The Long Way Home (5 page)

I climbed slowly to my feet. Mike didn’t say anything to me. He didn’t have to. I already felt terrible. What a stupid thing to do.

“Hey, Peter, I am really sorry, man,” I said. “I totally lost control. Way, way out of line. No excuse. I’m just sorry.”

Peter shrugged. He smiled. “No problem, bro. Heat of battle. It happens.”

I guess that was true enough. It was the heat of battle, and these things do happen. But that still didn’t make it all right. When you train with someone, you’re on the same team, even when you’re fighting. The idea isn’t to hurt him, it’s to help him learn by forcing him to compete and get better. I felt really bad about what I’d done. But I felt even worse—a lot worse—about what I would have done—what I meant to do—if Mike hadn’t stopped me.

We continued our lesson, even doing a little more kumite before we moved on to practicing
katas
. Sensei Mike didn’t say anything more about my slipup. He didn’t yell at me or lecture me or anything like that. I guess he could see how bad I felt about it already.

After the lesson, though, after Peter had left and I had changed back into my street clothes, I came out of the changing room. I was carrying my karate bag and kind of dragging my feet, keeping my head down, still feeling bad.

I came out of the dojo and into the little foyer. I stopped by the open door of Mike’s office. He was sitting in the swivel chair behind his gunmetal-gray desk. He was looking over something on his computer.

“Hey, Mike, I really am sorry about the kumite,” I told him.

He glanced up. “Yeah, I heard you the first time. You apologized like a man and Pete forgave you. You don’t have to torture yourself about it. Like he said, it was the heat of battle. It’s not like you really hurt him or anything.”

“I know,” I said. And then I said, “But I would’ve. I’d have kept going after him, if you hadn’t stopped me.”

Mike shrugged. “That’s what I’m here for, chuckle­head.” “Yeah, but you won’t always be there.”

He tilted back in his chair, put his feet up on the desk and his hands behind his head. He laughed and his eyes kind of laughed with him. “Sure I will. I’m your teacher. I’m in your head, double-ugly. You’ll never get rid of me. That’s why you have to be careful who you learn from.”

I couldn’t tell whether he was kidding around or not. It was like that a lot with Mike. He would say something that sounded serious, but there’d still be that laughter hiding under the ’stache.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s biting your butt, anyway?” he said now. “What got you all angry today? It wasn’t Peter, that’s for sure. I saw there was something stuck in your craw the minute you started working out.”

I don’t know why I should’ve been surprised by this. It was a weird thing about Mike. He could watch you practice karate and know almost exactly what you were thinking. I’d seen him do it a dozen times.

I sighed. I figured I might as well tell him. “I have this teacher at school . . .” I said. And then I laid it all out, explaining about Mr. Sherman and what he’d said in class and how I couldn’t figure out how to answer him.

When I was finished, Mike did this thing he did a lot, where he would sort of smooth his mustache down with his thumb and forefinger for a long time. That way, you couldn’t see him smiling at all, though you always suspected he was.

“So let me ask you something,” he said. “Do you love your mom?”

“What?”

“Your female parental unit. Your mom. You love her?”

“Yeah. Sure, I love my mom. I mean, she worries too much, but basically she’s a really good mom. In fact, I love her a lot.”

“Prove it.”

I laughed. “I . . . I mean . . . I can’t . . . I . . .”

Mike opened his mouth and went, “Uh, uh, uh,” pretending to make fun of me the way Mr. Sherman had.

“All right,” I said finally, “I can’t prove it, but there’s, like, stuff I do, you know. I mean, she knows I love her.”

“Sure she does. ’Cause you treat her with respect. You try to make her proud of you. You give her a little affection when no one’s looking. Maybe clean your room every fifty, hundred years or so.”

“Yeah. Right. Stuff like that,” I said.

“See, that’s the thing, pal. There are some truths you can’t prove,” Mike said. “There are some truths you can only live. Most of the really important truths—like the ones in the Declaration—you take them on faith at first. But then you live them, and that’s how you find out they’re really true.”

“Okay,” I said, thinking it over. “That makes sense, I guess. But then you might make a mistake, right? You might think something’s true at first and then live it and find out it’s not.”

“You not only might—you will. Everyone does. That’s how you learn to do better. No one starts out with the answers. You figure them out as you go and you learn from the people who figured them out before you. Like I said, it matters who your teachers are.”

“But then, Mr. Sherman’s right, in a way: if you might be wrong sometimes—if you might be doing something wrong right now or your country might be doing something wrong—then maybe you just think you’re the good guys when you’re really the bad guys. I mean, how can you tell whether you’re the good guys or not?”

Mike didn’t answer right away. He went on stroking his ’stache a long time. Then he said, “Put it this way, chucklehead. Say you got a bunch of people and they’re all chained up in a dark place, a pitch-black place, stumbling around in their chains. But there’s a light far off in the distance. And one day, some of the people start talking to each other and they say, ‘Hey, we’re tired of living in the dark. Why don’t we break these chains and head for that light?’ And at first, they can’t figure out how to do it. So they talk about it some more and argue about it and even fight about it. But after a while, they come up with a way to get themselves loose and they start walking. Now remember, it’s still dark where they are, so they stumble a lot and take wrong turns, and they’ve still got some of those old chains on them, and that makes them stumble too. But they keep moving, keep trying to get the chains off, keep heading for that light, no matter what, no matter who tries to stop them. And people do try to stop them— a lot of people. Because a lot of people like to be in the dark where no one can see what they are. And a lot of people even like to be in chains and they want to put other people in chains with them. But our guys, these people we’re talking about—they keep moving, some faster, some slower, still stumbling, still half blind, half chained, still arguing about the right way. But whatever happens, they keep moving toward the light.”

