Kung Fu High School (14 page)

"Look, you just got here. You can't understand this. But it's my life. And the Waves existed for a reason. We protected each other or Ridley would crush us. So he's finally done it. And he's about to do it again to the Wolves too."

"So what? You're going to get sucked into this revenge bullshit on account of Cue? Alfredo is already dead!" He said it in a kind of harsh whisper. Like everything was even somehow.

"Dammit, Jimmy, it's about more than revenge, it's about survival,
our
survival. So, no, I'm not going to run away. Not with Cue due to fill up a box in the churchyard, taking up my dad's plot next to my mom. And it's more than just me on the line here. Don't you understand that?"

"I just don't see how you can be loyal to these people. They aren't your
real
family!"

I stood up.

"If I leave, Mrs. Rodriguez will end up raped in the gutter! Remo will show up in the emergency room with no hands or feet! Everyone that ever fuckin' knew me will be in danger! Not just from the Hunters or Blades—from fuckin' Ridley!" I didn't care if Dad heard me. "Don't give me that look! Why do
you
think Ridley killed 'Fredo right in front of us? Because now we're witnesses! Now he's got a reason to do us in."

"So that's why we run."

"Didn't you hear what I just said? He's got an excuse to chase us, Jimmy! He's playing a game. We can't leave. Dad will die. Your mom will die. I'll die. The only one to survive will probably be badass you if you stopped being such a bitch and actually hit somebody."

Jimmy's gaze dropped right off my face and fell hard to the carpet. Like a little suicide, something hadn't survived that drop. I guess it finally sunk in that I didn't regard him as some kind of saint for giving up fighting. At least, not when it put me and others in danger trying to protect him when he was by far the one who should be defending us. That was the raw truth.

Still too upset to apologize, I said it as flat as I could: "The only thing to do now is keep playing the game. Ridley's playing to win. But we're playing not to lose."

That, somehow, Jimmy understood. No more questions got asked. The conversation over, he left the room.

On the news that night they called Cue a gang leader and they made it sound like he got what he deserved. They said he was notorious. They made it out like the city was a better place with him gone. How wrong they were. Serious though, how do you know who the good guy is when everybody's bad? The news anchor flipped her blond hair over her shoulder and they went on to the next story about sudden infant death syndrome.

During the rest of the news, into the weather and into another ballgame, I put the new bed together. But it wasn't for Jimmy anymore. He could have Cue's room. The bed was for Dad. His old one was falling apart. Besides, it was Cue's last project. I could still see where his fingers had sanded the wood soft. I didn't want to leave it unfinished even though the temptation was there to let it sit forever. Like he'd be right back to build it, just after he got home with his protein shake powder. I finished the frame at about eleven o'clock but I'd put the rest together tomorrow, that was what I told myself.

When I got out of the shower, the lights were off so I got ready for bed, assuming that Jimmy had gone to sleep. I was surprised to see him working out in the backyard. I tweaked the curtains so I could see out and just sat on the edge of the couch and watched him: out there in the chill, with no shirt or shoes on, pounding the hard dirt that had a glaze of frost over the top of it. The oven was pumping out the same old cooked-casserole kind of smell that was filling up the house and I was glad to be inside, wrapping my feet in a blanket. Mom had always cooked chicken divan casserole: cream sauce, broccoli, chicken, spices, and melted cheese on top. We loved that dish. She'd cooked it so often in that oven that it permanently smelled of divan with a slight whiff of burning. For me, it was a welcome side effect of the gas being off If I pretended, Mom was still alive and asleep in the next room. Not mad, not arguing, just quiet and dreaming.

I squinted, even leaned forward on the couch. But I still couldn't see the details of Jimmy's forms outside. They were way too fast. I mean, I could identify something that had to be a punch or a kick but the way they flowed into other attacks or defensive postures was smoother than smooth, it felt like watching something sped up. He did forms like the best chef you've ever seen chops with his knife. Blinding fast, and I had no doubt they were flawless. It bothered me though. The combined forms weren't like any specific style I'd ever seen, certainly not any of the ones he was supposedly a near-master of It was almost like he had no style.

