The Long Way Home (4 page)

And a wall of parked cars loomed in front of me.

I hit the brakes. The bike’s spinning tires seized. The bike angled sideways under me. It skidded past the startled pedestrian, slid sideways across the sidewalk, carrying me helplessly toward the parked cars.

I thumped against the side of a Toyota, pinching my leg between the car door and the bike. The motorcycle had nearly stopped by that time and though the impact was hard enough to send a shock of pain through me, it wasn’t hard enough to do any real damage.

The next second, I had the bike righted. I gave it gas again. I felt it dart forward under me, racing a little way along the sidewalk until I spotted an opening between parked cars.

The bike made the gap. I bounced hard over the curb. I rolled out into the street, already gathering speed again.

There was a wild screaming blare: a car horn. A huge sedan was barreling toward me, its headlights like a pair of eyes jacked wide in fear.

I cried out as I wrenched the bike’s handlebars. The tires of the onrushing sedan screeched as the car swerved in the opposite direction. We passed each other by inches, so close I felt the side of the car flick at the cloth of my jeans.

Then the bike turned, shot forward. I was heading down the street, the park to the right of me, a row of shops to my left. Up ahead, I saw a corner, a traffic light. A van was stopped on the cross street, the driver waiting for the light to change. The light was green facing me—then it was yellow. I was going to have to be quick if I wanted to make it through.

I heard the sirens start again. Even with the roar of the motorcycle enveloping me, there was no mistaking that sound. I glanced to the side and saw the red and blue flashers through the trees, saw them moving on the other side of the park as the police cars started up again.

The traffic light turned red. The van started moving. I didn’t slow down. I raced into the intersection. The van loomed to my left. I heard its tires screech. Then I was past it. The driver shouted curses behind me.

I looked back over my shoulder. Before the van could even start up again, the police cars were at the corner, coming around it, sirens screaming.

I gave the motorcycle gas and raced on, with the police right behind me.

And somewhere, deep inside me, there was this little voice, saying,
Maybe you should stop. Maybe you should give yourself up. Maybe the police are right.

Maybe you’re the bad guy.

CHAPTER EIGHT
The Truth You Live

In quiet moments there were things that came back to me sometimes—things from my life before this nightmare started. I thought a lot about my karate teacher, for instance: Sensei Mike.

Sensei Mike was just about the coolest guy I ever met. He’d been in the army for a long time and had fought the Islamic extremists in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He even got a medal from the president of the United States because he once helped hold off an attack by a hundred bad guys with a .50-caliber gun mounted on an armored truck. He never talked about that, but I looked it up on the Internet and found out what happened. He’d been wounded in the fight and had to come home and have a piece of titanium put in his leg. He never talked about that either.

But he did talk about a lot of other things. About karate mostly, of course. How to fight—and how to avoid a fight if there was any possible way you could. How to control your emotions and your body. How to harness your fears and transform your nervousness into energy and focus. He talked a lot about focus, about paying attention—not just to karate but to everything, to the people you loved and the people who needed you, and just to everything you were trying to accomplish, to life in general.

“Here’s the deal, chucklehead,” he told me once. “God wants you to have a big, full, terrific life. And you can’t have that kind of life unless you’re paying attention.”

I guess Mike was somewhere in his thirties. He was about my height, but with broader shoulders. He had this thick, black hair that he was very proud of. He always kept it neatly combed, even when he was working out. He had this big drooping mustache that he was proud of too. If you looked carefully, behind the mustache and into his eyes, you could usually see him smiling, as if he found everything kind of funny. After everything he’d been through, I don’t think there was really very much in life that Mike took seriously. Only a few things. Only the things that really mattered.

Anyway, this one time, something happened in the dojo . . . Well, it all ended up in the dojo, but it started before that. It started that morning in history class with my teacher Mr. Sherman.

