The last thing I remember

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sensei Mike What happened next? I asked myself. After the karate demonstration in school, I mean. After Beth came to the cafeteria and wrote her number on my hand. What happened after that? There was nothing. Nothing special, I mean. Nothing I could remember, anyway.

It was just a day. Just an ordinary day.

The truth is, after that talk with Beth, I guess I got a little blissed out, a little-how can I put it?-goofy. I remember going from class to class, doing my work and everything. But I don’t remember too many of the details. I guess it was mostly me sitting in my seat, sort of looking at my hand, sort of turning my hand this way and that, admiring the phone number written on it. Goofy, like I said.

After school, I went home for a while and did some homework. Then, just like every other Wednesday, I took my mom’s car-the Ford Explorer-and drove out to the Eastfield Mall for my karate lesson with Sensei Mike.

The karate school isn’t much to look at. It’s just a small storefront in the mall. There’s a sign over the window that says Karate Studio in black letters. That’s the only name it has.

It’s a simple set-up inside too. There’s a small anteroom where you come in and take off your shoes-there are no shoes allowed in the dojo itself. There’s a small office next to the anteroom with a desk and a computer and a phone and all that. And there’s the dojo-an open carpeted space for practicing-with a punching bag hanging in one corner, a big American flag hanging on one wall, and a wall of mirrors opposite that. Also, wherever there’s space, there’s a lot of cool swords and axes and other weapons hanging on pegs.

Sensei Mike owned the place and ran it. There were three or four other teachers who worked there, but Sensei Mike was the best. He was the coolest too. In fact, Sensei Mike was probably the coolest person I knew. He was-I don’t know-maybe thirty-five years old or something. He stood about six feet tall, slim but with broad shoulders. He had a lot of neatly combed black hair that always seemed to stay in place even when he was sparring or working out. His face was long and lean, with a lot of lines chiseled into it. He had a mustache, a real big soup-strainer that hung down over the sides of his mouth. Under the mustache, you could see there was always a sort of smile playing at the corners of his lips. The smile was in his brown eyes too. He always seemed to be laughing about something to himself.

Sensei Mike had been in the Army for a long time. He’d been in the War against Terror, fighting against the Islamic extremists both in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

“I’d still be over there,” he liked to tell us, “but I had to come back and knock some sense into all you chuckleheads.”

Actually, the truth was more complicated than that. I knew this because I looked Mike up on the Internet once and found some news stories about him. The truth was: Mike came home because he was wounded in action and had to have a piece of titanium put in his leg. The news stories said he’d been working with a task force that was helping to build a school in Afghanistan. The task force came under attack by more than a hundred Taliban fighters. Mike had to battle his way to a big.50-caliber machine gun that was mounted on an armored truck. He was wounded and surrounded by the enemy on three sides, but he used the big gun to hold them off, and the task force was saved. The president gave him a medal for it and everything-I mean, the actual president, as in the President of the United States. It was a pretty cool story. I couldn’t get Mike to talk about it, though. I tried to once. I asked him about it, but he just shrugged and said, “There’s not a soldier out there who wouldn’t do what I did and better. I just happened to be the first chuckle-head to get to the gun.”

Mike was the teacher on duty that Wednesday. After some warm-up exercises and some katas, he set me to sparring with Lou Wilson. Now, the main thing you have to understand about Lou is that Lou is big. Very big. Not very tall or anything, just about my height, but broad and thick and heavy and strong. If I had to compare him to something, it’d probably be a cement mixer. When you’re sparring with Lou and he comes at you, it’s like standing in the middle of the road while a cement mixer comes barreling your way.

That said, I’d always had good luck sparring with Lou. I generally got the better of the fight. Lou is a really nice guy, really friendly and all, but, just being honest here, you’d have to say he’s not all that strong in the brains department. Doesn’t have a lot of smarts, not in school and not when it comes to fighting. He comes at you like a cement mixer all right-and you dance out of his way and pepper him with punches and kicks. And then he comes at you like a cement mixer again and you do the same thing again. And that’s pretty much the way our sparring usually goes.

Only not today.

