by John Donohue
“And you?” It was the most conversation they had made all night.
“I lead you up,” Hector said simply. “Then I go back.” It wasn’t completely accurate, but it was all they needed to know. When the time came, he made the phone call and then led the way up the canyon wall, playing his light along the surface to show them the handholds. They clambered over the rim at the top and Hector pointed them down the gully to the rendezvous. He squatted in the darkness until the sound of their passing faded, content in a job completed.
And then he heard the clink of a rock kicked loose from the canyon passage below.
Hector felt the adrenalin rush of alarm grip his chest at the same time that he acknowledged that his gut instincts had been right: they were being tracked. Still crouching, he backed slowly away from the edge of the canyon. He touched the pistol in his belt like a talisman, took a deep breath, and thought.
They do not know the trail. Otherwise they would have intercepted us at the end. He squinted off down the gully in the direction he had sent the men he had brought across. It will take time to discover the way up. By that time, the rendezvous will have been made. He grunted softly in satisfaction: he had a professional’s commitment to completing a job. If whoever was tracking them had hoped to hijack his package, they had failed. All that remained now was for Hector to elude them and make his way back across the border. He hefted his canteen and felt how light it had become. There was water and food stashed in the cliff dwelling below him. He had planned to rest there during the day and return with the coming of another night. Now his pursuers blocked access to his supplies. Hector would have to wait until they realized they had failed to intercept him and left. Then it would be safe to grab the supplies and head home by another route.
The rationality of the plan comforted him, despite the shock of being tracked. He would have to review his security procedures before heading out again. For now, however, he believed that he merely had to hide and wait.
But things hadn’t worked out as he anticipated. The approaching day brought with it the awareness that they were coming—for him. Hector began to move away from the canyon rim, throwing glances behind him in the dim grayness of coming dawn, but the shadows and shapes of the rocky desert twilight could have held a hundred pursuers and he would have been none the wiser if they were gaining on him.
Hector worked the pistol out of his waistband. If the men moving up the cliff below him had tracked him across the border and done it carefully, they now knew one of his most closely held secrets. And perhaps this was not the first time he had been followed. He had to admit that this was a possibility.
So why come for me now?
Hector had a sudden mental image of one of the old women of the town, a leather-faced specter with wet, red-rimmed eyes. She had warned him that luck was a passing thing. Now, in the darkness, Hector imagined that she looked at him with the penetrating stare of a bruja, a witch. Her mouth moved, and the night around him seemed to mimic her voice.
Perdido the wind whispered. Danger.
Hector exploded across the slope, suddenly breathless with certainty and the need to escape. If the trackers knew his routes, then all they needed to do was eliminate him. Control the route, control the business. If they caught him, he would simply disappear in the night, one more coyote swallowed up in rock and heat.
The men down below had scaled the cliff. They heard Hector’s movement. Their hushed voices sounded strained and urgent, and the sound of their boots on the rock grew louder. Hector stumbled along the slope, hands outstretched for balance. He wanted to use his flashlight, but feared that it would give his position away. His mind was racing reviewing what he knew of the terrain, of the possibility of escape. Of survival.
He skittered along a slope of loose, flat rock fragments. His passage was marked by the clatter of rocks cascading down the hill. He lost his footing and, as his arms windmilled, the pistol went flying from his grasp, clattering into oblivion along with the moving rocks. Hector heard his pursuers closing on him and knew he couldn’t waste time searching for the weapon. He reached firmer ground, breathless with effort. But this was no time to rest. He bent double, using his hands to propel himself forward. Hector never sensed the cut in the hillside until he plunged into it. The sudden sense of weightlessness; for a moment he thought he could fly.
Hector went down hard. Although the drop was not more than a few meters, it was studded with rocks that caught him on the tumbling plunge to the bottom of the cut. He lay there, tasting blood, and rock dust, winded. He tried to move, felt the stab of pain in his ribs and almost shrieked out loud when his leg shifted.
Broken.
He gasped, trying to get his breathing under control. Along the crest of the hill, the horizon was lightening. He would be able to see the silhouettes when his pursuers came along the slope, if he waited that long. But Hector knew that to wait was really just to die. He began to drag himself along the bottom of the cut, moving in painful jerks that made him bite his lip with the effort of staying silent. He didn’t look back. He didn’t see the shadowy shapes of his pursuers, shapes that paused at the arroyo’s edge and then fanned out to look for a safe way down.
Hector’s world had narrowed down to the dirt and rock of the arroyo floor, to the imperative need to keep moving, and to the jolting stabs of pain that accompanied each lurch forward. His mind raced, seeking an escape. If he could elude them, move toward the rendezvous… He still had the cell phone. He could even call the Border Patrol. They would merely deport him. It was an option to consider.
The fact that Hector could think like this, could plan despite the pain, and could adjust and react to the situation, were the qualities that had made him such a good coyote in the first place. That and luck.
