Tom, flat on his back, was using pain to quell his memory. His arms ached. Above him teetered a weight which he must not let slip. In his mind it was now a boulder. Of basalt. Or limestone. Not that it mattered. What did was the muscle-pain. Grittily, he savoured that. You had, he believed, to conquer yourself so as later, if need be, to tackle the world. His pupils accepted this. Most of them. Only Rafael, missing the point, had once asked if Tom was thinking of the next world.
Raffo could get things a tad wrong, indeed was in jail just now enforcing Tom’s principles with excessive zest. He had wreaked mayhem on a pair of badasses. Fellow students said Tom shouldn’t blame himself if Raffo lacked flexibility.
‘He takes the American dream too much to heart!’ they decided. ‘Listen, he takes karate too much to heart.’
‘And the movies!’
‘It’s being an immigrant.’ Gary was the class intellectual. ‘If you psych yourself up to adapt to a whole new culture, you’ll keep looking for challenges. Raffo wanted to be like those knights in the blow-ups on our dojo walls, Tom. Dragon-slayers! They must have impressed him as a kid. They’d have been some of the first things here he saw.’
Rafael had been in Tom’s karate class since his family brought him to LA from Mexico at the age of ten. He’d been the first Hispanic to join and the only one to stay.
Tom, while he had nothing against Hispanics, had a test question for them. ‘Ever hear of a bunch of Mexicans,’ he’d ask, ‘who lay claim to California, Texas and everything in between? They call it Atalanta or something like that. Do you know about them?’
No one said they did, but Tom went on putting his question. He wanted any mad Mexicans on whom he might stumble to know their cover was blown.
He didn’t get to put it though to Rafael’s Mom. She was a Spanish-speaker, brown as gingerbread who, one day twenty years ago, simply appeared at Tom’s door with little Rafael, his baby sisters and a basketful of cakes in the colours of the Mexican flag. Raspberry, cream and pistachio! Pure cholesterol! Tinted sugar sifted from the basket; alien smells polluted the dojo and Tom couldn’t have said which of his powerful personal taboos was the most acutely violated. A baby started to cry. Soothing it, the gingerbread Mom opened her blouse, thrust her cakes at Tom, and pointed to little Rafael. ‘This one’, she said, ‘want study karate. Give me no peace. All day watch your class. From there.’ Popping one tit into the baby’s mouth, she pointed to an apartment balcony overlooking the dojo, then said something to the boy in Spanish, perhaps that he should show what he could do.
Tom expected shyness, but there was none.
‘Kiai!’ yelled Raffo, while performing a creditable middle-level sword-hand block in back stance. A natural! Then he did the splits. An uncle had promised to pay for his lessons.
Later, Tom wrapped up the unwholesome cakes and drove with them to a distant litter bin. He didn’t want anyone’s feelings hurt, but neither did he relish the smells which lingered in his dojo until he got at them with Listerine. Next day Raffo joined the class and, some years later, got his black belt. Since then, several more years had passed, and pupils from Tom’s first junior karate class had now had their black belts so long that the fine Japanese silk had worn thin, and the belts were turning white. About ten old pupils still trained though, turning up three times a week – it had once been six – and Rafael had been one of the most faithful until last month when an unathletic-looking judge sentenced him harshly on the grounds that having a karate black belt was the equivalent of being armed. The guy reminded Tom of his own uncles from Salt Lake City. Stiff! Dry! Convinced of their rectitude. Years ago, two of them had come out here to LA for three days, looked down their lean Wasp noses at California, then turned and gone home. Tom got the impression that he, like the state, had been considered and found wanting. On that occasion, however, no judgement was pronounced.
‘Remember, Tom,’ Gary reminisced, ‘how awful Rafael’s accent used to be? Martin kept making fun of it until Rafael punched him in the mouth. He broke two teeth and Martin’s Mom threatened to sue vou.’
‘I told her to go right ahead.’
‘Yeah!’ The class enjoyed the memory.
‘Martin’s Mom was quite something!’
‘So was Martin!’
‘Remember how we were all set to testify that he was a mean S.O.B who had it coming?’
‘Martin was worse than an S.O.B. He was a small sadist. What you never saw, Tom, was what he got up to when you turned your back. Especially during sparring.’
‘His Mom wouldn’t let him train with us after that.’
‘But when he was sixteen he came back.’
‘That’s right! She couldn’t stop him then and he’d grown into an acceptable guy!’
‘Fairly acceptable.’
‘Rafael had taught him a lesson!’
Wham! Nostalgically, Tom dreamed of evils which could be simply knocked out. Flattened! Murdilized! Up-p again! Wondering if he’d heard a bone crack, he steadied the weight. His arms buckled. Effortfully, he raised them once more. As a professional chiropractor and martial artist, he knew how much too much to demand of his body.
‘Push beyond your threshold,’ was his motto.
