by John Shannon
Maeve wondered what it would be like to grow up in such a whitebread universe. It sure wouldn’t equip you for dealing with differences. “Ornetta is a famous storyteller,” she blurted.
“Famous?” he said. “At your age? That’s a true feat.”
“Maeve is just being kind. I had one story published in a magazine.”
“And she’s been entertaining people with stories over the Internet for two years,” Maeve insisted.
“A new electronic Uncle Remus?”
“Well, he was a white man really, but he had a good heart,” Ornetta said.
The two of them watched each other for a few moments, like boxers in their corners, wondering if the other knew how to counter certain punches. Finally he offered them his wan smile, which Maeve was beginning to suspect held within it some kind of surreptitious need to feel powerful.
“Can you tell us one?”
“Oh, I do think so,” Ornetta said, and this was a new tone, too, as far as Maeve could tell, with a suggestion that she would not be hurried.
They heard another deep hoot from the harbor, and then some answering signal, much weaker, like a child replying to a shepherding parent.
“This is the story of the big grouchy bear and the monkeys,” Ornetta announced. “Are we ready?”
Declan Liffey smiled gently. “Shoot, young lady.”
“For years, the monkeys were all afraid to move into the big grouchy bear’s neighborhood. He was so mean and so big, they just stayed in their own place across the forest. Then, one day, two young monkeys who didn’t know any better moved in right next door to Mr. Bear.”
As the story went on, Ornetta recounted the monkeys’ tentative attempts to be neighborly, which were reciprocated by the big, grouchy bear’s snubs and taunts, and Maeve noticed that Ornetta had not once switched into dialect. It was the first time Maeve had ever heard her tell a tale completely in Standard English, as if even a single step into that other world would leave her too unguarded, too vulnerable in some way to the old man.
“ ‘All right, you monkeys,’ growled the big grouchy bear. ‘I’ll have you over for dinner, but you’ve got to wash your hands. They’re so filthy, they’re black.’
“The monkeys looked down at their hands and they were truly surprised. They’d never noticed it before, their hands were black as night. Of course, since they moved near Mr. Bear, they were all alone in the neighborhood so they couldn’t check out any other monkeys. They didn’t remember that all monkeys have black hands.
“So they scrubbed and scrubbed in the stream, but the black just wouldn’t come off.”
For some reason Maeve was reminded of The Jungle Book and the mesmerizing duel of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi the mongoose and the cobra. Not so much by the story Ornetta was telling, but by the real world there in the room. Ornetta and her grandfather seemed just as wary of one another, circling, watching, and she wondered which one was the mongoose and which the cobra. In Ornetta’s story, the bear made the monkeys rub their hands with sand harder and harder until they bled, and when that didn’t work, he made them scrape their hands on rough rocks for as long as they could stand it. Of course, that didn’t work any better. Eventually their hands hurt so much that the monkeys had to stop, and the grouchy old bear turned them away and said if they couldn’t get their hands clean, they couldn’t eat with him.
“The monkeys were sad for a long time, but little by little, other monkeys moved into that neighborhood until there were hundreds of different kinds of monkeys there, and just only one Mr. Bear. Those first monkeys couldn’t help noticing that the orangutans, the chimps, the spider monkeys, and even the howlers—in fact, all their neighbor monkeys—had black hands just like theirs. Their hands were still sore with scars from all the scraping, trying to get the black off, and they started to frown at that big, grouchy bear every time he peeked out his window and saw the changes in his neighborhood.
“Finally they called a congress of the monkeys and said they should invite the bear over to a big dinner party and all make friends. But first he had to make himself respectable, like any good monkey. The monkeys all agreed, so the two monkeys who had moved there first were appointed ambassadors to Mr. Bear.
“One morning, they were ready and they stood on the porch of the big grouchy bear’s house and knocked.
“ ‘What do you want?’ Mr. Bear growled through the door. ‘I know you two.’
