Tengu (6 page)
“Michael,” she called out the window into the backyard.
“Wha!” a voice demanded.
“Connor’s here,” Dee called with a heavy Long Island accent. When she said my name, it sounded like ‘Kahna.’ Her kids said it the same way. Dee jerked her head toward the backyard. “Go see him. I’m gonna get a vase for these.”
The backyard was where the men and children hid from women, the controlling elements in their lives. Even in the cold, Micky was out there, hovering over a barbecue. He wasn’t alone. Our brother Tommy was huffing across the yard, clutching a football while three small children clung, screaming, to his legs. They were having the time of their lives, but Tommy, never in the best of shape, looked like he was going to die. Off in the far corner of the yard, some older Burke kids were murmuring to each other and pressing the toes of their sneakers against the thin sheet of ice that had formed on a shallow puddle. They looked like prisoners planning the Big Break.
I came out the door and Micky glanced at me. “Finally,” he said. “Now we can eat.” Micky is whipcord thin with a patch of white in his dark reddish-brown hair. He has a military mustache that bristles with energy. As a homicide cop he’s seen lots of things, the kind most of us don’t want to know about. It tends to make him cranky. The two of us have always been different in many ways. But when you peel us down to the core, the surface differences fall away and are unimportant. We’d been together, smelling blood, and lived through it. So when we look at each other, the recognition of experiences shared is like a current arcing through space and making a connection.
But we don’t talk much about that. Micky squinted at me, then bent down, opened the lid on a big orange cooler, and handed me a bottle of beer. He picked up his own bottle and clicked the neck against mine. “Confusion to our enemies,” he said and took a sip.
“Why should we be alone?” I replied.
Micky’s partner Art came through the sliding glass door that led to the den. He smiled at me. Art is bigger than my brother and his hair is a lighter, sandy sort of red. But he has the same cop mustache. And the same cop eyes.
“Deirdre wants to know how much longer, Mick,” Art said.
Micky poked the meat with a finger. “Gimme five minutes and we’re set.”
Art nodded at that. He started to head back to the house, then turned. “You talk to Connor about that thing yet?”
My sister Irene’s husband Nick came into the yard just then. Micky jerked his head in Nick’s direction. “Not now,” he told Art.
“There’s a thing?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” Art said. “Right up your alley.”
“Art . . . ” Micky warned him. Then he looked at me. “After dinner. We’ll talk about the thing.”
“And what a thing it is,” Art said over his shoulder as he headed back into the house.
“I love it when you guys get technical,” I said to my brother.
Nick rooted around in the cooler and pulled out a beer, too. He looked at us with bright, expectant eyes, waiting to be let in on things. We changed the subject.
We had eaten and the light outside was fading. I always feel a bit overstuffed and sluggish after a family feed like this. But the kids hadn’t slowed down at all. They had gobbled down their meals and bolted for the yard, leaving paper plates piled haphazardly in the trash and a trail of potato chip crumbs that stretched from one end of the house to another. Twilight deepened and in the strengthening invisibility of night, they hooted like animals from far off jungles.
The den is Micky’s lair. It’s littered with old furniture and bad decorations. My brother paneled it himself, and in spots the wooden sheets of fake walnut are coming away from the furring strips. There’s a neat little space with a desk and a small file cabinet in one corner. On the wall to one side of the desk, there’s a framed collection of family pictures: my folks on the day they were married; all of us kids at the beach, squinting into the sun shining from behind the photographer. My dad, cocky and smooth-faced, posing outside a tent in Korea. He’s wearing a sidearm and a set of faded fatigues. His billed cap is pushed way back on his head. He looks young and thin and his ears seem big. He wouldn’t be that thin again until just before the cancer finally got him.
I sighed to myself, and Micky came up behind me and heard.
He handed me a beer, and in a rare moment of vulnerability, put his arm around my shoulders. We stood there for a hair’s breadth, sharing Dad, before he used the motion to turn me around to lead me to a seat. Art was with him. I looked at them expectantly, but Micky seemed like he didn’t want to talk business. Whatever it was.
