by Joseph Flynn
“That and a lot of other things”
“Okay, for the sake of discussion, tell me what you have to offer the army.
“In two months, I’m going to graduate summa cum laude with a journalism degree. I’m an All-American lacrosse player, and I speak Arabic fluently. How’s that?”
“Pretty damn good.”
“Wouldn’t look bad on your record, landing me, would it?”
“Not bad at all.”
“But if I sign up it has to be with the explicit understanding, in writing, that I get into Ranger training. If I can’t cut it, I’ll serve out my hitch at whatever else they assign me.”
A sly grin lit the recruiter’s face.
Reggie said, “Yeah, I know. I’m asking for trouble. I want it that way. You ready to meet my terms?”
“Let me make a phone call, check out what you’ve just told me.”
“Sure.”
The recruiter enclosed himself in a small office in a far corner of the room. He returned ten minutes later and extended a hand to Reggie. She stood and took it. “We’re good?”
“Ms. Green, you have a deal. You’ll enlist as a second lieutenant, go through basic training and if you do well at that you’ll get the opportunity to train as a Ranger. If you wash out, other more suitable duties will be found for you. Perhaps something using your journalism or language skills. Are you good with that?”
She nodded and shook his hand. “You play fair, I’ll play fair.”
“You say that as if you think the army might not honor its word.”
Reggie shrugged. “People, institutions, nobody is perfect.”
The recruiter reclaimed his hand and looked as if he was having second thoughts … until he realized she was testing him. If he backed out now, he’d be admitting he wasn’t dealing honestly with her. And then there was her boyfriend.
He was on his feet now, too, a big SOB. Tall and strong.
The recruiter was a war vet with extensive close-quarters combat experience. But the boyfriend was a monster, and he looked just a bit crazy. With guys like that, you wanted to have a bigger weapon and a full magazine.
The recruiter looked back at Reggie.
“You’ll get a fair shot, Ms. Green. The rest is up to you.”
Reggie, joined Zeke, George and Paulette for dinner that night: carry-out fried chicken. They ate in the kitchen, one of the first rooms to be completely rehabbed. The idea of dining on the terrace on a pleasant evening had been rejected, after a bit of discussion.
“You’re worried about someone dropping in, I could always growl at unwanted guests,” Reggie suggested.
George replied, “That’d scare them off, all right, but we don’t want to lose any of the good will we built up.”
“You feel the same way?” Reggie asked Zeke.
He said, “You know how I am. I want you all to myself, loonie or not.”
“Amen to that,” George added.
A look that would have intimidated an assassin flashed through Reggie’s eyes, but she let the moment of wrath pass. She turned to Paulette and said, “I told Zeke I’d be happy to help with his case, but he said he can’t tell me what it is. Client confidentiality and all that. He said I could ask you if you’d like to share.”
Reggie picked up a chicken leg and took a bite with an audible snap of teeth.
Way to make an impression, Zeke thought.
To his surprise, though, Paulette nodded. Rather than frighten Paulette, Reggie’s savage table manners seemed to reassure her. Or maybe she just wanted another woman involved in the effort. Maybe both of those things.
“Please understand that I’m not making things up here,” Paulette said to Reggie.
Reggie nodded. “Try me. I’ve heard a lot of strange stuff that turned out to be true.”
Paulette nodded, taking comfort in those words. She told Reggie her story and why she was afraid she would be murdered a second time. Then she squared her shoulders and waited for an adverse reaction.
Reggie liked that posturing. She told Zeke, “This is a brave woman.”
Paulette laughed. “Me? I’m Chicken Little.”
“Unh-uh, a coward would have just run and hidden herself. You not only took a stand against a threat, you opened yourself to possible ridicule. Although the two guys at this table probably know better than to do that.”
Reggie’s look said Zeke and George had better know better.
Zeke patted Reggie’s hand as if humoring her melodramatics.