“ ‘We want to invite you for a friendly dinner party with all the monkeys,’ the two first monkeys said. ‘But before you can come out here, you got to make yourself respectable, like all of us.’ They set a bucket of soapy water and a big razor on his porch. ‘No respectable monkey would be caught dead with a big hairy rump like yours. You can’t come out in polite society until you shave all that ugly hair off your big bear butt.’ ”
Ornetta trailed off a few moments at this point. Maeve gulped at her tea to suppress a kind of nervous laugh. She was overwhelmed by the tension, but Ornetta seemed as calm as ever. Her grandfather seemed on the edge of laughter, too, in his own way.
“Well,” Declan Liffey finally said, “did the bear go and do it?”
“I don’t know,” Ornetta said. She wouldn’t take her eyes off him. “That’s where the story seems to stop for now.”
He waited until precisely eight o’clock again, still haunted by the worry that being either early or late by a few minutes would reveal some kind of failing. There was a damp cold off the harbor, and another house in the neighborhood had added Christmas decorations, simple multicolored big-bulb lights along the eaves, a fixture from yesteryear. The door of the garage dwelling in back was standing ajar again, which he hoped was a good sign. He had no idea whether his big bluff would bear fruit. He had tossed down his gauntlet, that it was Joe Ozaki’s turn to talk, without any assurance that it would work. He knew perfectly well that there were times that a pure act of will could spread like a ripple in the world around you, to oblige others to acknowledge what you had decided. But that might only work with normal impressionable people. Ozaki was another kettle of fish altogether.
If anything, the room was darker than the evening before. Ozaki was not on the sofa. Jack Liffey waited there a moment in the doorway, willing his eyes to adjust. All of a sudden he saw the man, and the same chill shot through him. Joe Ozaki stood facing him in the dining room at parade rest, this time wearing his black jumpsuit. He had a black watch cap on, too, that looked like it would roll down to make a balaclava and hide his face, but it was rolled up now. Oh, Lord, Jack Liffey thought, here we go. He was determined not to talk first. If it was to be a battle of wills, so be it. He’d wait him out.
“Sit down,” a reedy voice finally ordered, after their eyes had rested on one another for what seemed a very long time.
Jack Liffey shook his head. He’d stand as long as the ninja did. Backlighted now with a faint outside glow from the dining-room window, the man looked amazingly thin and lithe. Jack Liffey had a better sense of his height now, maybe five-ten.
“There is nothing outside the immediate moment,” the man intoned. The pitch of his voice was a little high, but it was strong and unaccented, used to being obeyed, or at least heard out. “The mind that is pure and lacking complications.”
“Oh, I think there’s a lot outside the immediate moment, and it’s all complicated as shit.” He hadn’t meant to get drawn into an argument, and he renewed his vow to remain silent. He needed to learn what Ozaki was about.
“All of man’s work is a bloody business,” he went on, as if Jack Liffey hadn’t spoken.
At this point, Jack Liffey realized he could mention Buddha or Yeats or Gandhi or a few other rag ends of man’s business that weren’t very bloody at all, but he didn’t. A ship hooted in the harbor, so close that it seemed to be warning of a collision with the little house. His brain tingled in anticipation of something.
“It might seem to you that Lieutenant Steelyard and Dan Petricich are innocent as individuals, but tha
t’s just your Western individualism speaking. Honor inheres in families, as does shame and dishonor. Their families, and yours, participated in the dishonor of my family.”
What rubbish, Jack Liffey thought. And we all imported slaves and we all slaughtered the Indians at Wounded Knee. But he controlled his tongue.
“If I run from battle, my ancestors will carry that shame to the ends of time.” His voice seemed to shift gear. “You have chosen to challenge me.”
It was a flat statement, but it set all the hair on Jack Liffey’s neck astir. Had he, in fact? He had thought of it more as offering help, but in Ozaki’s strange world, offering help, certainly accepting it, would probably signify a kind of weakness. Real warriors, if there were such things outside the stunted male imagination—and he supposed a Special Forces soldier qualified as a real warrior if anyone did—were probably meant to be self-sufficient and pitiless.
