Chapter 05 - Groundwork (Patreon)

By Monday everybody at Central had a version of it.

The first one I heard was at my locker before homeroom, where Yamazaki had come into the dojo with six guys and a baseball bat. In the second one, which a sophomore was telling in the hallway without knowing I was behind him, it had been Geese Howard himself and I'd lost an eye. By lunch I'd heard that my dad had been arrested in Japan, that the dojo had burned down, and that I'd been in a coma since Saturday. That last one was hard to square with me sitting in the cafeteria eating a burrito.

My face didn't help. The bruise on my nose had gone yellow at the edges and green in the middle, the cut under my eye was a thin pink line that made people look twice, and on the stairs everybody could see I was wearing the brace under my jeans. My mother had driven me to school herself that morning, and sat in the car at the curb until I was through the doors.

I went to homeroom. I went to English, where Ms. Kowalski looked at my face for a long moment with her mouth slightly open, then closed it and handed back our essays. I'd gotten a B-minus on The Great Gatsby, which I'd mostly read. She was wearing the grey pencil skirt. I spent the rest of the period thinking about the grey pencil skirt and the warm place under my navel, more or less in turns.

I skipped chemistry. I didn't go to the roof, because the B-building stairs are steep and my knee was still telling me about every one of them. I sat in the library instead with my eyes closed and my head on a copy of National Geographic, breathing down into the warm place and feeling it fill, the way it had on Saturday night. It filled faster now. I didn't know what to do with it once it was full. I'd sit there holding it like a breath, and after a while it would leak back out into the rest of me, and I'd start again.

At lunch, Tyler Beck came over to my table.

I'd seen him coming. He had his two friends from the football team with him, the same two from the parking lot, and he walked across the cafeteria in the way you walk when you want people to notice you're walking somewhere. People noticed. Halfway across, the tables around mine got quieter.

Two tables over, Danny Ruiz was sitting by himself with a comic book open next to his tray. He'd looked up when Tyler came in, and now he was looking at me, and his face had gone the color of the milk carton in his hand.

Tyler stopped across the table from me. He looked at my nose and grinned.

"Heard somebody finally fixed your face, Phoenix."

I took a bite of my burrito.

"Your little friend over there says I'm supposed to be scared of you." He jerked his head toward Danny without looking at him. "Friday I tell him give me five bucks, and he says William Phoenix said to tell you to leave me alone." He did Danny's voice high and wobbly. His friends laughed. "So I figured I'd come see. Since you're crippled now."

"Tyler," I said. "Go away."

"Or what?"

I didn't answer. He leaned over the table and took hold of my ponytail and pulled.

It's not the first time somebody's grabbed my hair. It's long, and it's an easy handle, and I get it about once a year. My dad has a rule about it, which is that if they're going to grab it, you make it the worst decision they make that day.

On Friday night I'd taught eleven kids the first thing my dad ever taught me about what to do when a grown-up grabs you. I did it now. I put my hand over Tyler's on the back of my head and pinned it there, flat against my skull, so he couldn't let go. Then I stood up and turned under his arm. It doesn't take any strength. When you turn, his wrist has nowhere to go but the wrong way, and his elbow has to follow it, and then his shoulder, and then the rest of him.

Tyler went down onto his knees beside the table with his arm straight up behind him and his cheek on the edge of my tray. He made a high noise.

His friends had moved. One of them got a hand on my shoulder. I didn't bother stopping the world. I turned Tyler's wrist about a quarter of an inch further, and Tyler screamed, and his friend took his hand off my shoulder as if it had burned him.

"Danny," I said. "How much did he take off you?"

Danny looked at me across two tables. Everybody in the cafeteria was looking at me, and then at him.

"F-five dollars," he said. "Friday. And three last week."

"Eight dollars," I said to Tyler.

It took him a little while to get his wallet out with one hand. He held up a ten. I didn't give him change. I took the ten and let go of Tyler's wrist, and he folded up sideways on the floor holding his arm against his chest.

Down in the Dojo, something small and warm landed in the brazier, about a tenth of an ember's worth. I hadn't been thinking about it. I noticed it the way you notice a coin dropping into a jar in another room.

The lunch monitor was a math teacher named Mr. Haas, and he was standing at the far end of the cafeteria by the doors. He'd watched the whole thing. When I looked at him he turned around and went out into the hallway.