Micky gestured at the picture. “Remember what Dad used to say about the Marine Corps?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Two things. ‘Best thing I ever did other than marry your mother . . . ’”
“And?”
“And ‘Don’t ever join,’” I finished.
“Smart man,” Art concluded approvingly.
“The Service . . . ” Micky said with poignant reminiscence. “It’s a whole other world.”
Now I knew my brother had in fact served a tour with the Marines in his younger years. It was both a source of exasperation and pride to our dad. He hadn’t relaxed until Micky came home. And in short order Dad began to worry again: Micky was, after all, home.
“You gotta watch out,” Art said, keeping this odd little conversation rolling.
Who knew where we were heading? “Come on,” I said, “you were both in the military.”
“We were idiots,” Micky said.
“Speak for yourself,” Art said. “I knew just what I was doing . . . though I did come away with a strong desire to never go camping again.”
My brother snorted and drank some beer. Both men smirked in remembrance of things that I, a lifelong civilian, would never know.
I held up a hand. “Boys. Please. I can swear that I have no desire to enlist.”
“Enlist?” Art asked. “You’re too old.”
“Too weird,” Micky added.
“So what are we talking about?” I asked. I paused and added with emphasis, “Is it . . . the thing?” It was hard to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
Art got up and made sure the door was shut. It has a habit of popping open at odd moments. Micky’s carpentry is effective but rarely precise.
My brother eyed his partner. Art came back to his seat and sat forward, cradling his beer bottle in his hands. “Okay. Look. I got this call about you.”
“I didn’t do it,” I grinned. But neither man smiled back.
“Seems your fame is spreading, Connor,” Micky snickered. “Someone wants to know whether you’re the real deal.”
I sighed. I’ve been in the paper a few times over the last couple of years. I get some mail from martial artists who yearn to know “what it’s like to put your skills to the ultimate test.” That’s the way one guy put it. Some people confuse real life with a movie. I hate to break the news to them: being on the sharp end of events is scary and exhausting. There’s no sound track. No guarantee of a satisfying ending. When I think back, and I try not to, I’m left with a jumble of memories; my mouth so dry I couldn’t swallow, the feel of another human being’s waning heat. There’s the smell of blood and the crackle of radios when the ambulances arrive, as well as the flush of guilt, relief, and surprise. Finally, I recall the desire to sleep forever.
I looked at my brother and his partner, then held my hand out. “Come on. What’s up?”
Art licked his lips. “I got a semi-official inquiry about you. Guy I knew years ago in the service named Baker.” He looked at Micky and said, “He re-upped and made a career out of it.”
Micky shrugged and made a face that said we all screw our lives up in unique ways.
“This Baker sounds like a real hard-charger,” Micky continued. “You know, Special Forces stuff: parachutes, scuba gear, sneaking around, cutting throats . . . ” He looked up at Art. “Like someone else I know.”
His partner shrugged. “Yeah, well, I was young and foolish once, too.”
I sat forward. Special Forces? This was a part of Art’s life that I knew nothing about. Micky saw the look on my face and laughed tightly.
Art shot him a dirty look, and continued. “Baker loved all that crap. After I mustered out, I lost touch. But you hear things . . . he’s been involved in all kinds of stuff.”
Micky looked at me. “Like the martial arts.”
“Aha,” I said, ever alert to a clue.
“Aha,” Art echoed.
“They did some sort of basic hand-to-hand training when I was in the Marines,” Micky said.
I nodded. “Basically judo and jujutsu, from what I’ve read.”
“Yeah,” Art added. “That and the more subtle techniques like jump on the enemy’s head once you knock him down.” He reminisced for a minute. “Simple, yet effective.”
“So what’s Baker want?” I asked, trying to get them back on track.
Art fished a note out of his pocket. “He’s involved with some new unarmed system fighting they’re teaching.” He looked at the small piece of scrap paper. “It’s based at Fort Bragg at something called CERG.”
“Let me guess, “I said, “the Center for Effective . . . ” I trailed off, at a loss for inspiration, but sure that I was on the right track. The military loves acronyms.
“Close, but no cigar. It’s the Combat Effectiveness Research Group.”
“Seems important, yet extremely vague,” Micky said. “Now I’m sure this is something related to our government.”
