First Citizen (16 page)

When the roof was done, Suru brought sanding blocks and showed me how to work the floor. In another three weeks, I had created a surface as smooth and white as a lady’s skin. I expected that he would show me how to make the paper screens next, but those were brought up by the students one morning. They moved around the tiny cottage, laughing and friendly, asking what arrangement of rooms I wanted, trying the different-size screens here and there, then nailing down the tracks for them.

I had a home, my first since the breakup in San Francisco. Then, after all my work, it was time to cover the latrine again and dig a new one. Suru showed me where.

When the rains came, he oiled the wooden practice stage to protect it. We rigged an army- surplus parachute in the trees to cover it like a tent and went on with the lessons.

It took the Master two months to work his way back to the last row of the class, back to me. All he did was look at my feet and shake his head.

That afternoon after the meal, and as the other students were leaving, one of them came up to me. He was from the third row, a man in his forties with a receding hairline and a crewcut. He bowed once to me and said, stiffly, “Foot ex-ur-cise-ah?”

This phrase turned out to be the only English he knew, and I suspected the Master had taught him to say it this morning, as a way of introduction.

I bowed in return and the man, Shizuka, led me back to the stage. There he demonstrated a complicated pattern of steps—no punches or kicks, just a flow of stances that square-danced around the platform. From the feet-parallel of the forward stance, to the reverse-tee of the crane, to the feet-at-right-angles of the straddle, to the feet-turned-in of the side stance, position followed position until Shizuka was back facing me.

Then he gestured toward the open space: I was to repeat the pattern. Of course, I had spent more time admiring his grace than memorizing the steps in order, so I could only start out, falter after the first crane, and stop.

Still smiling, he shook his head and proceeded again with the pattern, catching up to me and taking me through step and turn and step. Twice over he did this, then stood off to one side and watched. After I had made five complete run-throughs without losing my place, he began to criticize individual stances and misaligned feet. Shizuka did this silently by darting forward, slapping lightly at the knee, ankle, or instep that was out of place. If I did not understand what was wrong, he would demonstrate the correct posture, bouncing once in place to show how it was set.

After three hours on the same pattern, I could dance it in my sleep. At one point I did drift off, and Shizuka was on me like a hawk. He gently cuffed the back of my head and held his own eyelids open with his fingers, grinning at me, telling me to stay awake.

By sunset I was extremely tired, but my stances did not sag. Each position was read into the muscles and joints themselves, as the pieces of a truss bridge know its shape and support it. I no longer had to create tension or energy to hold a stance. My legs were the stance. My head, my shoulders, and my unused arms were lolling with fatigue, but my hips and legs were working like machines.

I looked up at Shizuka and grinned.

“It would be appropriate to give him a present.” The voice came from the ground, below the stage. It was the Master. “In return for his gift of teaching you.”

“But … I have nothing to give.”

“Ahhh. It is known to me that the roof of his house is aging and lets in the rain. He would fix it, but must also work to support his family. You are skilled at patching roofs. You may take tomorrow and the next day off to do his.”

“Thank you, Sensei.”

I stayed in the clearing at Hakusan nine months. Every day, we were immersed in karate training or in the simple actions and transactions of keeping our bodies alive. In that time, I wrote nothing, spent nothing, touched no machine more complicated than a hoe or a knife. I could talk in complete English sentences only with the Master, and he had little time to spend with me.

He taught me almost nothing himself, the other students barely more. Yet I learned a great deal in those months. Karate is like that: It is the process of teaching yourself how to move in your own body, how to walk the earth on you own feet, how to dodge or defeat the blows life sends you. For every minute you spend learning a technique or absorbing a graceful movement from others, you spend an hour teaching it to yourself. What comes out of the mountains is not a deadly fighter, neither a great warrior nor a magician—just a man complete in the knowledge of himself.

And that is the source of all skill and magic.

I never sparred with the Master, although he sometimes watched me spar with other students.