I walked over to Danny's table and put the ten dollars on top of his comic book. It was a Spider-Man, the same one from the parking lot, with a shoe print across the cover that he'd tried to wipe off.

"They said you were in a coma," Danny said.

"I was eating a burrito."

He looked at my face, at the nose and the cut, and then at the brace through my jeans, and then over at Tyler, who his friends were helping up off the floor. "Was it bad? On Friday?"

"Yeah," I said. "It was bad."

He nodded slowly. I think it helped him somehow, that I said that.

On my way out of the cafeteria, a girl at the table by the door looked up at me. It was the junior from the volleyball team, the one with the long brown ponytail who'd nearly run into somebody on the track when I waved. She was sitting with three other girls, and all four of them had stopped eating.

"I'm Jessica," she said. "From the track."

"I know."

She went red again, the same way she had on the track. I kept walking, and at the doors I looked back. She was still watching me. Her friends were all talking at once, and she wasn't listening to any of them.

Terry Bogard pulled up across the street at a quarter to seven that evening in an old green pickup with a cracked windshield and a Pao Pao Café sticker on the bumper.

I was in the front room watching through the curtains, the way I'd been watching the Lincoln since it pulled up at six. Billy's car was in the same spot it had been every night that week, across Barnes Street and a little down, under the streetlight that doesn't work. Terry parked right behind it, close enough that the pickup's front bumper was almost touching the Lincoln's back one. Then he got out, stretched, put his cap on backward, and walked up to Billy's window and knocked on it.

I watched the window roll down. Neither of them moved for a while.

I couldn't hear what they said. It wasn't long. Terry stood there with his hands in his jacket pockets, and Billy sat with both hands on the wheel, and at one point Terry laughed, and Billy didn't. Then Terry straightened up and tapped twice on the roof of the Lincoln, like you'd tap the roof of a cab, and walked across the street to our house.

My mother had the door open before he got to it.

"Riley," Terry said. He took his cap off. I'd never seen him do that.

"Thank you for coming."

"You said you needed to talk." He looked past her at me in the hallway, and his eyes went over the nose and the brace the same way hers had on Saturday morning, taking inventory. "Hey, kid."

"Hey."

"Kitchen," said my mother.

She sent me to my room. I went down the hall and shut my door loudly, and then opened it again quietly and sat on the floor just inside it, because the kitchen is twenty feet down the hall and our house has thin walls, and I've been listening to conversations in that kitchen since before I could read.

She told him most of it. She didn't tell him about the Dojo. She told him about Yamazaki, and the knife, and the sign, and Billy's staff. She told him about Sunday and the tower. When she got to the part where Geese's hand stopped an inch from my nose and I didn't blink, Terry made a sound, a short breath out through his nose.

"He wanted to see if the kid could read him," Terry said.

"Yes."

"And he could."

"He could." My mother was quiet for a second. "Geese said he wanted nothing. He said it twice. He wanted me to remember."

"Geese never wanted nothing in his life." I heard a chair creak, as though Terry had leaned back in it. "What do you want from me, Riley? I'll do whatever you need. I'm just asking what that is."

"Paul's back Thursday. Until then, I'm working nights, and Geese Howard has a man parked across my street who saved my son's life and works for the man who killed your father." She said it flatly, the way she reads out lab results. "I don't know which part of that scares me more. I'd like someone on this side of the street too."

"Okay," said Terry. "Until Thursday's easy."

"And after Thursday," my mother said, "I'd like you to tell me the truth about something. You've known Paul for twenty years. You know what's out there better than he does. If people like Geese and that man Yamazaki are going to come for William no matter what we do, what does he need?"

Terry didn't answer right away.

"He needs to be able to do something about it," he said finally. "Paul's taught him most of what Paul can teach. That kid hits like Paul at twenty-five. But what came off him at Pao Pao, and what he put into Yamazaki at the end there—" He stopped. "Paul can't teach him that. Paul's never touched it. He's proud he's never touched it."

"And you can."

"I can show him where the door is. Walking through it's up to him." The chair creaked again. "You okay with that?"

My mother took long enough that I thought she wasn't going to answer.

"On Friday morning I'd have said no," she said. "Ask me on Saturday morning, the way I found him."

Neither of them said anything for a while after that.