In his fantasy the weight was a boulder which could slip, set off an earthslide and block the entrance to a cave from which fugitives had started to emerge. A girl had got out, but something had happened to the man behind her. His face was muzzled in blood, and one of his eyes, veined like a rare orchid, hung as if from a stem.
‘Aa-uuu-wwawwagh!’ Tom’s anguished bellow surprised himself.
Embarrassed, he assigned it to a predator deep in the cave. Dragon? Cyclops? No, a giant earth worm. Tom had watched a video once in which a lovely, white-skinned gal changed every night into one of those. The story was by the same guy who wrote Dracula. Tom tried to remember his name. Gram, was it? Or Bram? Bram Something? Bellowing again, he congratulated himself on having had his dojo soundproofed. At one time he’d had forty students, and when they all yelled ‘kiai’ the building shook. Neighbours complained that it sounded like the start of the big LA quake. So Tom called the sound-proofers.
Deep in the cave, something phosphorescent glowed. Tusks? Slime? Were the fugitives all safely out? ‘Ninety-nine!’ Tom let sink then raised his barbell one last time. ‘A hundred!’ Replacing it, he gave a high sign to a movie poster on the wall which showed a man hefting a rock. The man’s muscles jutted. A girl, wearing the stone-age equivalent of a bikini, was creeping fearfully from a cave, and you could tell that the man would now lower the rock, corral the evil inside and join her in the sunshine. Tom’s fantasies usually stopped there.
Today he held onto them, letting his mind flit through a medley in which the stone-age gal turned up in the Star Trek episode he’d watched last night. Slivers of reality knifed coldly in, making him shiver even as he stepped under the hot shower. Again he saw the dangling eye.
It was Jim’s.
Tom, embracing numbness, turned off shower and thought-stream, extracted a karate gi from a cottony pile smelling mildly of himself, put it on, took a quart of plain yoghurt from his office fridge and sat down to eat. The stiff sleeves creaked and he felt bolstered by routine. No point ringing the hospital yet. They’d said not to. Jim was in intensive care. Tom who hadn’t cried since he was a kid felt a hardness in his throat.
The yoghurt had the clotty texture of a nose bleed, but he ate it anyway for, as health-lore changed, so did his diet. Gone were the days of steaks and pie. Like his Mormon forebears, he looked to the long run, but, giving up on heaven, subscribed instead to news letters on smart drugs and nutrients and, to keep his brain active, took challenging courses in math and the biology of ageing in which he already had a PhD. His aim was to stay healthy until researchers into our DNA cracked the code which tells us to die and reversed the message. He believed this to be imminent.
‘I’d hate’, he told students, ‘to be the last man to go!’
Slyly timed, such remarks let him catch his breath between strenuous routines. Did the guys know, he wondered, and if so did this embarrass them? In the old days, he would have crucified anyone who said a word during training. His own Japanese sensei had run his dojo like a boot camp, and for years Tom, honouring the tradition, stayed inscrutably buttoned-up and dignified. Lately, though, he had been regarding his students as family and sharing his thoughts.
The change went back to Heppy’s death. Mom’s. Mrs Fuller’s. Her ghostly selves gusted back if he didn’t take measures – and must at some point be dealt with.
Crumpling his emptied yoghurt carton, he let one bad memory oust another. This morning, out on the boulevard, there had been a five-car pile-up. Sun-blurred after-images floated in and out of focus, hiding then brutally highlighting bone shards puncturing a cheek, Jim’s fierce, extruded eye, crushed metal and a bunch of stunned faces, two of which he knew. A car had been totalled right outside this office while another, somersaulting past the centre divider, burst into flames. Tom, hearing the collision, had rushed out and there was the totalled car wrapped around a lamp post and next to it Jim’s old jalopy with Jim folded into the steering wheel. In the periphery of Tom’s vision, making a getaway in his BMW, was an intact but tight-lipped Martin.
Martin! Tom got the picture instantly: those assholes had meant to fake it! Holy shit! They’d planned to fake injuries and walk off with the insurance money. Martin must have talked Jim into it. Tom could imagine his spiel: ‘Listen! Listen! Your old lady’s busting your balls. Your car’s worth zip. Just say you have a whiplash neck. We’ll get Honest Tom the Chiropractor to back you up. He’ll believe you and the insurers will believe him. We’ll do it right by his office. The symptoms are a cinch to fake.’
Jim, a mild, handsome ex-lifeguard with a knee injury, was one of Nature’s fall-guys. Before the knee-injury he had married a gal who kept nagging him to get off his butt and do something. But Jim didn’t see what he could do and had been in here joking miserably about this. She’d made him use their savings as a deposit on a house, and he couldn’t keep up the payments. He’d flunked law school and lost a job as security guard because of his limp.
