Kung Fu High School

by Ryan Gattis

  "Who dis?" Alfredo spat when he was done talking. Reason number three.

  "This is Jimmy, he's my cousin." I knew it was Cue's place to talk but I couldn't resist.

  "Cousin, huh?" Alfredo stepped up on Jimmy, all close too. That was Jimmy's turn to earn some respect and stare Alfredo in his beady little corneyes and let him know that he could tie him in a knot and roll him home to his mamá. But he didn't. He just stood there with a dumb smile on his face.

  "Hi, nice to meet you," Jimmy said.

  Damn, if Cue didn't laugh, we'd've had a roll on what used to be the lawn. We couldn't afford to water it anymore. Besides, that didn't make much sense in winter.

  Of course, Alfredo got pissed anyway.

  "What the fuck is that guy's problem, K?"

  Everybody in the Waves called Cue, K. That or Pop. Poppa Don maybe, but that was pretty much it.

  "Shut it, Corny," I said, "Jimmy'd roll your shit in a heartbeat."

  I should've been the one shutting it but it was all right there for the taking. And nothing gets Alfredo's goat better than calling him Corny. Cue shot me a look over his shoulder as he led us down the street.

  "Yeah? We'll see, little Jen-Jen. We'll see"—Alfredo raised his voice—"because I heard Chang was washed up. I heard Chang's gone softer than the Three Ninjas put together and yo, that's Rocky, Colt, AND Turn Turn!"

  Alfredo turned his attention to Cue after getting some laughs from his Hunters. "Seriously, K, what use is this guy to us if he won't roll? He's strictly a liability. Strictly slack me and the Hunters gotta pick up. And you know we don't carry stragglers. Hunters don't truck with no bitches."

  And then he licked his lips at me like he was LL Cool J or something, which he's not and never will be. All that guy's tired antics are straight out of the bad movies he was always referencing. I was about to tell him so too, but Jimmy put his hand on my shoulder and for a second I couldn't feel the ground underneath my feet.

  "Enough!" Cue was thinking about something else already and I didn't blame him. He was brainstorming, not just how to keep Jimmy out of a fight today, but for good. He must've known it was impossible.

  "I am finished. No more fighting," Jimmy said, then the little bastard smiled at me. It took an effort not to smile back too. Gravitas, that's what Jimmy had, gravitas. I learned that word in a Laurence Olivier documentary that I'll never, ever admit to having watched late one night on TV.

  "See?" Alfredo was just spooning it on. "He really is a bitch."

  I couldn't let that one go. Me and Cue both knew that Jimmy could tear Alfredo apart.

  "You know what, 'Fredo? Keep talking like that and the only kiss you'll ever get from me will be the kiss of death like I'm Michael Fuckin' Corleone but I'll be the one breaking your heart—" I paused for effect, and Alfredo was about to jump in and say something but I talked over him—"when I pull it out your rib cage!"

  There was even a chorus of "ooohs" from the Hunters on that one.

  Usually, it was just talk. This wasn't. I would've rolled on him in the street and that just isn't smart. By far the worst place to ever roll is the street. The cops would steam in and pick you up, throw you in juvie, and you're done. In our neighborhood, they pick on you, they taunt you, and then they wait. They're like trapdoor spiders just hiding in their holes, waiting for us to make a mistake.

  "Jen!" Cue spun around and lifted my whole body up off the ground. My feet were dangling before I even knew what hit me. His face loomed close to mine, but with eyes gone soft inside his sneer. When Cue's mouth turned up like that, his whole face followed: forehead, hairline, chin, everything. We have the same cheekbones. "Just stop right now. We don't need this. So save it." Big brother, always being the badass, dropped me on the ground instead of setting me back on my feet.

  Thankfully, Alfredo laughed when he glared at me. That meant he could keep walking without losing face. Cue was smart like that. Turning, Alfredo pulled his trademark long black comb out of his back pocket, the one that was too big for his stupid pinhead, and surfed it through his hair. What a vain bastard. Reason number four. Not like I needed any more reasons.

  Jimmy offered me a hand up and I forgot about everything else. Instead, I had to tell myself that I am not Sleeping Beauty. I am not Snow White. I am not a pretty princess. I am not the heroine. I do not get the guy in the end. The sooner I got used to it, the better.