“Not so hard!” he called out one time. “You do
kumite
like a man who fights enemies.”

“Isn’t that what karate is for?” I asked after the match was over. I was lying on my back and breathing hard, having been tripped, thrown, and brushed with five feather-touch punches. Meaning that I had lost.

“Karate is for itself,” Matsu said.

“Yes, of course. But what if you were attacked? Wouldn’t you use it to defend yourself?”

“I would run away if I could.”

“Suppose you couldn’t?”

“Then I would not put myself in a place where I could be attacked and have no room to run.”

“Well, what if you had to protect someone.” I was thinking of that night on Cannery Row with Alice Wycliffe and the boy I had killed, Emilio Lopez. Sensei Kan had been mad as hell and demoted me because of that fight. Would the Master give a different answer?

He just shook his head. “You may think of a thousand reasons to fight. None of them is enough. I teach you to fight so that you may never have to. A man so formidable that he cannot be beaten has no one to contend with,” Matsu went on, in a rare mood. “Such a man has no enemies. He has nothing to defend. He is like light and air: When others punch at him, there is nothing to hit. To make war against him is useless. When they see that, they stop trying to fight, which is the beginning of peace.”

I thought about Sybil Zahedi and her scar-faced lieutenant in the helicopter. They would have been amused by the “light and air” analogy. To them, I had just been a side of meat to barter for their cause. Arguments wouldn’t have stopped them, only bullets and finally the executioner’s sword.

“And if they don’t stop?” I asked. “Don’t you finally have to kill them?”

He just shook his head. “Disable, if you must and have no other choices, no other skills. But to disable is not to destroy. You think only in terms of winning and losing. You say, ‘My win is your loss.’ I would rather have you seek a third way, that both can win. Or else both lose something.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “you’ve been too long on this mountain. The world out there is full of people who don’t give up until either they’re dead or you are.”

Matsu’s face never lost its smile. “Do you think the world was any different before I came up here? If the people around you cannot learn, if they understand the
Tao
so poorly that they break their heads against it, then you must teach them, if only to save your own life. There is always a way. Even the rocks learn from the water.”

“If the water has enough time.”

“Time is an illusion of the body, as the
katas
have taught you. There is always a way around time.”

“But …” I was running out of arguments. I was a rock standing dumb against the flow of his simple optimism.

“To be human is to be apart from the natural world,” he said. “The rock wears away in the water or tumbles along the streambed because it can do nothing else. The vine reaches toward the sunlight and withers in the frost because it can do nothing else. The owl pounces and the mouse squeals because they can do nothing else. But the human has a mind that can see alternatives, a will that can choose something else. There is always a way. You only have to find it.” He paused. Time stopped. His eyes were looking right at me for once, not past me. But he gave the impression of seeing not me but someone else, far away, in memory. “And if there is not a way,” he said slowly, as if reciting a lesson he’d learned fifty years ago. “If you lack the skill to find alternatives, or your—opponent—cares so much about killing you that none will satisfy him, then you can submit to the natural world and die. As the mouse to the owl. The world will not end. The
Tao
continues.”

My head went down in submission. “Thank you, Sensei. I understand that now.”

Right then, I was lying, a little. I still thought, deep down, that you had to fight enemies and find justice, that winning was better than either losing or patching up a compromise. Since then, his words have proven to be wiser than I could have guessed. And I’m not talking about just a fistfight. …

The cycle of days at Hakusan went around, more months of training and learning and living. Then one morning after the class had formed up on
Hajime,
the Master called out, in English: “Student Corbin!” I knew what to expect, as he had done this several times since I had come to Hakusan. Still, it was a shock that it was happening to me. I walked forward and faced him at attention, biting my lower lip.

“You have learned as much as you can hold at this time,” he said. “I advance you one degree in rank and send you back to the world.” Sensei Matsu gave me a quick grin and then turned a sober face to the class. It took ten minutes for me to gather my few possessions from the cottage I had rebuilt and start walking down the trail. The cadence call of the morning class was soon lost on the wind breathing through the pines behind me. By noon I was back in civilization.