The man brought his hands from behind his back, and there it was. There it was. One of those big horrible serrated killing knives in his left hand. A K-bar. Jack Liffey nearly bolted, but he knew the man hadn’t hurt a soul yet.
“As a child I was afraid of knives,” Ozaki said, “especially very sharp knives like straight razors. I had a recurring vision of receiving one of those sudden deep cuts into my flesh, like a fish being gutted.”
He held out his right arm and ran the tip of the blade down his forearm, laying open a long cut. He let his arm dangle and watched without emotion as blood ran down his wrist, through the webbing of his fingers, and dripped to the floor.
“The idea of a knife fight terrified me in training. But once you accept the fact that you will be cut, there are no further barriers. To go into battle, you only need to decide that you are already dead. Morning after morning, you imagine your death, in every possible honorable way. You anchor your mind firmly in death. That is the true victory in the terrain of honor. Earthly victory or earthly defeat is irrelevant, a conjunction of stronger and weaker forces that you have no way to control. Welcoming death is not morbid, it’s no more than a question of a different awareness. Right now is no different from ‘when it will come to pass.’ ”
He put the knife back into some sheath in the small of his back and turned his gaze to the low coffee table in the room. There was a small book on the table.
“You have made the decision to be my enemy, Jack Liffey. Right now you are not worthy, not because you lack the military skills, but, more importantly, you haven’t the proper spirit. A duel with you would not be honorable. Take that book and read it.”
Jack Liffey’s eyes went to the book, a slim black paperback, but he couldn’t make out the title, and he was so rooted in place by dread that he couldn’t move toward it, couldn’t even lean. When he looked up, Ozaki was gone, just vanished, like a lizard removing itself suddenly from a big rock in the sunlight.
He let out a breath, felt how lopsided his one good lung made him feel, and let his head hang a moment as if exhausted. Finally he roused himself and picked up the book. It was a pristine copy of Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, by Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
Lord, he thought, take this nonsense from off my shoulders.
Sixteen
The Xhosa Delusion
The instant the door groaned open, he emerged angry from the graffiti-scarred elevator into the parking structure. He strode to his car, wrenched open the unlocked door, and then sat hard in a fuming funk. Dr. Shaheed had refused to pump up his left lung, maintaining that it needed another few weeks of healing. Jack Liffey had asked if this was some sort of exact science, the timing of the deflation and reflation of body parts, and the doctor had admitted it wasn’t. A few months earlier, in a small closed space, Jack Liffey had suffered the explosion of a powerful bomb loaded with finely milled granite—which the FBI had switched for what was supposed to be powdered plutonium in a dirty bomb. Not only had it filled his airways with silica and collapsed one of his lungs, but it had also ended up putting him into the keeping of these two quacks, Shaheed and Auslander, to continue getting a temporary disability check.
Shaheed explained that intentionally collapsing a lung had been done long ago as a desperation treatment for tuberculosis. The problem was, there wasn’t much good information on the procedure, and Jack Liffey’s pulmonary system had received such a trauma and such a dosing of fine particulates that the doctor thought it would be best to let the left lung rest a while longer. Best to be safe, not sorry, Shaheed intoned, poking his thick spectacles up his bulbous nose with a forefinger. He who hesitates is lost, Jack Liffey quoted back at him, hoping one dim-witted cliché might nullify another, but Doc Shaheed just smiled indulgently.
Jack Liffey knew better than to start the car right away in his foul mood—he might drive straight into a pillar in his rage—and he reached for the little black paperback about Bushido that he’d been reading off and on for a day now. You couldn’t take the stuff in large doses, all that macho strut and swagger, the toxic pall of a world slowly suffocating in its own mania for honor. It was like a fantastically bitter medicine that would cure nothing.
It is better not to bring up daughters. They are a blemish to the family name and a shame to the parents. The eldest daughter is special, but it is better to disregard the others.