He was the only guy in the world who could get away with that.
He said, “I got an email from a friend.” Never mentioning it was from his shrink. “It said the Division of Perceptual Research at the University of Virginia has people doing past lives research. They’ve been collecting stories of people who can recall earlier lives for 45 years.”
“Really?” Paulette looked happy to hear that news.
“Yeah,” Zeke said. “It took me by surprise, but apparently you’re not alone. Nobody’s come to any conclusions yet. I don’t see how they really could. But if psychiatrists and psychologists and a major university have all put decades of work into the subject, you have to think it’s either worthwhile or they have people who write damn good grant applications.”
Paulette looked at George, sitting next to her.
“Hey, I’m all in no matter what,” he said.
Paulette smiled at him. She turned to Zeke.
“Me, too. I don’t have all the answers, but I’ll try to find as many as I can.”
Reggie didn’t need a prompt. “I know more than Sluggo over here does. The way I can see helping is to make sure nobody sneaks up on him from behind. Or any other direction. Everybody good with that?”
They all were. When dinner was done, Paulette and George excused themselves. Zeke washed the dishes and Reggie dried.
Finishing the last plate, Reggie asked, “Have we waited long enough?”
“We’ve built up enough of an edge for me,” he said.
“Then show me to your bedroom, and I’ll tell you some war stories.”
“You’ve always known how to talk dirty to me.”
After they managed to rip the top sheet and scatter blankets and pillows to the four corners of the room, Reggie lay next to Zeke as they both stared at the ceiling and caught their breath.
“I remember a past life,” Reggie said.
“You were Alexander the Great or Attila the Hun?”
“Neither of those guys.”
“Emperor Nero?”
Reggie knew Zeke would continue mining that vein unless she stopped him.
“I was the wife of a samurai.”
Zeke turned his head to look at her. “You’re serious?”
She met his gaze and nodded.
Zeke said, “I haven’t read a lot about feudal Japanese society, but wasn’t it highly hierarchical?”
“It was.”
“And weren’t women nowhere to be found in that hierarchy?”
“There were exceptions, but you’re pretty much right.”
“You were one of the exceptions?” Zeke asked.
Reggie shook her head. “Minor aristocracy and a pain in the ass. By all rights, I should have had my head chopped off. Only I was a real looker and the local daimyo, my husband’s lord and master, issued an edict that he’d be the only one who would decide my fate. He wouldn’t have tolerated my impudence if it had been directed at him, but he was amused by a woman who gave other men fits. One of the unacceptable things I did was martial arts training.”
“Sounds risky,” Zeke said. “Let me guess. You got into it with your husband somehow.”
“There was an archery competition. He beat all the other samurai and should have received the grand prize: money, land and elevated status. Only the daimyo said, ‘Let’s see if you can beat your wife.’”
Deke sighed. “You just couldn’t help yourself, could you? You had to know your life would be richer, at the very least,
but you couldn’t throw the match.”
Reggie told him, “Under the rules of the game in those days, only a man could divorce a wife at will. My husband had been forbidden to kill me, but it was perfectly acceptable for him to boot me out of his house and his life. Which, I’d heard, was his plan. My only socially acceptable alternative was to become a nun in a temple. If I stuck it out there for two years, then I could get a divorce.”
Just the idea of Reggie as a nun boggled Zeke’s mind.
“So you showed the guy who was the better archer,” he said, “with a crowd looking on.”
“A great big crowd. My husband was so shamed he committed suicide on the spot.”
“Damn. How’d it all go over with the fans?”
“I didn’t get any proposals from the other samurai. My husband’s lands were forfeit to the daimyo, as were the the prizes my husband would have won.”
Zeke grinned. “Mr. Big played your husband for a sucker. He knew you were going to win.”
“The daimyo was more sly than even I knew. He claimed me as property that had belonged to my husband. That lasted only so long. His wife let him have his fun and then in the most polite way possible told him I had to go. He couldn’t bear to chop off my head or order me to kill myself.”