He knew now that he would not be able to outdistance his pursuers. His only option was to hide. Another jolt of pain shot through his leg and Hector dragged himself into the meager shadow of a creosote bush. He was panting, he realized, and made a conscious effort to quiet his breathing. They will hear you, he reminded himself. Hector strained to listen, to sort out the bird sound and the faint pulse of wind from noises that suggested something more sinister. He was sure that his pursuers were still out there. He closed his mouth, knowing that it would preserve moisture. He would need it. His water bottle had been lost in his shambling, twisting escape from his pursuers. But the need for water discipline was a distant concern. First he had to survive.
The night was fading. The coyote could sense the growing power of the sun looming just below the horizon. In the sparse brush along the arroyo, birds had started to chirp, but the only sounds he heard were rougher things: the gasp of his own breath and the scrapes and thuds as he dragged himself painfully over the stony earth. The end of night brought no comfort to him: the heat would kill him if his pursuers did not.
Hector dragged himself deeper into the space between the creosote bush and the rocks near it. He lay there, silent and still, like all animals when they hide from hunters. His heart was hammering in his chest. He closed his eyes and saw the image of the old bruja, her eyes red and insistent, boring into him. Pobrecito. Luck fails us all.
Exhaustion dragged on him. His body burned, his mind grew fuzzy. His eyelids drooped. Hector jerked his eyes open, unsure whether the sound of a voice was real or something from a dream. In the spreading light of the desert morning, the creature that loomed over him was a thing of shadows and swirls. He had the briefest of moments to react to the terror of discovery, unsure of what he was seeing. A man? Its tattooed visage was more like a devil. Hector’s last moments were a jumbled mix of pain and confusion. The clutch in the chest as he realized he was doomed. The sharp throb of shattered bone. The thing above him calling in triumph to the other hunters. Arms that lifted high into the washed out blue of a morning sky, as if pronouncing a benediction.
The jagged rock came down on Hector, again and again, until he lay still, slowly seeping moisture into the hard ground of
the borderlands. In time, flies would come to swarm over the sticky pool of fluid until the sun rose, fierce and full, and baked the moisture of Hector’s life away, sucking it deep into the desert’s heart.
2 Lessons
The things we remember best tend to come to us in special ways—often linked to extremes of emotion like joy and fear. Or pain. My teacher had been shaped in a tradition where both fear and pain were constant companions because, the old masters believed, an authentic life was one that didn’t deny these most inevitable of experiences, it just learned to transcend them.
Yamashita is a sensei, or teacher, of the martial arts—the bugei—of old Japan. The bugei are many things—ways of fighting, of physical training, aesthetic disciplines forged out of the most horrific of practices. My teacher is a master of the form and the essence of these systems, a lethal man whose spirit is as keen and polished as the blade he teaches me to wield. He is simultaneously demanding, exasperating and amazing. I’ve been banging around the martial arts world for almost thirty years now, and I’ve never seen anyone like him.
I use the word banging literally. Lots of people today think they know something about the martial arts—black belts and Zen, ninja in dark pajamas jumping across a movie screen doing cartwheels that would make an astronaut toss his lunch. The death touch. Wispy masters who never sweat and are never defeated. But Grasshopper, this is all an illusion.
To train in the martial arts is like being apprenticed to frustration, to the burn of effort, and the unattainable criteria of perfection. There’s no glamour, no reward beyond the ones you create in your own heart. You struggle along the path and your teacher goads you or challenges you, always three steps ahead and always waiting, his eyes betraying nothing but demanding everything. And you try to give it.
In the process you take some lumps. I’ve broken my fingers and toes more times than I can count. Some ribs. Until a few years ago, my nose was intact, but that’s a thing of the past. It’s probably not a huge tragedy—I have a relative in Ireland who once said I have a face like a Dublin pig. When I do my warm up stretches in the morning, I can feel the tug of years of muscle damage all over me and the buzzing reminder of an old dislocated shoulder. There are small white scars on both my hands from a morning when I tore through jagged undergrowth, focused only on the fight to come. I have a long slash of a scar down my back that I got in a sword fight on the night when I began to truly understand what all this training had turned me into. And there are other, less visible marks.
Late in the night images sometimes come unbidden, and I’m pulled back into a whirl of adrenalin and heat and blood. But you cope. You learn to breathe deeply and wait for the sweat to dry. You wait for morning to come and with it the light to remind you of the present. My scars suggest where I’ve been, not where I am. Most days, I’m in Yamashita’s training hall, honing my technique in closer imitation of him and putting his lower ranked students through their paces.
The dojo—what Japanese martial artists call their training hall—is a big space, with high ceilings and a polished floor of tightly fitted hardwood strips. There’s a mirror on one wall that we use to check ourselves for correct form. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of my features while I prowl the room, and the face is both familiar and strange. For at times it appears to me that my eyes have become as hard and flat as my master’s.
That day, I was grinding some swordsmen through a particularly tricky exercise. My teacher has started to hold seminars lately for martial artists who aren’t his regular students, but who study related arts and are looking to deepen their skills. We get people who are trained in all sorts of systems. They enter the training hall in uniforms that have been worn into supple functionality. Some are in the karate or judo uniforms known as gi and have tattered and faded black belts riding low on their waists. Others wear the more formal pleated skirt known as a hakama and tops of white or blue or black. They all stand quietly, people who are centered, balanced, and coiled like steel springs ready for release. They don’t impress Yamashita too much, because just to be accepted as one of his regular students you usually need black belts in a few different styles, recommendations from some seriously advanced teachers, and an almost infinite capacity to suffer. But I watch the seminar students carefully and treat them like dangerous, barely domesticated animals.
