A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  He stood, sweating, the very sharp blade in his hand so that his concentration wouldn’t wander. A mistake with a thing so sharp could cut him badly and he already bled in small quantities from a dozen brushes with the yakiba, the tempered edge, of the wicked thing. Doshu paid the blood no mind: the message was, if you work with live blades, you get cut. That’s all. No big thing. Get used to blood. It goes away or it needs stitches and there’s nothing in between.

  “Migi yokogiri!” the bastard commanded, and Bob obligingly performed the downward right to left cut, not a slash, not a lunge, not a thrust: a cut.

  “Kire! KIRE!” the man yelled at him.

  Cut.

  Bob realized there was magic to the Japanese in the word. It wasn’t like “cutting classes” or “cutting the rug” or “damn, I cut myself” or “don’t cut corners,” all those little metaphorical indulgences on the principle of the sharp thing encountering the soft thing, the sort of expressions a society might create that had never taken blades too seriously.

  To the Japanese the word cut had special significance. You didn’t toss it about lightly; it was almost a religious term. With a sword, you cut. To cut was to kill, or to try to kill. The weapons were meant for that purpose only; they were dead-zero serious, no jokes, no jive, no sport, no fun. In their way, they were as meaningful, emotionally, as loaded guns and possibly more so because a gun could be unloaded but a sword never could.

  “Left diagonal cut!”

  “Right sideways cut!”

  “Rising left diagonal!”

  There were only eight of them. But everything depended upon those eight. If you could not master those eight, you had no chance.

  “No, no. Angle all wrong! Angle bullshit. Angle must be perfect. Go slow!”

  How long had this been going on? It felt like the crazed exercise at Parris Island, back when Parris Island meant something, where you were on a seventy-two-hour field exercise and nights bled into days, which bled into nights, until you were so aching you thought it would never end and your movements had gotten stupid with fatigue. What was your name? Where were you from?

  But that’s what got Swagger through ’Nam three times, so as much as every second of it sucked hard and long, it was somehow worth it. You had to do it.

  “Rising left diagonal! No, no, blade bent, no! Feel!”

  The small man came behind the sweating gaijin and with vicelike fingers took his arm through the motion, controlling his elbow, controlling the angle of the blade, which had to be precisely aligned to the angle of the cut, else the whole process broke down, you got a blown cut and the sword torqued its way from your grip, or at least took you out of timing so that your opponent could get in and cut you bad.

  No, not cut you bad.

  The Japanese would say, Bassari kiru.

  Cut you through.

  He thought he’d pass out. But if the little man with the wispy goatee could keep going, so, somehow, could he. But it went on for hours and hours and hours until:

  “Put sword away.”

  Bob bowed, not knowing how or why.

  He found the saya, remembered to extend it from him, and dropped it over the extended sword, whose edge he’d turned to self according to etiquette, and then returned it to the rack in the deity alcove.

  When he turned, Doshu was tightening a men around his head and had already gotten on the body padding.

  “Come, come. Now, you, me, fight. Fight hard. You kill me with wood. Good cuts. Make good cuts.”

  Bob must have groaned; all he wanted was a nap.

  “Come on. Only do for six, maybe ten more hours. Then I give fifteen-minute break.”

  Bob realized—a rarity. A joke.

  Hmmm. He found out quickly that he could fight or he could cut. But it was damned hard to do both. He was as fast as Doshu and now and then got his licks in, though perhaps Doshu was going light on him, even if the whack of the wooden edge against his unprotected arms or torso would leave welts and bruises for days. But when he hit, he hit sloppily. When he cut well, he cut slow.

  “I can’t stay with you.”

  “No ‘stay with.’ Sickness. Sickness of ego. No win, no lose. You must fight in one mind.”

  One mind. Now what the fuck did that mean?

  “Concentrate but no concentrate. See but no see. Win but no win.”

  What language was this?

  “Stop,” the man said after a bit. “You like girls?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “Remember best time with girl?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “What?”

  “Come on. I can’t tell you that.”

  “When?”

