Ransom (17 page)

Twenty-six
.

Are you going to get married soon?

I don't think so
.

My parents want me to get married. I'm twenty-eight and in Japan that's time to get married
.

You have a girlfriend, don't you?

My parents want me to marry someone else. They've already decided
.

Who?

A daughter of my father's boss. I've never met her
.

Why don't they like your girlfriend?

Maybe because they didn't pick her for me. I asked the sensei for advice. He said I should marry the girl my parents want me to marry. He's very traditional. He doesn't believe in love
.

He thinks your girlfriend is the reason you've been missing karate
.

He's right
. Yamada sipped at his drink, his face slack and tired. The band played “Last Fair Deal Gone Down.”
She works at my office. She's very nice. They don't think she comes from a good family
.

Ransom was wary of giving advice. It wasn't his family, his country. He could leave any time, but Yamada had to live here, and he was in a better position than Ransom to know the price of deviation from the rigorous demands of convention.

Is it customary in America to choose your own wife?

That
, Ransom said,
was the usual practice
.

It's different here
, Yamada said.
You don't choose anything for yourself
.

Groping for vocabulary, Ransom suggested that following inclinations didn't necessarily make one happier in the long run. He mentioned the divorce rate in the States, and
tried to say that having no rules at all could be terribly confusing.

Have you ever been in love?
Yamada asked.

Ransom said he had, and then heard his name called out over the microphone. DeVito was standing onstage, holding the mike with one hand and pointing to Ransom with the other.

“I hereby publicly challenge Ransom-san to a duel, a karate match for the purpose of answering aspersions on my character. I challenge him in front of all these witnesses, so that everyone will know that he is a coward and a liar if he does not answer my challenge.”

Miles came around the bar with the ax handle; DeVito grabbed the microphone stand. When Miles took a swing at him he blocked it and swung back with the stand, the blow glancing off Ryder's shoulder.

Before Ransom could move, the narc posted at the door jumped between the two of them, identifying himself as a police officer.

“Do you have an answer for me, Ransom?” DeVito shouted, as the cop returned the mike stand to the anxious-looking Kano.

“Pesticide,” Ransom called back.

“You'll fight me. You wait and see.”

The cop marched DeVito off the stage. “You'll fight me,” he yelled again, as they disappeared out the door.

Guys like Ransom had been jerking DeVito around ever since he could remember. They had a way of dressing and talking, these guys. The lieutenant who had busted him out of the Marines was the same breed of cat. Although it was Ryder who bushwhacked him, he blamed it on Ransom, with his altar-boy face and his superior attitude. He thought he was so cool that he only used his last name. DeVito sussed him out the first time they met at Buffalo Rome, the night he was celebrating getting his black belt. Ransom sat there not drinking, in his baggy khaki pants with the cuffs, and he says with his thick girlish lips that his sensei doesn't believe in awarding belts. Like he thought there was something sleazy about the whole thing.

Busting up Ryder's bike had settled the scorecard with the cowboy nicely; stomping a mudhole in his ass would have been too easy. But Ransom he wanted to take apart with his hands, the way he had taken the Harley apart, except that he'd needed a pipe wrench to help with the Harley. In his mind DeVito rehearsed the various ways he could hurt Ransom. After watching him practice, DeVito knew exactly where he was coming from. If Ransom had been a pansy there would be a quick limit to the kind of
abuse he could take, and that was no more fun than shooting an old dog. But he was competent enough to drag out his own beating a good long time.

Someday he'd find that lieutenant and fix his wagon. Davis, Stuart, L., Atlanta, Georgia. He couldn't stay in the service forever. He had those same lips as Ransom. Like that Okinawan girl who brought him up on charges. Acting all of a sudden like she was a virgin.