Mike pressed his mustache down one last time and held it there, so I couldn’t see whether there was a smile on his lips or not. There was a smile in his eyes, though. I could see that. His eyes were laughing.

And he said, “Who do you think the good guys are, chucklehead?”

CHAPTER NINE
Collision

Who do you think the good guys are?

That was the question. And it haunted me. It bothered me all the time. Because the policemen are the good guys, right? They’re trying to protect people and arrest bad guys.

And here they were, trying to arrest me!

They thought I’d committed murder. They thought I’d killed my friend Alex. A jury had even convicted me.

And I couldn’t remember any of it. I couldn’t even remember Alex getting killed. So how did I know I was innocent? You see what I’m saying? How did I know if I was the good guy or the bad guy?

There was no time to think about it now. I was still racing through the night at top speed with the police on my trail. The air all around me was trembling with sirens, dancing with flashing lights. The machine underneath me was shuddering as if it were half alive. I felt that at any moment it might rear up and throw me off, pull itself out of my control and go spinning across the street. I held on as hard as I could. I fought the rattling handlebars, forcing the bike in the direction I wanted it to go. My breath was short. My heart was pounding. My stomach felt hollow with fear. Disaster—shattering injury, maybe even death—was only a single careless mistake away.

I shot down another dimly lit street of shops—and then it was gone—gone in a second. Now I was in a glaringly bright block with a lighted gas station on one side of me and a spotlit car lot on the other. Four police cars had piled into the street behind me. The lead one was close, very close, and getting closer by the second. Another block or so and it would overtake me, force me off the road or even force me down.

I looked up ahead. There was more light there. A big shopping mall with lighted signs and some fast-food joints. Before that, though, a smaller street met this one at the intersection. This smaller street ran off into shadows to my right and left. I thought if I could turn off, if I could get into those shadows, maybe I’d have some small chance of losing the cruisers behind me.

My heart seemed to rise into my throat, hammering. If I kept going straight, stayed in the light, it would only be a matter of time before they had me. But how could I make a turn, going so fast?

I wasn’t sure I could. But I knew I had to try.

I brought my body low to the throbbing, stuttering bike. I said one of your basic prayers—one of those prayers that’s not in the prayer book but everyone knows it anyway—something like, “Please, please, please, don’t let me die!” I squinted through the onrushing wind at the intersection where the light and shadow met. I held my breath as the intersection came racing toward me.

And all of a sudden, without any warning at all, another siren started. Another set of flashing lights exploded red and blue. Another cruiser was charging toward me—this one coming toward the intersection from the side street to my right. It was moving to cut me off at the corner, to block my escape from the cops behind me and force me to stop. If it reached the corner before I did, I’d never be able to get past it, never be able to make the turn.

My whole body now felt like one enormous pulse, pounding as fast and as hard as the pulse of the engine under me. It looked certain to me that my motorcycle and the police cruiser were going to reach the corner at the same time, were going to smash into each other.

I pushed the throttle and the world sped up around me. It seemed impossible I would be able to make the turn.

I started the turn anyway. There was no oncoming traffic. The sirens had scared the other drivers off. I angled the motorcycle across the street into the other lane, hoping to slant between the approaching cruiser and the edge of the sidewalk. If I hit either one, I’d be finished.

I shot into the intersection head-on just as the cruiser shot into it from my right. We hurtled toward each other. The scream of the siren was so loud it nearly drowned out the roar of the motorcycle and the roar of my own blood in my ears. Then the scream of the cruiser’s brakes joined the siren. The cop car swerved. He was trying to keep from killing me. Of course he was. He was a cop. The cops are the good guys.

As the braking cruiser turned, I slipped past its front fender on my right. I cleared the edge of the sidewalk on my left by inches. The motorcycle leaned over into the turn—and then farther over until it felt like it was practically horizontal.

Then I was around the corner. The motorcycle straightened underneath me. It gathered speed and rocketed down the smaller street. The lights of the shopping mall dropped away behind me. The shadows closed over me.

I glanced back over my shoulder. I saw the cop car still in the intersection, blocking the way. The other cruisers were rushing toward it. Their brakes were screeching now too as they tried to avoid a collision. They didn’t quite make it. The first car to reach the corner clipped the tail of the cruiser that blocked the way. The car behind that one managed to swerve and avoid a rear-end crash. But the next one hit, shattering the taillight just as it got hit in turn by the car behind.

It wasn’t a dangerous pileup, just a bunch of fender benders. But for a few seconds it brought all five police cars to a stop. They sat tangled together in the intersection, their flashers whirling uselessly, their sirens howling like frustrated hounds who’d lost the scent of their prey.

And I rushed on into the night.

CHAPTER TEN
Gunfire

I was in a residential section now, moving past houses and under a canopy of trees. The naked late-autumn branches interlaced above me. Through them, I could see the last light fading from the deepening blue of the sky. Fallen leaves looped up from the gutter into the air as my bike swept past them. With the sirens growing dim as they fell away behind me, it was almost quiet here for a second or two.

I slowed to take another corner. I came down another dark street of houses and turned a corner again and came down another dark street. Here the houses were small and very close together. Narrow two-story clapboards, most of them, with little porches. There was a small lawn out in front of each house, and narrow alleys between them. Most of them had lights on in the windows, sending a yellow glow out into the night.