at Billy and Juan and showed me some grillwork on his teeth, and the grillwork was silver and shiny and had what looked like diamond in them. For all I knew they were paste or glass.
On his right side was a young white girl who wasn’t bad looking except for a long scar on her cheek, and on her right hand side was a guy who looked as if he might like to eat me and spit me out. On Grillwork’s left was a husky looking Hispanic guy with eyes so narrow they looked like slits.
“So, you got a wayward soldier,” Grillwork said.
“That’s right, and we known him now a couple weeks, and he’s been wanting in, talking to us, walking around with us some, and he did some righteous business tonight,” Juan said.
“No shit,” Grillwork said. “What’d he do?”
Billy told him and Grillwork nodded like he had just been told I had invented time travel.
“That’s good,” Grillwork said. “That’s real good. So you wanting in, huh?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I want in. I thought I was in. I did what was asked.”
“Well, that’s a beginning,” Grillwork said. “You showed some stones doing something like that.”
I didn’t think it had taken that much in the way of stones. She was a kid, something a high wind could knock over.
“Sit the fuck down, man,” Grillwork said. “What’s your name?”
I sat in the chair in front of the table and told him my name.
“What you want in for,” Grillwork asked.
“I don’t have a family. It’s tough to make it in this town. Jobs bore me.”
“All right, all right,” Grillwork nodded. “You got to understand some things. You come in, you got to stay in. You want to get out, well, you get out all right, but all the way and pretty goddamn final. No final. Not pretty final. Final. Savvy?”
I nodded.
“You get in, we got work of our own, but it’s different. You do stuff that makes money by taking other people’s money. We sell some chemicals, man. Got our own lab.”
“Meth?” I said.
“Oh, yeah. Now and again, we deal in some weed and some pussy, but mostly we got the meth. You pick dough up on the side, that’s yours, but not by selling chemicals, man. The mind mixer business, that’s all ours, and I find you dipping your dick into that, you’ll wind up in a ditch with flies on your face. Got me?”
I nodded again.
“You can’t run your own string of whores, lessen’ you hook up with some gal will pull the train for the club, then go out there and lube some johns. You got that understood?”
“I do.”
“All right, the things on the side, you can do what you want to the citizens, you know. I don’t care you rob them or rape them or whatever, but you get caught and dragged down town, not a thing we can do. But there is this. Cops, on our turf, which is about twelve blocks, almost square, cause it’s got an old park in it that fucks up the square thing, makes it like a square with an addition—“
“Who gives a shit,” the girl next to him said. “Just tell him what you’re gonna tell him.”
Grillwork looked at her, and she looked back. Her eyes were pretty damn cold too.
He looked back at me, said, “Those twelve blocks, the park, that’s ours… But these cops, they pretty much leave us alone, cause when they don’t, we got a way of not liking it, a way of tracking them down. It’s been done, man.”
I nodded.
Juan was chewing gum now, and I could hear him popping it, and I felt something cold against the back of my neck. I turned. Juan had a nine poking against my neck and he was grinning and chewing his gum.
“That there,” Grillwork said, “that was in case you didn’t have all the right answers. Like maybe you wanted to argue a point.”
“No argument,” I said, turning back to face Grillwork. “I take it you’re the one called Headmaster, since you’re the one laying out the ground rules.”
Juan took the nine out of my neck.
“No. You don’t talk to Headmaster about this shit. I’m one of his lieutenants. You can call me Hummy.”
“All right,” I said. It was a curious name, some nickname, and I wondered about it, but I didn’t really care enough to ask.
“You frisked him?” Hummy said to Juan and Billy.
“Earlier tonight,” Juan said. “He ain’t packing nothing but a dick and balls.”
“All right,” Hummy said. “Let me ask.”
I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t ask who he wanted to ask, and what he wanted to ask them about. I found the best thing was just to be quiet and everyone filled things in for themselves. You said too much, then you gave them room for varied interpretation. You didn’t say anything, they usually filled it up with what they wanted.
Hummy got up and went away. He was gone for a good while. When he came back, he jerked a thumb toward the door he had gone through, and we went through it, along a narrow hall by a bathroom with an open door where a guy that was maybe three hundred pounds, sat on a sagging toilet and made noises like he was trying to pass a water buffalo, antlers and all. The hallway was full of stink.
“Close the fucking door,” Juan said, as we went by. “God damn Rhino, who wants to smell that shit, or see you delivering it. Close the fucking door.”
Rhino didn’t reach out and close the door, and we just kept going along the hallway. At the end of the hall was another door and this one was a thick door that looked as if it had been added recently. Billy knocked, and a voice said, “Come in,” and we went inside.
It was a big stinking room and it was full of weapons. All kinds of things. I saw an AK-47 and some automatic pistols, small and large, and there were machetes and gas cans all over the place. There were some net bags hanging from the ceiling, and in the bags were human heads, and they were the source of the smell. They were jacking with me, trying to see what I was made of, how scared I was.
Way I felt, scared was not on the agenda. I was way past scared and had leveled out into a steady feeling of numbness. My body was numb, my mind was numb, my soul was numb. The world to me was nothing more than one big numb ball of grief.
I could cope with it because of the sensei I had had when I moved away from here, some years back. I had enjoyed the training so much I almost didn’t move back. It almost made me mellow.
Almost.
But I had the demon inside, and I had left sensei and what he had taught me. I wasn’t trying to use martial arts to learn to live my life without violence, with confidence and harmony, way he taught me. I wanted to use it to hurt someone, the thing I wasn’t supposed to do. I had learned nothing that really mattered from my sensei and I knew it and it made me feel a little ill.
There was a guy in the back, and I took him for the Headmaster, way he carried himself, and there were some guys with him. Juan and Billy left me looking at the heads in the bags, and went over to the guy and talked with him. I could hear them whispering, looking back at me from time to time, so I knew I was the subject.
This went on for awhile, and I looked around and saw all the guns and the ammunition; all the representatives of power. Straight people, they tell you they like guns because they like to shoot targets, but it’s the power, man, that’s what it is and all it is. It’s the big dick spurting lead cum all over the place. You can call it our rights or you can call it target practice or you can call it personal protection, but it’s about power, and I wanted power, and I wanted a gun just like everyone else. Martial arts, Shen Chuan, it gave me power, but a gun, that was the ultimate power.
I put that all out of my mind as the crowd back there broke off and I got a really good look at the guy they were surrounding. He was a little blonde guy with a burr hair cut and he came strutting around one of the racks of weapons. He was covered in weapons himself. He had holsters filled with automatics all over him, and his eyes darted from side to side. He was as paranoid as a staked goat at a Fourth of July picnic. And like the goat, just because he was paranoid didn’t mean they weren’t out to get him.
“You’re the Headmaster,” I said.
“They call me that,” he said, and he didn’t offer me his hand when I offered mine. I put my hand away,