Now, we always try to do things safely in the dojo, and sparring’s no different. We wear soft gloves and a helmet and shin pads and, of course, a hard cup for protection. Sure, you can get bruised ribs or a fat lip on a bad day, but in general, no one’s going to hurt you too much.

The one exception to that rule would be if you were to-oh, let’s just say for example-get run over by a cement mixer. Which I was. Or at least it felt as if I were.

I’m not sure exactly how it happened. When we started out, it was the usual scenario. There I was in my sparring gear, and there was Lou in his. Sensei Mike stood between us, wearing his black gi and his black belt with four red stripes-a very high ranking. He had Lou and me face each other in the front position. We bowed karate-style to show that we respected each other and that we were working together to learn karate and not trying to do any real damage.

Then Sensei Mike said, “On guard.” We both leapt back and put up our fists in fighting position.

Sensei Mike lifted his hand between us. Then he dropped it and said, “Go!”

And, as always, here came Lou the Cement Mixer. Rumble, rumble, rumble. And I did my usual dancing out of the way, peppering him with a couple of good jabs to the side of his helmet and one sharp roundhouse kick into his stomach above his belt. And then here came Lou again, rumble, rumble, rumble. And again, I danced out of the way and hit and kicked him.

Now, mind you, the blows didn’t bother Lou any. If you wanted to bother Lou, I really think you’d have to sneak up behind him and hit him with a brick. That might annoy him a little, anyway. As it was, I got to show off my karate style-and Lou just came a-rumbling at me again.

And I remember thinking to myself: Boy, if Beth could see me now, she would be really impressed.

Then, right after that, I remember thinking, I wonder why I’m looking up at the ceiling with stars twinkling in front of my eyes and birds twittering in my ears?

As nearly as I can reconstruct it, what happened was this:

Once again, Lou came at me, rumble, rumble, rumble. Once again, I was getting ready to dance out of the way. But instead of dancing out of the way, I started thinking about Beth and how impressed she would be if she could see me dancing out of the way. Lou, finding to his delight that instead of being somewhere else I was standing in front of him thinking about being somewhere else, decided that this might be a good opportunity to throw a roundhouse right to the side of my head. Which he did. Whereupon I went down on my backside, and cue the twinkling stars and twittering birds.

Of course, I jumped back up to my feet right away- just as soon as I realized I had left them. I didn’t want Sensei Mike to think I couldn’t take a punch-even if it was a punch from a cement mixer. I started dancing around again immediately with my fists up in front of me, trying to pretend that a chorus of boings and dings wasn’t still going off inside my head.

Luckily, about two seconds after that, Sensei Mike stopped the fight. He laughed and slapped me and Lou both on our shoulders.

“All right, chuckleheads, good job. Salute the flag and go get dressed.”

Lou and I punched our gloves together-a way of shaking hands.

“Nice punch,” I said. “You really tagged me with that one.”

Under his helmet, I could see Lou beam with pride. Then we both turned and gave a karate-style bow to the American flag.

There’s a changing room at the back of the dojo, just big enough for one person. I waited for Lou to finish, then I went in and stripped my gi off and climbed back into my street clothes. There’s no shower or anything in there, so I don’t usually wash up until I get home and my mother gets a whiff of me.

When I was dressed, I walked across the dojo, carrying my karate bag. At the edge of the anteroom, I turned and gave one last bow of respect to the dojo. Then I walked out.

Lou had left already. Mike was sitting in the office behind his computer, typing up some notes.

“Thanks, Sensei,” I called in to him.

“Hey, chucklehead,” he said without looking up. “Get in here.”

I walked in and stood in front of the desk. Sensei Mike finished whatever he was typing. Then he sat back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, and looked up at me.

“How’s your gray matter?” he said. “That was a pretty good one Lou got in on you.”

“Yeah, it was a good shot, I gotta admit,” I said. I didn’t sound happy about it, and, in fact, I wasn’t. But the truth is the truth. It was a pretty good shot.

“You want to be careful with that head of yours,” Sensei Mike said. He hid his smile by bringing one hand around and smoothing his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. “Brains are more important than fists, you know. It’s no good learning karate if you get knocked stupid in the process.”

