LITMIR.BIZ

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Nate, good to see you,” I say, extending my hand. Last evening when we chatted before class, he seemed subdued, as if he hadn’t an ounce of energy. But he came alive during class. As soon as it was over, though, he slipped back into the same lifeless, quiet demeanor. Before he left, he came over to where I was talking with a couple of brown belts and thanked me. He hesitated for a second, as if he wanted to say something else, but he didn’t, and left without uttering another word to anyone. I haven’t known him long, but it’s apparent he is a troubled man.

      “You’re here early,” I say. “White belts are at six and black belts are at seven.”

      Nate nods. “I was going to work on stretching while the white belts trained.” He’s wearing all black again, a long-sleeve button shirt this time. A large turquoise ring adorns the index finger of his right hand.

      “Sounds good,” I say. We look at each other for a moment, break eye contact, and then look back at the same time.

      He clears his throat. “You teaching the white belts?” he asks, his tone more like, “Do you have to teach the white belts?”

      “The padre will teach it if I’m not there.” He nods, looks at the passing traffic, sniffs, and then looks back at me. “Nate, you want to sit in my pickup?”

      He tightens his lips, blinks several times, nods.

      I move my truck just off the lot and park at the curb a few feet away from the church entrance. “The arriving students shouldn’t interrupt us now.”

      He sits stiffly, holding his workout bag in his lap, like a woman on the bus clutching her purse. He unconsciously squeezes the fabric with both hands.

      “You looked real good in class last night,” I say to get the conversation going. “It was clear you had good teachers.” He bows his head slightly, the gesture reminding me of my new Vietnamese friends in Saigon. “You’ve trained with my black belts already, right?”

      “Yes,” he says. “They are very good, strong, fast. I especially like their attitudes. No one shows off. I have seen too much of it at other schools.”

      “Thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment. I have always taught that besides self-defense, the martial arts should teach you to respect the struggle, respect it in yourself and respect it in your training partners. In my school, there is no place for strutting peacocks.”

      He nods.

      When he doesn’t speak, I ask, in an attempt to establish a comfortable connection, “It’s been my experience most kenpo practitioners are hand specialists.”

      “My teacher is a very good kicker but he is amazing with his hands. So I lean toward hand techniques more than kicking.”

      “Most street encounters are settled with the hands, anyway. I don’t think I know what weapons are used in kenpo.” Actually, I do. Just trying to encourage conversation.

      “The usual: staff, Chinese sword, chain. My teacher helped me adapt my family’s war club to the martial arts.”

      “Really. You mean the hammer-looking weapon with a rock attached to one end?”

      Nate smiles, no doubt at my ignorance. “I have mine,” he says, unzipping his bag. He rummages through his training gear to the bottom, and extracts a thick cylinder of rolled brown and white cowhide.

      “As near as my father can tell,” Nate says, unwrapping it, “this has been in our family for over a hundred and fifty years. He told me another family might have owned it before, and it was either lost in battle or maybe dropped when its owner fell injured or dead. He lifts it up with reverence. He doesn’t offer it to me to hold.

      The twelve- or fifteen-inch-long handle is some kind of hardwood with black cowhide wrapped in the middle, a clump of brownish fur above it, then another band of black cowhide, and near the top one more clump of fur. I’ve seen photos of war clubs with a fist-sized rock secured to the end, but this one has about a ten-inch-curved piece of something black and hard looking. It’s not steel and I don’t think it’s a rock. One end looks a little like an axe and the other end a blunt snout, like a hammer. Whatever it is, someone has carved about a dozen shark-like teeth into the axe end.

      “This would leave a fella lonesome for his skull,” I say. “What is the head made of?”

      “Jawbone of a buffalo. See how this end has been ground to give it teeth?”

      “Nasty,” I say. “Guess you could hit with the blunt end too? Like a hammer?”

      “It’s all good.” He spins it in his hand so the hammer end is forward, and then snaps his wrist a couple times as if pounding in a nail. “You can bash someone’s head or any other body part with the hammer end.” He spins the blade side forward, snaps his wrist again to hit an imaginary target, then rips the blade downward. “I like to hack with it like it’s an ax and then slice downward a few inches to rip flesh with the teeth.”

      “Gee, I was going to ask you to teach it to the tiny tots class until you mentioned the ripping flesh part.” He smiles. “Impressive. How often do you train with it?”

      “Three or four days a week. I’ve created a routine of strikes, blocks, and combinations. There is no one to test me, but my father and grandfather approved when I demonstrated my skills.”

      “You’ll have to show me. Not on me, of course, maybe on one of the white belts.”

      Nate laughs, the first time I’ve heard him do so. It fades quickly. Silently he rewraps the club and puts it back under his training gear. He folds his hands on top of the bag. When he doesn’t say anything, I crack the window a little to let in some air. I’m not going to force the conversation this time. The ball is in his court.

      Awkward silence. More awkward silence. Then, “How did you do it?” he asks softly, looking out the windshield.

      “Meaning?”

      Thirty seconds pass. “How did you survive what happened to you?”

      I know he’s not referring to the shooting in the secondhand store. He means the one in the house, the hostage taker … and the hostage. Three cops have asked me this same question. They had been involved in deadly force encounters, all good shoots. Still, they were haunted by their experiences. I told them every day is a challenge because every day I wake up, I’m a killer. Alcoholics have the twelve-step program. There isn’t anything out there for cops who kill innocent children.

      On two occasions, people who recognized me at the grocery asked the same thing. Actually, they asked how I could live with myself. My first impulse was to strike out at them. My second was to hope they’d strike me. In the end, I walked away without doing or saying anything.

      When I tell Nate it’s mostly the ol’ one-day-at-a-time thing, he nods, as if he knew already knew it, but knowing wasn’t helping. “Do you feel like telling me what happened?” I ask.

      He shrugs.

      “I’m sorry, I thought you were wanting to talk about—”

      “Sensei, have you heard the expression, ‘Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself’?”

      I shake my head. “I haven’t but it’s interesting.” I wonder if my father knows it.

      “I’m not sure if it applies to what is going on between our countries around the world because, as has always been the case, the grunts, the one’s doing the fighting, aren’t privy. Their job is to put on the war garb and go into harm’s way. Some go mindlessly into the fray, others go like wound-up robots, others go with a sense of doing something right for the indigenous people. Lastly, there is a small percentage who go in with the anticipation of getting to kill. I went two times with all those reasons except for wanting to kill.”

      He shakes his head as he looks out the side window. He mindlessly drums his fingernails on the glass for a moment before clutching the fabric on

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