Tom, hating to know about scams, averted his eyes from so much that, for a while, his disbelief in ambulance-chasers, snuff-movies and markets-in-stolen-hearts-and-kidneys had equalled that with which other people greeted his hopes of living forever. The difference was that when they had evidence, he bowed to it, which was more than they did to his. This amazed him whose sources included bulletins from the Centre d’Etude du Polymorphisme Humain (CEPH) in Paris where researchers had mapped the human genetic blueprint. Awesomely, human immortality had begun to look attainable and, bafflingly, his students didn’t seem to care. Tom harangued them with wonder. Just last week, Martin’s pale little eyes had blinked impassively while Tom talked right through the limbering-up period.
Why, he marvelled, were they not ecstatic! Their generation could – Tom delicately stretched his hamstrings – be thirty-plus forever. Didn’t they grasp the privilege? Didn’t they – here he still happily, though still delicately, swung a kick in the air – want immortality? Making imaginary contact, his bare toes trembled at high noon.
‘Listen, I’m in my sixties, and I want it!’
In the training mirror, his levitating self reminded him of a prophet ranting in some souk! Prophet or monk. His crewcut had acquired a tonsure. Or some white, arrowy, Japanese bird.
‘Hey,’ someone – Martin? – guffawed in the back row, ‘if nobody dies, the planet’ll get overcrowded. They’ll have to ban sex!’
‘Yeah! You’ll have to be castrated!’ Aiming humorous assaults at each other’s groins.
‘It should be done now. Aids is the warning!’
‘Aids! Yeah! Yah!’
‘Don’t touch me, man! Keep your body liquids to yourself!’
‘Sex-maniacs should be interned!’
‘Or at least banned from the dojo!’
Feinting and dodging, kicks snapped, punches were pulled and white sleeves furrowed the air like paper darts. Rowdiness was how Tom’s class stopped him wasting paid-up time in talk. Only rarely, in retaliation, did he assign them five minutes’ squat-kicking – high kicks from a low squat, like dancing Cossacks – then, when he had them winded, return to his topic.
Doing this had once drawn a taunt from a flagging Gary – less fit than he liked to pretend: ‘Tom! Know why immortality appeals so much to you? It’s because you don’t live life! You save it up.’
The verbal punch to the gut took the others’ breath away. How could it fail to in a dojo devoted to the values of Southern Cal? The hush, compounding unease, lasted until Gary, in a manœuvre learned from Tom who trained actors to perform it in movies, floored a phantom assailant, then whirled to demolish other lurkers – among them, surely, an unworthy self?
Tom was flummoxed. In what way did he not live? How? What could Gary mean? The attack was the more hurtful because Tom liked to be joshed. Lately, aiming to Americanize karate, he had tried to behave less like a sensei and more like a genial uncle who attended students’ graduation parties and welcomed them back after their divorces – matrimony tended to interrupt training.
As a chiropractor, treating the unfit among them, he no longer nagged when their flesh proved softer than his own. Jim was one of these, a slack, needy man whom Tom should have protected. He should have warned him against Martin who last June had made some startling admissions right here in the dojo.
It was just before class. The day was hot and the door to the boulevard had been left open to cool the place down. Suddenly a collision – like a small try-out for this morning’s – happened so close that the men catching the breeze had a ringside seat.
‘Hey! Look!’ Gary had been a rubberneck since he was ten.
‘Diosito!’ Rafael reverted to Spanish.
‘Faked!’ decided Martin after a quick glance. ‘Half of all accidents are.’ Then he told how teams of bogus victims, paramedics, lawyers and doctors – ‘or’, with a foxy grin at Tom, ‘chiropractors’ – divvied up insurance money. Later, privately, he offered to cut Tom in, as he was apparently in a position to do. There was a lot, ‘And I mean a lot,’ said Martin, to be made. ‘If you don’t grab it, others will.’
Tom was less shaken by the dishonesty which he knew to be rampant than by Martin’s failure to see how genuinely he, Tom, cared about honour. Karate, he always scrupulously taught, was as spiritual as it was physical. It was why he had chosen, decades ago, to perfect himself in an art which, at the time, few Americans understood. ‘Kara’ – ‘empty’ – referred not only to the fighting man’s hand but to his need to empty his inner self of ego, leaving it as straight, clean and hollow as a green bamboo shoot. Clearly, despite years of training, this message had not reached Martin. Was the fault Tom’s?
Had he, softening, let his own egotism back in? Undeniably, he had mellowed and was sometimes startled to recall a self who had favoured interning peaceniks and keeping fags and women in their place. These aims baffled him now – which did not mean that he thought right the same as wrong.
‘Stop right now!’ In a panic of refusal, he tried to shut Martin up. ‘Stop! You mustn’t say things like that around the dojo!’
‘OK then! Have it your way!’ Shrugging, Martin opened the door of Tom’s office in which this talk had been taking place. ‘Well,’ he exclaimed. ‘Just look who’s outside!’ Amused, he tilted his chin towards the car park where Gary was clearly on the watch. ‘Your protector’s worried, Tom! Afraid I’ll stir you up and get you really mad. Give you a stroke maybe? I’m still the badass in this Castle of Virtue!’