He slapped the book shut and banged it on his knee. Nuggets like that didn’t help. He wondered what Maeve would make of that aphorism. Still, he puffed out his half breath and opened the book again. He wasn’t sure why he had taken on this responsibility, but he felt he should try to drag poor Joe Ozaki, kicking and screaming, out of all this medieval nonsense if he could, before anybody got seriously hurt. Jack Liffey did have a certain reservoir of sympathy for this poor frozen-souled warrior who had obviously become overwhelmed by his need to soothe the wounds he’d carried inside himself for so long. And he was using all this manly gibberish for the soothing. But Ozaki’s dark hurt scared him, too. The man was wound so tight that he was obviously capable of serious mayhem at the drop of a hat.
He read for a few minutes more, and the passages seemed to lighten a little, one even speaking briefly of a kind of single-minded compassion.
Then two men in skimpy black bathing suits, racing Speedos, walked toward the VW. It was a dark afternoon in the dead of a California winter, maybe fifty degrees at best, made worse right there, at least psychologically, by the flat slabs of cold, gray concrete all around, like a manmade ice palace. They passed him, barefoot and as buff as professional bodybuilders, with bulgy arms and annoyingly narrow waists. One turned around slowly as he walked, keeping pace backward with the other, as if to check if anyone were following. Before this man turned away again, Jack Liffey caught a glimpse of the washboard abs that the TV infomercials that sold pricey exercise machines were always going on about. He cracked his window and heard one say, “Archibald insists on weight training on Sundays, right up to the moment of the contest. But Exodus thirty-five, verse two, says he should be put to death for working on the Sabbath.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I wonder if it means we’re obligated to do it.”
“It wouldn’t be right to let him win by violating the word of the Lord.”
They reached the waist-high wall at the edge of the parking structure, where it was open to the chill air outside. The first man cupped his hands as if to pray, and, without hesitation, dived straight over the wall and out of sight, giving Jack Liffey a sudden frisson of fright. The second man held back a moment and then followed. This time there was a chilling scream as the man went out of sight. They had leaped westward, if Jack Liffey’s orientation was right, but he couldn’t form a mental picture of what was out there in the West Hollywood environs. He was pretty sure he had parked on the fourth floor coming up the spiral ramp, and he had no idea what they could possibly be jumping into. He wondered if he had an ethical obligation to check, and maybe to try to save Archibald from whatever fate they had planned for him, but he figured his ethical dance card was already full
up dealing with Joe Ozaki. He started the VW engine, first twist, reliable as always.
Maeve’s little white Toyota was in the lot at his condo when he got back, which surprised him, but he was less worried about her now that he’d met Ozaki and satisfied himself that the man’s malign will was pretty much focused on himself. It was now a duel of wills of some arcane sort. Well, more than a duel of wills, of course, he thought. Ozaki was well armed. But he was hardly going to meet the man out on the Palos Verdes bluffs at dawn with samurai swords. He would do his best to grasp what was eating at the man’s soul and try to defuse it, that was all.
He went inside quietly, and his heart melted as he saw Maeve napping snuggled against Loco on the sofa, her arm casually over the dog’s shoulder. Her mouth was open unattractively, and she snored softly. There was a bright green envelope on the tiny table by the door, without a stamp. It was from Becky and hadn’t been opened. As silently as he could, he tore it open with his finger and brought out a three-page missive.
Dearest Jack, I think it is best that for a while now.…
That was all he needed, really. He folded the letter back up and put it into the envelope. It would take quite a tin ear, he thought, to miss the precise resonances of a “Dear John” letter. There was no need to subject himself to the full humiliation at that moment. He noticed some food brewing in pots in the kitchen and had no idea how long it had been going, so he squatted beside the sofa and rested his palm on Maeve’s forehead.
“Hon. Wake up.”
Loco stirred first, and his forelegs quivered, some ancestral dream of a hunt, then he writhed around in a predator’s panic and woke Maeve.
“Oooh, Dad.” She rubbed her eyes. “I was soo far away.”