“Osu,” Clyde grunted, his heart fluttering like a rabbit’s. Clyde had never had a father to teach him the fearlessness a boy needs if he wants any respect at all.
“Heaven’s found an inch beneath the blade,” Jay said.
Clyde landed his only good punch when Dale turned before running into the street. “Hey!” Jay said. “We ain’t done!” Clyde saw where Dale was headed: a group of boys were crossing the Ridge. “Ahh,” Jay said. “Dale don’t like them Molasses Gap boys.” Clyde’s chest heaved, the lungs struggling to take air. Blood rushed in his ears like he was being dragged underwater. “My nephew’s about as sharp as a turd, Clyde, but fierce.” When the boys saw Dale coming they scattered like catfish, leaving three who stuck to their course. “They like to cut through here to get to the Colonel’s down the hill.” Jay gave Clyde a little shove. “Think he needs backup.” Clyde huffed. He thought Jay was kidding. “Fight’s over there, Clyde-san,” Jay shouted, shoving him again. Clyde had never been in a real fight in his life, and he hardly ever encountered black people. Jay shoved him from behind. “We still training, Clyde-san, I train at work, when I’m driving, watching TV. Anything can be training, whatever I say is training is training.”
“Osu,” Clyde grunted.
“Look,” Jay said, and Clyde saw Dale surrounded, swinging arms and legs. “Sempei needs assistance.”
Clyde said, “Osu,” but the vicious beating Dale had just given him didn’t make him too eager to help the guy out.
When those boys saw Clyde and Jay coming, they bolted, leaving Dale with a black eye. “This our property, niggers!” Dale yelled, throwing a rock.
They flipped him off and started down the hill. One of the boys yelled, “We gonna come back with a nine millimeter!”
“Good!” Jay yelled. “It’ll be a fair fight!”
Dale said, “Thanks for the help, white belt,” and walked back to the house touching his face. “I got to get to work.”
Clyde watched Dale stomp off touching his face and felt what Jay had seen in him the other day—anger. What he felt right now was fury. He did not think he’d ever hated another human being as quickly or completely as he hated Tina’s fucking cousin. Clyde had hardly trained at all and Dale had shown no mercy, and called him “white belt” like it was pathetic. Clyde’s ribs were sore to the touch, his left thigh hurt bad enough from a kick that he had to limp, a wrist was strained, both ankles, the bones where his thumbs came off the hand were twice their normal size. If this was the way everybody learned karate there would be only one tough fucker at the top of the mountain and everybody else gone home.
Jay wrapped an arm around Clyde’s neck, hot and sweat-slick. “In Japan,” Jay said, “uchi deshi guard the training ground. They live at the dojo, train, keep the bad guys from getting in. Back then students would go around challenging your karate. Uchi deshi was the first line of defense. If they let a challenger beat ’em, challengers got in the dojo.” Jay shook his head to indicate how bad that was. Ahead, Dale entered the yard, the house. “People who don’t train, Clyde, they don’t understand. This.” Jay made a fist. “What it’s all about. Outside this, nothing but distraction. Job, friends, even family, whatever it is people worry about. Money, sex, religion, none of it matters when it comes to this. You tell other people the way we train? They gonna question you, think it’s brutal. Too macho for our modern times. But let me ask you, when the day comes to defend yourself or your way of life, and it will come, only a matter of time, what gonna matter then? Shit goes down, I mean really, all them doubters are the ones suckin pee-pees for a slice of bread. And that’s the lucky ones with their pussies still ripe.” Jay sniffed the air like a dog and slapped Clyde’s chest. “But you and me, Clyde-san, we’s warriors. Five hundred years ago we woulda been respected, part of the warrior class. I’ve trained with you only twice now and I can tell how strong you is.” Jay tapped Clyde’s sternum. It was also sore, bruised from a punch. “I train every day. Door’s always open to warriors.” They were in the yard now. The sod felt good on Clyde’s bare feet. The sun was down, but a few hundred street lamps around Liberty Ridge laid hard shadows around everything.
Dale came out of the house in his tattered poncho. Tina followed in a gray Mickey Mouse sweatshirt that ran to her knees, an enormous glass in both hands. Jan stood behind the screen door. “Osu, Uncle Jay,” Dale said, getting in his car, a twenty-year-old, dented, rusted Chevy Nova, and drove off, belts slipping under the hood.
“Did he know this was my second class?” Clyde said to Jay, low enough that Tina wouldn’t hear him.
“Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You don’t like it? Hit him back. This how real men communicate, Clyde.” Jay looked at Tina and said, “Cigarettes.” She threw a pack that he caught without hardly looking. He slipped out two, handing one to Clyde, and lit them. “Just like after a good fuckin, nothing like a smoke after hard training.” Jay sucked deeply and said, smoke leaving his mouth with every word, “Karate men built different than normal men. Stronger lungs. Better blood cells, scare the shit out of cancer.”
Clyde nodded and took a drag. His second cigarette in two days. His throat burned, already raw from class. Jan came into the yard and lit her own cigarette and Tina sipped her drink. Clyde wondered if it was a clean version of what her parents drank, or if Jay and Jan let their sixteen-year-old daughter drink booze.
“He do good?” Jan said.
“Yes, he did,” Jay said, winking at Clyde. Then Jay slapped Clyde’s stomach. “We leave you two lovebirds alone,” he said.
“Dad!”
Jay snickered, went with Jan into the house. Tina dropped her face into her hands and shook her head, Clyde stood in the grass and finished the bitter cigarette. When she looked up, she said, “Want a margarita?”
He’d never had a margarita before. Tina went in and fetched another big glass, salt around the wide rim, full of phosphorescent mix.
“Cheers, buddy,” she said, clinking his glass carefully. He sat beside her and she said, after a minute, “You’re warm.” He nodded. “Try that shampoo yet?” He shook his head. “You’ll like it. It smells real good.” Tina launched then into a steady stream of words about her business dreams, telling Clyde about trying to start a publishing company when she was fourteen, selling Herbalife when she was fifteen, studying for but never taking her real estate license exam. Amway was a new thing, and she thought it was going good.
“I never done nothing like that,” Clyde said.
“My dad thinks you’re gonna be really good, by the way.”
“Hardly done anything yet,” Clyde said.
Tina shrugged. “Just telling you what he said. Says you’re like really good clay. Got tons of raw potential.” Clyde used to hear that word pushed his way back when he’d played baseball and it hadn’t amounted to anything, so he didn’t get too excited. It was usually more about the person who saw the potential than the one who supposedly possessed it. Tina smiled at him in a girlish way, folding over her legs. “Do you have a girlfriend?” she said. It was funny, a question that a little girl might ask on the playground. But he had to admit that there was something sexy about a female being that direct.
“Huh uh,” he said, thinking about Esther.
Tina grinned with all her little teeth and pushed into him with her hip, she dropped her head. “Do you think I could be your girlfriend?”
Without really thinking it through, Clyde answered her. “You want to?”
Tina put her glass down, took Clyde’s glass and put it next to hers, leaned in, and kissed him with a sticky, cold, open mouth. Her tongue pushed in, running across Clyde’s teeth. She stroked