Enzan: The Far Mountain (26 page)

I closed in and slugged the guy in front of me, using the shotgun as a club.
Save the ammunition
. It was a shame I hit him so hard, because he collapsed and now everyone could see me. The scene froze for a second: time snagging again, the world catching its breath before a cyclone of noise and violence rushed in.

Too much happening at once
. Goro’s eyes widening, his pistol floating up toward me. On my left, Yamashita whirled on the periphery of my vision, sweeping Chie off her feet, and then flowing up and around on the attack. There was the report of a pistol, impossibly loud in that snow-muffled world. But now Yamashita somehow had the gun in his possession and drove his fist into his captor’s throat. The man’s eyes bulged as he collapsed. Sue was on overload as she tried to figure out just who to shoot. Her gun was rising toward Yamashita, but her head was swiveling toward me. I’m not sure she eventually made a conscious decision. The gun simply went off as if on impulse, the slide working, the brass casing arcing up into a ray of morning sunlight. My shotgun erupted, the flash bright in the dim room, and she went down in a mist of blood. My ears rang.

Some of the shotgun pellets must have swept beyond her. I saw Goro flinch from their impact and his pistol jerked slightly off line. The muzzle bloomed and I felt the impact on my hip. Something large and fast and very angry had just plowed into me. I spun around to my right, carried by the kinetic energy, trying to somehow stay on my feet, but it wasn’t happening—the floor rushed up at me. As I collapsed, the assault rifle stitched a volley through the air. I heard the bullets snapping above me and then I was down, spasming there on the floor. The guy I had slugged was trying to get to his feet and walked right into the rounds. I thought I heard the wet slap of impact and his yelp as part of his jaw was shot away; then he was down as well.

I was having trouble moving my legs. They swung sluggishly, pushed to earth as if I were under the weight of an immensely heavy blanket. Somehow the shotgun was still in my right hand—no credit on my part, I just think my gloved fingers had gotten twisted in the trigger guard. I pulled the shotgun toward me. My movements were slow and clumsy, the weapon an extension of a distant landscape, a thing slowly dragging itself across the expanse. I tried to sit up and failed. I lay on my side and desperately tried to bring the weapon to bear. Everything I touched was hot and slippery, smelling of copper.

There was blood everywhere. I looked toward my sensei and saw his chest sheeted in red. He staggered slightly, the pistol in his hand. Then he seemed to straighten, his head swiveling from Goro to the man with the rifle, checking his angles, figuring his options. The guy with the rifle dropped a magazine out and rammed home a fresh one. His eyes bore into me and I had no doubt what he was going to do once he reloaded. Goro had started to move toward my teacher, taking aim. Yamashita stood very still and very straight, and in that instant I saw the calculations flash across his face: the imminent threat to himself from Goro, the certainty the man with the assault rifle would finish me off in the next few seconds.

In that moment, the years fell away from my teacher’s face. His form swelled with a last flush of vitality. He was the Yamashita I remembered: fully alive, fully aware, a man with no doubts and an iron will. And even in my despair I felt a surge of pride:
This is my teacher
. Then Yamashita blinked once in my direction. I’d like to believe in that last moment he read my thoughts, a last flash of
haragei
between us. His gesture was at least that, I am sure, but also, a final acknowledgment of so much else. His nostrils flared and a great look of calm settled on his face, a still, bright thing in a dim world. Then he aimed carefully and put a round into the rifleman’s forehead.

My scream of protest was smothered by the sharp report of Goro’s shot. I squirmed in agony as I saw my teacher go down. Goro walked slowly toward him, taking careful aim. “A last message from the Miyazaki family,” he said, sneering, preparing for the coup de grace. Then he heard my last grunting attempt to aim the shotgun. He turned my way.

I was belly down in the gore, squinting to keep my target in focus. The barrel wavered and I gulped desperately at the air, feeling the darkness pushing in on me, seeing the light start to bleed from my sight.

Goro took a quick step in my direction, surprised I was still alive. His movements were slow and measured as his pistol swung up at me—I don’t think he believed I’d be able to do it. He was still sneering when I pulled the trigger and the world shattered in light and noise.

