Until I Find You

Now that Jack thought about it, he hadn’t. “I can’t remember seeing any,” he said.

“Maybe there aren’t any new locks, baby cakes.”

It wasn’t the conversation he’d had in mind.

They were at the Bathurst Street gym so early that Krung hadn’t yet arrived. A couple of pretty good kickboxers were going at each other. Chenko was sitting on the rolled-up wrestling mats, drinking his coffee. “Jackie boy!” he said, when he saw Emma. “Did you bring your girlfriend?”

“I’m Jack’s new workout partner,” Emma told him. “Jack’s too young to have a girlfriend.”

Chenko stood up to shake Emma’s hand. The Ukrainian was in his early sixties—a little thick in the waist, but the muscles in his chest and arms were well-defined slabs, and he was very light on his feet for a man who weighed one-eighty or one-ninety and was only five feet ten.

“This is Emma,” Jack said to Chenko, who bowed his head to her when he shook her hand. Emma regarded the snarling wolf on Chenko’s bald pate as if it were a family pet. (Jack had told her all about it.)

“You must be five-eleven, Emma,” Chenko said.

“Five-eleven-and-a-half,” Emma told him. “But I’m still growing.”

Emma and Jack helped Chenko roll out the mats before they went to their respective locker rooms to change into their workout gear. Emma didn’t have any wrestling shoes, just socks. “I’ll find you some wrestling shoes, Emma,” Chenko said. “You’ll slip on the mat in those socks.”

“I don’t slip a whole lot,” Emma told him.

“What does she weigh, do you suppose?” Chenko whispered to Jack—the Ukrainian was finding Emma a pair of shoes—but Emma heard him.

“I weigh one-sixty-five, on a good day,” she answered.

“On a good day,” Chenko repeated, watching her put on the shoes.

“Maybe one-seventy-five today,” Emma said.

“You’re a little out of Jack’s weight class, Emma,” Chenko said.

“I’ll start with you,” Emma told Chenko. “You look big enough.”

“Well—” Chenko started to say, but Emma was out on the mat; she was already circling him.

“I suppose you should start by telling me the rules,” Emma said. “If there are any rules, I guess I should know them.”

“There are some rules, not many,” Chenko began. “You can’t poke your opponent in the eyes.”

“That’s too bad,” Emma said.

Chenko started with a little hand fighting—just grabbing Emma’s wrists and controlling her hands—but she got the idea and peeled his fingers off her wrists, grabbing his hands and wrists instead. “That’s the way,” Chenko said. “You seem to have a feeling for hand control. You just have to remember to grab a whole fistful of fingers at a time, at least three or four. No grabbing a thumb or a pinkie by itself and bending it.”

“Why not?” Emma asked.

“You can break someone’s finger that way,” Chenko told her. “It’s illegal. You have to grab a bunch of fingers.”

“There’s no biting, I suppose,” Emma said. (She sounded disappointed.)

“No, of course not!” Chenko said. “And no pulling hair, no grasping clothes. And no choke holds,” Chenko added.

“Show me a choke hold,” Emma said.

He put her in a front headlock, jerking her head down and holding the back of her neck against his chest with his forearm across her throat. “This is an illegal headlock,” Chenko explained, “because I don’t have your arm, too.” He incorporated one of Emma’s arms in the headlock; this kept Chenko’s forearm off her throat. “You headlock someone, you have to take his arm, too. You can’t wrap your arm around someone’s neck and just choke him.”

“That’s too bad,” Emma repeated.

Chenko showed her a proper stance and a pretty basic knee-pick. He showed her an underhook and a double-underhook, and how you get from a collar tie-up into a front headlock. “With the arm,” Chenko made a point of repeating. He showed Emma a lateral drop; he even let her do a lateral drop on him. (Jack could tell that Chenko landed a little harder than he expected, with all of Emma’s weight on him.) “You’ve got good—” Chenko started to say; then he stopped. He was pointing at the middle of her body.

