Kage (20 page)

you get just before a fight is joined—you’re not positive about

what will happen, but sense the invisible jangling of energy that

telegraphs danger.

“
Si, senor
,” Art said in his best Mexican accent. “Better for

you here, where you are safe, I
theenk.
”

He meant well, but was more wrong than any of us could

have known.

126

10

Targets

I live in Brooklyn. Immigrants from Europe spawned here

after making the scary trip across the gray expanse of the Atlan-

tic. Later waves of newcomers journeyed across different seas,

mixing with the Irish, Scandinavians, Italians, and Jews. Today,

there are places in Brooklyn where you can still get canned

reindeer meat and markets where shopkeepers speak only in

Mandarin.

It’s no real surprise that Yamashita ended up here. His
dojo

is in Red Hook, inside an old warehouse. The building is made

of worn orange-red brick baked before the turn of the century,

and it sits on an ugly street in a neighborhood that was grump-

ily becoming gentrified. Just finding it is an adventure. In the

old days, getting home safe was not a given. In retrospect, I

think my
sensei
originally chose the location on purpose—it

tended to winnow out the faint of heart.

I live in Brooklyn partly to be near the
dojo
. But there are

other reasons as well. The Burkes have deep roots in the bor-

ough. Rheumy-eyed women, bent with age, still wander these

streets and remember my father when he was a child. The Irish

American diaspora didn’t end with a flight from the city to the

suburbs; some of us have found our way back.

The house I live in on 61st street is part of the transitional

zone between Sunset Park and the more upscale section known

as Fort Hamilton. Many of the families in my neighborhood

go back for three generations and the area still has the feeling

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John Donohue

of a community. The block is made up of narrow, attached

houses, their brick faces seasoned with time and peppered with

urban grit. They are all essentially the same and only the front

porches offer any variety or clue to the owners’ personalities.

Some porches have been enclosed, as if to shut out the streets.

Others embrace it and sport bizarrely green outdoor carpeting

and lawn chairs. A few flower boxes are in evidence here and

there, and in season bright geraniums and pansies sprout and

seek the yellow light of a Brooklyn summer.

Inside, each building has a classic railroad flat configura-

tion. You enter through an outer and inner door into a small

foyer. Three short stairs to your left lead to a landing, then

turn right and climb up to the second floor. A hall directly in

front of you stretches to the rear—a long, dim tube that ends

at the kitchen. In years past, my landlady, Mrs. O’Toole, would

invariably be there. You’d walk in and smell the odd perfume

of her home: old plaster, the faint hint of steam, the smell of

onions and meat cooking. The kitchen was a bright, distant

rectangle, the room where she held sway, murmuring to herself

like a harmless witch and tending a stove that seemed to be

perpetually in use.

A pocket door to your right opens on the living room, with

a broad window facing the street. This half of the house par-

allels the hallway and is divided by heavy mahogany pocket

doors into two small bedrooms and the larger dining room at

the rear, next to the kitchen.

It’s all mine now. Mrs. O’Toole had outlived all her relatives

and, when she died, she left me the place because, as the note

in the will said, “he’s an odd sort of fellow and his family must

worry he’ll never amount to anything.” I was grateful for the

gift. Kindness is rare enough, no matter the motive.

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Kage

Sarah had her own place in Manhattan, but after our time

apart we were eager to be together. She stayed the night and we

decided to spend the next day just knocking around. At dawn,

I slipped out of bed, leaving her nestled in the sheets. I pad-

ded quietly to the room at the rear of the second story of the

house that I had turned into a makeshift
dojo
. I gazed groggily

out the window, across the elevated section of the expressway

in the distance, toward Staten Island. The sky was still dark

over there, and the lights on the top of the Verrazano Bridge

twinkled.

I sank to the floor and stretched, my body slowly warm-

ing but my mind still sluggish with the last vestiges of sleep.

Eventually, I picked up a
bokken
and went through some basic

routines. Later in the session, I’d use the
katana
that waited in

lethal repose on the rack on a small table nearby. But I have a

basic rule of thumb: never use a live blade when you’re still half

asleep.

I’ve come to like the dawn, its quiet and the hushed sense

of possibility. Part of that potential is increasingly revealed for

me in the act of training. It’s become a constant companion in

my life. I used to think that following the martial path was a

journey that had specific destinations in view: achieving a black

belt, gaining admission to a prestigious school like Yamashita’s,

or perhaps mastering a weapon and its techniques. But I was

confusing the road markers for the journey. Now, I have come

to realize that an essential element of what I do is not lineal, but

cyclical. You strive and endure and train, and, at the end of it,

the curtain parts. You see more clearly into new territory and

understand what will be asked of you anew: effort, endurance.

And more training.

I sensed something behind me in the quiet of the room.

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John Donohue

It was Sarah, wrapped in a robe, watching me silently with an

expression that seemed somehow sad. I put down my sword

and went to her, but she moved away.

“Finish,” she said, shaking her head. Then she shuffled away.

Later, after lingering over coffee and the morning newspa-

per, we went out, heading toward 8th Avenue and the super-

market. Sarah still seemed subdued, but outside the day was

coming alive. At any given moment, there’s a lot of movement

on my street. Buicks rock through the neighborhood, their

speakers pulsing like the heartbeat of an animal. Kids shout.

The gates in the wrought-iron fences that front each home

creak and clang as people emerge for the day. I was happy to be

back home—happy to be with Sarah. All those things together

are probably why I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.