Tom was mad. Stung, he warned, ‘I ought to turn you in. How do you know I won’t? Ten years ago I would have.’
‘Ten years ago I wouldn’t have told you.’
Tom turned that over in his mind. Martin had intuition: a thing you had to respect. Seeing idealism die, he had adapted and that, like it or not, was evolution. It was how humanity survived. He’d surely survive better than Gary who couldn’t see beyond the tip of his own argument. Words, to Gary, were only words and films films. He and Tom battled over this and last Monday, when Tom was probing the significance of the videos he had watched over the weekend – Batman, which he’d seen for the tenth time, and Bladerunner – Gary had cut in with a ‘Tom, those are films! That’s all they are!’
Tom couldn’t let this pass. Mindful of the jibe about his not living, he had argued with more assurance than he felt, ‘No, no! Films tell you what the trends are. That’s why you got to watch them. With all the brains and money that go into them, they have to reflect current thinking. Violence is going to take over. That’s their message. Breakdown. It’ll be every man for himself. I don’t worry. I have my guns. I’ve always been a rugged individualist. I’ll stop being a chiropractor if they bring in socialized medicine. I wouldn’t work for that. I’d get another job. Adaptation is the name of the game. Individualism. Being self-sufficient.’
For Gary this was the sort of day-dreaming which had brought down Rafael.
Was it?
Wrapping an old T-shirt round a broom, Tom buffed the dojo floor while casting an occasional glance up at the dragon-and-knight images on its walls. He hadn’t really looked at them in years and, now that he did, was surprised to find the dragons – robotic, feral, breathing fire – more impressive than the knights. Martin, with his fiery accidents, was a sort of dragon. Or a Merlin: a faker who even faked himself. Tom guessed that he took steroids, for his muscles were oddly swollen. Poor Rafael, though he had shown the valour of a knight errant by single-handedly giving three nasty guys their comeuppance, did not look at all like the knights in Tom’s blow-ups.
These bestrode their space. Their muscles thrust past armour-plating whose scaly bristle made them too look dragonlike. The effect was futuristic and mediaeval: a blend Tom enjoyed. It was as though the future held the best of the past in store: Paradise Two, a sequel to Eden. Later, would come the Fall.
‘It’s coming,’ he kept telling his class. ‘There were several films about it recently.’ He mentioned the actresses’ names. ‘Great-looking gals!’ As his listeners savoured this, he pulsed with their breathing pattern. Gals interested him most at a remove. ‘There’s a trend.’
‘Tom, those are films!’
‘No! Films’, Tom had insisted, ‘are real!’ He corrected that. ‘They anticipate reality. The thinking that goes into them does.’
Putting away his broom, he wondered who would come to class today. Not Martin, not Jim, not Rafael. Then the door was pushed open and there was Gary with a gal whom Tom recognized as Rafael’s wife, Elena. Small but feisty, at one time she’d started training here, then decided she’d be better off in a women’s self-defence class. Tom, not really wanting women around, had been relieved. He liked her though, and she had been very good about visiting his mother in her last months. The two, surprisingly, had grown close and Elena had spent whole days with the dying woman.
Greeting her, he asked about Rafael and was told he was bearing up.
It turned out she needed a favour. With Rafael in jail, the bank had foreclosed their mortgage and taken their house, so now they had nowhere to store their furniture. It was in a truck outside. Could she leave it here?
‘Just for a bit,’ she begged and explained that she hoped to rent a place soon.
‘It could go upstairs,’ Gary told Tom, ‘in your mother’s old apartment.’
Six months earlier, Heppy, Tom’s mother, had died, leaving a clutter of Norman Rockwell plates, flimsy side-tables with sugar-stick legs and knickknacks so alien to Tom that, after shipping what she’d asked him to ship to cousins in Salt Lake City, he had given the rest to the Salvation Army. Only the room, where she had spent her last months, was intact. She’d had a house in Pasadena until her arthritis got bad and Tom brought her here where he could keep an eye on her during the day. She had died upstairs. Maybe it was as well to crowd out her ghost.
‘Sure,’ he agreed.
So instead of a karate class, there was a furniture-moving session with everyone who turned up for training pitching in. Tom relished the sociability, as neighbours dropped by, containers too big to move were broken into and objects piled on his strip of lawn. As in a garage sale, private things were incongruously displayed. A chest-expander lay between a picture of the Virgen de Guadalupe, a juicer and a bathroom scales. A long package was possibly a rifle, and a box of cakes was an offering from the girl whose misfortunes had sparked off Rafael’s troubles. Elena introduced her: Juana. They were cousins. Tom, though he hadn’t met her until now, knew her story from Rafael and the L.A. Times.
He tried not to stare. She couldn’t be more than sixteen.
‘Just fourteen when it happened,’ Rafael had told the class. Gangsters, he explained, had kidnapped her from her village in Mexico, then smuggled her here to LA to be a sexual slave.
‘Slavey?’