“Hips?” Emma said.

“Good hips, yes,” Chenko said. “Your hips are the strongest part of your body.”

“I always thought so,” Emma replied.

They were down on the mat—Chenko was showing Emma an arm-bar—when Jack noticed that Mrs. Machado had come out on the mat in her workout gear. She was just stretching, but he could tell she had her eye on Emma. “Who ees the beeg girl, dahleen?” Mrs. Machado asked him.

Jack was as tongue-tied as he was in any dream; he couldn’t speak. Emma was still rolling around on the mat with Chenko. “Mrs. Machado is molesting Jack,” Emma told the Ukrainian. “She made his little penis sore.” Chenko had rolled into a sitting position; he was staring at Jack and Mrs. Machado. Emma was already on her feet and walking toward them.

“Jack, did you tell thees beeg girl our secret?” Mrs. Machado asked.

It was no contest, Chenko would tell Boris and Pavel later. Emma poked Mrs. Machado in the eyes, in both her eyes. Mrs. Machado cried out in pain and covered her face with her hands. Emma grabbed the pinkie on Mrs. Machado’s right hand and bent it back, breaking it. The finger stood up at a right angle from the back of her hand. Mrs. Machado screamed as if she’d been stabbed.

Emma slapped a collar tie-up on Mrs. Machado and snapped her neck forward, putting her into an illegal front headlock—without the arm. Emma dropped her weight on the back of Mrs. Machado’s head; with Emma’s forearm across her throat, Mrs. Machado couldn’t breathe.

Jack realized only then that Krung was there. The former Mr. Bangkok may have noticed the wrestling because Emma and Mrs. Machado had rolled off the mat, but Emma hadn’t let up with her choke hold. Mrs. Machado couldn’t breathe but her legs were still thrashing.

“Who’s the new girl?” Krung asked Chenko.

“She’s a fast learner, isn’t she?” Chenko said. Emma had hit three illegal moves in under ten seconds; it was hard to imagine a faster learner. No wonder she wanted to know the rules!

“Aren’t you going to stop it?” Krung asked the Ukrainian.

“In a minute,” Chenko said. Mrs. Machado was flat on her belly; her legs had almost stopped moving, but one foot was feebly kicking. She didn’t have a high-groin kick left in her.

“I guess this has gone far enough,” Chenko said to Jack. He knelt beside the wrestlers and put a three- quarter nelson on Emma. “You can’t believe how I had to crank on her to get her to let go of that headlock!” he would tell Pavel and Boris that afternoon when he introduced them to Jack’s new workout partner.

Mrs. Machado never said a word. By the time the defeated woman left the Bathurst Street gym, which was as soon as she was able to stand up and walk, her throat was so sore that she couldn’t speak. Emma did the talking. It may have been lost on Mrs. Machado when Emma called her “not exactly mail-order-bride material,” but she understood what Emma meant when Emma called herself “Jack’s only workout partner.” However this registered with Mrs. Machado, both Krung and Chenko were suitably impressed—albeit a trifle afraid for the boy.

Mr. Bangkok tried to interest Emma in a kickboxing class, but Emma said she would stick to the wrestling. “I only like kicking something when it’s on the ground,” she told Krung, who ultimately looked relieved, even grateful, that Emma was committed to the mat.

When Pavel and Boris came to the gym to wrestle that afternoon, Emma rolled around with them, too. Jack needed a break by that time. He had a mat burn on his cheek and a sore shoulder—Chenko had shown Emma a fireman’s carry, which she had a natural feeling for—and Jack was nursing his first cauliflower ear.

When Emma saw that Pavel and Boris had cauliflower ears that were almost as bad as Chenko’s, she insisted that Jack get his cauliflower ear fixed. It was news to Jack that one could fix a cauliflower ear, but although Chenko and the Minskies disapproved of “draining” cauliflower ears, they knew how.