Then Terry's voice came down the hall, louder. "Kid. You can come out now. Your door's open."

He took me out to the backyard, under the porch light, by the makiwara.

My dad put it in when I was eleven. It's a four-by-four post sunk three feet into the ground and set in concrete, planed down toward the top so it flexes, with a pad of rope wound around the top and tied off. The rope has been replaced six times. The post's never been replaced. There are two dark patches worn into the wood on either side of the rope pad where my dad's knuckles and mine have hit it about a million times between us, and the grass around the base doesn't grow anymore.

Terry looked at it for a while. He put his hand on the post and pushed and felt it spring back.

"Your dad's," he said.

"He hits it every morning. I do too."

"I know. He's been telling me about this post for ten years. He talks about it like it's a dog." Terry took his hand away and turned around. "Okay. Where's it live?"

I didn't have to ask what he meant. I put my hand flat on my stomach, a couple of inches under my navel.

Terry looked at my hand for a second. "Huh. Okay. Most people take a year to find that. I took about two." He sat down on the back step and leaned his elbows on his knees. "When you went to hit Yamazaki at the end, where'd it go?"

"Everywhere. Then my fist."

"Can you do it again?"

"I don't know. I haven't tried."

"Try."

I stood in front of the makiwara and took my stance, and breathed down into the warm place, and filled it. Then I hit the post.

It was a good punch. The post bent back and sprang forward and the rope pad made the flat hard sound it always makes. Nothing else happened. The warm place stayed exactly where it was, full, like water in a jar with the lid screwed on.

"Again," said Terry.

I hit it again, and again after that. Twenty times. The rope pad started to smell hot and my knuckles started to sting where they'd split on Friday. The warm place never moved.

"Okay, stop." Terry got up off the step and came over. "What were you thinking about at the end there? Friday. When it came out."

I thought about it. I remembered the lights, and the moth, and getting up the last time with my left arm hanging. "That I had one punch left."

"Right. You had nothing, so it had nowhere to hide. Everything else in you was empty, and it went to the only place that wasn't." He put his fist against my chest, not hard. "Right now you've got a nice full tank and a body that thinks it can do it alone. Your body's been doing it alone for sixteen years. It's good at it. Your dad made it good at it. It doesn't want any help."

"So how do I make it want help?"

"You don't make it. You give the ki somewhere to go and you get out of the way." Terry stepped back. "Watch."

He walked to the middle of the yard, where the grass was long because my dad had been meaning to mow it for a month. He stood there for a second with his hands loose. Then he dropped into a crouch and brought his right fist down into the ground.

The ground lit up where he hit it. A wave of gold light came off his knuckles and ran along the grass away from him, low, about knee-high, fast as a thrown ball. It flattened the grass as it went. It hit the back fence and the fence shook from one end to the other, and one of the pickets cracked down the middle with a sound like a bat hitting a ball. Next door, Mr. Okafor's dog started barking.

Terry stood up and shook his hand out.

"Power Wave," he said. "My dad taught me that when I was nine. He used to say the ground always hits back. You hit it, it hits back, you send that along." He looked at the cracked picket. "Tell your mom I'll fix that."

I stared at the strip of flattened grass running from his feet to the fence.

"I'm not going to learn that by Thursday," I said.

"Nope." Terry grinned for the first time since he'd come in. "You're not going to learn that by Christmas. I'm not here to teach you my moves, kid. I'm here to get you to put that stuff somewhere on purpose, once. After that it's practice." He went back to the step and sat. "Now. Don't hit the post. Put your fist on it."

I put my fist on the rope pad.

"Now push, without moving your arm. Push from your feet. Push from the floor. Push from where it lives." He leaned back against the door. "We've got all night."

We were out there until two in the morning. I didn't move the post an inch. Around midnight Mr. Okafor came out in his bathrobe and stood at the cracked picket and looked at Terry for a long moment, and Terry waved at him, and Mr. Okafor went back inside without saying anything.

When my mother got home from her shift at a quarter past twelve, she stood at the kitchen window for a while and watched. Then she brought out two glasses of water and a bag of frozen peas for my knuckles, and went to bed.

Tuesday, I didn't go to the Dojo once. Wednesday, I went in between classes and stood in front of the brazier for a few minutes and left again. It had two hundred and fifty-two embers in it and change, and Terry's lessons hadn't put anything into it at all, which I'd expected. Whatever runs the place only pays for fights. It didn't seem to care that I was standing in my backyard every night until two in the morning with my fist against a post.