  We got to school fifteen minutes early, passed the metal check, and then Cue had plenty of time (but he'd never admit it) to iron out Jimmy's schedule and assign him a couple of Waves for each class: Period 1 Photography (7 Waves, easy class), Period 2 Earth Science (4 Waves), Period 3 Geometry (6 Waves), Period 4 Lunch (the back right corner of the cafeteria was sort of our section), Period'S Gym (0 Waves), Period 6 English (4 Waves), Period 7 Study Hall (10 Waves, generally, it would mean Jimmy could skip out and go home, but not at Kung Fu—circles started at closing bell and you weren't allowed to leave early). We were the only family that I knew of that had chess-inspired classroom seating strategies (unwritten part of #3 on the survival list: families weren't allowed to sit together, too easy to detect who was with who, Dermoody would be in on us in a flash). So the seating arrangements were like snapshots of opening chess moves that Cue thieved from some book. He'd look at the diagrams of the pieces set up and then he'd assign desks in the somewhat similar positionings of one side, always black. Roll over it. Dress it up. Put a flag in it.

  Cue said he picked them all according to how many people were in each class. So it was funny to hear Cue explain to Jimmy that he was a bishop to N2 in the fianghetto in his science course, and rook to king's one, castling in English. They were all static. Not set up to continue a game, but just to spread us out. Secretly, I was a little sad I didn't have any classes with Jimmy, but he was a junior and I was a sophomore and that was the bad luck of the draw.

  I hoped to god that he'd last until the final bell, but by lunchtime, everybody had heard that Jimmy was new and it was only curiosity that kept them off him. Like they thought his claim not to fight anymore was a lie, so they didn't go too close right away. I knew it would happen, everyone noticing him, I had just prayed it wouldn't. Word had spread fast. If he wasn't a legacy, the family with the last pick in the draft would've got him. That would've been the Blades. They knew who he was. Everyone knew who Jimmy Chang was. And it was well within their right to test him on closing bell.

  We were in public so I couldn't give Jimmy a hug good-bye, I just gave him a shoulder clench instead. You know, how guys do. For someone who was supposedly done fighting, he was absolutely solid. He must still be training, I thought as I turned away and shuffled off to my Period 1 Civics (3 Waves, Hungarian Defense), where I was an unmoving bishop on the back row, the buried piece.

  THE HUNGARIAN DEFENSE

  WHY EVERYONE KNEW WHO JIMMY WAS

  Undefeated in all competitions for seven years, that's why. That's never happened before so I'll just say it this way: undefeated forever and ever. In the United States, he was undefeated for five years. Officially a combined 882-0-0, he averaged nine major tournaments per year and the maximum number of fights per tournament, sometimes as many as three fights per day depending on seeding. Put it this way, jimmy stopped collecting trophies. He didn't have room for them anymore. So he would either give them back, convince the organizers to make it a standing trophy with engraved names, or donate it to charity somehow. He probably even sold one or two for scrap.

  By the time he was fourteen, Jimmy'd won five straight national championships and five straight world championships in three different disciplines: karate, judo, and kung fu. Then he won a scholarship to the most prestigious martial arts academy in Hong Kong: Fire Mountain School. It was in all the papers. They taught all the southern styles of kung fu. Had been doing it for hundreds and hundreds of years. Lots of people had no idea how difficult that must've been, relocating to HK after spending most of his life out on the plains. But Jimmy went, left his parents, moved h
alfway across the world, sucked it up, and went to work.

  After training for six months within the school, Jimmy began competing on the local circuit in every tournament available. Same result. Not a single loss. He tore China up en route to two more world championships in FIVE different disciplines. And he would have won all the Chinese championships as well if not for the fact that he was barred from certain ones for not being a citizen. That didn't stop people from idolizing him, wanting to be near him, politicians from using him to curry favor with the masses. It must've been a crazy time. Jimmy found himself the national spokesman for a noodle company, and a cooking sauce company. They made sweet-and-sour sauces and stuff like that, put them in bottles and sold them for home use. He sent the money to his parents because rules at his school forbade the live-in members from earning. They were only there to train.