DeVito paid a modest rent to the monks, who did not own enough art treasures or historically significant buildings to attract as many tourists as they would have liked, and who didn't seem to mind the women coming and going, or the music from his system. The stereo had everything; he kept it up-to-date researching new developments and traveling to Tokyo to the electronics shows, selling off his castaways to the incoming gaijin. He had soundproofed one of his two rooms with fiberboard, asbestos panels and industrial carpet. By now he was running two hundred watts per channel. Even with the soundproofing he couldn't begin to use it all. The tunes room was also the weight room; he had reinforced the frame under the tatami and laid down a gym mat. He would seal himself in there, slap weight on the bar, the Dead on the system, and crank the volume while he pumped some serious iron. He had everything the Dead ever recorded, which was a good thing because you weren't apt to get any at Buffalo Rome, all that blues, whining about going home—who the hell wanted to go home?

One afternoon an apprentice monk came over and asked to hear “Sympathy for the Devil.” A kid from the country,
his heart wasn't really in Buddhism, but he said that his family were patrons of a big temple in the north and he was expected to become the roshi. He was big for a Japanese, really porky, and it turned out he had done some sumo wrestling. Over the next few weeks DeVito worked out with him when the kid was supposed to be sweeping the grounds and pumped him for everything he knew. DeVito's ambition was to master all of the martial arts and then develop a new system incorporating the best aspects of each. He could open his own chain of dojos worldwide. If he needed capital, there was always the yakuza; they knew how to make a buck, and they could relate to the samurai traditions. A new kid at his dojo had explained to him that the finger-chopping business went back to the samurai; back then when a warrior lost a finger he lost some finesse with the sword. Lose enough fingers and presto—dead meat. Even in the days of yore, especially then, there was no free lunch. This, he thought, was something guys like Ransom would never understand.

The fat-kid monk one day told DeVito about the temple's sword collection. Trying not to show his excitement, DeVito asked dumb questions. The swords had accumulated over the years, the legacy of samurai patrons of the temple. It had once been illegal for anyone but samurai to wear swords; it was now illegal for anyone to possess them without a license. DeVito had applied for a license, but hadn't heard anything. The red tape, especially for a gaijin, was impenetrable. He had seen the old blades, blades that could slice a three-inch oak like butter or a man from shoulder to waist, that sang when they parted the air, forged by hand out of layers of native steel, heated,
stretched and folded over again and again until they held the finest edge known to man. He had seen them in licensed shops and in museums and he owned more than a dozen volumes in English and Japanese devoted exclusively to katana. He owned a prewar officer's sword, something he'd picked up in a card game at the base on Okinawa and later smuggled to the mainland in a guitar case, but it was basically a piece of shit.

The kid eventually let drop where the katana were stored, adding that no one had taken them out of their chests in years. The building, a relic of a previous century, was padlocked, but one night, when he knew the roshi was away drinking, DeVito scouted it out and found a crawl-space underneath the structure, which stood on posts two feet above ground. He slipped through the opening, and it was a simple matter to push up on the tatami mats which constituted the floor and climb inside. The chests were not even locked. It was an unbelievable cache—about ten katana, wrapped in silk, in each of the chests. He took only one, the best, a treasure which he determined by the tag attached to the scabbard was forged in 1525. He left the rest where they were and took care to make sure that the chests looked undisturbed. He went out the way he came in and stashed the katana beneath the floor of his weight room.

Sometimes, at night, he took the sword out. The blade, when it was finely polished, showed a wavy layered pattern almost like wood grain along the line of the temper. In one of his books he had read the instructions of a fifteenth-century swordmaker to his apprentice: “Heat the steel at final forging until it turns the color
of the moon about to set out on its journey across the heavens on a June or July evening.” The scabbard was finished in rich black lacquer without any ornamentation, in keeping with the austere spirit of the period of warfare in which it had been born; the guard, however, made of iron, was elaborately engraved with a chrysanthemum design inlaid in gold, clearly a later mounting. The hilt was traditional sharkskin bound with silk cord.

