Chapter 06 - Downbeat (Patreon)

My parents waited until Saturday to talk about it.

My dad taught the kids' class on Friday night with his neck taped and a black eye, and the kids loved the black eye. Marisol asked if she could touch it. Tomás's mother looked at it and then at me, and seemed to decide that whatever had happened in our family that week, at least it was spread out evenly. Afterward my dad slept for fourteen hours. My mother had the weekend off for the first time in a month, and she spent Saturday morning at the kitchen table with the newspaper and Saturday afternoon in the garden pulling up things that may or may not have been weeds, and neither of them said a word about anything that mattered. I knew them well enough to know they were waiting for me to be somewhere else.

After dinner I said I was going to my room, and went to my room, and shut the door loudly. Then I opened it again quietly and sat down on the floor just inside it.

I've heard a lot of my parents' marriage from that spot. It's twenty feet from the kitchen, and the house was built in 1961 by people who didn't believe in insulation.

For a while there was only the sound of the dishwasher. Then my mother said, "Sit down, Paul."

A chair scraped. I heard it creak the way it does when he sits in it backward.

"I'm not angry about the scroll," my mother said.

"You're not?"

"I'm angry about a lot of things. That isn't one of them. Somebody left something in a cave and our son found it. That's nobody's fault." She was quiet for a second. "For five days I was the only person in this house who didn't know what was happening to his body. I'm his mother, and I'm the one who puts him back together when he comes home in pieces. I took his pulse on Friday night and it was fifty-eight, and you knew why, and I didn't."

My dad didn't say anything.

"I know he asked you not to tell me," she said. "I know you promised him. You're his father, and I understand why you did it. I'd have liked you to tell him no."

"Yeah," said my dad, after a while. "Yeah. I should've told him no."

"We said no secrets. Before he was born, in that apartment over the laundromat with the radiator that banged all night. You said it, Paul. Not me."

"I remember."

"I know you do."

It went quiet for long enough that I thought they might be finished. Then I heard her pull out the chair across from him and sit down.

"So," she said. "What do we do?"

"About what?"

"About our son, who has a dojo in his head that pays him to get hurt, and who's been visited this month by Billy Kane, Ryuji Yamazaki, and Geese Howard, in that order."

My dad let out a long breath. "He's going to fight. Riley, I'm not going to be able to stop him. I don't want to stop him."

"I know. I've stopped pretending he won't." My mother said it plainly, the way she'd say a bone was broken. "Then he learns from people who can teach him what he needs. You, for everything you know. Terry, for the rest, while Terry's here."

"I can teach him."

"You can teach him everything you know. You can't teach him that." I heard her tap something on the table, maybe her finger. "You're not competing with Terry Bogard."

"I'm kind of competing with Terry Bogard."

"I know you are," said my mother. Her voice changed a little when she said it, and for a second she sounded almost fond.

Then my dad told her about Asami Kuroe.

He told her about Nogi's people asking, and about Yamazaki in a bar in Osaka telling everybody the story. He told her what he'd said, which was not yet. My mother listened all the way through without interrupting, which is how I knew she was taking it seriously.

"Then he doesn't go near those people," she said.

"That's what I told her."

"Marshall's apartment in Tokyo has three bedrooms."

My dad didn't answer right away.

"And Heihachi's offer is still open," he said finally. "The exchange at the Polytechnical. He said whenever the kid was old enough. It's a good school, Riley."

"Is it safer than here?"

I waited. I could picture his face doing nothing.

"I don't know," my dad said. "I don't think anywhere's safe for him now. Not since January."

My mother was quiet for a long time after that.

"Not this year," she said. "We decide by Christmas. Together. And he gets a say."

"Okay."

"Okay."

Then my dad said, "There's one more thing I've gotta tell you," and his voice dropped, and the rest of it went too low for me to hear. I leaned closer to the doorframe. I could hear him talking, steady and quiet, for about a minute. I couldn't make out a word.

When he stopped, nobody said anything for a long time.

"How long?" said my mother.

"Since I signed. Four years."

Another silence.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?"

"No. I'm not okay with it. But I heard you." A chair moved. "Thank you for telling me."

I sat there in my doorway trying to work out what my father had been hiding for four years, and coming up with nothing, and feeling for the first time what my mother must have felt all week.

Then my mother laughed. It was low and short, and it surprised me, because I hadn't heard her laugh like that in a while.

"Your neck," she said.

"My neck's fine."

"A man dropped you on your head on Wednesday."

"Then you'd better check it, Doctor," said my father.

I heard the chairs, and their footsteps in the hall going past my door, and their bedroom door closing at the end of it. I let out a breath. They'd talked it out, more or less, and nobody had cried, and whatever my dad's thing was, my mother had said thank you about it. I got up off the floor feeling lighter than I had in a week, and sat down on my bed, and picked up my chemistry textbook for the first time since March.