But then he did something weird. He slowed down, way down. He started doing his forms in slow motion. It was mesmerizing to watch him do a sideways full-circular kick with a straight leg that extended up to forty-five degrees and then to ninety directly above his head and then to one-thirty-five as he turned just slightly on his standing leg before sinking through the dark to one-eighty and back to standing. I'd never seen anything like it.

I pretended I was asleep when he came back in and hit the shower. I couldn't help it though. I sat back up just to see the marks in the dirt that his movements had made. They were the only things of interest in the empty backyard that held no grass, just a cracking concrete patio that stopped about two feet away from the house foundation and a disused shed in the back corner, all surrounded by a peeling fence about five feet high.

The lamp flicked on behind me, the bent gold one next to the couch. If you weren't careful sitting down, you'd hit your head on it. I tried to turn around but he put his hands on my shoulders. I wasn't wearing a bra. So I held down the front of my T-shirt as the back lifted up and gathered in a clump at the base of my neck. The air still lacked heat, but the fingers that traced the waves of my tattoo were very warm.

Some of those waves, the ink laid in right above bone, never really sat down after I had it done. The skin stayed raised, giving them a ridged texture. Sometimes I run my fingers over the space on the back of my right hip when I'm alone and thinking. It was a completely different sensation when Jimmy's fingers hovered just barely over the skin of my back.

I probably sounded like a stupid little kid but I said it anyway, "Today was the longest day of my life."

He just sniffed and I felt a burst of his breath hit my back: the wind over the waves, almost pushing the boat between my shoulder blades as I got goose bumps and all the little hairs stood up along my spine.

I was almost twelve years old when we first visited Jimmy in the country. My mom and Jimmy's mom were sisters. Mine was older. She drove us out to the farm. It was five hours away, on the plains, but it felt like more when I was actually in the car. It was a real hot summer, a no-cloud-in-the-sky kind of summer, and, of course, the air-conditioning broke halfway there so we had to roll down the windows. The back ones only rolled down partway and the re-echoed air that bounced around the car and off my ears was just about deafening at eighty miles an hour. So even with no way to listen to her audio book about two lawyers falling in love, Mom kept going. She was the type not to stop once she had her mind set on something. Cue always accused me of being the same way.

I guess I was just a normal suburban kid back then. This was years before Mom died and we had to move to a smaller place closer to the "heart of the city." That's what Dad called it, but then he had his accident and ever since he's just called it a shit-hole. Both were probably right in retrospect. Either way, I had no interest in leaving the house for a trip to some farm in the middle of nowhere during my summer vacation.

Of course, I had no choice. Dad was working and Cue was old enough to decide for himself all of a sudden, "and really, Jen," he said it stern, "Mom needs someone to go with her." It was bullying and it wasn't fair, no matter how hard Mom tried to convince me that the trip would be a great chance for a girls' vacation, you know, a bonding experience, I still wasn't happy about it. She was always positive. Wish she gave that to me too, but she didn't.

So after driving a few hundred miles of yellowed, dried-up-crop flatness, we left the highway, drove through the crappy-looking town of Barguss and its silly-looking blimp floating in the air and made our way to back road X and then back road Y, smelling manure the whole way because the fields had been fertilized. When Mom pulled up in front of the Chang Family Farm, she nearly knocked over the mailbox, with its smaller accompanying blue sidecar of a box for the newspaper. Of course, they all came out from behind their quaint screen door and hugged us welcome, Aunt Marin, Uncle Chun Mao, and Cousin Jimmy. Too picture perfect.

You could tell from the start that Jimmy didn't really get any visitors because he was real excited to show me all around. He was an only child anyway so he didn't know what it was like to fight for the last spoonful of food or be pushed into the community swimming pool and look like an idiot during adult swim. I saw all there was to see on the farm in the space of five minutes: the chicken coops, the empty cornfields that had already been harvested and reseeded, the corn left to die in other fields because of government grants, his favorite tree, and the main house. If they hadn't had satellite TV I would've made my mom drive us back right then, with or without air-conditioning.

