front of me. I couldn’t get my bearings in the all-consuming blackness.
“Just get it over with. I don’t like playing games.” It did, though. I knew it just as surely as I knew what waited out there in the dark. It would play with me, even after it got its claws on me. It would toss me in the air and bat me around like a cat with a mouse.
The growl came again from the front, but the attack came from the rear as I had known it would. Even knowing it, I couldn’t turn fast enough; I couldn’t strike hard enough. The red eyes and silver claws seemed to float from the endless night, and swept toward me in a beautiful and deadly arc. And there was nowhere for me to go when the Yeti struck home.
To my credit, I no longer lurch from bed yelling and waking the whole house up, so my eyes merely popped open, following the slow spin of the ceiling fan as my heart pounded in my ears. In her sleep, Mira snuggled close, perhaps sensing my distress, but when she found my skin sweat-soaked, she frowned faintly.
“Shhh… Sleep, baby. It’s okay.” That seemed to be all the reassurance she needed, and the creases on her brow smoothed. For my part, I lay awake for another hour, counting revolutions of the fan and waiting to see if the Yeti would pay me another visit.
The night officially sucked.
6
The cannonball landing in the middle of my bed announced dawn’s arrival. Annabelle giggled, proud of herself. “Mommy, come turn cartoons on for me!”
Keep in mind, my daughter is quite capable of manipulating the television on her own. I’m pretty sure she could program the DVR. But it is always more fun to have Mommy or Daddy do it for her.
Although she could barely keep her feet, Mira slid out of bed before I was fully awake, and my girls disappeared down the hallway. I struggled out of my short nap, intent on at least trying to help Mira with breakfast this morning.
Pulling on a pair of loose sweats, I grabbed a ratty T-shirt and shambled my way out through the kitchen. Mira’s eyes were ringed with dark circles, but she threatened me with a spatula when I tried to go near the stove. “Out. I have this.”
I debated for several long moments before relenting. If she said she was all right, then she must be all right. I kissed her gently, and then Anna, before I headed out to the backyard. The cold dew on my bare feet served to wake me up quite nicely. Of course, it was a thousand times better than the subzero midwestern winter we’d just passed, so I wasn’t about to complain.
The sun was barely up high enough to shine over our neighbor’s privacy fence, casting my long shadow across the yard. I kept my face to the light but closed my eyes as I set about going through my morning katas. It allowed me to feel the warmth as it seeped into my stiff muscles, feel the life flowing into my limbs without the distraction of sight.
I could do every kata I knew without thought, simply moving through the forms for the exercise, but that wasn’t my preference. Each gesture, each step had a purpose and a function. The graceful wave of my hand here could snap bone at speed. This step to the left would block a low kick and bring me inside an opponent’s guard. Each movement was at once beautiful and potentially lethal. Something like that should be contemplated. Before a person does something he should always have a full awareness of his capabilities and where his actions might lead.
I follow the bushido, the Japanese code of honor and conduct dating back to the thirteenth century and possibly before. The samurai believed in loyalty, frugality, mastery of oneself and one’s art, and most important, honor. You might wonder how in the world one comes to call himself a modern samurai.
Well, I wasn’t always the fine upstanding member of society you see today. I had a temper, as a child. Oh, who am I kidding? I still do. But at fifteen, it was fueled by all the usual teenage angst, the slings and arrows of a misspent youth. I traveled with a pack of like-minded degenerates and malcontents, and we left destruction and violence in our wake. I wasted more nights than I like to think about, blitzed on whatever drug we could easily get our hands on, gleefully causing mayhem in the name of whatever entitlement we felt we had. I was headed down that long road that so many travel and very few escape.
The best thing that ever happened to me was getting arrested for chucking cinder blocks through business windows. Sure, you might say I was a juvenile, and therefore pretty much untouchable, but you didn’t grow up in my little Missouri town. They still believed in straps behind the woodshed back then.
There was no getting out of it. The cops caught me red-handed while my supposed friends bailed out over the back fence. I remember standing there in the flashing blue lights, fists clenched, ready to take on the world simply because it existed. These days, a kid like that would get shot, but I grew up in a different time. It probably saved my life.
The second-best thing to happen was coming before Judge Carter, a staunch advocate of alternative punishments. It was his idea to stick me in a court-mandated martial arts class, saying it would teach me discipline and control. (His opponents insisted it would teach me only a more efficient way to cause havoc, and he retired under pressure shortly thereafter. I still send him a Christmas card every year.)
I hated him, at the time. I hated the class. I hated the sensei, and all the other clean-cut, bright-eyed students. I sulked my way through, feeling they were lucky I even showed up. Any effort on my part was just gravy.
While I would like to tell you there was a tiny little Asian man in my life, a Mr. Miyagi to set me on my path, there wasn’t. Instead, I had Carl. Carl Bledsoe was as large and as black as they come. As a teenager, I had to crane my neck upward to look into his face, and he seemed an immovable mountain of solid obsidian. As an adult, I still do, and he still is. Every once in a while, I go spar with him and get my ass handed to me. I’m getting closer to beating him, though. Maybe someday I will, when he’s old and in a wheelchair or something. (Hell, he’ll probably just run over my spine with it.)
He worked out in a cut-off sweatshirt and Gi pants, his thighs as big around as my waist, and his biceps bulging like cantaloupes about to burst. Back then, I had no doubt in my mind that he could squash me like a bug and laugh while doing it. He told me so himself. Trust me-he cut me no slack. If I wasn’t on the ball, I paid for it. But amidst the sparring and the humiliation, he would also spout sayings and ruminations that sounded really cool, things I’d never heard in my sleepy redneck town. He would say, “For a warrior whose duty it is to restrain brigandage, it will not do to act like a brigand yourself.” I even went and looked up brigand, just to see what it meant. I liked the idea of being a warrior instead of a punk kid.
I was way too cool at the time to admit I was intrigued, of course, so I mocked Carl and called him some names I refuse to repeat now. But I remembered everything he said, and I wondered where he’d learned it.
One day, after my usual halfhearted efforts, he tossed me a video as I headed out the door.
“What the hell is this?” I wrinkled my nose, turning the case over in my hands. It was some old black-and- white movie, and I sneered.
“Kurosawa. The Seven Samurai. Watch it. It’s in Japanese, but it has subtitles.”
“You give me a movie, then expect me to read?”
He grinned, white teeth flashing against his ebon skin. “Trust me.”
I watched it, just so I could tell him how lame and stupid it was. Then I watched it again. After about the fifth viewing, I knew parts of it by heart. My favorite scene involved the samurai who masqueraded as a monk to disarm an enemy with his bare hands. My mom told me The Magnificent Seven was based on it, so I had her rent that and watched it, too. It wasn’t as good, in my opinion, but I could see the parallels between the two movies, the themes that carried over. Here were men with honor, who used their powers for good (so to speak). I was fascinated.
When I took the movie back to Carl at my next weekly class, I felt so educated and worldly. After all, I’d watched a foreign film! Carl quickly proved me wrong.
“If you want to truly understand bushido, and the way of the samurai, you have to read-a lot. Samurai were educated men, not just trained thugs.”
The first book he gave me was Hagakure. He quizzed me over it as we sparred, forcing me to use my mind