‘Slave! She was a slave! They paid her nothing and kept her locked up.’
‘Your having us on!’
‘No.’
‘What sort of gangsters?’
‘Small-time ones. They own a bar in East LA where they made her work.’
The scenario seemed to belong to another place and time. Tom imagined the young Liz Taylor as Juana whose age suggested a fanciful romp with periwigs and tricorne hats. ‘Yer money or yer life, yer ducats or yer wife!’ Or an ad. ‘Pray, take these instead,’ cries the captive girl, offering brand-name chocolates to the heavies who lower their muskets, lick their lips and accept the bargain. In a darker mood, your thoughts could slide to the stolen children whose hearts and kidneys are allegedly sold to rich or desperate First World parents.
The reality was less harrowing since, by the time Rafael heard of it, Juana had been found. Her family, into which he had meanwhile married, had known who to blame – pistoleros who had moved to Los Angeles – so her brother, though himself a child, had set out in pursuit. Making his way across the border then, though he had neither money nor English, to the LA barrio where people from his part of Mexico lived, the boy had succeeded in picking up the trail of the men who, with violent thrift, were using and abusing his sister as maid-of-all-work and whore.
‘So he got her home? Back to Mexico?’
‘Yeah, but it took a while.’
‘What a feat though! Like Samson and Goliath!’
‘The newspapers helped. They made a story of it.’
‘How old did you say he was?’
‘About like the kid in The Thief of Baghdad?’
‘Or Les Misérables.’
Without movie-world lore, the thing would have been too alien to understand. As it was, the class had to look with a new eye at their old pal, Raffo, who must, they now saw, have a Mexican border slicing through his mind: a division as hard to negotiate as a Rio Grande in flood.
*
‘Pan Mexicano?’
Juana was offering cake. Oozing cream from a sugary slit, it looked even less salubrious than the ones with which Rafael’s Mom had failed to tempt Tom twenty years ago. Juana had removed her jacket and revealed blue-veined arms. A waif. A Dickens girl. Her skin, he saw from close up, was poor. Probably ate the wrong diet and needed further salvation. In a film, the make-up people would have provided this and Tom, to his amused surprise, imagined himself transfiguring her, as the orphaned Little Lord Fauntleroy had been transfigured, in a lace-collared velvet suit. Instead, he accepted her cake and a coffee – Elena must have unpacked her own percolator, for he never drank the stuff – then walked off to find somewhere to rid himself of both.
*
The kidnappers, Raffo had told the shocked dojo, had gone scot free. They must have done a deal with the police though, naturally, he didn’t know details. Maybe they were stool pigeons? Part of an undercover anti-drug-or-smuggling-squad? Juana was sure some of the clients she’d been forced to service were cops. By now the newspapers had lost interest – or been warned off?
Vigorously kicking the air and, with it, the dreamed-up faces of pistoleros, the class considered their society’s loss of virtue. When had the rot set in? Kick. With President Kennedy’s death? The cover-up? Kick. Water- or Irangate? Kossovo? Kick, kick and kick again! Somewhere faith had been lost. Mislaid. Roundhouse kick.
‘Again with the other leg,’ encouraged Tom. ‘Add a backfist to the face, elbow strike, upper block and back kick. Pulverize the opposition. Yell kiai! Turn. Keep together! More spirit! And again!’
Few of us, he reflected, were the straight bamboo shoots empty of selfishness that we would have wished. The scourges and avengers. The new brooms. Excited advice, though, was lavished on Rafael – most of it, Tom saw with hindsight, unwise.
He tried to recall what he’d said himself, but was interrupted by Elena who wanted to be shown how to use the barbecue. Next came a debate over who should go to the store for refreshments and what they should buy. Beer? Mineral water? Juice? Tom didn’t join in.
There was a debt owing to that girl. ‘A debt outstanding!’ Hearing the words hammer in his head, he wondered if they were his? His words to Raffo? They had a boom which reminded Tom of his father more than fifty years ago. A pillar of pin-striped darkness looming up to make him cry. Acrid-smelling. Fuming and unpredictable. ‘Young man,’ it scolded, ‘you owe … owe …’ What? To whom? ‘To me,’ boomed Pop and slid menacingly into focus. ‘And you’ll pay, young man! I’ll see to that. Don’t cringe! Cringing doesn’t impress me. I have a duty to bring you up right, even if your mother spoils you. A duty to society!’ Stiff collar. Stiff-judging mouth! Huge, terrifying fist! Slamming down, it blocked out the light as Tom fell on his back and his ears rang from the blow. Strong smells of alcohol. Once Pop dislocated Tom’s shoulder. Then, somehow, he died and Tom and Mom came West. In the train, she sang a rhyme which Tom misinterpreted:
A penny for a cotton ball,
Tuppence for a needle!
That’s the way the money goes,
And POP goes the weasel!
Bang! Blow Pop away! Pop-the-Weasel! Wasn’t that what had happened?