Terry came every evening at a quarter to seven and parked behind Billy. On Tuesday, after about an hour of me pushing on the makiwara, the post stayed where it was and the warm place moved. It shifted, the way your stomach shifts in an elevator, and for maybe half a second I felt heat slide up through my hips and into my back. Then it was gone, and the tank was full again with the lid on.

"There," said Terry from the step. He'd felt it too. "Did you feel where it stopped?"

"Here." I touched my back, between my shoulder blades.

"That's your shoulders. You tighten up there. Your dad tightens up there too, right before he throws the big one. It's how he gets all that power, and it's a wall." He came over and put two fingers between my shoulder blades and pressed. "Loosen that."

It took me until Wednesday night to loosen it.

At around ten that night, Billy Kane got out of the Lincoln for the first time all week. I heard the car door, and then footsteps on the sidewalk, and then he was standing at our side gate in his bad suit with his hands in his pockets, on the far side of the fence from Terry.

Terry stood up off the step.

"Billy," he said.

"Bogard." Billy didn't open the gate. He looked at me, and at the post, and at the strip of flattened grass that still ran across the yard from Monday night. "Ryuji's gone."

Terry waited.

"Got on a plane Sunday night. LAX to Osaka. Mr. Howard's people saw him off." Billy shrugged. "Thought you'd want to know."

"Why tell us?" Terry asked.

Billy took a while to answer.

"Mr. Howard didn't tell me not to," he said. He looked at me again. "Japan's where your dad is, blondie."

"I know."

"Big country," said Billy. "Lot of people in it." He turned around and walked back to his car.

I stood in front of the makiwara for a while after he'd gone. Terry didn't say anything. He sat back down on the step and waited.

When I put my fist against the rope pad again, I wasn't thinking about the post at all. I was thinking about a hotel in Yokohama, and Room 1108, and my dad with his going-away face on, and somewhere on the same island, a man with a long right arm and a folding knife who'd started laughing at me in a way I'd never seen before.

Something in my back let go.

It came up out of the warm place and through my hips and up my spine and across my shoulders without stopping, and down my arm, and into my fist. I felt it arrive. My knuckles went hot all at once, as if I'd put them on a stove. The air around my fist bent, the way it had on Friday night. I didn't move my arm at all.

The makiwara bent away from my fist about two inches and stayed there, quivering, for a second. Then it sprang back, and the rope pad was smoking.

Terry came down off the step.

He came over and looked at the rope, which had a scorched place on it the size of my fist, and put his hand on the post, and then looked at me. He wasn't grinning.

"Okay," he said quietly. "That's the door." He took his cap off and turned it around in his hands, and put it back on. "Now you've got to do it a hundred thousand more times."

Interlude: Yokohama

The Kengan match was held at nine o'clock on Wednesday night in the basement of a shipping company's building near Honmoku Pier, in a concrete room that had been built to hold machinery and had held nothing but fights since the eighties. There were seats for about sixty people. Forty-one of them were full, nearly all men in dark suits. Two companies were fighting over the lease on a container terminal, and whoever won tonight got the terminal for twenty years.

Paul Phoenix sat on a bench in the room next door, wrapping his hands.

He did it the way he'd done it since he was seventeen, the long tape over the knuckles first, then around the wrist, then between the fingers. He'd done it before maybe two thousand fights. His hands knew how to do it without him, which was good, because he wasn't thinking about his hands. He was thinking about a voice on the phone at five in the afternoon on Saturday saying to the sign and to him.

Asami Kuroe stood by the door with her phone in her hand and a folder under her arm. She had been in that position for the last twenty minutes, saying nothing and watching him wrap, while the phone buzzed now and then in her hand and she didn't look at it.

"You're thinking about your son," she said.

"I'm thinking about the guy I'm fighting."

"You do not know who you are fighting." She opened the folder. "Jun Sekibayashi. He is a professional wrestler. A very famous one, in Japan."

"Never heard of him."

"I know. You said so on the phone." She turned a page. "He has one rule, Phoenix-san. He does not avoid any attack. He does not block, he does not slip, he does not move. He believes a wrestler receives everything his opponent has and then answers it. He has fought in the Kengan eleven times this way. He has won nine."