Art gave his partner a look, then faced me. “Anyway, Baker’s always on the prowl for new ideas and techniques . . . ”
“New blood,” I suggested.
“Fresh meat,” Micky corrected.
“ . . . and he had read a bit about you. He made the connection between you and Micky, then between Micky and me, and was making some inquiries about you.”
“What did you tell him?”
Art held up a finger, “Well, we both spoke with him. I said you were an academic, a writer of fine, yet obscure tomes . . . ”
“I said you had a knack for pissing people off and getting into trouble,” my brother continued.
Art nodded thoughtfully at the comment. “It’s true, you know, Connor.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “And I say that as a friend.”
I shrugged his hand off and smiled. “Will you cut that out?” I looked at Micky. “What else did you say?”
For once, my brother’s face lost its usual sarcastic look. We both had light blue eyes and the same smirky facial expressions that had outraged countless nuns in our bumpy progress through parochial school. But it was gone now and he was very quiet and very serious.
“I told him,” Micky said in a careful voice, “that I had seen you do some remarkable things in some tough situations.”
Art added, “I told Baker I thought that you were the real deal.”
“Hmm,” I said, momentarily surprised at them both.
Then Micky reverted to type. “We also told him you needed a job.”
“He said he’d contact you,” Art supplied. “He may have a proposition.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
Art, however, did. He sat back and took a long sip of his beer. “Baker’s a wild man, Connor. Keep your eyes open. But look on the bright side.”
Micky and I looked at Art skeptically.
“Your mother will be so pleased,” he told the two of us, beaming.
The video footage was flat, and it obscured the subtlety of angle and timing. The old teacher regretted that. But the audience wasn’t trained to appreciate subtlety and the outcome was clear enough. That was all that mattered.
They watched it without comment, which was unusual. They were garrulous as a rule, excitable, and given to flowery discussion. The small old Japanese man in the corner was just the opposite. Words leaked from him in a cadence that was shaped by patience, the slow drip of insight squeezed out drop by drop only by the force of necessity. He felt no need for speech, certainly not here. The image on the television screen spoke for him.
The group’s mission had not moved him, but their timing had suited his purpose. They believed that they had sought him out. In reality, it had not been difficult for him to attract them. He would have preferred to remain in the mountains of his home islands, desiring familiar territory in which to execute his attack. But it was not to be—that meddler from Tokyo had seen to that.
They had asked for his knowledge and he had come, knowing that what they sought was a thing that was easy to bestow. It merely needed devotion, and they had that quality in abundance. He had left one island chain for another, abandoning the peaks and rice fields of his ancestors, spurning the cities that had grown up in sterile imitation of the West. His new pupils understood the decay that the West created. They, too, resented what had been done: legacies spurned and lives rendered pointless. The old teacher spoke to them through translators, but when his eyes looked into theirs, he saw a familiar glint. The anger and resentment needed no translation.
It was not a difficult task to teach them the techniques of his art. To create the warrior’s spirit was a deeper challenge. They were willing to fight, but had spent so long hiding that their impulse was always for ambush—a vicious blow to the back of the head, or the strike from a distance—a peaceful morning rent by the blast of a car bomb. It was sometimes effective, the old man knew, but it was a tactic ultimately shaped by fear. It was ironic in some ways. They hated the nations that had made them weak, and yet their very weakness drove them to rely on the technology of the people they hated.
The rushing bloom and fire of explosions entranced them. The old man watched them swell with pride and power as they spoke of it. They ignored the imprecision and gloried only in the fear that it created. The old man thought them foolish. He valued few things in this world, but precision was one of them.
Yet, he persisted in instructing them. They knew of guns and bombs, the things that brought death from afar. He had different, more feral skills to impart.
Deep down, he felt contempt for their tactics. They had chortled in glee at the video footage from New York, seeing in the storm of concrete dust and black smoke a great battle won. The old man did not care one way or the other about the lives snuffed out as the buildings pancaked down into the ground, but he knew that the true warrior faces his enemy. What their brothers had done was not the act of warriors, whatever they called themselves; it was homicidal demolition.