, the thing that stands there was standing there.

It still didn't have a shape. But it was taller than it had been on Monday night, I was sure of it, and when I turned around to look at it straight on, I thought for just a second that the dark had something like shoulders.

Then it was gone, and it was just the dark again.

I counted the embers. Two hundred and fifty-two and change. Getting beaten nearly to death by Ryuji Yamazaki had paid me two hundred, and I sat there beside the brazier with that number and couldn't make myself feel anything about it.

My mother found me at twenty past twelve.

I heard her car in the driveway, and the kitchen door, and her calling my name in the house, and then calling it again, closer, sharper. Then the back door of the dojo opened and she came in, still in her scrubs with her bag over her shoulder, and saw me.

I've seen my mother at work. Once, when I was nine, she couldn't get a sitter and took me to the ER for a night shift, and I sat in the break room and watched through the door while they brought in a man from a car crash. She walked toward him with exactly the same face she wore now. Completely calm. The bag came off her shoulder and hit the floor, and she crossed the mat in about four steps and knelt down in front of me in my blood without looking at it.

"Talk to me," she said. "What's your name?"

"Mom."

"What's your name?"

"William Phoenix."

"What day is it?"

"Friday."

"Who's the president?"

"Bush. The son."

She was already working while I answered. Her fingers went to my neck for my pulse and then to my nose, and then to the cut under my eye, and then down my left arm to the long cut on my forearm. She stopped there for a moment. I watched her see that it had already stopped bleeding. It was closed at the edges, an angry red line with the beginning of a scab on it. It should have been an hour's worth of stitches and a lot of blood on the way to the hospital.

She didn't say anything. She put her fingers back on my neck and held them there for a long time, looking at her watch. I watched her lips move while she counted.

"Fifty-eight," she said quietly. "You've lost a lot of blood. You've been fighting for I don't know how long. Your heart should be going a hundred and forty, and you're breathing like you just woke up from a nap." She looked up at me. "Explain that to me."

I didn't know what to say. I said, "I'm okay."

"You're not okay. You're conscious, which is different." She looked at my knee, and I watched her face not change while she looked at it. Then she looked past me, at the broken cubbies, and the split mat, and the knife lying in the dark corner behind the heavy bag where it had landed. Last, she looked up at the sign on the wall.

"Who," she said.

"A man called Yamazaki. He wanted the sign." I swallowed. "I took the challenge. He didn't get it."

My mother closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them she was a doctor again.

"Can you stand?"

"I don't know."

"We're going to find out." She got her shoulder under my good arm and lifted, and I came up off the mat with my knee screaming. We started across the mat toward the back door, slowly, with most of my weight on her. She's five foot six. I didn't know she could carry that much.

"Mom," I said, halfway to the door. "Geese Howard wants to meet me. Sunday."

She didn't stop walking. "No."

"Billy Kane stopped him. Yamazaki. Billy stopped him, or I'd be dead."