“Did you ever wonder what’s the point of all that train-

ing, Burke?” She asked as we wandered through the store.

Sarah looked at me pointedly. I shrugged and put some cans of

tomato paste into the cart.

“I dunno. What do you mean?” I said. She didn’t answer

right away, just wheeled the cart slowly down the aisle. Sarah

reached stiffly for a box of lasagna noodles. I followed, wonder-

ing what was behind her question. I thought about the look on

her face this morning.

She continued, “Well, here you are working so hard at

something. All these years… And it’s sort of, I don’t know…”

“Abstract?” I offered. “Archaic? That’s probably half the

attraction for me.” I smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back.

“No.” She shook her head emphatically. “Maybe in some

places you could say that. But not in Yamashita’s
dojo
. It’s much

too serious.” We wandered over to the cheese section. She

picked up a packet of mozzarella and looked at it, but I don’t

130

Kage

think that was what she was seeing.

“Well,” I countered. “You know something about this from

your own experience—The coordination of mind and body—

The Way—All that stuff.”

“The Way…” she said reflectively. “The Way to—what?”

It was a good question and a hard one to answer in some

ways. You hope that the training gives you a better insight into

yourself, that the archaic discipline of the martial art makes

you more able to deal with the world in the here and now. But

the reality is that martial artists are like everyone else: some are

good people; some are idiots. The process is supposed to make

you a better person through the alchemy of training, but in

many
dojo
there are individuals who have walked the path for

years and are still idiots. They’re just highly-skilled idiots.

“For me,” I finally told her, “it’s complicated. I enjoy the

physical action and the way I can lose myself in it.” I shrugged

again. “And there’s Yamashita…”

She tossed the cheese in the basket and I pushed it down

the aisle. One of the wheels turned sideways and the cart shud-

dered a bit before I got it lined up just right.

Sarah sighed. “I know. But sometimes, Burke, I see you in

the
dojo
and the look in your eyes—I’ve seen it before. There are

times when you are—not there. I was afraid that you wouldn’t

come back in time to stop yourself from hurting a student.”

I almost replied that that was a good thing, but I wisely held

my tongue.

“I don’t know,” she concluded as we paid the cashier. “I

wonder whether training like that doesn’t bring something bad

out in a person.”

“Oh, come on, Sarah,” I protested.

“Come on, yourself. Think about it. I mean, I respect

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John Donohue

Yamashita and his training. It’s a big part of your life. It’s a

good part of your life…”

“There’s a ‘but’ coming,” I said warily.

She cocked her head and looked at me. Her gaze was remote

and objective. “There’s a terrible sadness in him, Burke. I mean,

a master of his caliber, out in the US, buried in Red Hook?”

I shrugged. “He’s got his reasons, I suppose.” Privately I

wondered whether someday he’d ever share them with me.

“You’re travelling blind, Burke.” She reached out to touch

me, her eyes glistening with emotion. “He’s swallowing you

up.”I felt a jet of anger. Was she jealous? A faint voice way in the

back of my head wondered whether she was intuiting some-

thing that I couldn’t see. But I ignored it and shrugged off her

touch.

“You used to have your university job—awful as it was—it

kept you aware of the rest of the world. Now your whole life is

Yamashita. And violence.” She swallowed. “I worry about you

and I worry about me.”

I didn’t know what to say. In retrospect, perhaps she was

more sensitive to a whole range of forces that flitted around us,

waiting to pounce. We wandered back to the house in silence.

The lookout probably picked us up when we went to the

store. They certainly had enough time to set up. Once again, I

was too focused on internal things and not alert to the growing

threat around me.

It’s not an excuse mind you, just an explanation.

Sarah, still deeply annoyed, pushed into the house clutch-

ing her grocery bags, and moved away from me down the hall

toward the kitchen. I fumbled with my own bags at the door,

132

Kage

watching her recede from me.

Somehow I must have registered the sounds behind me—

the clank of the gate, the scuffle of footsteps—but I reacted too

late. They pushed in behind me with the force and efficiency

of long practice, sweeping me into the foyer. I spun around to

face them.

There were three men, al Hispanic looking. They formed

an arc in front of me. Two shooters stood expectantly, pistols

hanging at their sides. They were thick and experienced looking,

calm presences on either side of a man wearing a black raincoat

and knit cap. He was younger, leaner, and appeared unarmed.

I could see the dark vinelike curl of a tattoo climbing his neck

and thought he also had tattoos on his temples that looked like a

devil’s horns, but the cap partial y obscured the ink.

We could al hear Sarah in the rear of the house. The man in

black looked to the shooter on my left. “
La mujer
,” he said softly,

and the man began to move past me toward the kitchen.

I started for him and shouted out a warning to Sarah. The

man in black came at me, a knife appearing in his hand like a

sorcerer’s trick. It wasn’t some cheap brittle street blade. This was

a combat weapon, double-edged with the flat sheen of quality

steel.The ones with knives always come at you first—it’s why they

choose knives in the first place. They like the action, the inti-

macy of attack. Above al , they like the smooth purr and wet

sensation of cutting.

The guy heading for Sarah eluded me. I had to let him go. In

that enclosed space of the hal way, my world had narrowed down

to the two other men as they launched their attack. I knew in an

elemental way that this wasn’t about robbery. It wasn’t a typical