“What’d he do?” Zeke asked, knowing things couldn’t have a happy ending.
“He poisoned my sake. I knew it, but I also knew it was the easiest way out. I drank it, hating myself as I did it. The last thing I remember him telling me was he would have me covered in golden wax to preserve my beauty.”
“Creepy,” Zeke said.
“Sure, by modern American standards. But I imagine wax as a preservative lasts only so long. His wife probably asked him, ‘Aren’t you tired of that smelly old thing yet?’ And off I went to the local dump.”
Zeke sat up and looked down on Reggie. “That’s a good story, but how do you know any of it’s true?”
“I didn’t, not for most of my life. I mean, it first came to me as a dream, and I thought that was all it was. Only that particular dream started when I was little, and it has recurred right through the rest of my life. I mentioned it to this little old holy man I met in India when I was covering the fighting in Kashmir between the Indians and the Pakistanis.”
“Don’t a lot of Indians believe in reincarnation as a part of their religion?” Zeke asked.
“The Hindus do.”
“So this guy you were talking to had a built-in bias.”
“Sure, he did,” Reggie said. “I knew that and told him so. He countered with a suggestion: Why don’t I see how good I am archery?”
Zeke had seen Reggie play lacrosse — they met when they were both getting physical therapy after being dinged up practicing their respective sports. He seen her run and shoot a basketball, too. She was an all-around impressive jock. But he’d never seen her use a bow and arrows.
“Let me guess,” he said, “you’re not half-bad.”
“I’m freaking great, and that’s from the first time I tried.”
“It’s not just beginner’s luck?”
Reggie laughed. “You want, I’ll show you how good I am, and you can tell me.”
Zeke lay down, his head resting on his palms. He wanted to think this was all a big joke Reggie was playing on him. He’d start nodding his head, buy the whole story and she’d pounce. Laugh in his face and say, “Sucker!”
But he looked her in the eyes and didn’t see any sign he was being conned.
What he saw was an epiphany.
He asked Reggie, “You think you’re still mad in this life because of what happened to you in your past life.”
“Not just me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’ve met your mom and dad. They’re great people, and you’ve told me they’ve broken their backs doing their best for you. So what the hell do you have to be angry about most of the time?”
Zeke said, “A chemical imbalance? Too much testosterone?”
Reggie laughed and said, “Sure, if that’s what you want to think.”
“You’re saying I’ve had a past life?”
“Maybe more than one. Who knows?”
Chapter 6
Zeke and Reggie parked his Porsche on Winthrop, just around the corner from Sensei Sugiyama’s dojo on Bryn Mawr. As an exercise in humility and municipal hygiene, the aikido master was sweeping the sidewalk in front of his place of business. But that was only the second thing Zeke noticed as he and Reggie came around the corner.
The first was the monstrous guy, Polynesian at a glance, as big as George during his playing days, charging at him with his teeth bared and hands extended like claws. Zeke’s first defensive impulse came from the gridiron. Duck under the guy’s outstretched arms and hit him with a clothesline tackle, a forearm across the throat. Didn’t matter how big he was. He’d go down like he’d been shot.
Might wind up just as dead, too.
Leaving the SOB no opportunity to explain his attack. Having seen Sugiyama-san, though, Zeke’s more recent training kicked in. He stepped off to his left at a 45-degree angle to the big guy’s line of attack. He seized the giant’s left wrist as it shot past. He didn’t try to slow his assailant’s attack; he added spin to it. He smoothly rotated the man’s outstretched arm clockwise.
Where the arm went, the oversized body followed. The giant flipped through the air almost elegantly, as if he were a willing participant in an acrobatic stunt. Only his head slammed into the sidewalk, making a cracking sound. He remained conscious for a second or two. Then his eyes glazed and closed.
Leaving Zeke to wonder if he’d wound up killing the prick anyway.
