The Magician (22 page)

Chapter 24

Ed Japhet knew he could not make the withdrawal without his father, and his father refused to accompany him to the bank. “It’s my money,” said Ed. “All you do is sign the slip.”

Mr. Japhet couldn’t disagree about that. All the money Ed had saved from his allowance and later, sums he had made from delivering newspapers, mowing lawns, raking grass, and finally from giving magic performances for children’s birthday parties, had gone into the savings account. But the account had prudently been set up as a trust account so that Mr. Japhet would not be taxed on the interest that accrued.

“A hundred and eighty dollars,” said Mr. Japhet, “is more than half of what you’ve saved in four years.”

“It’s my money.”

“You’ve got to learn to be cautious about money.”

“I’m taking it out for a useful purpose.”

“I consider karate lessons a dangerous purpose. I’d just as soon let you buy a gun with it.”

“You can’t go to that school without knowing how to fight back.”

“Take boxing lessons, then.”

“Oh, Dad, you can’t box with kids that carry knives. You’re living in a dream world.”

“You think everything was invented yesterday. We had hoodlums in school when I was a boy.”

“And what did you do?”

“I stayed clear of trouble.”

“I mean, when they came after you.”

“I stayed out of confrontations.”

“You mean you ran away.”

Terence Japhet watched Ed leave the first unpleasant conversation they’d had in a long time and go up the stairs to his room. Was his son accusing him of having been a coward? Had he been? Never mind, he was convinced that the karate lessons were not a solution to anything. It was to him like the escalation of an arms race.

At moments like this he wished that they had had a second child, because when one was being impossible, it was probably nice to be able to turn to another, to have an alternative. He had never been able to bear a quarrel that lasted beyond the speaking point.

Mr. Japhet was conscious of each step as he drift-walked up to Ed’s room and patted the door with his fingertips. It took Ed a long time to answer. Then he said merely, “Yes?”

“It’s me. Please open up.”

Terence Japhet would never have opened the door of his son’s room unasked, any more than he would have walked into a friend’s house if the door were open.

“Come on in,” said Ed, sighing.

The walls were covered with a collection of bright posters, some in luminous oranges, yellows, and reds, a few garish and ugly to Mr. Japhet’s eye, and some certainly obscene by the standards of an earlier time. Mr. Japhet did not understand the attraction of posters to almost all of the young. Once a middle-class boy’s room might have had a triangular banner of the college the boy hoped most to go to, a framed photo of a girl, and that was all. Here it seemed that all visible space had been allotted to—what? Hendrix, dead. Joplin, dead. Zappa
sitting on a toilet. The idiot boy from
Mad
magazine, wearing an Uncle Sam uniform and saying, “Who Needs YOU?” And on the facing wall, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda on their strangely shaped cycles, smiling easily as they ride toward a gratuitous death. And on the door itself, an election poster which had once said under the candidate’s picture, “Make America Great,” and now, with the last word obliterated, said “Make America.”

He was staring at the last one when Ed said, “You like that one, don’t you, Dad?”

The posters had offended at first as they had been intended to. But Mr. Japhet had gotten used to them. Some he had actually liked from the beginning: the one in Miro-like colors that said “To Love Is Enough” and another one, “War is unhealthy for children and other living things.” It would be an idea, thought Mr. Japhet, if the delegates at the United Nations made posters instead of speeches.

“Yes,” he said.

They sat at opposite ends of the bed, facing the same poster-filled wall and not each other.

“I don’t want to be unreasonable,” said Mr. Japhet. “I was trying to make my point of view clear.”

Ed wondered when his father would capitulate. He usually did.

“Dad, I didn’t mean to imply that you were a sissy or anything. I’d just as soon duck trouble as face it myself.” He closed his eyes. “The trouble is, you just can’t anymore. It’s not just our school, it’s all over.”