I got about four minutes into it.

The first thing was the headboard.

Our house has thin walls, and my parents' bedroom shares one of them with mine, and their headboard is against it. I've known that my whole life in the way you know things you've decided not to think about. I'd never had to think about it this hard.

On my side of the wall there's a framed photo of me at my first junior tournament, age nine, holding a trophy taller than my head. It started to tap against the plaster. Slowly at first. Then not slowly.

Then my father's voice came through the wall. My father is loud at everything. He's loud on the phone and loud in restaurants, and loud at the TV during the playoffs, and I had somehow never put together what that meant about the rest of his life.

I put my pillow over my head. It didn't help. My mother said something I'm going to spend years trying to forget, and the photo frame tapped faster.

I did the only thing I could think of. I turned on the music.

It's the soundtrack in my head that nobody else can hear, the one that sounds like the part of an anime where the hero gets back up. I'd never turned it on to drown something out before. It came up loud and fast, strings and drums and the singer going for the big note, and for about ten seconds it worked.

Then the drums lined up with the headboard.

I got up. I put on my shoes without untying them and grabbed my jacket off the chair, and went down the hall past their door without looking at it, and out the kitchen door into the yard. Next door, Mr. Okafor's dog was barking. My dad's voice came out through their bedroom window, which was open, because it was April. The dog barked harder.

I got my bike out of the side yard, and rode.

The Laws live on the north side, in a duplex over a dry cleaner, about twelve minutes away by car. It's about twenty-five on a bike if your knee is still getting over a sprain. I did it in eighteen.

Forest answered the door in sweatpants and a Jeet Kune Do T-shirt with a bowl of cereal in his hand. Behind him the TV was playing a Shaw Brothers movie with the sound way up. Marshall's van wasn't in the driveway; on Saturdays he works the dinner rush at the restaurant until midnight.

Forest looked at me. I was out of breath and my hair had come half out of its tie.

"What happened? Is it Yamazaki?"

"My parents."

"Are they fighting?" His face went worried. "Is your mom—"

"They're not fighting."

Forest stared at me for a second longer. Then he understood, and I watched it happen on his face.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, no."

"Can I come in?"

"Yeah. Yeah, come in." He stood aside. "Do you want cereal? You look like you need cereal."

I didn't want cereal. I sat on the Laws' couch with my hands on my knees and watched a man on the TV kill six other men with a bench, and Forest sat on the other end of the couch and ate his cereal and kept looking over at me, and for a while neither of us said anything.

"I can't go back for at least an hour," I said.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"No."

"Okay." He finished the cereal and put the bowl on the floor. Then he looked at the clock on the VCR, which said 9:14. "It's Saturday."

"I know it's Saturday."

"No, I mean it's Saturday." He was already getting up. "Pao Pao. Saturday nights. People fight on the platform." He was pulling a hoodie on over the T-shirt. "My dad's got the van. But the car's here."

"Does your dad know you drive the car?"

"My dad doesn't know a lot of things," said Forest, and went to get the keys.

Pao Pao on a Saturday night is a different place than Pao Pao on a Wednesday. It was packed. People were standing three deep at the bar and sitting on the rail of the fighting platform with drinks in their hands, and somebody had put a salsa record on loud enough that you felt it in your chest. The TV over the bar was showing a baseball game nobody was watching. The air smelled like grilled fish and beer and sweat.

Richard Meyer was behind the bar in a Hawaiian shirt with toucans on it. He saw me come in and came down the length of the bar toward us, still drying a glass.

"William." He looked at Forest, and then back at me. "Your father know you're here?"

"My father's busy."

Richard looked at me for a moment. I don't know what he saw in my face. He set the glass down.

"Busy," he said.

"Very busy."

Richard Meyer started to laugh. He tried to stop, and couldn't, and finally gave up and put both hands flat on the bar and laughed until he had to wipe his eyes. Forest looked at the ceiling. I waited it out.

"Okay," Richard said, when he could talk. "Okay. Sit. You eat something, it's on the house." He pointed at me. "You don't drink. Your mother would kill me. And him," he pointed at Forest, "his father would kill me after your mother."

He sat us at the end of the bar near the platform and brought out two plates of rice and beans and fried plantains and two Cokes. Up on the platform, two guys in their twenties were circling each other in jeans and bare feet, one a boxer and one some kind of kicker, while Richard's bouncer stood at the top of the steps as referee. The boxer won. Somebody at the rail paid somebody else twenty dollars.

"Who's good tonight?" I asked Forest.

He didn't have to look. He pointed with his fork.

There was a man sitting on the rail at the far corner of the platform with a boombox on the boards beside him. He was in his thirties, very lean, in black pants and a sleeveless shirt that showed the long hard muscles of somebody who used his whole body for a living. His hair was dyed blond and stood up off his head in a long swept crest, like a duck's tail. He had headphones around his neck. As I watched, he reached up and scratched under the chin of a small yellow chick that was sitting in his hair.

