Lou went to the TV stand, took a VHS tape from a drawer, shoved it into the VCR, and turned on the TV. “Put your hand in the bucket,” he said.
“Why?” I said.
“You wanted to start training. This is training. It’s called the trout test.”
I submerged my hand into the cold water. The ice cubes bobbed around and bumped into my wrist. A close-up of a clear creek appeared on the screen, running over rocks carpeted with algae. Judging by the quality of the video, this had been shot sometime during the 1980s. Lou hit pause, and said, “Soon the cold water is going to start hurting, but don’t take your hand out. Just wait till the video’s done. I want you to count how many cutthroat and rainbow trouts are in the video. Can you handle that?”
I nodded, and he pressed play. Soon, the first trout jumped over the rocks, struggling to swim upstream. I couldn’t tell what kind it was, but I counted it. The next one passed, and I tried to study it for differences, but there were none that I noticed, except for maybe the size. As the cold became painful, it excited the cackle inside me, and the voices started, all muttering at once, broken up by the occasional shout. But I continued to count. The pain got worse. The voices grew louder. I counted. Finally, the video ended.
I took out my hand, shoved it into my armpit, and rocked back and forth, hissing a little because that seemed to help.
“How many rainbow trout did you see?” Lou said.
I had counted seventeen fish total, but I hadn’t been able to tell which were rainbow trout and which were cutthroat. “Three cutthroat,” I said, guessing. “And fourteen rainbow.”
“Nope.”
“How am I supposed to tell them apart?”
“That’s for you to figure out.”
“It’s impossible.”
“Do you see why you’re not ready now?”
I demanded that he let me try again, and he acquiesced. I put my other hand in the bucket. He pressed play. This time I tried to focus on the fins because I knew some fish could be identified that way. The pain and voices came back, and I tried to study the fins, but the trout moved so fast, and when Lou stopped the tape again, I still had no confidence in my count.
“Eleven cutthroat,” I said. “Six rainbow.”
Lou shook his head. “Not very good, Doughboy. We’re calling it a day. You’re tired.”
You’re tired, I thought as Lou turned off the TV and emptied the bucket into the sink. I wasn’t ready to call it a day yet.
He went to the desk and pulled out a small bag of dried peppers, a VHS tape entitled “Kung Fu for Beginners,” and what looked like a homemade coffee table book, then set them on the table. “These are for you,” he said. The coffee table book was grey and unmarked. I picked it up and flipped through it. Titles like “Affectation Potpourri” and “Conflation Coping” caught my eye.
“That book will tell you everything you need to know about cackle poisons,” he said. “Read it. Memorize it. I’m telling you, with the right spray bottles, you can conquer the world. And that tape, I want you to watch it every morning. And after that, exercise—run, stretch, and do push-ups, and run some more. And follow along with the Kung Fu tape. Don’t cut corners, because if you do, and you end up riding the ghost of some expert martial artist in Kaliah’s line, you’ll either die trying to do the moves, or you’ll be so sore you won’t be able to get out of bed the next morning.”
“What about these?” I said, holding up the peppers.
“Eat two before every meal,” he said. “We need to build up your pain tolerance. When the bag is gone, we move you onto serranos, then cayenne, and so on.”
Chapter 3
LOU GAVE ME SOME clean clothes and a toothbrush, pointed out the spare bathroom and where the clean towels were, then showed me my room and how to use the TV mounted to the wall at the foot of the bed. Taking a shower felt amazing, but it had no right to. Kaliah was a prisoner, at the mercy of her abusive ex-boyfriend, Kayak Brad, and the lives of my sister and niece had been completely upended. Em couldn’t go to school, see her friends, and May couldn’t run her business until I could make things safe, until I could make sure Blanche Duluth and her followers wouldn’t hurt them again.
Lou seemed like a good guy, seemed like he knew his mobiak magic, but he didn’t have enough urgency. I needed to stop the Blanche now, before my sister lost her business, before Kaliah lost her mind. I didn’t have the luxury to train for years, to master my magic. I needed to make leaps in my training, take risks, do what I could as soon as I could
When I got out of the shower, a Bruce Springsteen song was blaring from down the hall, a little muffled by the closed door of Lou’s music room, but not much. Inside, Lou played along with an electric guitar, inserting blues licks here and there in odd places.
I dressed quickly, skulked down the hall past the music room, and tiptoed down the stairs to the basement.
The last time I ate peppers before grafting had been a disaster. I’d been stuck in the whorl for far too long. But I knew what a drop of bloom did so I looked around for some. None of the spray bottles on the Lazy Susan were labeled. One was blackish-brown, like bloom, but I didn’t want to