I tried to laugh it off. Sometimes you win in sparring and sometimes you lose, and you have to get used to that. But-again, the truth is the truth-I don’t much like losing. I don’t suppose anyone does. “I just forgot to duck, that’s all,” I said.

“Sure,” said Sensei Mike, still smoothing his ’stache.

“I guess you just got distracted by all your math homework.”

I didn’t know what he meant. “Math homework?”

“Yeah,” said Mike. He swiveled back and forth in his chair, smoothing his mustache, hiding his smile. “You must have a lot of math homework, seeing as you ran out of room in your notebook and had to start writing the numbers on your hand. I guess it was thinking about the numbers on your hand that distracted you.”

I looked stupidly down at my hand for a second. Then I got it, and I felt the color rising up into my face.

Sensei Mike laughed. “Don’t sweat it, chucklehead. I’m just giving you a hard time.”

I rolled my eyes, embarrassed.

“The fact is,” said Sensei Mike, “you’ve been distracted around here a lot lately. I guess I was just wondering: is that all about… your math homework?”

I shrugged. “I guess so,” I said.

“Nothing else.”

I shrugged again. “Well, there’s a lot of stuff. You know, school and whatnot.”

“You gonna tell me about it or am I gonna have to beat it out of you?”

“Well…” I wagged my head back and forth. I didn’t really want to talk to him about it. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it. But before I knew it, I heard myself saying, “There is one thing…”

I was sorry the minute the words came out of my mouth. I was sorry, and, weirdly enough, I was kind of happy at the same time. Because there was this one thing on my mind that I’d wanted to bring up to Sensei Mike for a long time. It was this secret ambition I had that I hadn’t told anybody. The reason I hadn’t told anybody was because I wasn’t sure it was possible. If there was anyone who would know, it was Sensei Mike.

Now the thing about Sensei Mike is: he tells you the truth. He’s not one of these happy-talk guys who’ll say what you want to hear or what he thinks you’re supposed to hear because he read it in some article or something. He’ll tell you his best opinion, flat out, without mincing words. So I was happy because I wanted to know his opinion. But I was sorry because I was afraid of what his opinion might be.

So I took a deep breath. I went into a side pocket of my karate bag and wrestled out a battered old paperback book I kept hidden there. I’d found it in a box at a fundraising book sale they’d had at the public library. I’d been reading it and reading it in secret for weeks now, cover to cover and back again. I kept it in my karate bag because sometimes my mother goes through my school bag to clean out the half-eaten lunches and so on. But she leaves my karate bag alone. I didn’t want her to find it because, like I said before, I knew it would drive her crazy with fear and I’d never hear the end of it. And I knew if I asked my father about it, he’d tell my mother, so I couldn’t talk to him either.

I held the book out to Sensei Mike. It was called: To Be a U.S. Air Force Pilot.

Sensei Mike took the book in one hand and glanced down at it.

“What do you think?” I said. “You think I could make it as a fighter pilot in the Air Force?”

Sensei Mike pulled the book close to himself. Leaning back in the chair, swiveling back and forth, he opened it, paged through it.

“Cool,” he murmured. “Cool jets.”

He glanced through a few more pages, then shut the book and held it out to me. I took it and stuffed it back down into my karate bag.

I stood there, nervous, waiting to hear the answer to my question.

“You wanna be an Air Force pilot?” he asked me.

I managed to nod.

“Really tough. Really tough training. Very selective, very elite. A lot of guys don’t make it. Even some of the best. Just not that many slots open.”

I went on nodding. I already knew all that.

Sensei Mike folded his hands on the knot of his black belt. “You know, a lot of guys, teachers and so on-they’d be happy to tell you that you can be anything you want to be, anything you set your mind on. You go to them, they’ll tell you you should feel good about yourself, that you’re special and all that stuff.”

“I know that, Sensei Mike. That’s why I didn’t go to them. I asked you ’cause I want the truth.”