Ultimately, it was fine. I can't even remember everything we did that week, apart from Jimmy teaching me some moves. See, he'd been training for years by that point and already had some national championships under his belt. That was a cool moment though, seeing the living room and all the trophies that were taller than me. They were so huge and fake golden, the biggest ones had several levels that were held up by carved wooden pillars. He showed me all of them and then he just showed me pictures and pictures of him shaking hands with people with medals around his neck. And you know, he never really looked like anything scary or special. Only about five foot four and not stocky in the least, he looked like a regular kid who played sports, not the world champion he was to become.

Jimmy's dad had converted the hayloft of the barn to a training gym. There were bars he did pull-ups on, various tilted benches for sit-ups and push-ups, and there was this mannequin-looking thing that Jimmy did pressure-point strikes on. Each one was marked with a red dot in his mom's red lipstick. His dad had rigged it up to a pulley system that could shift it any direction in a seven-foot radius and even make it jump. Jimmy's dad was a genius. Well, there was also one of those kung fu block/ strike training tools that looked like a big coatrack that had sawed-off coffee-table legs sticking out of it. Even at thirteen, Jimmy could play that thing like a drum set with his block-and-strike combinations.

I watched him a lot. That was basically what I did for a week, just climbed up the ladder and sat watching while he did morning, afternoon, and night training. We talked a lot too. He wanted to know everything about the city. What it looked like where we lived, what it smelled like. Stuff I'd never even thought about before until he asked me really. I think that was the first thing that got me liking Jimmy as more than a cousin. He made me feel important with all those questions. Out of nowhere, I was an authority on something.

Back home I was nothing. I was Cue's punching bag. I was always supposed to shut my mouth because I didn't know anything, that's what my big brother told me. The summer before, Cue accidentally broke my leg by jumping off the bed and trying to scare me but he slipped as he was jumping and fell on me funny, on my left tibia bone. It broke through the skin and bled a lot. Mom freaked out and screamed at Cue that he was trying to kill me.

"Girls are gentle! Girls are different from brute boys!" She screamed those a couple times each. Women were soft and kind and worthy of respect. She screamed that too. Something like it anyway. Cue was a perfect gentleman until it fully healed.

Well, my mom and Jimmy's parents thought it was great that we had become such close friends. They actually encouraged us to spend all of our time together. So it was okay for me to watch him train as long as I didn't disturb him, Mom said. That was where it happened, in the hayloft.

It was a typical late summer afternoon on the plains, hot and dry. Jimmy confirmed it. Felt like the hay up in the loft was going to spark up around me it was so warm with the heat rising up from the ground and getting trapped in the upside-down "V" angle of the wooden ceiling so close above us. Jimmy was working out as usual. A few solid forms and he was sweating, bare-chested, having discarded his shirt. He'd put his towel next to me so really he was leaning over for it and I thought I'd be helpful by picking it up and handing it to him but he wasn't looking at me. He was just leaning over, setting his water bottle down, leaning toward me, and no, it wasn't one of those things where we didn't mean it to happen, nothing that lame. I knew exactly what I was doing when I grabbed him and kissed him. Right like Melinda showed me. I pulled the back of his head hard toward me and I sucked on his lower lip before putting my whole mouth over his, but never with tongue.

Coming in to tell us about lunch, my mom stopped dead just inside the entrance. I'll never forget the look on her face when she saw us from down below. I saw her. Jimmy didn't, he was facing away, toward the barn wall. But he noticed when I stopped kissing him, kept my lips on his, just stopped completely. It was like she pitied me, like there was something wrong with me and I just couldn't help myself from ruining the golden boy. Obviously, it was all my fault. It was my compulsive nature, my lust, and my internal corruption. It was the same look she gave mice that were foolish enough to get stuck in one of the traps Dad would lay in the old garage.

We left the next day. That was the last time I saw Jimmy before he just waltzed into the house that night. It'd been almost four years since we kissed that I saw him and I could still feel my mother's look in the lining of my stomach like an animated wrestling ring that collapsed inward to take revenge on the bad, bad wrestlers trying to pin each other.