  “Oh, ’ninety-three. I hadn’t been no good for a long time. Hadn’t been with a decent woman in a long time. Got in a bad scrape and was on the run, and I made it to the house of a woman who’d been married to my spotter in Vietnam. In some way, I’d fallen in love with her picture first. She was what I lost when I lost him. It fucked up my head. So anyway, had no place to go and I went to her and it’s been okay ever since. She saved my life. And the sex part—well, hell, it don’t get no better.”

  “Think of sex,” said Doshu, and cut him hard in the throat.

  “Ach! Hey,” Bob shouted.

  “Think of sex,” said Doshu, and whapped him hard with the blade in the right shoulder.

  “No!” Bob said. “It’s too goddamn private. It ain’t for this. I can’t think of sex. It’s wrong.”

  “You fool. No Japanese. Think of—think of smooth.”

  Smooth?

  What was smooth?

  “I don’t—”

  “No! Think of smooth!”

  And what came to mind when “smooth” was ordered? He thought of the scythe. He thought of his solitude on the high arroyo, the long spring and early summer months, the old blade in his hand, the suppleness through his torso, the way he could only keep it going three hours the first day and by the end, when he was damn near finished, he could go fifteen, sixteen hours at a whack, thinking nothing of it. He thought of the small, tough desert scrub, the way that old blade, nothing a samurai would look at twice, would just smooth through it. Sending stalks and leaves aflying in a spray, with that oddly satisfying whipping sound as it rent the air.

  Somehow he found something private and his own, and using it, he blocked the next cut, stepped inside it, and cut Doshu hard across the wrists, knowing that he’d purposely missed the wrist guard by a hair so that the blow really hurt the little bastard like hell.

  Think of the scythe!

  He wasn’t sure when it stopped, he wasn’t sure when he rested, but somehow he found himself outside in the dark, rolling carpets.

  “Roll tight. Not tight enough! Roll tighter.”

  What the fuck did this have to do with anything?

  “Why are—”

  “No why, fool! No why! Do! Do well, do right, do as Doshu say, do, do, do!”

  And so he did. He rolled the thatchy carpet squares into tight rolls, pinned them, got twine around them, and tied them tight. The absurd image of tying off an elephant’s penis came to him, and when he smiled, Doshu hit him hard with the switch.

  “No goddamn joke, gaijin.”

  Finally, he got them secured. It took a while to get the feel of it, but finally he could do it fast enough, and when all the carpets were rolled, he’d accumulated quite a pile, maybe seventy-five or eighty.

  “Now soak!”

  “What?”

  “Soak, goddamn! Soak!”

  What this turned out to mean was loading the carpet rolls into a trough, then going to the hose and filling the trough to the brim. It was dark. What day was it? He thought it was the third day, though maybe it was the fourth day or maybe just the second. Who knew? Who knew when this little bastard was shutting up? Who knew when it would stop—

  “You sleep now. Till dawn. Two hours. Then we cut.”

  “Cut?”

  “Yes, no bullshit, sword is c
ut. No cut, no sword. We cut, cut well, cut hard, or I kick you out, you hopeless gaijin, goddamn you to hell.”

  Three hours later, slightly refreshed but still groggy as hell, he found himself in the back courtyard. Doshu had directed him to load five of the soaked, rolled carpets on five heavy wooden bases, each with a vertical rod from which sprang a spike. The carpets sank on the spike and stood upright, like little soldiers.

  “Tameshigiri.”

  “Okay,” said Bob.

  “You watch, then do.”

  The old fellow took the sword, bowed to it, withdrew it from its saya. Then he turned, faced the array of five carpet rolls on five spikes.

  “Ai!” he shouted, and with a speed that Swagger almost could not follow he flashed through the formation, coiling and uncoiling, the blade whispering at warptime, just a sliver of light, a flash of shadow, a sense of willed disturbance in the cosmos, and in what had to be less than one second, he had precisely cut each carpet roll at about a 47.5-degree angle, talk about your “smooth,” and stood still.

  “You do. Tameshigiri. Test cutting. Must cut real. Pretend all bullshit. Do it. Do it now.”