I had Mr. Sherman in history two years running. He was a trim, fit, youthful-looking guy, handsome in a sort of bland way with a friendly smile and intelligent eyes. I never thought he was a bad person or anything, but, to be honest, I did think he was kind of a doofus. My problem with him—the thing you could say sort of constituted his doofy-os-itude—was that he fancied himself some kind of big-time radical. He was always trying to get us to “question our assumptions.” And look, there’s nothing wrong with that as a general sort of thing. It’s just that Mr. Sherman sort of took it to the Crazy Place, if you know what I mean.

See, Mr. Sherman’s point of view was that nothing was really good or bad, it was just a matter of how you thought about it. Now that didn’t make any sense to me, but I have to admit I sometimes found it hard to argue with him.

That’s what happened this one morning in class. We’d been having a discussion about current events. Mr. Sherman was sitting on the edge of his desk, tossing one of the whiteboard markers in the air and catching it. “The problem with this country,” he was saying, “is that too many people believe blindly in absolute morality, absolute truth. Our country was founded on absolutes: truths that are supposedly ‘self-evident.’ And because we believe our truths are absolute and self-evident, we’re only too quick to hate other people and impose our truths on them. Absolutism is the meat of tyrants. Real morality is always changing. It depends on your situation and your cultural tradition.”

Now there were so many things about this statement that I thought were false, they kind of got jammed up in my brain as they tried to get to my mouth. For one thing, there are a lot of countries in the world that hate other people and attack other countries without reason, or that try to force even their own citizens to believe things whether they want to or not. America never does that. But before I could even get to that point, I blurted out:

“Wait a minute. You’re talking about the Declaration of Independence, right? The only truths it holds to be ‘self-evident’ are that all men are created equal. And that their Creator gave them the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

“Ah, I knew we’d hear from Charlie on this one,” said Mr. Sherman, looking around at the rest of the class. “Charlie is a True Believer. I can always count on him to follow blindly along with the crowd. The All-American Zombie.” He put his hands out in front of him like a zombie and let his mouth hang open. “Night of the Living Charlie.”

This was another thing that always annoyed me about Mr. Sherman. When you argued with him, he didn’t exactly use facts and logic. He just tried to make fun of you and change the subject and tangle you up with words so you looked bad or the class laughed at you and you got flustered and couldn’t make your point. And another thing that annoyed me was that a lot of times it worked.

I glanced around at the rest of the students. They were all laughing at Mr. Sherman’s zombie routine. Even Rick Donnelly, one of my best friends, was laughing over at his desk near the window. I knew Rick agreed with me about Mr. Sherman. He thought this was a great country and even wanted to go into politics when he grew up. But he was the kind of guy who never argued with teachers, who was always trying to please them and say what they wanted to hear so he would get good grades. Maybe that’s how you get to be a politician.

“So what part of the Declaration don’t you agree with?” I asked Mr. Sherman.

Sherman stopped waving his arms around. He smiled. “Ah, my zombielike friend, that’s exactly the wrong question. The question is: What part of it can you prove to be true? Prove that we’re created equal. We don’t look equal to me.”

“That’s not what it means. It means that we’re created with equal rights.”

“Prove it, Charlie. You can’t. It’s just something Americans have come to believe, that’s all. Other people believe other things. You can’t even prove that we were created, that we have a Creator in the first place. It’s just something you were told and so you believe it. Go on, Zombie Guy—prove it.”

I opened my mouth to answer, but I couldn’t think what to say. I didn’t know exactly how you would prove something like that. Sherman made the class laugh at me again by opening his mouth and making stuttering sounds to imitate my confusion: “Uh, uh, uh!”

Then the bell rang. That was the end of class.

“All right, that’s it,” said Sherman, “unless you guys want to stay behind and listen to Charlie sing the national anthem.”

That made everyone laugh again. And they were still laughing as they filed out of the room.

So I guess Sherman won that argument or at least got the last laugh. And yeah, it bothered me. I felt bad that the kids laughed, and I felt especially bad that I hadn’t been able to come up with a good argument for what I was trying to say. It made me angry—because I knew I was right and he was wrong.