Maybe the voice in Tom’s head was an echo of his own? ‘This city’s lost its virtue!’ That was his all right! He must have been remembering the lost, radiant, Pop-free LA in which he grew up: clear air, innocent leafiness, sun spraying like yellow petals and nothing to be afraid of. Even in the canyons the only danger was from coyotes which would eat a baby if its mother was an airhead and wandered off, leaving it on a rug. There had been one such case, he recalled – but things went wrong in Eden too. Eden. The jacaranda trees seemed to unravel the sky when their blossoms opened in a blaze as blue as the sea – which was there too, rippling like shaken silk. Warm and salty. Luminous, unpolluted and safe.
‘We’re safe,’ his mother whispered, ‘safe, safe, safe and we’ll never go back! Never! We’ll stay here together.’
So they did. She wasn’t the sort of mother who’d leave him alone on a rug. Nor he her.
*
Elena, back from the store with charcoal and lighters, paused to watch Gary fix the barbecue and to tell Tom how much more culture meant to Mexicans than it did to people here. ‘That’s why Rafael is so impressed by your studies. He used to tell me how when you talked of the things you cared about, it went right over the heads of the class. It went over his head too but he loved listening. And he admires your beliefs. He says you are one of the last men to have principles the way the great Americans did. Ah, good! Gary’s got the fire going. I’d better bring the food.’
*
Dusk found Tom sitting at the head of a table – Elena’s table which had been set up in his mother’s dining room – picking at take-away Mexican food. From politeness, he let fajitas and chile relleno be piled on his plate, though he remained proof against beer. Dos Xs. The two women were to spend some nights here. Gary had brokered the decision while Tom was ringing the hospital where Jim turned out to be less badly injured than had been feared. He was in stable condition and could have visitors soon. Tom asked about his eye but the gal at the other end of the phone was slow-witted and didn’t seem to understand.
He was pleased to see Juana eat. She was not at all like the small Elizabeth Taylor, but thinnish and frail like a plant in need of a stake. Her wrists were the size of his two middle fingers and there were shadows under her eyes.
Watching him watch, Elena whispered, ‘She had to leave home and come back here because of the disgrace. People were calling her the gringos’ whore.’ Her brothers, murmured Elena, were treated as pimps, even the one who’d rescued her. ‘She needs someone older to look after her. Don’t you like those fajitas? There’s no fat on them.’
Tom said sure he did and put some chicken on his fork. Cancer, he remembered reading. They buy the good bits of cancerous chickens and cover them with chile. He hid the chicken under some onion. No way would he eat this.
‘You don’t eat much,’ said Elena, catching him.
Tom said he’d had something earlier.
‘Juana starved herself when she got home,’ said Elena. ‘Trying to get rid of her ass and tits from shame at being a woman. That’s what the doctor said, so her mother sent her to me. It’s not a convenient time to have her, but how could I say “no”? She can’t go back there. There’s nothing there anyway.’
‘I suppose not.’ Tom thought of a drive he had taken to Baja California where the First World meets the Third and green land yields to parched brown. A mile or so south of this, he’d taken a wrong turn into an encampment of derelicts sitting by a bonfire. It was dusk and the air was thick with ashes or maybe bats. Some of them stood up and closed in on his car. They waved their arms menacingly – but were bought off with the price of a few beers.
Pocketing it, they’d looked shrunken and forlorn and the thought grazed him that maybe they’d merely been directing him to the nearest hotel, a place where you could drink margaritas and listen to mariachis while the sun set over the Pacific. Where else would the gringo driver of a car like his be heading? He had no Spanish, and money, his only currency, seemed to disappoint them. Perhaps they had been hoping for news of the First World which, though inaccessible to themselves, was just up the road?
‘Rafael’, Elena was saying, ‘sees you as his model. His father is jealous. He never liked his doing karate.’
‘Why not?’
Elena looked uncomfortable.
‘Does his father blame me for Rafael’s trouble?’
‘Sure he does, but don’t let that bother you. It’s how Chicano families are! The parents are fearful but the kids want to stand up for themselves. Rafael thinks of you as his North American father. Really! And your mother was a heroine for me too. Heppy! So brave when she had to defend you from your father! She told me how he’d get drunk and beat you senseless until she was sure he’d turn you into an idiot or maybe kill you, if she didn’t kill him. And how then she had to explain this to a jury which had been turned against her by photographs of his head with the eye hanging out like a loose knob. I’m sorry, am I upsetting you? No. I know you’re proud of her! She had such courage! And heart! Corage y corazon! She was such a small woman, no bigger than Juana, yet she told me she snatched up that statuette without thinking whether it would do the job – or of what would happen if it didn’t. It was just there on a side table and could have been made of anything – ceramic, glass, but she was lucky and it was made of lead. That helped with the jury. That it wasn’t premeditated. Oh I’m sure even they admired her. Anyway they found her innocent. That was great – even if she did have to leave home later. Like Juana. Juries try to be fair but gossip doesn’t. Do you know that if I’m letting Juana stay with me at a time like this, it’s in memory of Heppy?’