"Is that a bird?"

"That's Pyoko," said Forest. "That's Duck King. He's been in South Town since forever. He fought Terry Bogard in the first big tournament, back in, like, '91." He lowered his voice. "He's already beaten two guys tonight. He breakdances. You can't tell where anything's coming from."

Duck King must have heard his name, or felt us looking. He turned his head and looked down the length of the platform at me, at my face and the bruise and the hair. I watched him look at the hair for a while. Then he took the headphones off his neck and set them on the boombox, and stood up on the rail, balancing there with no hands, and called down the bar.

"Hey! Richard!"

Richard looked up from the taps.

"That's Paul's kid, right? The one Ryuji couldn't keep down?" Duck King was grinning. The whole bar had turned around. "I heard he got up eleven times!"

"He's here to eat," said Richard.

"Come on, Richard. It's Saturday." Duck King jumped down off the rail onto the platform, landed without a sound, and bowed toward me with one arm across his stomach, like a waiter. "Kid. Two minutes. No money. Just to see."

Every face in Pao Pao was on me. Forest had stopped chewing.

I looked at Richard. He looked back at me for a long moment. He was the only person in the bar who knew my father had sat in a booth in this room a week and a half ago and gone very still about a mountain.

"Your mother said no fighting for a week," Richard said.

"That was two weeks ago."

He sighed. Then he took off his apron and came around the end of the bar.

"Two minutes," he said. "Saturday rules. No weapons, nothing on the ground once a man taps, and nobody leaves on a stretcher. I referee." He pointed at Duck King. "And you, behave."

"I always behave," said Duck King, and reached down and pressed play on the boombox.

I took my jacket off and gave it to Forest, and tied my hair back properly, and went up the steps.

The boombox was playing something with a heavy break and a lot of bass, and Duck King was moving to it before Richard had even said go. He wasn't dancing, exactly. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet with his weight shifting side to side, and his hands loose, and his shoulders rolling, and Pyoko was riding on top of his head through all of it as though she'd done it a thousand times. She probably had.

Richard looked at both of us. "Fight."

I stopped the world.

In the grey, Duck King hung in the middle of a bounce with both feet off the boards. He was a mess to read. His weight wasn't anywhere. His hips were going one way and his shoulders the other, and his hands were at different heights, and when I tried to picture what came next, I got four or five versions at once, the same way I had with Yamazaki.

But Yamazaki had been a mess because he didn't care what happened next. This was different. Duck King's mess had a shape. He was off the ground because the music had told him to be, and in every version I pictured, he came down on the same beat.

I'd been hearing my own music since I stopped the world, without paying attention to it. It's always there in a fight. I listened to his instead, the heavy break thumping out of the boombox, frozen mid-thump.

I spent the rest of my thirty seconds counting.

Time came back. Duck King came down on the beat, and went into a spin on one hand, and his legs came around at my head like the blades of a fan.

I'd known it was coming and I still barely got under it. His heel took a piece of my hair. The second leg came around lower and I jumped it, and while I was in the air he was already up on his feet again, and his knee came up into my stomach and folded me over.

I went down on one knee on the boards. The crowd shouted.

"Ooh," said Duck King, dancing back. "Sorry. You okay, kid?"

I got up. He grinned and came in again.

For the next minute he made me look stupid. He went down onto the boards and spun, and came up out of it with a kick, and dropped again before I could touch him. When I went after him he was never where I aimed. He got me in the ribs with a heel and in the back of the head with a forearm on the way past, and once he walked his hands up my body and flipped off my shoulders and landed behind me, and the bar went crazy. I didn't land anything. The shield caught two of his kicks, and the second one cracked it.

I tried the ki once. I'd been doing it every night at the makiwara, standing still, with Terry on the step and all the time in the world. I tried to drop into the warm place while Duck King spun past me, and my shoulders went tight the way they always do when I'm about to throw something big, and it stayed exactly where it was, the lid screwed shut. Terry had told me it would be like that. I hadn't believed him.

So I stopped trying for it, and listened to his music.

Mine was going the whole time, strings and drums, the hero getting back up, and I made myself hear past it. The break coming out of the boombox was the same eight beats over and over, and everything Duck King did, he did on it. He dropped on the one. He spun on the three. He came up out of the spin with the kick on the five, every time, because that was where the music put it, and he'd been fighting to music for so long that he couldn't hear it and do anything else.

On the next five I wasn't where the kick was going. I was a step inside it, where his hip was.

His leg came around and found my shoulder instead of my head. I trapped it against my neck with both arms. He was off the ground on one hand with his other leg in the air, and his eyes went wide.