Engraved on the steel tang, DeVito found characters that related the history of the sword. He made a crayon rubbing of the inscription and showed it to a leading Kyoto egghead who hung out at Buffalo Rome, claiming that it came from a sword in a private American collection. This guy, who would believe anything, dutifully translated the inscription: the maker's name, the date it was made, the province and the name of the owner of the sword. The second inscription, added seventy years later when the sword was shortened, especially interested DeVito, recording the results of a cutting test performed by the craftsman who had customized the sword:
mitsudo setsudan: three bodies with one stroke
. The custom of the time was to test the sword on bodies; usually corpses, sometimes condemned criminals.
Three bodies with one stroke
. Somehow DeVito felt certain that living men, lined up side by side, had constituted this test. He imagined the arc of the sword, the sound of cleaving flesh and bone.

Every morning DeVito ran ten kilometers, did one hundred push-ups and one hundred sit-ups. That was his
warm-up for working out in earnest. The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes in the morning was the sign tacked to the wall at the foot of the futon:

When one thinks he has gone too far,
he will not have erred.

—
Hagakure

Sunday morning came around again. Ransom woke with a dread reminiscent of his childhood, when he could look forward to sitting on the hard pew between his parents, who seemed particularly unhappy with each other on Sunday mornings; later, alone with his mother after his father had stopped pretending to be a Catholic. He had learned to hate Sundays. Now, years after he had set foot in a church, it was the day he could expect to get his ass kicked by the Monk.

He rolled back the sliding doors and walked onto the terrace. There was a fresh smell in the air, and when he looked down he saw the pink blossoms on his landlord's cherry tree. The odor of cherry blossoms was, for Ransom, inextricably associated with that of vomit. For the past two years, under the sponsorship of his English students, Ransom had participated in the annual custom of cherry-blossom viewing, a ritual which consisted of bivouacking en masse at one of the designated parks or temples, provisioned with enough food and drink for a week; then, under the canopy of cherry trees, singing songs, drinking, vomiting and pissing as the petals fluttered down and spangled all. The tree in Kaji's garden, which had blos somed
only hours ago, was already losing petals, and Ransom was touched by the melancholy that informed the old haiku about the transience of this life, and then by the awareness that he was still susceptible to the tender emotions. This was not bad in itself, but neither was it good.

The sky hovered low over the city. On a terrace across from his own, a young wife was hanging laundry. Ransom had found her uncannily accurate as a forecaster; he gave up any hope of rain and cancellation of practice. She started with the smallest of children's socks, working up to her husband's; then the larger items precisely in order of size. Ransom wondered what the imperative was behind this acute organization. Would her world collapse if the socks were pinned at random? Or was there a secret stain in her laundress's heart, a calamity that compelled her to make a ritual out of the humblest task, fighting chaos with order?

Inside, he washed at the sink and boiled water for shaving and tea. After shaving, he rolled up the futon and swept the room. Out in the street he heard the plaintive wail of the tofu man's horn. With almost two hours to practice there was time to eat; if he didn't eat he would be in rough shape by the middle of practice. Taking a bowl from the cabinet, he ran downstairs and halfway down the street before he caught up to the big tricycle. The tofu man dismounted decorously and bowed several times. Ransom asked for a block of the soft.

Back in the kitchen, he grated some dried bonito over the tofu and wet it down with soy sauce. Knowing he would burn this off in an hour without carbohydrates, he
found a bowl of rice in the refrigerator. Breakfast of champions. He ate all of the tofu and half of the rice, having learned to find the middle ground between eating too little and fainting, and eating too much and puking.

An hour and twenty minutes left. Ransom sat cross-legged at the table and tweezed grains of rice from the side of the bowl with his chopsticks. The master swordsmen and karate-ka of old were said to be able to pluck flies out of the air with theirs.

The bowls washed, he rummaged in the desk drawer for the bound typescript of his father's play. Ransom had tried to read it several times in the past year, getting no farther than the first act, wanting it to be a masterpiece and finding it uninspired. It was not respect for his father that made him want to like it. For years he had judged the old man harshly, using this play as the standard of excellence from which he seemed to have fallen; the possibility that it was no good complicated the question of his father's career integrity.