“The truth is: you can’t be anything you want to be. All that talk is garbage. I mean, I could try till my ears smoked, but I couldn’t write a symphony-not a good one, anyway. I couldn’t throw a baseball ninety-five miles an hour or hit one out of a major-league park. I want to do all those things, but it doesn’t matter how hard I try-I just wasn’t given those abilities.” Sensei Mike came forward in his chair, leaned forward, and looked up at me hard. “But this is also the truth: if you try your best and better than your best, and work and push yourself until you think you can’t go on and then push yourself some more-then-then if you have a little bit of luck on your side-then you can be all the good things God made you to be.”

“Well, I’d do that,” I said. “You know I would. You’ve seen me. I’d bust my chops for this.”

“Yeah, you would, that’s true.”

“So what do you think? Could I do it?”

He turned it over in his mind one more second. Then he said, “Absolutely. With your brains, your reflexes, and the way you work… assuming you meet the physical requirements, the eyesight and all that… I think you got Ace written all over you.” He pointed a finger at me. “You’ll still be a chucklehead-but you’ll be an Ace chucklehead.”

“I don’t know, Mike,” I said. “You gotta get a congressman to nominate you and everything.”

“Don’t sweat it. I know plenty of congressmen. I know some Air Force brass too. Finish your education, pull down the big grades, and you’ll get your shot, I promise you. And hey… meanwhile, try to keep your mind on what you’re doing. You can’t fly jets if Lou Wilson splatters your brains all over the dojo.”

When I walked out of the karate studio that day, I felt like I was about ten feet tall, a giant among men looking down at the world from high above. My mind was racing over all kinds of things, over everything that had happened that day. The karate demonstration and the way all the kids shouted and applauded. Beth coming into the cafeteria the way she did, and the way we talked and she wrote on my hand and everything. And now, Sensei Mike: I think you got Ace written all over you…

I had this feeling-this incredible feeling-that it was actually possible that I could turn my daydreams into reality.

It was just like Sensei Mike said. My mind was totally in the clouds. I wasn’t paying attention. I was completely unprepared for what happened next.

It was getting toward evening now, around five o’clock or so. On the far side of the mall, in the gap between the Pizza Kitchen and the movie theater-beyond where the movie theater parking was-I could see the sun turning red as it reached the tops of the far hills. I took a deep breath of the cool September air. I wished I could get in my mom’s car and drive out to those hills and look out from the top of them toward the setting sun and see my future out there-see what was going to happen and what it would be like, and end all the suspense I felt inside me.

I guess it’s a good thing I couldn’t do that. If I had seen what my future was really going to be like, I would’ve gone home that night and hidden under the bed.

Anyway, I had to get back for dinner. Plus I still had my history paper to write.

So I started walking across the parking lot. I’d parked the car in back of Paulson’s, the mall supermarket. That part of the lot wasn’t the nicest place in the mall. It was where the garbage Dumpsters were. It was also where the homeless guys hung out-the crazy ones and the alcoholic ones who pawed through the Dumpsters for food. Kids hung out there sometimes too. Everyone knew there were some checkout people in Paulson’s who would sell you beer without checking your ID. So sometimes kids bought a beer in Paulson’s and drank it in the back by the Dumpsters after the police patrols had passed through.

What I mean is: that rear area wasn’t a great place to be, especially after dark. But on a busy day like today, when the parking lot was practically full, it was easier to find a space back there because the shopping moms avoided it. Anyway, I knew I’d be out of karate before dark, and I wasn’t worried. I went down the narrow lane next to Paulson’s and came around the back. I reached my car. Opened the hatch. Threw in my karate bag.

Then I stopped. Stopped with my hand on the hatch door, about to push it down.

I had lifted my eyes to scan the area, make sure nothing threatening was going on. As I was turning away, I spotted a group of kids slouching against a brick wall near the Dumpsters. There were three of them. They all had paper bags in their hands. They were lifting the paper bags to their mouths and lowering them again. I knew there were beer bottles in the bags.

One of the kids was Alex Hauser. He was glaring at me. He lifted his paper bag to his lips and lowered it again. I waved to him. He didn’t smile or wave back. He just tapped one of his friends on the shoulder. He pointed me out to him.

With that, the three kids pushed their way off the wall. They tossed their paper bags into one of the Dumpsters. They started coming my way, with Alex in the lead.

They didn’t look friendly.