Sorcerer's Apprentice

by Charles Johnson

  “You write this?” he asked. “It’s not right to play with the Lord’s money, you know.”

  “I like to play,” she said.

  “You do, huh?” He never looked directly at people. Women, she guessed, terrified him. Or, to be exact, the powerful emotions they caused in him terrified Rudolph. He was a pud puller, if she ever saw one. He kept his eyes on a spot left of her face. “You’re Joe Montgomery’s daughter, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe,” teased Evelyn.

  He trousered the note and stood marking the ground with his toe. “And just what you expect to get, Miss Playful, by fooling with people during collection time?”

  She waited, let him look away, and, when the back-and-forth swing of his gaze crossed her again, said in her most melic, soft-breathing voice: “You.”

  Up front, portly Reverend Merrill concluded his sermon. Evelyn tipped her head slightly, smiling into memory; her hand reached left to pat Rudolph’s leg gently; then she remembered it was Shelberdine beside her, and lifted her hand to the seat in front of her. She said a prayer for Rudolph’s health, but mainly it was for herself, a hedge against her fear that their childless years had slipped by like wind, that she might return home one day and find him—as she had found her father—on the floor, bellied up, one arm twisted behind him where he fell, alone, his fingers locked against his chest. Rudolph had begun to run down, Evelyn decided, the minute he was turned down by Moody Bible Institute. They moved to Seattle in 1956—his brother Eli was stationed nearby and said Boeing was hiring black men. But they didn’t hire Rudolph. He had kidney trouble on and off before he landed the job at the Post Office. Whenever he bent forward, he felt dizzy. Liver, heart, and lungs—they’d worn down gradually as his belly grew, but none of this was as bad as what he called “the Problem.” His pecker shrank to no bigger than a pencil eraser each time he saw her undress. Or when Evelyn, as was her habit when talking, touched his arm. Was she the cause of this? Well, she knew she wasn’t much to look at anymore. She’d seen the bottom of a few too many candy wrappers. Evelyn was nothing to make a man pant and jump her bones, pulling her fully clothed onto the davenport, as Rudolph had done years before, but wasn’t sex something else you surrendered with age? It never seemed all that good to her anyway. And besides, he’d wanted oral sex, which Evelyn—if she knew nothing else—thought was a nasty, unsanitary thing to do with your mouth. She glanced up from under her spring hat past the pulpit, past the choir of black and brown faces to the agonized beauty of a bearded white carpenter impaled on a rood, and in this timeless image she felt comforted that suffering was inescapable, the loss of vitality inevitable, even a good thing maybe, and that she had to steel herself—yes—for someday opening her bedroom door and finding her Rudolph face down in his breakfast oatmeal. He would die before her, she knew that in her bones.

  And so, after service, Sanka, and a slice of meat pie with Shelberdine downstairs in the brightly lit church basement, Evelyn returned home to tell her husband how lovely the Griffin girls had sung that day, that their neighbor Rod Kenner had been saved, and to listen, if necessary, to Rudolph’s fear that the lump on his shoulder was an early-warning sign of something evil. As it turned out, Evelyn found that except for their cat, Mr. Miller, the little A-frame house was empty. She looked in his bedroom. No Rudolph. The unnaturally still house made Evelyn uneasy, and she took the excruciatingly painful twenty stairs into the basement to peer into a workroom littered with power tools, planks of wood, and the blueprints her husband used to make bookshelves and cabinets. No Rudolph. Frightened, Evelyn called the eight hospitals in Seattle, but no one had a Rudolph Lee Jackson on his books. After her last call the star-burst clock in the living room read twelve-thirty. Putting down the wall phone, she felt a familiar pain in her abdomen. Another attack of Hershey squirts, probably from the meat pie. She hurried into the bathroom, lifted her skirt, and lowered her underwear around her ankles, but kept the door wide open, something impossible to do if Rudolph was home. Actually, it felt good not to have him underfoot, a little like he was dead already. But the last thing Evelyn wanted was that or, as she lay down against her lumpy backrest, to fall asleep, though she did, nodding off and dreaming until something shifted down her weight on the side of her bed away from the wall.

  “Evelyn,” said Rudolph, “look at this.” She blinked back sleep and squinted at the cover of a magazine called Inside Kung-Fu, which Rudolph waved under her nose. On the cover a man stood bowlegged, one hand cocked under his armpit, the other corkscrewing straight at Evelyn’s nose.