It’s not paranoia on my part. The presence of outsiders at our dojo is new, and at first I was puzzled about why Yamashita would allow this. My teacher doesn’t advertise anywhere and just to find the converted warehouse where we train, you have to know where you’re going and be willing to thread the obscure backstreets of the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. But a small stream of fanatics do make the journey along the hard cement and past the harder eyes of Red Hook’s less desirable element. It took a while, but ultimately Yamashita’s reasons for sponsoring these seminars became clear: he wasn’t interested in letting people in to see him; he was letting them in to see me.
I’m his senior student, although when you say it like that it doesn’t begin to get at the core of our relationship. He has forged me into something, a version of himself, and we are tied together with filament so fine and so strong that the link is as invisible as it is undeniable. I struggled against it for a time, but I’ve come to learn to accept it. I move just like him now, and if my footsteps take me along slightly different routes, I know that in essence we travel the same path.
So these seminars were Yamashita’s way of letting people know who I was and that I would one day assume leadership of the dojo. We have both been scarred by our pasts and now, imperceptible to most, my teacher’s movements tell of his wounds. It’s something I try not to think about: it’s bad for my head and my heart.
But I’m not just being sentimental. My teacher has taught me better than that. I watch the trainees with slightly narrowed eyes, judging them, measuring their skill, and trying to divine their intent. They look back in much the same way. Bringing a bunch of highly skilled fighters together, pointing someone out and implying that he’s better than everyone else in the room, is the martial arts equivalent of pouring chum into shark infested waters.
These seminars have the feel of those old Westerns where a bunch of new gunmen stalk into town looking to take on the local prodigy. You can hold up your hands and protest you’re not interested in a fight, but people just smirk in disbelief and you know, deep down, that you’d better go get your weapon.
In the martial arts, we meditate and talk about the nature of training as a Do, a path, to enlightenment. But there are lots of ways to accomplish this end that don’t involve pounding on people in the way we do. Ultimately, no matter how hard we deny it, there’s part of us that likes that aspect of the bugei. The heat. The contact. The fury, trapped and funneled into something truly dangerous. No matter what the particular martial art system is called or what the techniques look like, there’s a basic pattern to advanced training: you get pounded and you pound back. The easily bruised should not apply.
I’ve taken my lumps in the dojo and in places far more terrifying as well. I prefer to approach training as a way to fine-tune my technique. I save punching on the afterburners for the real thing. But no matter how calmly I speak to people at these seminars, no matter how much I stress that we’re here to learn from each other, I can see that deep down they don’t buy it. They wait and watch, hoping for an opportunity to prove to Yamashita that there was a better choice for his top student than the guy leading the exercises. I brace myself to prove them wrong.
And, I‘ve come to realize, this is also part of Yamashita’s plan. Everything in my master’s world is a means of training. The fact that someone at a seminar may take a run at me is not necessarily a bad thing. From Yamashita’s perspective it’s more like icing on the cake, or a pickled plum in the middle of a rice ball.
It’s not all tension, of course: a few participants at the seminar weren’t strangers. Some of the dojo regulars were there to help out. A while ago, Yamashita and I
had met a woman named Sarah Klein who practiced kyudo, the Japanese art of archery. We had both been attracted to her, although for different reasons. Yamashita had been intrigued by her focused energy, and while I had been drawn to that spirit, I was intrigued by so much more. What she saw in me was anyone’s guess, but I was glad that she saw something. And I was glad she was at the seminar today.
Sarah’s not a big person, but when watching her slight figure move, you got a sense of grace and strength rare in most people. It may have been that suggestion of physical potential that made Yamashita take her on as a student. She was dark-haired with big eyes and a heart shaped face. Just seeing her across a room usually made my stomach flip. Today, as I moved around the seminar participants, she’d occasionally catch my eye for a split second and I’d see a hint of the smile I knew she was suppressing. Sarah has a great smile.
I kept my sensei face on, however, and resisted the impulse to wink at her. For now, I had to keep the seminar participants in check. We were executing a series of moves that in the beginning look a lot like the mae routine in your basic iaido kata. Iaido students focus on practicing a series of connected techniques known as kata that involve the art of drawing and cutting with the Japanese sword. In the first kata that they typically learn, students sit in the formal kneeling position, their swords sheathed. As they sense an attack being launched from the front, they rise on their knees, then draw the sword from its sheath and cut in a wide lateral arc across their front, planting their right foot forward so that only the left knee remains touching the ground.
In the sequence as traditionally practiced, the lateral swipe is followed up with a vertical cut. The idea is that your attacker, kneeling before you, starts to move. You swipe at him, but he jerks back just out of range. You follow up by drawing yourself forward with your right leg and then cutting down in what is meant to be a decisive attack to the head.