I stamped. My front foot came down on the old boards hard enough that a glass fell off the rail and broke. Then I turned my hips, and threw him.

It wasn't a clean throw. You can't throw a man cleanly when you've got him by the leg and he's upside down. But it was enough. He went over my shoulder and hit the boards flat on his back, and Pyoko went up off his head in a puff of yellow and landed on the rail, and I came down on top of him with my knee on his chest and my right fist drawn back over his face.

I didn't throw it. I held it there.

The boombox kept playing. Duck King looked up at my fist, and then at me, and then he laughed and slapped the boards twice with his palm.

"Okay!" he said. "Okay, okay. You got me."

"That's time," said Richard. I don't think it was. Nobody argued.

The bar was louder than it had been all night. People were banging on the rail. Somewhere in the back somebody was trying to collect on a bet that Richard had said there wouldn't be. Forest was standing on his stool with my jacket over his head, yelling something I couldn't hear.

I got up off Duck King and held out my hand, and he took it and came up off the boards, light as a cat. He went and got Pyoko off the rail and put her back on his head, where she settled down into his hair as though nothing had happened. Then he came back and looked at me with his head on one side.

"You hear music when you fight," he said.

I didn't say anything.

"Don't worry, I won't tell anybody. They'd think you're crazy." He grinned. "But I can see it. You move like there's a song on. I've been doing this for twenty years. I know what a guy looks like when he's dancing to something." He reached down and turned off the boombox. "Took you a minute to stop listening to yours and start listening to mine, though."

"Yeah," I said. "It did."

"That's the trick. Everybody's got a rhythm, kid. Ryuji too. Even Geese." He picked up the boombox and swung it up onto his shoulder. "Tell your dad Duck King says hi. And tell Terry he still owes me a rematch."

He went down the steps into the crowd, and people slapped him on the back as he went, and he was laughing.

Down in the Dojo, something landed in the brazier.

I felt it the way I always do, a weight dropping somewhere under my ribs. It was more than Boxcar had been worth. Boxcar had paid thirty-seven and a half. This was half again on top of that, and I stood there on the platform at Pao Pao with my ribs aching where his heel had caught them and did the math, slowly, the way I'd watched my mother do it on the paper towel.

Fifty-six and a quarter. More because I'd never fought anybody like him before, and more because Richard was standing there as referee, and the whole thing had counted. Three hundred and eight, and nearly nine.

It was the first real fight I'd won since the docks.

Forest drove me home at a quarter to one, with my bike in the trunk sticking out the back and tied down with a bungee cord.

He'd been talking the whole way. He'd been talking since the platform. He'd done Duck King's spin with his hand three times, and he'd done my stamp twice, and he'd told me that the way I'd caught the leg was the coolest thing he'd seen in his whole life, including the movie with the bench. When we turned onto Barnes Street he went quiet, though, and pulled up at the curb in front of the dojo and sat there with the engine running.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

"Yeah."

"When you go to Japan." He was looking at the steering wheel. "My dad told me what he said to your mom. About the apartment. Are you going to come?"

"I don't know. They're deciding by Christmas."

"I don't want to go," said Forest. He said it very quickly, as if it had been waiting. "Everybody I know is here. The Dragon's here." He laughed a little, and stopped. "But if you came, it'd be okay. I think."

I looked at him. He was still looking at the steering wheel.

"If I come," I said, "you've got to change the name."

Forest started laughing. He laughed until he had to put his forehead down on the wheel, and the horn went off, and up and down Barnes Street a couple of dogs started barking, and Mr. Okafor's was one of them.

The house was quiet. The kitchen light was on.

My father was sitting at the kitchen table in a T-shirt and boxers, eating cold rice out of the container with a fork. His hair was standing up even further than usual, which I hadn't thought was possible. When I came in through the back door he looked up.

"Hey, kiddo," he said. "Where'd you go?"

"Forest's. Then Pao Pao."

He put the fork down. "You fight?"

"Duck King."

My dad's face did about six things at once. "Duck King? With the bird?"

"With the bird."

"You win?"

"Yeah."

He looked at me for a second, and then he looked down at the rice container, and then back up at me, and I watched him start to work out why I'd left the house in the first place. His ears went red. I'd never seen my father's ears go red in my life.

"Hey," he said. "About earlier—"

"Dad."

"I'm just saying, your mom and me—"

"Dad."

He stopped. He sat there with his ears red and his hair standing up, looking at me across the kitchen table. Then he started to laugh, very quietly so he wouldn't wake her, with his hand over his mouth and his shoulders shaking. After a while I started too. I couldn't help it. We stood there in the kitchen at one in the morning, laughing without making any noise, until my ribs hurt where Duck King's heel had caught them.

When he could talk again, he pushed the rice container across the table at me.

"Sit down," said my father. "Tell me how you caught the leg."