Dead Man's Song

much Karl likes cops anyway. I’ll bet he’d think you were the cat’s ass, Jim. Yeah, maybe that’d be good. You and Karl. I could have him drop by tonight. Bring you a token of our esteem.”

Only strangled sounds wormed their way out of Polk’s throat.

Vic snorted with disgust. “Listen to me, asshole—you got your money, and you’ll get more—but I’ll be the one to decide what you get and when you get it. Do you understand me?” Polk gurgled something and Vic snapped, “I didn’t quite hear that, Jim.”

“Y…yes…!” Polk gasped.

“Good. Now you go and you do your frigging job and don’t you ever dare try and put the squeeze on me again. Don’t even dream about it. You just do your job and you’d better do it right, or so help me God I’ll arrange a whole party at your place. Karl and Ritchie and all of them. I’ll bet they could make it last a long time for you, and you really wouldn’t like that, Jim, no by God you would not.”

Vic disconnected abruptly at the other end. For a horrible frozen span of seconds Polk stood there, clutching the phone to his head, eyes bulging with terror, heart hammering in his chest. Then he slammed the phone down and made it into the bathroom at a dead run, just barely slamming his way into a stall before he vomited.

(3)

“I know it’s cool and all that,” Mike said, “but why do I have to learn how to use a sword? How is that going to help me in a fight? I mean…I can’t exactly pull out a samurai sword next time Vic gets in one of his moods.”

Crow grinned. “Though that would be kind of cool…take a sword and cut a few pounds of ugly off that son of a bitch.” He held a sheathed sword in his hands, admiring it fondly. The scabbard was finished in a matte black, rough and cool to the touch, and the knuckle guard, or tsuba, was a round plate of wrought iron in the pattern of a small flock of crows flying from tree to tree. By contrast, the sword Mike held was carved from a single piece of oak, with only a line cut like a channel running around the shaft to indicate the break between handle and blade. “I told you I was going to shortcut the process for you,” Crow said, “but at the same time I need you to have some idea for where it comes from and how it works. Jujutsu is science and art kind of blended together.”

In a fair approximation of Obi Wan Kenobi, Mike said, “A lightsaber is the weapon of a Jedi—not as clumsy or random as a blaster.” He slashed it back and forth and made electrical humming noises on each pass.

Crow grinned at that. “I’ll give you some books on the samurai, Mike…and you can look up some stuff on the Net. They were among the greatest warriors in history, and to them the sword was emblematic of their soul. In fact they believed that their sword was a physical manifestation of their soul.”

Mike looked at his wooden sword and then at Crow’s beautiful weapon and then cocked an eyebrow. “So…my soul is a beat-up piece of wood and yours is a work of art?”

“Well, of course, that’s obvious,” Crow said straight-faced, then smiled and shook his head. “No, the difference between the two weapons is like the difference between what you are and what you can become.” When he saw that Mike wasn’t following him, he tried it another way. “You look at the two swords and see the difference between us, or at least what you perceive is the difference between us, but in fact the difference is that your sword is blunt. Just like you right now. Now, consider Vic for a moment…he’s dangerous, but he isn’t sharp. He isn’t refined. He’s the perfect definition of blunt force.” He saw Mike glance suddenly down at the wooden sword as if he wanted to spit on it and throw it away. “Whereas you may be starting blunt and unrefined you are not going to stay that way. Are you?”

Mike hefted the wooden sword and considered its weight, and then glanced at Crow’s sword. He shook his head.

“So, I’m going to show you some things to do with the sword because the sword teaches us so much.”

“Like what?”

“Glad you asked,” said Crow, and winked. “Kenjutsu, the Japanese art of swordplay, may not be practical on the streets of the twenty-first century, that I’ll grant you, but the process of learning the sword is. Very much so, because it teaches focus, balance, precision, timing, control. You see, there’s a paradox in swordplay that is at the heart of its appeal. You know what a paradox is?”

“Dude, how many science fiction novels have I read? Of course I know what a paradox is.”

“I stand corrected. Well, the paradox at the heart of kenjutsu is that there is no way to achieve perfection in swordsmanship. No matter how good you are, there is always a level of skill beyond where you are.”

“So…what’s that mean? That it doesn’t matter how good you are?”

“Not exactly. What it means is that it only matters that you are striving to be better than you are.” Crow let Mike chew on that for a moment.

Mike rolled his eyes. “Is this one of those ‘the journey is the destination’ things?”

“Yep, and if you’re about to dismiss that concept just because you’ve heard it before—don’t. In this case it’s especially important because in learning the sword we aren’t just learn to be good at it…we’re discovering that each time we train we’re better at it, and that the more we concentrate on it and the harder we train, the more subtle and deft we become. You see, when the samurai trained all those thousands of hours in swordplay, only part of it was to sharpen their skills in case they had to fight. What they were really doing was sharpening their souls.” He paused. “They were refining who they were. Cutting away at the elements of their personalities that did not advance them forward in spirit.”

“You’re starting to go all Yoda on me here.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Crow sucked his teeth for a minute, assessing his own words. “Tell you what…let’s just do some training with the sword and then we’ll see if you’re getting anything out of it. Is that simple enough?”

Mike shrugged. “I guess.”

Crow walked over and flipped open the top of the plastic cooler that was set on the back step of his building, fished around in it, and then brought out an apple. “I’m going to throw this at your head,” he said casually. “Try to knock it out of the way with your sword.”

“You kidding me here?” Mike said.

“Nope,” said Crow and tossed the apple. He threw it under-handed and without much speed or force, but it bumped Mike in the forehead despite the wild swings of the wooden bokken.

“Ow!”

“Sorry. Now, pick it up and throw it back.”

Looking angry, Mike picked up the apple and threw it. Harder than he intended and much faster, right at Crow’s face. There was a rasping sound, a glitter of sunlight on steel, and the two halves of the apple hit the back wall of the building on either side of where Crow stood. He held the sword in one hand, the scabbard in the other, and he was smiling. With a snap of his wrist he pointed the sword down at the floor and droplets of moisture from the apple flew from the oiled blade and patterned the flagstones; then with a flash that was too fast for Mike to follow, Crow swung the sword around and returned it to its scabbard.

“Holy shit!” Mike cried.

“Watch your language, you juvenile delinquent,” Crow said, feeling pleased with himself—especially since he sometimes bungled that particular trick and screwing it up right now would have really sucked. That it had worked so well just then he counted as a nice gesture on the part of the universe—not for himself, but for Mike, whose eyes were sparkling with excitement. “So…you wanna learn how to be a samurai?” Crow asked.

Mike looked at the two pieces of apple, then at Crow’s sword, and then at his own.

“Yeah,” he said softly and when he looked up, Crow could see that something had ignited in the boy’s eyes.

But Crow read it wrong. Mike was not standing there dazzled by what Crow had just done—he was impressed, sure—but seeing the sweet elegance of that cut had done something else to Mike and he was teetering on the edge of understanding it. He was also dangerously close to lapsing into another fugue state, but that part of his mind was closed to introspection. No, the realization that was slowly catching fire in his mind was how close all of this—Crow, the sword, the skill of the cut—was to the stuff of his recent dreams. Even the sword Crow held looked the same. Mike was almost positive it was the same, though he knew it couldn’t be. As Crow’s sword flashed through the air Mike felt as if somehow lightning had danced from the edge of that blade right into his chest. He felt supercharged and while he stood there listening to Crow speak and not taking in a single word, Mike’s grip on the sword changed. It was a subtle thing, but as he held the