  It probably goes without saying that Jimmy was the most famous kid in the world of martial arts. They even put his face on a Chinese edition Coke can without his permission. That's how famous Jimmy was: fifteen years old and the legend of all legends. Kids would play tournaments in their backyards and actually get into real fights over who could be Jimmy Chang, All American, All World, All Invincible.

  So why did everyone at Kung Fu know him? Because Jimmy Chang isn't real. He's a myth: the kid who couldn't lose. You probably heard about piano prodigies who can start playing at four or some ridiculous age, well Jimmy was like that, except with martial arts. His dad started him out at three, training him in the fields. See, his dad was a farmer and a good one but somehow he found time to run a farm and train Jimmy at night. He started Jimmy out with simple Tiger Fist forms, just practice stuff to do in the morning and at night in the barn. Of course, it didn't take him long to progress. He was on to full contact by the time he turned six. So his dad taught him what he knew of Hung Gar and Yong Chun styles. By the time Jimmy was eight he was competing.

  When he quit just before his sixteenth birthday, his record was 2,412-0-0. He was a ghost. Never been injured. Never even been thrown. And for his last full year on the mat in Hong Kong, NEVER EVEN BEEN HIT. Get your head around that. Not a single opponent scored a hit on him. All the scorecards are kept in the main tournament hall in HK. You can go look if you want. But that's not really necessary, because if you saw Jimmy's final fight to defend his world championship in the open category (any style was acceptable), you would've seen everything you'd ever need to see. That was the day he fought The Bulgarian.

  Nobody I know knows The Bulgarian's real name and if they did they couldn't pronounce it, so everyone, even the TV announcers, just called him The Bulgarian. Supposedly he was the biggest-ever threat to Jimmy's domination of the sport. Cue and I didn't believe that for a second. We heard the same thing every year. It was all just hype. We knew Jimmy couldn't be defeated. It didn't matter that The Bulgarian had been stolen from his gypsy parents and taken off to Mongolia when he was a kid and raised in the mountains like some wild, latter-day Genghis Khan warrior.

  The World Championships were being held in London that year and there was this huge procession in front of Buckingham Palace and then down in front of Big Ben, I remember watching that. The best part though was the standing room only in the giant event hall. There must have been twenty thousand people in there. Serious. The atmosphere was ridiculous. People were even singing: "Hey throw that fellah / We said a-hey throw that fellah / Jimm-y throw that fellah / hey throw that fellah," to the tune of "Guantanamera." But Jimmy didn't throw that fellah. He looked disinterested for much of the match, and it was amazing to watch him avoid full-strength spinning kicks by centimeters, and hammer-throw punches by millimeters. The timed first and second rounds ended with no points scored and the third and final round was much the same until the last two seconds.

  To this day, every person who saw that fight swears Jimmy somehow teleported himself behind The Bulgarian to score the hit that won it. They showed it on television for months on super-slow-motion replay but watching it was like watching a jumpy old movie that was missing frames somewhere. See, Jimmy was in front of The Bulgarian, not two inches from him, with his heels on the out-of-bounds line, as the big challenger opened his arms wide and was bringing them down on Jimmy. There was no way he could escape. There was really no room, nowhere to go. I remember grabbing Cue's leg in the shady bar we had snuck into to watch the match on pay-per-view at one in the afternoon. I knew he had had it. Cue knew it was over. Everyone watching knew it was over.

  The announcers were even starting the sentence, "A remarkable run has finally en—," when Jimmy disappeared/reappeared behind The Bulgarian, extended his right leg, and executed a perfect kick to the back of his opponent's weight-bearing knee and sent him sprawling forward onto the out-of-bounds part of the mat. I'd love to be able to tell you that I jumped and screamed and shouted and was so happy that Jimmy won, but I didn't. My mouth was just as open as Cue's and we were trying to figure out how he did it. It was shocking for real.

  The cameras timed it afterward. Jimmy literally disappeared for a thousandth of a second before reappearing and winning the match. This didn't go over too well. Back in China, a leading priest denounced Jimmy as a dark spirit and people really got scared.