  Bob bowed to the little god in his sword, not because he believed there was a little god in there but because not bowing would be one thing more to be yelled at for, unsheathed, and approached the closest rolled carpet.

  “Jodan-kamae,” yelled the man, meaning on high, and being right-handed, Bob found that position, one leg slightly ahead of the other, almost a batting stance but not quite as his hands were far apart on the hilt of the weapon and he was thinking of killing.

  “Ai!” he shouted, and brought the sword down hard at 45 degrees against the bundled material. With a vibratory clatter, the sword twisted in his hand and seemed stuck about a half inch in the bundle.

  “No, no, no,” screamed the little man. “Angle all wrong, much stupidity. Angle of edge be same as angle of blade or you get bullshit like that. I told you. Do what I say.”

  Bob readdressed his carpeted opponent, tried to shake his brain free of thought and not feel like an idiot in a bathrobe with a long knife cutting up carpets, but instead like a ferocious samurai warrior about to dispatch an enemy.

  The sword seemed to move on its own; his mind was blank to results and he thought for a second he’d missed completely it was so smooth, but then with the lazy grace of the totally dead, the top half of the carpet roll fell off to hit the ground.

  “Again!”

  And again, and again, and again.

  Somewhere in there, he progressed to two-cut sequences, cutting one way, reversing smoothly by the gyroscopic guidance in his elbows from the center of his shoulders, then coming back through it. He seemed to be getting it, feeling the power in his hands, making subtle corrections in the stroke, cutting not with arms but with the “center of his body,” that is, with the whole weight of the body behind it; there was weird satisfaction in watching the carpeting fall helpless before his blade.

  “Not good,” said Doshu. “Is maybe okay. But no time to make good. Now you can cut a little, so tomorrow we teach you to fight.”

  “Floating feeling in thumb and forefinger, with the middle finger neither tight nor slack and the last two fingers tight. When you take up sword, you must feel intent on cutting the enemy. No fixedness. Hand alive. I no like fixedness in swords and hands. Fixedness means a dead hand. Pliability is a living hand.”

  Yeah, sure, easy for you to say, thought Bob, and Doshu raised his own sword smoothly and with elegant grace and rhythm, a snake coiling to strike, a swan rising, his muscles in perfect syncopation.

  Bob tried to model on him, feeling his body fight him, feeling ridiculous, a barefoot Fred Astaire with a pretend sword in a gymnasium.

  “No! No, again, no thought. No thought. Too much thought.”

  What does that mean?

  He tried to concentrate but thought, See, it would be easier if he broke it down, one, two, three, then four, five, six, and I could practice each one and—

  He pinched off the spurt of frustration and tried to feel the move, the slow rotation of hips, the uprising of the arms, that goddamned “floating feeling in thumb and forefinger,” and somehow it was just a little better.

  “In one timing, Swagger,” said Doshu, whatever that meant.

  “I—”

  “No talk! One timing. One timing!”

  What did one timing mean?

  “Make shield of fists.”

  “I—”

  “Place body sideways.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “Keep shoulders level with opponent’s fists.”

  “I’ll try if—”

  “Keep rear leg open, Swagger.”

  “Like this?”

  “Keep stance same as opponent’s.”

  He tried to do it all, and of course could do none of it. There was no end, no progress, no start, no finish, no lesson plan. Doshu gave him opaque orders, shouted commands to “Approach no-think!” as though he were ordering a trainee to drop and give him fifty. It went on, pointlessly, forever. Fourth day? Fifth? Afternoon of first? Who knew? He realized at a certain point the only way to deal with this wasn’t to think about it being “over.” Don’t think about it “ending.” It is not a thing of beginning and ending. Concentrate only on exactly what is before you. Do exactly what is stated. Do it, don’t think about it, analyze it, try to “learn” it. Just do the fucking thing, and do not place it in time or cause-effect, or this, then that. See it—this seemed to help—as shooting. You simply have to teach your body the way. The body knows the way, so that you don’t have to instruct it; it is on subconscious autopilot, there’s no particular sense of having “mastered” a thing, it’s just that all the work is connecting and the body is learning things without telling its owner.