There was a hushed silence after that, the stunned hum of air after it’s been in violent motion. Voices, cries of alarm that sounded in the distance. Close by, the wet grunting of an animal.

Yamashita was lying not twenty feet away, and Chie was kneeling near him, her mouth frozen open, her already tenuous hold on life close to snapping. I tried desperately to reach him, my elbows digging furrows in the floor, slipping in blood. My body was burning, but I was shivering and whimpering in frustration and pain. My legs were dead weight. The animal I had become kept grunting, kept flailing, but ultimately got nowhere. My visual field was greying out at the edges; my breathing was shallow and desperate.

Someone came to me, tried to calm me down. “Easy, now.” A voice floating above me in the mist, trying to be comforting.

I jerked my head in furious protest, maybe the last part of me that seemed to be under my control. “Get me …” I growled. I tried to will myself to his side. “Sensei … Get me …” I couldn’t even finish the message.

There were more hands, more voices of concern.

In the end, they dragged me over to my sensei, and set me so my head was close to his.

He was lying on his back, but the guy from the Tenth Mountain Division took one look at the bloody froth around Yamashita’s mouth and rolled him up on his side, trying to keep the blood out the lungs. Our faces were very close. I could feel the small, warm flutter of my teacher’s breath and smell the blood. His eyes were open but I am not sure what he was really seeing.

People were rushing around, bringing sheets and towels and whatever was on hand. Tenth Mountain was barking commands, his hands moving swiftly and surely across Yamashita’s torso. He glanced at me and shouted at the people who had brought me over: “Stop fucking around and somebody get some pressure on that wound!” I could almost have smiled:
not quite ready for the monastery, I guess
.

They had Chie sit by Yamashita’s head and help prop him up. Yamashita’s sight seemed to sharpen somewhat. He looked at me. “Burke!” he said, the words bubbling with blood. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or calling me. “The dojo!” he said, his voice panicked and agitated. A spasm hit him and he grimaced, then settled back, his eyes drawn to a distant image only he could see.

His eyes floated over to Chie’s tearful face hovering above him. He gazed up at her with a wonder and a joy I had never seen in his face—I swear I heard him whisper—
Himesama
. His head swiveled back to me, his neck muscles cording with the effort it took to focus. Once again he blinked at me. The movement was slow and deliberate.

I reached out and placed my hand on his chest, my head struggling to stay up off the hard, cold floor. He tried again to say something, cleared his airway and with great effort, spoke.

“
Enzan
…” he said and smiled.

The voice pushed and strained against all that held him down: the past, the present, the tangled bindings he had strapped on in the course of his life. Then, in an instant, he was free. The last sound he uttered swirled and rose, growing fainter, diffusing, up, up through the dark ceiling, into the cold air, where it merged with a morning sky of a deep and infinite blue.

Epilogue

Light and cold. My face sticky with blood. There was pain and the taste of vomit in my mouth, jostling and a deep grinding when they moved me. Mercifully I finally blacked out.

Voices and sounds floated around me in the darkness. Some were familiar; others were strange to me. But the one I wanted to hear most was absent.

There were surgeries, they tell me. A doctor came in at one point, his scrubs wrinkled and faintly patterned with blood, a pointillist rendering of his experience. He gave me the rundown. My eyes were open and I nodded when he paused to give him the impression I was taking it all in, but I was still groggy from anesthesia.

“The iliac crest on the right side was pretty well shattered and we did some extensive reconstruction there,” he said. I looked it up later. It’s the superior border of the wing of ilium, the superolateral margin of the greater pelvis.

“I got shot in the hip,” I told him. My voice was thick and I was desperately thirsty.

The doctor gave me a look:
Uh, no kidding
. He continued talking, but also started to fiddle with the machines and lines all around me. “In addition to the blood loss, and you were pretty far down, Mr. Burke, there was significant muscle damage, some potential nerve issues that we’ll continue to evaluate …” He flashed a light into my eyes, pulled my lids back, and frowned. I licked my lips and weariness overwhelmed me. His voice faded and I slipped back into darkness.