  His time at Fire Mountain School ended and Jimmy returned to the farm. His dad was real sick by then though, so Jimmy took care of him day and night for three months until he finally passed away. Lung cancer. His dad never went to the hospital because he said he didn't believe in it. That was less than a year before he came to live with us. Me and Cue talked about it once and in a way, we think that was Jimmy's first loss ever. Because after that, Jimmy went a little crazy and got in that brawl that forced his mother to make him promise never to fight again and also, to send him here.

  So as far as any person at Kung Fu was concerned, Jimmy Chang was Count Dracula, Houdini, and Bruce Lee all rolled into one when Cue and me walked him out into the unusually bright sunlight for early winter to find that every single student at Kung Fu had circled up. Kids were packed in sixteen deep, all the way to the front of buildings. People had dragged tables out of the cafeteria and were standing on them. I could see that Ridley had positioned himself in the usual place so that he could look down on the circle from the second-floor bay windows of the main building, in what used to be the guidance office. Even Dermoody was on the far end of the quad with Cap'n Joe, just standing still and observing like they were Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. They knew this was Ridley's time. They wouldn't interfere with the circle. It was moving, as people pushed against shoulders and bodies, stuck their elbows in ribs to get a glance at Jimmy, to size him up. I could tell the conclusion they were all coming to: he was so much smaller in real life.

  From high enough above the Kung Fu quad, it must've looked like some kind of growing tropical storm rolling toward an unseen coast. These students, these fighters, just pinpoints of streaming cloud mass pushed by hurricane winds around a silent center, had been waiting.

  THE TEST

  That was the quietest I ever heard Rung Fu. Out in the open air of the quad, it was cold enough to snow but there were no flakes. White clouds clotted up the sky like rough skin after the old scab gets picked and it didn't look like they'd be dropping anything anytime soon. There was no wind, and I could smell one of the last operating factories. Sulphur-y, but not as strong. It was harsher than usual. For real though, I was surprised I even noticed. Everyone at Kung Fu was used to them after about two weeks.

  When we got to the middle, you could just feel the stares of two thousand-plus kids on me, Cue, and Jimmy. That was when I started to get nervous. Usually, I don't get nervous before rolls. Well, not my own anyway. After a while it's just like going to work. Nothing special. But I had this feeling in my gut that Jimmy wasn't going to fight back. I knew he wasn't. I hoped at least that he would dodge but I had a feeling that he wouldn't. Everyone making up the circle had no idea though. They thought Jimmy was the Prince of Darkness and when he smiled, it made i
t worse. Previously, fear was Ridley's territory. He must've felt threatened.

  From up on his perch, the bastard was looking at me too. I could feel it. Whenever he did, it felt like I hadn't taken a shower in three days, just greasy. Anonymous hands were pushing us farther to the center as people tried to get closer, but not too close, to Jimmy. It wasn't just the reputation that drew eyes to him. It was something inside him that no one else had. Just as I could feel Ridley's eyes on me, I could feel when Jimmy was nearby.

  When we broke through the mass of kids, Karl Fellar-Hahl was waiting in the circle, the Blades' Pop, big white guy with a shaved head. He wasn't so tough but he was a cutter and he was quick. The guy would fold if Jimmy threw a punch. He had almost no power but he picked his shots and made them count. A real TKO kind of guy, his strategy was always just to cut you, put your own blood in your eyes 'til you gave up or couldn't see where the next blow was coming from.

  Karl was dangerous because he would fight dirty. Like after-it-was-over dirty, which isn't all that uncommon around here but Karl was probably the worst. If he got the upper hand on you, you better pray that your family had your back because if Karl lost it, got in a rhythm, he'd just keep going. He'd be all the sharks and the feeding frenzy too. Nine times out of ten it isn't a big deal because someone'd jump in and end it, but one time, Karl put a freshman in a coma. That was two years ago now. The kid is still in that coma.

  In fact, they showed a picture of the kid in the newspaper last year in some plea to stop all youth violence. Clustered around the story were wicked pictures of the kid's head looking like a tennis ball with curving scars across the top. They had to remove pieces of his skull and put in a plate, then staple his scalp back on. His hair grew back all patchy because of it too. Kid has this weird circle of hair on his forehead now. That was all Karl's handiwork. He has the newspaper clippings in his locker. He'd show them to you if you asked him.