  Maybe he was getting it, sort of.

  Swagger cleans the floor of the dojo on his hands and knees. With a soft wet cloth and a pail of warm water, he scrubs each and every square inch. He goes over the woodwork and reaches spots that have not been reached before. He gives himself to this work, taking pride in the perfection of it.

  And in cleaning he came across a little corner where a few treasures of ego were on display: it was in what he knew to be the deity alcove, the spiritual heart of the dojo, where the truly supplicant went to worship.

  What Swagger saw, beyond an indecipherable kanji banner and a few photos of elders who must have founded this particular style or school or way or whatever, were pictures from a past full of men and boys and, lately, girls. All were sweaty, all in triumph, all in gi and hakama, and Bob always recognized Doshu, and in some of the earlier ones he recognized his sponsor in this madness, Dr. Otowa, supremely cool and intelligent. In one Otowa and Doshu stood with a boy, who by the cast of his eyes and the wit in his mouth and the sternness in his forehead had to be a little Otowa, a son, with some silly trophy or something, all of them sweaty, all of them exhilarated. It was like a Little League photo from the ’70s, so far distant in time and place as to be all but unrecognizable, all of it however speaking of some unbroken line, father to son, going back through the generations.

  You saw these photos all over Arkansas, though usually a dead deer or a baseball bat or a football was part of it, instead of a kendo shinai; it was the same, the father passing on what he knew, the boy, though distant, hungry for it.

  “Swagger! Sword, now. Now!”

  Doshu is a drill sergeant. He’s a yeller, a pressure cooker, a demander. But it’s so hard because it’s not progressive in a western sense; there’s no feeling of going from here to there. The edges of things are blended. Somewhere—the start is indistinct—he’d moved into kata, which was a series of moves with the sword, a kind of offensive syncopation so that the blade came out, flowed around the shoulders to a certain perfect position, then was cut with, the cut riding a rhythm, never just a brute expression of force. It seemed to have something to do with wave dynamics, a sense of harnessing a blast of ener
gy that would rise from one hip, course through the body to the opposite shoulder, flow downward into the fists, which would then surge in opposing directions, bringing the blade through with an amazement of unwilled speed and force, all without trying. Doshu would swing lazily at him with his bokken and Bob would block it, feel it sliding off his own wooden blade, and see how to ride it down and open up a way to the man’s innards, then turn back and slip into another kata.

  “Attack and abide in one,” Doshu said, “migi yokogiri,” and Bob delivered his side cut.

  “By the false, the true is obtained,” he also said, “hidari kesagiri,” so that Bob tried to obtain the truth through a left-to-right diagonal.

  He clarified by adding, “Beat the grass and scare up the snake, tsuki,” and Bob thrust, trying to scare up snakes.

  Then to make it absolutely clear: “Use thought to approach no-thought; use attachment to be unattached.”

  He then tried speed. A Swagger gift: fast, good hands.

  He brought maximum speed to a horizontal stroke from the draw—nutisuke—and you’d have thought he’d blown his nose on a flag or something.

  “No! No! Speed wrong. Speed bad. Speed sick, Swagger. No speed. No speed!”

  It was not the only time the obscure little man seemed really agitated, but something about speed annoyed him deeply.

  “Speed sick. Speed bad.”

  He said it over and over.

  Don’t think of speed, Bob cautioned himself. If you connect with speed, it’s all wrong. No, no, no. Slow, sure, smooth. Smooth is fast. Fast is not fast. Fast is slow. Smooth is fast. Be smooth.

  “Moon in the cold stream like a mirror.” That was the strangest, yet it was what Doshu would always come back to. Opaque, cute even, some Asian cornball thing from an old TV show or other. It felt too self-consciously “mystic.”

  He remembered Yoda from some Star Wars thing: “There is no try. Only do.” Something like that. Maybe he was some aged fool of a Luke Skywalker on a strange planet far from home, trying to master a little wizard’s poetry, which would only work if you believed it, yet he could not believe it at his heart, because he was a U.S. Marine and what he believed in was obedience to orders, obedience to traditions, never surrendering, and breaking the weapon down to clean it.