There was no real day or night for a while—just time spent floating to the beeping cadence of machines. The room was dim and someone had strung small holiday lights around a whiteboard that had my name and vitals written on it. Eventually, I came back to the world. I spent the week before Christmas in a wheelchair. A series of perky physical therapists rolled me around and introduced me to their diabolical art. They worked me hard. It was a brutal type of care that left me wrung out and aching. But I was determined to be using a walker by New Year’s Day.

Mickey was there as often as he could be. He tied a small red felt Christmas stocking to my walker.

“Is there a beer in there?” I asked.

He frowned. “Sorry, bud. They tell me no.”

Art was at the foot of the bed, scanning the readouts on the machines above my head. “The PTs tell us you’re making progress, Connor.” He was using his optimistic good-cop voice.

I snorted. “Half my ass was shot away, Art.”

Art shook his head. “Always a glass half empty with you Burkes.”

I closed my eyes.

“You gettin’ visitor overload?” Mickey asked. “We can leave …”

The holidays plus the eventual clearing of the snow-clogged roads had brought a parade of guests: my mom, frail and somewhat confused, my sisters and their worn-out husbands, Ken and a few of the senior students from the dojo. Owen and Ann. They were all so sincere and sympathetic. So intent on being chipper. So deeply annoying.

Art and Mickey were a refreshing change of pace, if only because they refused to treat me like an invalid. Art headed toward the door. “Yeah, Connor. We don’t have to hang around here for the abuse. There’s no shortage of people waiting to be cranky to us.”

I opened my eyes and pushed the button that made the bed support me into sitting straighter. I could feel the pull in my hip but did it anyway.

“God no,” I told him. “You’re all that stands between me and more physical therapy.”

My brother stood, squinting out the window, hands on his hips. “The feds come by?”

I nodded wearily.

“And?” Mickey prompted.

“The usual tight-lipped, smug bullshit. They asked me the same questions I’ve answered about a million times and gave me no real information.”

“They’re very conflicted,” Art said.

“Yeah,” Mickey added. “On the one hand, they are really pissed off at all the screaming and yelling.” I started to protest but my brother held up his hand. “The blowing of a federal stakeout on suspected North Korean agents. Not to mention the apparent shooting of the assistant to an elder statesman of the Japanese corporate community.”

Art sat down at the foot of the bed and smiled. “On the other hand, they have now broken up a blackmail scheme designed to get access to secret diplomatic information. In the process, they rounded up a bunch of Koreans and turned them into double agents.”

“What!”

“Sure,” Mickey snickered. “You think any of those guys want to go back to Pyongyang and report failure?”

Art smiled broadly. “Pyongyang, even on a good day, is nobody’s idea of a place to be.”

“So we are reliably informed that you are officially off the hook, Connor.” My brother shook his head in amused wonder. “Somewhere at an undisclosed location, some functionary has decided that, despite the mess, the pluses outweigh the minuses.”

At times the images from that last morning at the zendo flash into my mind, a painful kaleidoscope. I closed my eyes, squeezing them tight against the burning.
A mess … is that all it was to those people?

Nobody said anything for a while. Mickey and Art had been cops a long time. They were good at reading people’s moods. My machine beeped insistently in the quiet. Then it stopped.

“What happened?” I said.

Art shrugged. “I pushed a button.”

“Which one?”

“The one marked ‘annoying noises.’”

My hip ached and I motored the bed back so I could stare at the ceiling. I was doing a lot of that lately. My brother left the window and started to speak. Something in the tone of his voice made me look at him. He sounded uncertain, hesitant.

“Look, Connor,” he began. “You’ve lost a lot. We know that.”

“And your point?” My voice surprised even me: cranky, vicious, self-pitying.

Mickey glared at me. “He’s gone, Connor. There’s no changing that. You’ve gotta figure a way past it.”

I swallowed, not sure I could get the words out. My eyes were burning again. I shook my head in frustration. “Not sure that I can, Mick.”

Another uncomfortable silence. The bed murmured as Art got up. He stood shoulder to shoulder with his partner, my brother. They looked at me.

“Not gonna sugarcoat it for you, buddy boy,” Mickey said.

“Remember Mr. T in
Rocky III
, when they asked him about the big fight?” Art asked me. “His prediction?”