“Couldn’t you just try a lesson or two and see if you really do find it useful? Maybe a couple of lessons’ll give you more physical self-confidence, keep people from picking on you. I mean, why commit a hundred and eighty dollars at once?”

“If you pay in advance, they give you your karate suit, a white gym suit, free. You need the suit anyway, and if you pay piecemeal, it costs you an additional twenty dollars.”

“It sounds a little like a racket to use your money before they’ve provided the services. How long is the course?”

“Four months.”

“You see!” Terence leaped at the point. “It’s like a bank deducting interest in advance. It actually means you’re paying more than a hundred eighty for the course. And suppose you decide to quit—will they refund?”

“I suppose they’d have to give you some back pro rata, I didn’t ask. But they’d make you pay for the suit you got free.”

“It’s not just the money. I don’t like the psychology of prepayment.”

“It’s an advantage to me, Dad. It’ll make me go.”

“Why should you take on something that requires forcing?”

“Because I know it’s something I have to do.”

The cash withdrawn from the savings account was deposited by Mr. Japhet, who gave Ed a check for a hundred and eighty dollars so they would have a record of the payment. “I don’t trust people who run a school like that,” Mr. Japhet said.

The owner, Mr. Fumoko, was also the instructor. The ad for the school had billed him as a black-belt holder and a third-generation instructor in the Japanese arts of self-defense. Mr. Fumoko, a fortyish, soft-spoken nisei, was a very short man with a broad flat face and shiny black hair. He registered Ed in the cramped cubicle that passed as a front office, told him he could pick up his suit after three days, when the check had cleared. A new course started each Monday. In the meantime, would the young man mind filling out this questionnaire?

Ed glanced at the questions. Gently Mr. Fumoko said, “Insurance company wants no trouble. This is educational institution.” He smiled, and Ed filled out the form, which included such questions as, “Have you ever been arrested? If yes, please explain.” And he had to give three adult references, who, Ed soon learned, actually were called by Mr. Fumoko.

Mr. Fumoko introduced the other new students elaborately, each to the group and then each to each. The Baxe boys were brothers, one Ed’s age, one two years younger. One tall, skinny boy of nineteen had kept himself apart. He had a pronounced Adam’s apple that went up and down when he mumbled a “how-do-you-do” in response to the other people’s “hi” or “hello.” One of the boys Ed’s own age was Japanese, like Mr. Fumoko. And there was an older man, past forty, with a very white face and white legs. Ed hoped he wouldn’t have to pair off with him.

Perhaps because the nineteen-year-old was shy, Mr. Fumoko picked him as the model to point out the vulnerable parts of the body. In a dispassionate voice, Mr. Fumoko explained how a blow to the bridge of the nose would drive the bone back into the brain, stunning, or paralyzing, or killing the victim, depending on the strength of the blow. He showed how to strike the windpipe and explained the consequences. He dealt with the temple, the ear, under the jaw, the side of the neck, the Adam’s apple, the hollow of the throat, how to
grasp the shoulder muscle to cause great pain, the solar-plexus strike, the vulnerability of the side just below the last rib, how to
cause pain in the back of the hand, the wrist, the forearm, how to crack fingers that came within one’s grasp, how to kick the upper and lower thigh, the shin, ankle, and instep, and then, turning the nineteen-year-old around, Mr. Fumoko indicated the vulnerable base of the skull, the center of the back, the seventh vertebra, the back between the shoulderblades, the back of the arm and the back of the elbow, the kidney, the back of the upper leg, the back of the knee, the calf, and the vulnerable tendon called the Achilles’ heel.