While she talked, Elena was removing plates and bringing on a ‘flan’. Some sort of custard. Taken up by her reminiscences, she said no more about Tom not touching his food. He felt badly about that, recognizing a primitive violation of – what? Solidarity? Also he was hungry. Maybe that stuff about cancerous chickens wasn’t true? Too late now to change his mind. Elena had scraped the plates into a garbage bag. Pinkish refried beans mingled with tomato sauce. The business about his father’s eye shocked him. Had he suppressed it? Tried to give it to Jim? ‘Hanging out like a loose knob?’ Yes, that was how it had been. A drooping tassel. On whom? Jim? Pop? For moments their heads fused and swam inside his own. Nacreous and messy, the eye swayed unattributably. What colour had his father’s been anyway? Pop’s popped eye! Now back in its socket, it lit up in Tom’s memory and scanned him knowingly. It expressed pure rage and Tom was dazed with fear. Behind Pop’s head, Tom’s mother raised the statuette and he, despite his daze, saw – and stayed silent until his father’s exploding head splashed substances which, later, had to be washed from Tom’s hair. Could he have imagined this? Could he?
Blinking, he rose. ‘I’ve got to phone about Jim,’ he told the table and went down to his office.
‘How about his eyes?’ he insisted when he got through. ‘Are they injured?’
He was told that the patient’s vision did not seem impaired. Tests would be run later but as of now no injuries to the ocular region appeared to have been sustained.
Tom went into the bathroom where he rolled his own guilty eyes at the mirror and threw water on his face. His mother had clearly needed to reminisce and rid herself of her memories, and he’d never let her. Couldn’t bear to be left with them himself. Oh well, too late now! Pop goes the weasel! Try and forget it all. They were both dead.
Or should he see a shrink?
He went back up to find Gary leaving along with a neighbour who had helped with the moving and stayed to eat. Elena was loading the dishwasher. She asked about Jim, then remarked that he and Martin had been trying to raise money to help pay for Rafael’s appeal.
‘For that and Jim’s downpayment. Well, they blew it. Poor Jim!’ She turned on the machine.
Its heave echoed the sensation in Tom’s head.
‘Are you sure?’ he harried on a rising note.
‘Of what?’
‘That Jim and Martin …’
‘What?’
‘Never mind. Excuse me. Must talk to Gary.’ He could hear him down below saying goodbye to the neighbour. A car door slammed. Tom tumbled downstairs and out to where Gary’s face, gleaming in his car window, vanished, then gleamed again in the blink of a revolving sign. ‘Did Jim and Martin plan to raise money for Rafael?’ Tom asked.
‘Tom, you don’t want to know. OK?’ Gary patted Tom’s hand, removed it from his window pane and drove off.
Tom stumped indoors. Back in his own quarters on the ground floor, he looked glumly at his video collection. There was no way he’d get to sleep now. Why did they keep things from him? What was their opinion of him anyway? Reading the video titles like mantras, he tried to calm down. Four Feathers, Oliver Twist, Superman Two, Silence of the Lambs … Violence was coming all right. Great Expectations. Funny how much, even as a boy, he’d liked nineteenth-century English stories! That century had been a manly time for the English. Their prime. Elena had been trying to work on him. She wanted him to see her as in some way Mom’s heir.
Really hungry now – he’d eaten nothing since the yoghurt – he opened his office fridge which was empty except for a can of tuna. He was starting to wolf it when there was a knock on his door. It was Elena to ask about locking up. She saw the tuna.
‘Oh Tom, you’re hungry! You hated those fajitas! I could …’
‘Hungry? No, no. I was just tidying. Throwing this out.’
He threw it in the garbage. Rafael’s family was always making him do this.
‘I’ll take that out, then lock the doors. You go to sleep. We’ve disturbed you enough.’
‘No, no, please, don’t bother.’
‘It’s no bother,’ she picked up the bag.
Arguing, he followed her through the dojo. He had half a notion that he might discreetly recover that tuna since the office garbage-bag would have nothing worse in it than paper. But she evaded him playfully and seemed to be in high spirits. He remembered that she had drunk several beers.
Pausing to wave at the dragon-and-knight pictures, she said, ‘Know what Rafael says, Tom? He says you’re “in thrall” – that’s his word – “to the dragon of memory”! That it’s like in some old story about someone who’s asleep and guarded by a dragon!’ She nodded at a lively monster with a scarlet trim to its jaws and scales sprouting green as grass. ‘This made no sense to me, so one time I asked your Mom what she made of it – and she began to cry.’ Elena shook her head a few times, shrugged, then smiled, it seemed to Tom, a little sourly and added, ‘Of course Rafael wants to rescue you!’
Tom didn’t understand any of this and had a feeling that he didn’t want to either, so he gave up on the tuna and, after saying goodnight to Elena, returned to his room.