I guess I was still a little angry when I went to the dojo that afternoon for my karate lesson.

Here’s what happened. There was this other kid, Peter Williams. He was taking a lesson that day too. Sensei Mike decided to have us do some
kumite
. Kumite is sparring without protective gear, without soft gloves and helmets and shin pads and everything. In kumite, you just dress in your
gi
—your karate outfit—and you use your bare hands and feet with your head and body unprotected.

So, of course, with kumite, you have to be extra careful. You strike with the open hand and not the fist, and you make sure to pull all your strikes and kicks so no one gets hurt. It’s an exercise meant to teach you control—and also to teach you not to be afraid of getting hit from time to time.

Sensei Mike told us to begin and Peter and I started to circle around each other, looking for an opening, ready to fight. Now, Peter went to a different high school than I did and I didn’t know him very well, but he always seemed like a good enough guy. He was smaller than I was, but wiry, muscular, and very fast. He had good high kicks that could catch you on the shoulder or even the head if you weren’t careful. And he was hard to hit because he knew how to dance around and dodge.

I knew Peter liked to stay away from you and then suddenly dart in for a strike. That way he could use his speed to his advantage. My strategy against him was to stay on defense: stay back, stay focused, keep a good eye on him, and try to figure out when he was about to make his rush. That way, I could usually stop his attack and come back at him with a counterattack of my own.

The first time Peter rushed me, this strategy worked really well. Peter dashed at me across the carpeted dojo floor and launched a front ball kick at my stomach. I managed to dodge out of the way, but he followed up quickly with a slap at my head. I blocked the slap with my arm and then sent a sort of backhanded slap of my own into his belly. Again, we were unprotected, so we only used our open hands and were careful not to hit too hard.

Peter retreated, circling and dancing too far away for me to reach, looking for another opening into which he could rush again. I waited him out. I was paying close attention. I was ready for his rush. But none of that mattered. He was just too quick this time, too good. He rushed in with a fake, pretending to strike low. Then he came up fast at my head. I fell for it. I blocked him low and he came in over the top of the block and landed a good solid slap to the side of my forehead.

Peter kept full control of his strike. He didn’t hurt me or anything, so there was nothing wrong with it. If you spar, sometimes you get hit, that’s just the way it is. As Sensei Mike always told us, “You gotta lose to learn.”

But there was something wrong with what happened next. There was something very wrong about it.

I felt a flash of anger go through me. Even though he hadn’t injured me, I didn’t like getting fooled and I didn’t like getting hit. It hurt my pride. And I guess the thing is, too, I was already angry when I came to the dojo. I was angry because of what happened in Sherman’s class. Having Peter outfight me like that just set the anger off.

Before I even had a chance to think, I snapped back at him. I ducked under his guard and shot my forearm into his midsection. It landed with more force than I meant—a lot more. I heard him say, “Oof,” as the air rushed out of him. I should have pulled back then, but it was too late to stop. I was already moving, already bringing the back of my hand up toward his face. It was an openhanded strike and all that, but my knuckles cracked against Peter’s chin. His head flew back and he stumbled away from me, dazed.

I didn’t stop then either. I was still angry. I charged right after him, ready to deliver another series of strikes to his gut and to his face. I took—I don’t know—maybe half a step.

And then, Sensei Mike came between us.

He moved so quickly I had no time to react. In one simultaneous combination, he grabbed my arm, hit me in the chest with his palm, and used his foot to sweep my leg out from under me. I went down hard, my back landing on the carpet with a bone-shaking
thud
. Mike’s move took me by such surprise that I just barely managed to slap the floor, breaking my fall. Even so, the air was knocked out of me. I lay there for a moment, winded.

Mike turned his back on me and went to Peter.

“You okay, buddy?” he asked him.

Peter rubbed his chin and gave the sensei a lopsided smile. “Oh yeah. I’m fine. It’s nothing.”

“Good man.”