  “Rudolph!” She batted the magazine aside, then swung her eyes toward the cluttered night-stand, focusing on the electric clock beside her water glass from McDonald’s, Preparation H suppositories, and Harlequin romances. “It’s morning!” Now she was mad. At least, working at it. “Where have you been?”

  Her husband inhaled, a wheezing, whistlelike breath. He rolled the magazine into a cylinder and, as he spoke, struck his left palm with it. “That movie we saw advertised? You remember—it was called The Five Fingers of Death. I just saw that and one called Deep Thrust.”

  “Wonderful.” Evelyn screwed up her lips. “I’m calling hospitals and you’re at a Hong Kong double feature.”

  “Listen,” said Rudolph. “You don’t understand.” He seemed at that moment as if he did not understand either. “It was a Seattle movie premiere. The Northwest is crawling with fighters. It has something to do with all the Asians out here. Before they showed the movie, four students from a kwoon in Chinatown went onstage—”

  “A what?” asked Evelyn.

  “A kwoon—it’s a place to study fighting, a meditation hall.” He looked at her but was really watching, Evelyn realized, something exciting she had missed. “They did a demonstration to drum up their membership. They broke boards and bricks, Evelyn. They went through what’s called kata and kumite and…” He stopped again to breathe. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. The reason I’m late is because I wanted to talk with them after the movie.”

  Evelyn, suspicious, took a Valium and waited.

  “I signed up for lessons,” he said.

  She gave a glacial look at Rudolph, then at his magazine, and said in the voice she used five years ago when he wanted to take a vacation to Upper Volta or, before that, invest in a British car she knew they couldn’t afford:

  “You’re fifty-four years old, Rudolph.”

  “I know that.”

  “You’re no Muhammad Ali.”

  “I know that,” he said.

  “You’re no Bruce Lee. Do you want to be Bruce Lee? Do you know where he is now, Rudolph? He’d dead—dead here in a Seattle cemetery and buried up on Capital Hill.”

  His shoulders slumped a little. Silently, Rudolph began undressing, his beefy backside turned toward her, slipping his pa jama bottoms on before taking off his shirt so his scrawny lower body would not be fully exposed. He picked up his magazine, said, “I’m sorry if I worried you,” and huffed upstairs to his bedroom. Evelyn clicked off the mushroom-shaped lamp on her nightstand. She lay on her side, listening to his slow footsteps strike the stairs, then heard his mattress creak above her—his bedroom was directly above hers—but she did not hear him click off his own light. From time to time she heard his shifting weight squeak the mattress springs. He was reading that foolish magazine, she guessed; then she grew tired and gave this impossible man up to God. With a copy of The Thorn Birds open on her lap, Evelyn fell heavily to sleep again.

  At breakfast the next morning any mention of the lessons gave Rudolph lockjaw. He kissed her forehead, as always, before going to work, and simply said he might be home late. Climbing the stairs to his bedroom was painful for Evelyn, but she hauled herself up, pausing at each step to huff, then sat on his bed and looked over his copy of Inside Kung-Fu. There were articles on empty-hand combat, soft-focus photos of ferocious-looking men in funny suits, parables about legendary Zen masters, an interview with someone named Bernie Bernheim, who bega
n to study karate at age fifty-seven and became a black belt at age sixty-one, and page after page of advertisements for exotic Asian weapons: nunchaku, shuriken, sai swords, tonfa, bo staffs, training bags of all sorts, a wooden dummy shaped like a man and called a Mook Jong, and weights. Rudolph had circled them all. He had torn the order form from the last page of the magazine. The total cost of the things he’d circled—Evelyn added them furiously, rounding off the figures—was $800.

  Two minutes later she was on the telephone to Shelberdine.

  “Let him tire of it,” said her friend. “Didn’t you tell me Rudolph had Lower Lombard Strain?”

  Evelyn’s nose clogged with tears.

  “Why is he doing this? Is it me, do you think?”

  “It’s the Problem,” said Shelberdine. “He wants his manhood back. Before he died, Arthur did the same. Someone at the plant told him he could get it back if he did twenty-yard sprints. He went into convulsions while running around the lake.”