Zeke looked up and saw Sugiyama-san standing next to him now. The master martial artist gave Zeke the slightest nod. As if to say his technique had begun to approach acceptability. Then he handed Zeke his broom, making clear that the duty of cleaning the sidewalk was now his.
Zeke had no problem with that, but the thought occurred to him that he should see how Reggie was. For all he knew, he might have grazed her with the oversized dude. He hadn’t. To the contrary, Reggie stood over the supine body of yet another colossus, this one also unconscious, and bleeding from his nose and both ears.
In her hand, Reggie held a metal baton.
She looked at Zeke and asked, “Did you see the other guy?”
“What, this one?” He nudged the guy at his feet with a shoe.
Sugiyama-san shook his head. “She means the third one, the man in the car.”
“The man in the car with the camera,” Reggie added.
Aaron Levy crossed the street to join them, moving like he still had two legs instead of one and a half plus a prosthetic. He bowed to Sugiyama-san and the two men shook hands.
“If nobody else got the license plate number, I did,” Aaron said. “I also called 911.”
Sugiyama-san invited everyone upstairs for tea.
Except for Zeke. He got to stand guard over the fallen thugs. Wait for the cops.
And finish sweeping the sidewalk.
George told Paulette his big secret. “My birth name is Percival Butler.”
They were having coffee and pastries at Bistro Bordeaux in Evanston.
“Being a football player, you didn’t want to be called Percy?” Paulette asked.
“That, too,” George said, “but mostly I didn’t want to be a Butler. The part of Georgia my family calls home, a lot of my ancestors were owned by a family named Butler.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I didn’t realize that until an African girl named Neema came to my high school as an exchange student. I was there on a football scholarship. Anyway, both of us being outside the mainstream, we hit it off.”
“I bet she was cute, too.”
George grinned. “That did help.”
“And she felt safe being around you.”
George nodded. “She did, but the best thing was we really liked talking with each other. I w
as kind of unsure of myself back then. You know, a big kid whose personality was trying to catch up to his physical size. Neema helped me get there. She and Miz Livingston, the obeah lady across the street, helped me become an honor roll student and an all-state football player.”
“Do you still see them?” Paulette asked.
George shook his head. “Miz Livingston passed on, God bless her. Neema went home and got married. It was an arranged thing. She knew it was going to happen before we met and she honored her parents wishes.”
“Breaking your heart, right?”
“Only for four or five years.” George chuckled. “The last day before she left, though, she gave me a kiss right out of the blue. Surprised me no end. It’s still vivid. Whenever I think of Neema now, that’s what I remember most.”
Paulette said, “A parting gift, but what I’m thinking is she was the one who helped you find out about the Butlers owning some of your family members.”
“She was,” George said. “She said it was important to know who my people were. We worked a lot of evenings in the school library finding out. I knew, of course, that like most African-Americans I came from people who’d been slaves, but learning some of the details …” George shook his head. “It made me really angry.”
“Like Zeke?”
George had told Paulette that Zeke had anger management issues.
“At times, but not all the time. I used my anger to fuel my football game. Worked like a charm, too. Until that big collision Zeke and I had.”
Paulette was one of the few people in town who hadn’t seen the play, not even one of the endless reruns.
“Did Neema suggest you change your name?”
“No, that was my idea, but she offered some African names as suggestions, ones she thought fit me. But I didn’t want to come off as a foreigner. So I decided to go with something generic but descriptive: Georgia Black.”
“But Georgia is a female name.”
“That’s just what the judge said when I applied for the change. I told him it was also a state name. He said when I became a state, if it was okay with the original Georgia, he’d give me his permission.”
Paulette smiled.
“He wasn’t a bad guy,” George said. “He was African-American, understood what I was feeling. He said he could go as far as allowing me to become George A. Black. I pointed out the long-A sound wasn’t the same. He said as big as I was I might politely correct people.”