And did I ever learn the thirteenth
kata
—which was the whole reason I came to Japan? Yes, a student named Kudasaru taught it to me one afternoon. It has only eight moves, and in half an hour I could perform them perfectly.

Chapter 9

Billy Birdsong: Easy Money

Stuffing a cork up the backside of the Feds had always seemed like a good idea to me. I mean, who had been my biggest source of aggravation right from the start? The Feds.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs had put my people on a piece of land even the coyotes avoided. The Drug Enforcement Agency had tried to queer the pitch on selling that twelve pounds of coke I had lucked into. The Internal Revenue Service was always hassling about my profits from running the kiddie tricks. The Department of Defense had sent me to Nicco—and jammed my system full of poison when they dusted Managua. The Central Intelligence Agency had probably been behind the kidnapping in Arabia. If anybody was going to clap and cheer when those debt and tax laws finally passed, it was me.

For a time, it looked like the worst depression anybody would ever see. All the money dried up one morning. The stock market and real estate went bad overnight. Everybody I knew lost his job. But the funny thing was, some things did not change. In San Francisco, anyway, the Safeway stores still had food on the shelves, more of it than before, I think. Pacific Gas & Electric still gave you light when you flipped the switch. Hetch-Hetchy water was still coming out of the tap. The cable cars still rolled; the streets got cleaned. And the main cop was still around the corner in his squad car, dammit.

For a while, Bank of America was issuing paper scrip backed by its own assets, whatever they were—mostly loans the bank would never collect. On the street, we said “backed by its ass.” But people took it.

After about six months, MasterCard and Visa got together and fixed a rate of exchange, the New Dollar, at about thirteen cents on the old on. Everyone grumbled and a few of the larger cities tried to issue their own bills. Except they turned into colored paper when you got past the city limits—no good for a national economy. So, in a few weeks, American Express, Diners Club, and most of the banks went along with the McVisa Plan and the currency stabilized as much as it ever does.

And about that time I got steady work in the pollution control field.

Happened this way. The Twenty-ninth Amendment had turned the Environmental Protection Agency into a kind of advisory council to big business. A million pages of regulation got squeezed down into The Little Green Book, which everybody thought the big boys would ignore while they stuffed asbestos and other crud into their landfills, poured raw sewage into the Bay, and blew smoke where they felt like it. Except the people still wanted these messes cleaned up. So the EPA hired guys like me.

I bought a bond for a million new dollars and filed it with the Agency. They, in turn, gave me half of Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, for inspection and enforcement. Which means that I looked into all the citizens’ complaints; sampled air, water, and garbage trucks; and “counseled with” the businesses and private individuals who broke the Green Standards in my jurisdiction. Otherwise, I lost my bond and went on my ear.

Who watched the watchdog—that is, me? Everybody. Neighborhood associations, consumer groups, county health agents, Naderites, you name it. They all had their sampling gear plugged in right alongside mine. Three unresolved complaints in a quarter and I would be out—with the bonding agency looking for a piece of my skin.

Right away things got very hostile. I had a fistful of complaints about an etching lab called P&L Partners that was shown to be dumping one-tenth-molar solutions of hydrofluoric acid into the sewer system. That is the kind of acid that scratches glass, really bad stuff. So I went and “counseled with” them.

The guard at the gate paused over his racing form to send me to Reception. The dish at that desk stopped chewing her gum long enough to sign me in and point me toward the office of the Environmental Director. The secretary there put down her coffee, the phone, and a paperback novel and pushed open his inner door. And from inside came a yell: “You got a warrant?”

“No, sir. But we have had several complaints about—”

“I don’t do business with you jokers unless you get a Federal warrant. And that’s with the whole specification: the dates, the times, the names, and the complete chemical analysis for each alleged infraction. You got me, Chief?”