Paul stopped wrapping and looked up at her.

"He doesn't block," he said.

"He does not block."

Paul started to grin. It was the first time in five days.

Asami watched the grin with an expression of polite and complete disapproval. "Please do not enjoy this, Phoenix-san. The terminal is worth eleven billion yen."

Jun Sekibayashi was taller than Paul by half a head and wider by a lot, with a long, cheerful face and a neck as wide as his head. He came out in black trunks and wrestling boots, and he bowed to the room, and then he bowed to Paul, and then he spread his arms out wide on either side of him and stood in the middle of the floor with his chest open, waiting.

Paul looked at him for a second. Then he walked up and hit him with a straight right in the middle of the chest, as hard as he'd ever hit anybody.

Sekibayashi rocked back a step. He came forward again, smiling, and hit Paul with a forearm across the side of the neck that knocked him off his feet.

That was how it went for nineteen minutes.

Paul hit him with everything he had. The shoulder strike off the stamp. The flash elbow, twice, which split Sekibayashi's eyebrow open. Low kicks to the thigh until the leg was purple from hip to knee. Sekibayashi stood there and took every one of them with his arms out, and after every one he answered: a chop to the chest that left a red handprint on Paul through his gi, a lariat, a headbutt. Seventeen minutes in, he picked Paul up, turned him upside down, and dropped him on the back of his neck on the concrete, and the room went very quiet.

Paul lay on the floor and looked at the ceiling. There were pipes up there, painted green, and a single bulb in a cage.

He thought about his son on the floor of the dojo, looking up at the lights.

He got up.

Sekibayashi was waiting for him in the middle of the floor with his arms out. His face was a mess of blood from the eyebrow, and he was smiling at Paul as if Paul was the best thing that had happened to him all year.

Paul smiled back. He walked up to him, set his feet, and threw a punch he'd thrown into a post in a backyard in South Town about two hundred thousand times.

The sound of it carried out into the hallway, where two of the building's security guards looked at each other.

Sekibayashi stood there for a moment afterward with his arms still out. He looked down at his chest. Then he looked up at Paul and nodded, once, the way one wrestler nods to another at the end of a good match, and fell forward. Paul caught him under the arms before his face hit the concrete and lowered him down onto it, slowly, and knelt there beside him.

The referee called it. Forty-one men in suits stood up at once. Asami Kuroe, in the front row, made a note in her folder.

She caught up with him in the hallway afterward, on his way to the showers, with his gi top over one shoulder and the handprints coming up red and purple across his chest.

"Ginza Pacific thanks you," she said. "The bonus will be in your account on Monday."

"Great." He kept walking.

"Phoenix-san." She didn't raise her voice. She didn't have to; he stopped. "Nogi-sama's people called me this morning. They asked about your son."

Paul turned around slowly.

"A man named Ryuji Yamazaki got off a plane at Kansai on Monday," Asami said, "and has been in Osaka since, telling a story to anyone who will buy him a drink. A sixteen-year-old boy in South Town, he says. Paul Phoenix's son. He stood up eleven times. And at the end he hit Yamazaki with ki." She paused. "Nogi-sama finds that interesting. So do I."

Paul didn't say anything.

"Nogi-sama would like to meet him," Asami said. "So would I."

Paul looked at her for a long time.

"He's sixteen," he said. "He's got a busted knee and a broken nose and his mother's checking him every two hours. Not yet."

Asami Kuroe wrote something in her folder and closed it.

"In March you asked me when Ginza Pacific would call your clause," she said. "I told you not yet. You were very happy with that answer, Phoenix-san. You should know that it is the same answer I give everyone, and that it has never once meant never." She looked at him. "Contracts do not lie. I will ask again." She bowed to him, exactly as deep as was correct and not a fraction deeper, and walked back down the hall toward the room where the men in suits were still standing.

Paul went into the shower and stood under it with both hands flat on the tile for a long time, until the water ran cold.

My dad's plane landed at South Town International at ten-forty on Thursday morning. My mother and I picked him up. I didn't ask whether I could skip school, and she didn't bring it up.

He came out through the doors from customs with his duffel bag over his shoulder and his hair standing straight up, and a black eye, and a strip of tape across the bridge of his nose that matched mine. He walked carefully, the way people walk when their whole back hurts. When he saw us he stopped.

