slash, not a lunge, not a thrust: a cut.
“Kire! KIRE!” the man yelled at him.
Cut.
Bob realized there was magic to the Japanese in the word. It wasn’t like “cutting classes” or “cutting the rug” or “damn, I cut myself” or “don’t cut corners,” all those little metaphorical indulgences on the principle of the sharp thing encountering the soft thing, the sort of expressions a society might create that had never taken blades too seriously.
To the Japanese the word cut had special significance. You didn’t toss it about lightly; it was almost a religious term. With a sword, you cut. To cut was to kill, or to try to kill. The weapons were meant for that purpose only; they were dead-zero serious, no jokes, no jive, no sport, no fun. In their way, they were as meaningful, emotionally, as loaded guns and possibly more so because a gun could be unloaded but a sword never could.
“Left diagonal cut!”
“Right sideways cut!”
“Rising left diagonal!”
There were only eight of them. But everything depended upon those eight. If you could not master those eight, you had no chance.
“No, no. Angle all wrong! Angle bullshit. Angle must be perfect. Go slow!”
How long had this been going on? It felt like the crazed exercise at Parris Island, back when Parris Island meant something, where you were on a seventy-two-hour field exercise and nights bled into days, which bled into nights, until you were so aching you thought it would never end and your movements had gotten stupid with fatigue. What was your name? Where were you from?
But that’s what got Swagger through ’Nam three times, so as much as every second of it sucked hard and long, it was somehow worth it. You had to do it.
“Rising left diagonal! No, no, blade bent, no! Feel!”
The small man came behind the sweating gaijin and with vicelike fingers took his arm through the motion, controlling his elbow, controlling the angle of the blade, which had to be precisely aligned to the angle of the cut, else the whole process broke down, you got a blown cut and the sword torqued its way from your grip, or at least took you out of timing so that your opponent could get in and cut you bad.
No, not cut you bad.
The Japanese would say, Bassari kiru.
Cut you through.
He thought he’d pass out. But if the little man with the wispy goatee could keep going, so, somehow, could he. But it went on for hours and hours and hours until:
“Put sword away.”
Bob bowed, not knowing how or why.
He found the saya, remembered to extend it from him, and dropped it over the extended sword, whose edge he’d turned to self according to etiquette, and then returned it to the rack in the deity alcove.
When he turned, Doshu was tightening a men around his head and had already gotten on the body padding.
“Come, come. Now, you, me, fight. Fight hard. You kill me with wood. Good cuts. Make good cuts.”
Bob must have groaned; all he wanted was a nap.
“Come on. Only do for six, maybe ten more hours. Then I give fifteen-minute break.”
Bob realized-a rarity. A joke.
Hmmm. He found out quickly that he could fight or he could cut. But it was damned hard to do both. He was as fast as Doshu and now and then got his licks in, though perhaps Doshu was going light on him, even if the whack of the wooden edge against his unprotected arms or torso would leave welts and bruises for days. But when he hit, he hit sloppily. When he cut well, he cut slow.
“I can’t stay with you.”
“No ‘stay with.’ Sickness. Sickness of ego. No win, no lose. You must fight in one mind.”
One mind. Now what the fuck did that mean?
“Concentrate but no concentrate. See but no see. Win but no win.”
What language was this?
“Stop,” the man said after a bit. “You like girls?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Remember best time with girl?”
“Well, yeah.”
“What?”
“Come on. I can’t tell you that.”
“When?”
“Oh, ’ninety-three. I hadn’t been no good for a long time. Hadn’t been with a decent woman in a long time. Got in a bad scrape and was on the run, and I made it to the house of a woman who’d been married to my spotter in Vietnam. In some way, I’d fallen in love with her picture first. She was what I lost when I lost him. It fucked up my head. So anyway, had no place to go and I went to her and it’s been okay ever since. She saved my life. And the sex part-well, hell, it don’t get no better.”
“Think of sex,” said Doshu, and cut him hard in the throat.
“Ach! Hey,” Bob shouted.
“Think of sex,” said Doshu, and whapped him hard with the blade in the right shoulder.
“No!” Bob said. “It’s too goddamn private. It ain’t for this. I can’t think of sex. It’s wrong.”
“You fool. No Japanese. Think of-think of smooth.”
Smooth?
What was smooth?
“I don’t-”
“No! Think of smooth!”
And what came to mind when “smooth” was ordered? He thought of the scythe. He thought of his solitude on the high arroyo, the long spring and early summer months, the old blade in his hand, the suppleness through his torso, the way he could only keep it going three hours the first day and by the end, when he was damn near finished, he could go fifteen, sixteen hours at a whack, thinking nothing of it. He thought of the small, tough desert scrub, the way that old blade, nothing a samurai would look at twice, would just smooth through it. Sending stalks and leaves aflying in a spray, with that oddly satisfying whipping sound as it rent the air.
Somehow he found something private and his own, and using it, he blocked the next cut, stepped inside it, and cut Doshu hard across the wrists, knowing that he’d purposely missed the wrist guard by a hair so that the blow really hurt the little bastard like hell.
Think of the scythe!
He wasn’t sure when it stopped, he wasn’t sure when he rested, but somehow he found himself outside in the dark, rolling carpets.
“Roll tight. Not tight enough! Roll tighter.”
What the fuck did this have to do with anything?
“Why are-”
“No why, fool! No why! Do! Do well, do right, do as Doshu say, do, do, do!”
And so he did. He rolled the thatchy carpet squares into tight rolls, pinned them, got twine around them, and tied them tight. The absurd image of tying off an elephant’s penis came to him, and when he smiled, Doshu hit him hard with the switch.
“No goddamn joke, gaijin.”
Finally, he got them secured. It took a while to get the feel of it, but finally he could do it fast enough, and when all the carpets were rolled, he’d accumulated quite a pile, maybe seventy-five or eighty.
“Now soak!”
“What?”