Mr. Fumoko had them pair off, then point to the vulnerable parts of the partner’s body as he called off the places, murmuring, “Very good, very good.” Finally, as the hour drew to an end, he warned them of the dangers inherent in the sport of self-defense and devoted himself to the description of five degrees of force. A moderate blow would cause moderate pain. A sharp blow would cause sharp pain. A hard blow would stun or numb in the head or neck area and would interfere with an opponent’s ability to strike back for anywhere from several seconds to several hours. A really hard blow in several spots would probably cause a temporary paralysis—very useful in self-defense—and he was quick to point out that temporary meant not a few hours always but perhaps only a few minutes, time to get away, or call the police. Then, watching the faces of his pupils with greater attention than some of them were paying to him, using his hand against himself with pretended ferocity, Mr. Fumoko showed how hard and where a blow would cause a severe and possibly permanent injury, or kill. In a whisper he said, “You think of this only if life is in danger.”

Ed was glad the lesson was over. Perhaps his father’s advice had been right: he would not want to force himself through the entire course; maybe just a few lessons would suffice. As he changed in the back room with the others, a room that had the pungency of a locker room, though there were no lockers and all their clothes were hung on hooks along the wall, he was aware of all of the parts of his body that might be struck, and also of his hands, which might strike, and a memory crossed his mind of seeing a nuclear physicist on television, a famous one—he couldn’t remember who at the moment—explaining the sense of guilt that the developers of the atomic bomb felt, of having tasted the apple in Eden. During the disruptions in school that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Ed had taken the position that owning a gun meant having the means to kill. Now, Ed thought, he was developing those means in his own hands, which Mr. Fumoko had urged them all to harden by hitting against hard objects.

Dressed in his street clothes, his gym suit rolled in a bundle, Ed was walking past the door of the cubicle that was the front office when out of it came Urek, angry, carrying the questionnaire. Ed hurried to get out the front door before Urek could see him, but there was a hand on the door as he reached it, and then Urek slid in front of it, his face in front of Ed’s face.

“Hello, Japhet,” he said.

“What are you doing here?”

“I heard you were taking the course, Japhet.”

“So?”

“I thought I’d take it, too.”

Urek opened the door to let Ed through. Ed went out, frozen, saw his mother in the car at the curb, tried not to walk too fast to its door, got in beside her.

“Isn’t that—?” said his mother, looking over her right shoulder.

“Yes, it is.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“Don’t start the car.” Ed turned the rear-view mirror so he could watch Urek go down the street toward the bus stop. Luckily, there was a bus just pulling into the corner, and Urek got on.

“Please wait here for me,” said Ed, and he ran from the car back to the judo school and found Mr. Fumoko in the office. “That boy who was just here,” he blurted out, then realized he had better calm down, “is he enrolled?”

“He take questionnaire home.”

“He can’t answer some of those questions truthfully.”

“Please sit down.”

Ed sat on the edge of the chair, his hands folded in his lap to keep them from trembling.

“The question about whether you’ve been arrested, et cetera. He’s been arrested. He’s up for trial.”

“For?”

“Assault.”

“That boy?”

“Yes.”

“Who he assault.”

“My father. And me. If he gives Mr. Thomassy as a reference, ask Mr. Thomassy. He’s his lawyer. He wouldn’t lie to you.”

Ed thought Mr. Fumoko was about to touch his hand. “Please, judo-karate is sport, build self-confidence, not for trouble. Only for emergency. Insurance company say no troublemakers. Bad for other students. Bad for school. I wait till questionnaire returned.”

Mr. Fumoko seemed satisfied that he had stated his case perfectly. “Okay?” he asked.

“If he gets in,” said Ed, “I quit.”

*

When Urek returned his questionnaire by mail, he lied about being arrested, but Thomassy, whose number he listed, confirmed to Mr. Fumoko that the boy was in trouble. Moreover, Mr. Thomassy made it quite clear that enrolling Urek could mean problems for the school. Mr. Fumoko didn’t want any trouble. He sent a polite, oriental turn-down letter, so discreet that Urek couldn’t figure out that he was being refused until he read it the third time. He took his mother’s paring knife and jabbed the letter to the cork bulletin board so hard, that the knife went through the cork and embedded its point in the wall behind.

Chapter 25