Then he dropped the bag and crossed the floor and grabbed me.

He didn't say anything. He held onto me in the middle of the arrivals hall with people walking around us on both sides, with one hand on the back of my head, and I could feel him breathing. He held on for a long time. When he let go he kept his hand on the back of my neck, and looked at my nose, and at the cut under my eye, and down at my knee.

"To the sign and to him," he said.

"Yeah."

He nodded. His eyes were wet. He let go of my neck and looked at my mother.

She hadn't moved. She stood there with her car keys in her hand, looking at him: the black eye, the tape, the way he was standing. He looked back at her and didn't say anything either, and I watched my father, who interrupts the weather, stand there and wait to be told.

My mother walked over and put her hand flat on his chest, where the handprints were under his shirt. He winced.

"Car," she said.

She patched him up at the kitchen table. She did it the way she always does, without a word: she took the tape off his nose and looked at it, and pressed along his ribs, and found the place on the back of his neck where Sekibayashi had dropped him and held her fingers there with her eyes closed. My dad sat backward on his chair with his arms crossed on the back of it, and let her, and watched her face the whole time.

When she was finished she washed her hands at the sink and dried them on the towel.

"You promised me," she said.

My dad closed his eyes.

I was standing in the doorway to the hall. Neither of them looked at me. I didn't know what she meant at first, and then I did: whenever it was, a long time before I was born, some promise he'd made her about secrets, and he'd kept it for twenty years, until I'd asked him to break it.

"I know," said my dad.

That was all. My mother hung the towel back up on the oven door. She stood there for a moment with her hand on it. Then she walked around the table and kissed the top of his head, on the hair that sticks straight up, and went down the hall to their bedroom and shut the door.

My dad sat in the chair for a while with his eyes closed.

"Your mom," he said eventually, without opening them, "is the toughest person I ever met. You know that?"

"I know."

"Tougher than Kazuya." He opened his eyes. "Okay. Show me the dojo."

Marshall and Forest had come back on Sunday while we were at the tower and built new cubbies out of plywood and paint, so they didn't match the old ones on the other side of the door, and the plywood still smelled fresh. Marshall had patched the splits in the mat with blue vinyl tape. The patches were a slightly different blue. The blood had come out of everything except the seam where the two halves of the mat met near the middle, where it had gone down into the gap and turned brown, and no amount of scrubbing would get it out.

My dad walked around the room slowly. He looked at the new cubbies and the patched mat and the new light tubes, which were brighter than the old ones. He looked at the brown line in the seam for a long time. Then he walked to the front of the room and stood under the sign, and put his hand flat on the wall beside it, next to the place where Yamazaki's hand had been.

He didn't say anything. He stood there and looked up at it, and I stood behind him and waited.

"Terry says you found the door," he said at last.

"He told you?"

"He called the hotel before my flight. After Billy came by." He turned around. "Show me."

We went out into the backyard. It was the middle of the afternoon and the sun was out. The strip of flattened grass from Monday night had mostly stood back up, and one of the pickets in the back fence had a new board in it, unpainted, where Terry had replaced it on Tuesday.

I stood in front of the makiwara and put my fist against the rope pad.

It had taken me three nights to do it once. I'd done it four more times on Wednesday after Billy left and Terry had sat on the step watching me, and each time it had been a little less like breaking a wall and a little more like opening a door. Now I breathed down into the warm place and felt it fill, and loosened my shoulders, and sent it.

The air around my fist bent. The makiwara leaned away from me two inches and hung there, quivering, and then sprang back, and a thin line of smoke came up off the rope.

My father stood beside me looking at the post.

I'd thought about this all morning. I'd thought about it on the drive to the airport. My dad has never used ki in his life and doesn't care to. He says it's for people who can't punch. He'd beaten a man that week who never blocked anything, with a fist and nothing else, and I knew he was proud of that the way he's proud of the sign. I didn't know what he was going to say.

He put his hand on the post, on the dark patch where his knuckles had worn the wood, and pushed it, and felt it spring back.

"I put this in the week you turned eleven," he said. "You couldn't even make it move."

"I remember."

"Took you a year." He was quiet for a moment, looking at the smoke still curling up off the rope. Then he looked at me, and he was grinning, and his eyes were wet again, and he wasn't trying to hide either one.

"Again," said my father.