I smiled despite myself. “Pain,” I told them.

“Yeah,” Art said. “So it’s pretty much like that: pain. But you’ll get through it, Connor.”

I could feel the tears coming and I shut my eyes tight, not wanting them to see.

“Do you remember much about the first few days in here?” Mickey said.

“Nah,” I croaked, the sudden change in topic tricking me into a response despite myself.

“That Miyazaki chick was here almost all the time. Surprised the shit out of all of us, but go figure.”

“I asked her why she was here,” Art noted conversationally. “Know what she said?”

I just shook my head.

“She said you were one of the most deeply frustrating people she had ever met …”

“A sentiment widely shared,” Mickey added.

“But she couldn’t stop thinking about something you told her.”

I rolled my head wearily toward him. “What?”

“She said you told her something like, ‘The saddest people in the world aren’t the ones who don’t find themselves; it’s the people who stopped looking.’”

I lay there, feeling guilt and resentment and an overpowering weariness. I remained silent. After a time I opened my eyes and Mickey and Art were gone.

* * *

“I don’t know why we have to go there tonight,” I told my brother. A late January evening and the streets were wet with an unexpected thaw. My hip groaned in the damp cold.

“Chie’s father has established a foundation in Yamashita’s memory,” Art explained. “He wants to ensure that the dojo can survive.”

“They’ll need to find a new sensei,” I told them. “Good luck with that.” I winced at the asperity in my voice.
Still the cranky invalid, Burke
.
Get over it
.

“Whatever,” Mickey said. “They’re doing some insurance underwriting and need someone to go over the place with the agent. Who better than you?”

“I don’t want to go,” I said.

“Shut up,” Mickey told me and eased me into the passenger’s seat.

“There are no classes tonight, Connor,” Art assured me. They were both proud men and they understood me. I was able to walk with a cane by this point, but I didn’t want anyone from the dojo to see me hobble around. They knew I was worried about looking like an invalid.

“I still don’t want to go.”

“We know you don’t,” Art assured me. “Shut up.”

They double-parked in front of the building. The lights were on inside and I looked at Mickey. He shrugged. “The agent has a key, ya know.”

He and Art came around to my side of the car as I levered my creaking form up and out. They stopped me for a minute. “Here,” Mickey said, and took the aluminum cane away from me. Art reached into the backseat and took out a bokken, its end rounded to fit in my palm and the tip flattened out. A weapon, now cut down to serve as a crutch. My brother shrugged. “For old times’ sake.”

I gripped the bokken, moved slowly up to the door, and pushed my way through.

The dojo was brightly lit and filled with people. All the blue-clad members sat in silent rows, facing the front of the dojo. Centered high up on the wall was a framed piece of calligraphy in my dead master’s unmistakable hand:
Enzan no Metsuke
. The admonition to perception and attention. The call to see beyond petty distractions.

“You bastard,” I whispered to my brother.

They led me to the head of the dojo and I stood there. Etiquette demanded that I kneel, but I couldn’t be sure I could reach the floor unaided, and I knew for sure I couldn’t get up. In the struggle between pride and manners, pride won out.

The students were all silent, but I saw them looking at me intently, taking the measure of my injuries. They were all experts in movement and could calibrate the extent of my damage just from watching me walk.

But I didn’t see pity there, or disappointment. They were expectant. They looked at me with a type of yearning, with hope for something I wasn’t sure I could give them.

Is this how it was for you?
I had taken to addressing Yamashita in my head. He never answered, but it was good to have him to talk to.
Is this the weight you felt every day that you taught us? Duty, as heavy as a mountain?

I looked around and gestured at them. Took a breath and opened my mouth to speak, wondering what I could possibly say.

But the dojo captain cut me off. “
Sensei ni rei
,” he commanded, the traditional call to bow to the dojo’s master. The ranks of swordsmen bowed toward me. I looked to the side where Mickey and Art stood. They nodded encouragingly.

I gave a stiff bow in response. The class straightened up. I felt the weight of their expectation dragging at me. I wasn’t sure I could carry the load. I was sure I wasn’t worthy. But I knew he would want me to try.

“
Hajime
,” I told them.

Begin.