Where the dead lay

SEVEN

Aurelio Santos jogs up Cumberland and slows to walk the last block. He crosses the parking area and be-bops toward his studio, quietly singing “Chuva, Suor e Cerveja.” His keys click and rattle as he spins the key ring around his finger, ready to let himself in. When he reaches the door and inserts the key, the bolt doesn’t turn, it is already open. Estranho, he thinks, sure he’d locked it the night before. He walks inside and is hit across the back of his head, a solid blow. The pain comes in a hot rush that makes him see white. He tries to keep his balance, reaching for the chair, but falls through it, crashing into the table next to it and knocking it over as he hits the ground. Knees to armpits. In a rush of instinct, he rolls to his back and curls into a tight ball, finding the position that’s second nature to him. He spins on his back to face his attacker. In the dim morning light he makes out a few others coming from behind the first one. One holds a large black shotgun. That’s what I was hit with, Aurelio registers, and then launches out a low sideways kick that lands on his attacker’s patella. The man goes down. Aurelio seizes the opportunity to kip up to his feet. But the blow to the back of his head has done damage and he doesn’t land solidly. He totters to the side, getting hold of the second man, but not for a clean throw. Instead, he lurches forward, knocking the man into the wall, caving it in. Then more white flashes through his eyes, as he is gun-butted in the back of the head for a second time. He feels himself falling, falling through darkness…

Behr’s feet pounded the pavement, rage shooting up through the soles of his shoes, as he hoofed it up Saddle Hill. He wore a weighted vest that added thirty pounds to the effort. The vest was a gift from Susan, who noticed the abrasions on his shoulders from the loaded backpack he used to wear when doing roadwork. It does sit better, Behr had to admit of the vest, though it wasn’t heavy enough for him to really get into the red zone. Nothing, he’d found, was as tough as extended jiu-jitsu sparring. The sets could go on for ten, twenty, thirty minutes without a break and demanded strength, cardio, and lactic acid recovery, especially when he rolled with Aurelio. Though Aurelio weighed south of two hundred pounds, the man had had a special relationship with gravity. He knew how to make himself heavy. When Aurelio established side control, Behr felt as if a car were parked on top of him.

He thought back to the beginning of his training almost a year and a half ago. Back then he felt as weak as a newborn kitten when on the mat with Aurelio. The strength disparity between them seemed like ten to one. It was disturbing. Especially since he knew he could easily out-lift his teacher when it came to weights. It was leverage that made the difference. As he learned the techniques, though, Behr felt the disparity in strength start to level out.

You try to stay up on your feet, but fights end up on the ground. It was a truth, and one he’d known for a long time, but it took him a long time to finally accept it. Between his hand-to-hand training at police academy, his work on patrol, and his time going hard at boxing, Muay Thai, and the like, Behr was aware that despite trying for precision with punches, kicks, and restraining holds, almost all real-world physical confrontations ended up on the floor. They weren’t tidy and organized like in the movies, but messy and savage and full of awkward moves, strange noises, and even odors.

In the scuffles he’d had while on the force, and since, Behr had relied on his size, strength, and rusty high school wrestling chops to sort things out when they went to the deck. He tried not to give it too much thought, just like he tried not to think about how much harder he had to work in the gym just to maintain as the years ticked by. He didn’t want to dwell on a future where he kept getting older and smaller and weaker, while the guys he came up against kept getting younger and bigger and stronger. Then, one night, he found himself in a bar watching an Ultimate Fighting Championship match on pay-per-view and saw a formidable striker square off against an experienced grappler. The striker danced around the ring snapping dangerous punches into the air for a moment before the grappler ducked one, shot the striker’s legs, took him down, got the man’s back, and choked him out in under a minute. The striker had been completely defenseless. Countless hours of intense punch and kick training had been neutralized in one second, and Behr couldn’t deny it any longer. As the bar crowd grumbled over how lame the main event had turned out, the winning fighter did his postfight interview and thanked his training partners and teachers in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The next day Behr found the academy in the phone book and dropped by to watch a class.

He walked in to see a medium-sized but fit teacher with a wide smile, thick curly black hair, and an almost unreal energy on the mat taking a small group of students through break-falls that day. The man noticed Behr near the door and beckoned him out onto the mat.