Later, hearing her go upstairs, he put on a video, then fell asleep in front of it. Woken by hunger, he decided to go to an all-night store, only to find, on trying the outer doors, that she had taken away the keys.
*
Upstairs the rhythm of sleeping breath had changed the place; the temperature was warm and the air musky. Padding about in stocking feet, he told himself that Elena must surely have left the keys somewhere obvious. Having switched on a light in the kitchen and found no keys there, he followed its slanting gleam into the dining room which smelled of Mexican cloth – that cheesy memory of sheep – a whiff which he remembered sometimes getting from Rafael.
There was a rebozo on the table but no keys. Groping, his fingers alighted on flesh and someone gave a tiny scream. It was Juana who turned out to have left the bed she had been sharing with Elena, then fallen asleep in here. In explanation, she showed him the photo-romance she had been reading before turning out the light. Pointing and grimacing, she laughed at her own lack of English.
‘Elena took my keys.’
‘I sorry. No understand!’ A breathy gabble of Spanish.
The whispers were too loud. Tom, who wanted her to look for his keys in Elena’s room, led her downstairs in the hope of explaining his predicament by showing her the locked front door.
A prompt, submissive smile told him she’d got the wrong idea. Of course! The photo-romance still in her hand showed a picture of an evil seducer.
‘Not that!’ Waving agitated hands, he tried to shoo away her misapprehension. Poor girl! She saw men as predators!
She quailed, clearly thinking him angry, so he tried to look well-disposed but not predatory. ‘It’s all right, Juana. Don’t worry. It’s just that I need my keys. To get out. See.’ Carefully avoiding eye-contact, he made a show of trying and failing to open the front door. But now her misapprehension changed. Panic clouded her. Was he putting her out? No, no. He smiled reassurance – but this too was open to misunderstanding.
‘Keys?’ He mimed the act of sliding one into a lock. ‘Llaves? Get it? No?’ Frustrated, he flung himself onto the sofa in front of the video where Scrooge – he must have put him on earlier – was embracing Tiny Tim.
‘A!’ she cried, ‘que rico!’ And, joining him, cuddled close and took his hand in hers.
He snatched it away then, as she quailed, became remorseful and led her back up to where a startled Elena awoke, rubbed her eyes and shot him an unwarrantedly knowing look.
‘Elena,’ he tried to keep exasperation out of his voice, ‘Juana keeps getting the wrong end of the stick. Will you please tell her that I’m not putting her out, but that I don’t want to sleep with her either?’ The voice sounded querulous. He tried to soften it. ‘Listen,’ he soothed. Yes, that was better. ‘Listen, you can both stay here as long as you choose. OK?’
‘Oh Tom, do you mean it?’
‘I … oh well I guess so!’
He went back down to find his TV screen curdling furiously. Turning it off, he realized that they might want to stay for months! Years even! Could he back out? He couldn’t. He had, moreover, forgotten to ask for the keys. Could he go up and ask for them? No, he could not do that either. The girls would be in bed again by now. He’d embarrass them – and Juana might again get the wrong end of the stick. Yet he was hungrier than ever and his windows, since he’d had the place soundproofed, didn’t open. Sitting on his couch, he could only laugh to think of Rafael in prison, Jim in hospital and himself locked in his own house and dreaming of food. Gary might say he’d always kept himself locked in and on a diet! Well, maybe so.
Upstairs was now silent, so he tiptoed back up, opened the fridge and took out Juana’s last remaining cakes which were by now a little crumbly and reminded him of boyhood greeds. Bright and smeary like First Grade crayons and dripping with lipids! Thoughtfully, he chewed, then swallowed one, two, and finally four with the help of a can of Dos Xs beer which was in the fridge too, then went down to his bed where he dreamed recklessly that Juana was lying beside him, only to find her turning into Rafael who had the same black, brilliant eyes but was in better shape and had the grace of a healthy feline. The crumbs on Tom’s lips were sweet and he imagined a prison-hungry Rafael asking if he might lick them, and himself saying ‘Sure!’ Rafael said, ‘Hombre, I’m weak with longing for pan Mexicano!’ Then, somehow Tom had him in his arms. Why not, he thought and, feeling himself start to wake up, pulled the dream back over him like a slipping comforter. Why not? Why not stay under here with the smell of vanilla and strawberry and Rafael’s smooth, hard body and fresh, athlete’s sweat? Because before we know it, hombre, pop goes the weasel. The DNA boys aren’t moving fast enough, so we’d better be our own Merlin the Magicians – if and while we can! Tomorrow, he thought, mañana, I’ll visit Jim. Then dozed again, with an eager, dreamy hunger, in Rafael’s arms.
Later, in a deeper, more unruly dream, he thought he heard himself say one day in class,
‘Somebody should teach those guys! Blow them away! Wham!’
Had he? Had he said that? To Rafael? Egged him on? Played Lucifer? He had. He had.