  Evelyn felt something turn in her chest. “You don’t think he’ll hurt himself, do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Do you think he’ll hurt me?”

  Her friend reassured Evelyn that Mid-Life Crisis brought out these shenanigans in men. Evelyn replied that she thought Mid-Life Crisis started around age forty, to which Shelberdine said, “Honey, I don’t mean no harm, but Rudolph always was a little on the slow side,” and Evelyn agreed. She would wait until he worked this thing out of his system, until Nature defeated him and he surrendered, as any right-thinking person would, to the breakdown of the body, the brutal fact of decay, which could only be blunted, it seemed to her, by decaying with someone, the comfort every Negro couple felt when, aging, they knew enough to let things wind down.

  Her patience was rewarded in the beginning. Rudolph crawled home from his first lesson, hunched over, hardly able to stand, afraid he had permanently ruptured something. He collapsed face down on the living room sofa, his feet on the floor. She helped him change into his pajamas and fingered Ben-Gay into his back muscles. Evelyn had never seen her husband so close to tears.

  “I can’t do push-ups,” he moaned. “Or situps. I’m so stiff—I don’t know my body.” He lifted his head, looking up pitifully, his eyes pleading. “Call Dr. Guylee. Make an appointment for Thursday, okay?”

  “Yes, dear.” Evelyn hid her smile with one hand. “You shouldn’t push yourself so hard.”

  At that, he sat up, bare-chested, his stomach bubbling over his pa jama bottoms. “That’s what it means. Gung-fu means ‘hard work’ in Chinese. Evelyn”—he lowered his voice—“I don’t think I’ve ever really done hard work in my life. Not like this, something that asks me to give everything, body and soul, spirit and flesh. I’ve always felt…” He looked down, his dark hands dangling between his thighs. “I’ve never been able to give everything to anything. The world never let me. It won’t let me put all of myself into play. Do you know what I’m saying? Every job I’ve ever had, everything I’ve ever done, it only demanded part of me. It was like there was so much more of me that went unused after the job was over. I get that feeling in church sometimes.” He lay back down, talking now into the sofa cushion. “Sometimes I get that feeling with you.”

  Her hand stopped on his shoulder. She wasn’t sure she’d heard him right, his voice was so muffled. “That I’ve never used all of you?”

  Rudolph nodded, rubbing his right knuckle where, at the kwoon, he’d lost a stretch of skin on a speedbag. “There’s still part of me left over. You never tried to touch all of me, to take everything. Maybe you can’t. Maybe no one can. But sometimes I get the feeling that the unused part—the unlived life—spoils, that you get cancer because it sits like fruit on the ground and rots.” Rudolph shook his head; he’d said too much and knew it, perhaps had not even put it the way he felt inside. Stiffly, he got to his feet. “Don’t ask me to stop training.” His eyebrows spread inward. “If I stop, I’ll die.”

  Evelyn twisted the cap back onto the Ben-Gay. She held out her hand, which Rudolph took. Veins on the back of his hand burgeoned abnormally like dough. Once when she was shopping at the Public Market she’d seen monstrous plastic gloves shaped like hands in a magic store window. His hand looked like that. It belonged on Lon Chaney. Her voice shook a little, panicky, “I’ll call Dr. Guylee in the morning.”

  Evelyn knew—or thought she knew—his trouble. He’d never come to terms with the disagree-ableness of things. Rudolph had always been too serious for some people, even in South Carolina. It was the thing, strange to say, that drew her to him, this crimped-browed tendency in Rudolph to listen with every atom of his life when their minister in Hodges, quoting Marcus Aurelius to give his sermon flash, said, “Live with the gods,” or later in Seattle, the habit of working himself up over Reverend Merrill’s reading from Ecclesiastes 9:10: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.” Now, he didn’t really mean that, Evelyn knew. Nothing in the world could be taken that seriously; that’s why this was the world. And, as all Mount Zion knew, Reverend Merrill had a weakness for high-yellow choir-girls and gin, and was forever complaining that his salary was too small for his family. People made compromises, nodded at spiritual commonplaces—the high seriousness of biblical verses that demanded nearly superhuman duty and self-denial—and laughed off their lapses into sloth, envy, and the other deadly sins. It was what made living so enjoyably human: this built-in inability of man to square his performance with perfection. People were naturally soft on themselves. But not her Rudolph.