“You want to join, huh?” he asked, a lilting Brazilian slurry under his English.

Behr shrugged. “Maybe.”

“You look like you in shape. You take me down, eh?” he offered Behr. “Off my feet and we done, maybe you don’t need the jiu-jitsu.” The man stood there barefoot, in surfing shorts and a tight nylon T-shirt. He smiled, bright white teeth shining.

Behr had earned his way through college pushing like-sized and bigger men than himself-men as strong as draft horses- around football fields, so he didn’t hesitate for long before nodding and removing his watch, jacket, shoes, and socks. But this average-sized man proved immobile on first grasp. They locked up in a collar and elbow clinch and struggled around in a circle. Behr was immediately impressed with the man’s balance, which was better than his own, and the smile that didn’t leave his face as he yelled merry encouragement to Behr all the while.

Finally, deciding extended duration wasn’t to his advantage, Behr managed to wrap his arms around the instructor in a body lock, lifted him in the air, and slammed him to the mat. Behr expected a wheezing bag of cracked ribs to be writhing at his feet as the result, but instead found that the man wasn’t hurt or even stunned. He hadn’t really hit the ground at all, but instead had held on to Behr’s arm. He had also gotten his legs around Behr’s arm and shoulder, locked his feet against Behr’s neck, and bridged his hips in a way that hyperextended the elbow and caused Behr to drop to his knees and submit with repeated taps to the man’s leg before the joint could be snapped clean through.

“Welcome, huh,” Aurelio said, letting off the pressure and patting Behr on the back. As the awestruck students went back to their practice, he climbed to his feet. “You strong. You be good, eh,” he said, still smiling. Behr joined up on the spot.

At least that’s what Behr had thought he’d said. For the first three months he had trained there, Behr couldn’t understand a word Aurelio was saying. It wasn’t just the heavy accent, but also what the man was teaching. Using an opponent’s own weight, strength, momentum, and intention against him was not natural to Behr, who typically met force with force. In his life if he ended up facing a brick wall it was a head-on affair until either he or the wall crumbled.

Case in point, Behr thought, grinding his way up Saddle Hill.

But bit by bit, four mornings a week, Aurelio’s teachings had begun to sink in. By the end of each hour at the academy he’d be physically shot, bottomed out and shaky, the proud owner of fresh mat burns, bruises, various painful joint and tendon surprises, and often a wrenched neck thanks to Aurelio’s viselike chokes. The knowledge he’d been gaining sure didn’t come cheap. Before the sessions were over he’d know helplessness, futility, outright failure, and invariably feel tiny bits of information seep down into the deep reaches of muscle memory, the only place they’d do any good if needed in a situation.

He never did get a submission against Aurelio in open sparring. That moment was at least a good five or six years away with steady training, if ever. After all, Aurelio was world class, while he was just a mule. But recently he’d started to take steps-at least the domination wasn’t total anymore. Behr had also seen the pounds peel off his frame as he trained. Everything that wasn’t muscle stripped away until he was as rawboned as he’d been as a seventeen-year-old farm boy. And a certain kinship grew between them too, like some kind of hardy mountain plant that didn’t need tending. When it came to teachers and trainers and the like, it was either hate or this kinship that motivated him. Behr had experienced both, and reflecting on past coaches and police captains, the latter worked a whole lot better for him. He and Aurelio had only gone out for beers and to watch MMA events a few times. Other than that it was just the four mornings a week on the mat. But that was all it took. The bond grew out of the effort and the pain, the stoic lack of complaint in the face of it, in the sharing of knowledge, and as vague as it sounded, in the spirit, Behr concluded, reaching the top of the hill for his eighth rep. After about six months of training he realized he’d made his first friend, save for a client a while back, in fifteen years.

Upon arriving at the top of the hill for the tenth time, Behr bent at the waist and grabbed his shorts. Sweat rolled off of him onto the road like a concentrated rain. He felt his right lower leg barking from a knee bar Aurelio had put him in two days earlier.

The hospitals, he thought suddenly. He’d check the hospitals for certain likely injuries that came along with facing someone like Aurelio: a dislocated elbow, snapped wrist, a broken jaw. Behr straightened and began busting it down the hill toward home.