  Of course, he seldom complained. It was not in his nature to complain when, looking for “gods,” he found only ruin and wreckage. What did he expect? Evelyn wondered. Man was evil—she’d told him that a thousand times—or, if not evil, hopelessly flawed. Everything failed; it was some sort of law. But at least there was laughter, and lovers clinging to one another against the cliff; there were novels—wonderful tales of how things should be—and perfection promised in the afterworld. He’d sit and listen, her Rudolph, when she put things this way, nodding because he knew that in his persistent hunger for perfection in the here and now he was, at best, in the minority. He kept his dissatisfaction to himself, but occasionally Evelyn would glimpse in his eyes that look, that distant, pained expression that asked: Is this all? She saw it after her first miscarriage, then her second; saw it when he stopped searching the want ads and settled on the Post Office as the fulfillment of his potential in the marketplace. It was always there, that look, after he turned forty, and no new, lavishly praised novel from the Book-of-the-Month Club, no feature-length movie, prayer meeting, or meal she fixed for him wiped it from Rudolph’s eyes. He was, at least, this sort of man before he saw that martial-arts B movie. It was a dark vision, Evelyn decided, a dangerous vision, and in it she whiffed something that might destroy her. What that was, she couldn’t say, but she knew her Rudolph better than he knew himself. He would see the error—the waste of time—in his new hobby, and she was sure he would mend his ways.

  In the weeks, then months that followed Evelyn waited, watching her husband for a flag of surrender. There was no such sign. He became worse than before. He cooked his own meals, called her heavy soul food dishes “too acidic,” lived on raw vegetables, seaweed, nuts, and fruit to make his body “more alkaline,” and fasted on Sundays. He ordered books on something called Shaolin fighting and meditation from a store in California, and when his equipment arrived UPS from Dolan’s Sports in New Jersey, he ordered more—in consternation, Evelyn read the list—leg stretchers, makiwara boards, air shields, hand grips, bokken, focus mitts, a full-length mirror (for heaven’s sake) so he could correct his form, and protective equipment. For proper use of his headgear and gloves, however, he said he needed a sparring partner—an opponent—he said, to help him instinctively understand “combat strategy,” how to “flow” and “close the Gap” between himself and an adversary, how to create by his movements a negative space in which the other would be neu
tralized.

  “Well,” crabbed Evelyn, “if you need a punching bag, don’t look at me.”

  He sat across the kitchen table from her, doing dynamic-tension exercises as she read a new magazine called Self. “Did I ever tell you what a black belt means?” he asked.

  “You told me.”

  “Sifu Chan doesn’t use belts for ranking. They were introduced seventy years ago because Westerners were impatient, you know, needed signposts and all that.”

  “You told me,” said Evelyn.

  “Originally, all you got was a white belt. It symbolized innocence. Virginity.” His face was immensely serious, like a preacher’s. “As you worked, it got darker, dirtier, and turned brown. Then black. You were a master then. With even more work, the belt became frayed, the threads came loose, you see, and the belt showed white again.”

  “Rudolph, I’ve heard this before!” Evelyn picked up her magazine and took it into her bedroom. From there, with her legs drawn up under the blankets, she shouted: “I won’t be your punching bag!”

  So he brought friends from his kwoon, friends she wanted nothing to do with. There was something unsettling about them. Some were street fighters. Young. They wore tank-top shirts and motorcycle jackets. After drinking racks of Rainier beer on the front porch, they tossed their crumpled empties next door into Rod Kenner’s yard. Together, two of Rudolph’s new friends—Truck and Tuco—weighed a quarter of a ton. Evelyn kept a rolling pin under her pillow when they came, but she knew they could eat that along with her. But some of his new friends were students at the University of Washington. Truck, a Vietnamese only two years in America, planned to apply to the Police Academy once his training ended; and Tuco, who was Puerto Rican, had been fighting since he could make a fist; but a delicate young man named Andrea, a blue sash, was an actor in the drama department at the university. His kwoon training, he said, was less for self-defense than helping him understand his movements onstage—how, for example, to convincingly explode across a room in anger. Her husband liked them, Evelyn realized in horror. And they liked him. They were separated by money, background, and religion, but something she could not identify made them seem, those nights on the porch after his class, like a single body. They called Rudolph “Older Brother” or, less politely, “Pop.”