Lost In Place (10 page)

Michael had chosen the Allied and Axis teams not on the basis of any aptitude any of us might have for leadership, running speed or stealth, but according to how strong our BB guns were. The Allies had the good guns, operated either by pump action or, in one case, a CO
₂
cartridge semiautomatic, whereas the Axis powers wielded “My Very First BB Gun” Daisy spring-type rifles—in other words, pieces of shit. If I was lucky enough to hit one of the Allied soldiers, my BB would bounce off his nylon windbreaker without even raising a welt. When
one of the Allies hit one of us, on the other hand, everybody knew it from the sound of our wretched squealing.

We held these war games on weekends, usually six boys to a team. Our most serious mishap occurred when one boy attempted a daring flanking attack by sneaking across an ice-covered lake behind enemy lines. Peeking over the wall of our fort, we watched him as he moved stealthily across the lake in a half crouch. One moment he was there, the next moment we heard a crack, a splash, and he was gone. He managed to get himself out of the water, but lost his gun and nearly froze to death when his captors insisted that he stay locked in “prisoner-of-war camp”—an abandoned Chevy Nova—until the battle was over. That was when I first discovered that people really did turn blue when they were cold.

Fortunately, before any of us lost an eye or worse, the commander in chief of the Allies developed a new interest. One of his brothers had brought home a .22 pistol, and that was where the rest of us bowed out. I saw Michael only once during this phase of his development; the Golden Horde had found an abandoned station wagon and driven it out to one of the lakes for an adventure. I’d heard about it beforehand at school—most Dempsey events were publicized well in advance—and got to the lake just in time to see them driving the station wagon, by now shot full of holes, at full speed over ditches and into boulders. In a rare display of concern for safety, they were all wearing football helmets. The finale came when they got out of the car, pointed it at the lake, placed a cinder block on the gas pedal and jammed it into gear. To this day, fishermen get their hooks stuck on its submerged body.

My next series of encounters with Michael occurred in
the sixth grade, when I heard that he and his brothers were building gas-engined model airplanes and solid-fuel model rockets and sending them off into space from their back porch. Once again, hoping to become friendly with Michael, I made a sacrifice: I persuaded my parents to buy me a small model rocket, which I worked on for several days. When the last fin had been glued on and the last decal had dried, I took it over to Dempsey headquarters, and sure enough, three of his brothers and a whole bunch of older boys were spread out on the grass in lawn chairs, drinking beer from a keg and using an electric launchpad to send the rockets up. I handed my rocket to Michael and he laughed. “This dinky thing? Come on, let’s give it to Frank. He’ll customize it.” He banged on the door of the garage, and when it opened there stood the fourth Dempsey brother, Frank, who had long black hair and a Zapata-style mustache, and who could bench-press over three hundred pounds. He must have been sixteen at the time. Frank was the brother who could tell you from memory virtually anything about any major European battle occurring within the last thousand years. Michael handed him the rocket and I swelled with pride. It was my first personal audience with one of the Immortals; I felt like a buck private having his rifle examined by General Patton. Frank looked at my rocket solemnly, ran his fingers over his mustache and finally said, “This’ll never reach Berlin, gentlemen. The free world hangs in the balance—we must act immediately.”

He led us through their garage and into a dark room known as the Laboratory, which held his weight-lifting equipment and explosives. He put my rocket on the workbench and pulled its solid-fuel engine out from the tube. “Mr. Von Braun doesn’t use these, you can be sure of
that,” he said, tossing the tiny engine into a wastebasket. The man at the hobby shop who sold it to me had said it was the largest engine designed for that scale rocket. Frank opened up a wooden chest filled with rocket engines, gas-powered model engines, fireworks, M80s (quarter sticks of dynamite) and a few unspecified devices rigged with underwater fuses. Pulling out a huge rocket engine identified as Big Bertha, he attempted to insert it into my rocket but without success. “This will require a minor technical adjustment,” he said, grinning. He clamped my rocket to the desk and used a pair of heavy shears to slit open the bottom. He managed to stuff the huge engine inside, wrapped black electrical tape around the rocket to firm everything up, and then took it out to the launchpad.

The rest of the Golden Horde and their foot soldiers were sitting around the keg with no shirts on and big plastic cups full of brew propped on the grass next to them. “This is strictly experimental,” Frank announced. “Everybody behind the ramparts.” He was referring to a pile of old tires and garbage cans set up near the porch. Once everyone had found proper cover, Frank handed me the electrical switch that would ignite my rocket. “The young lieutenant will have the honor of sending his rocket into space,” he said with dignified gravity. There was one thing about the Dempsey brothers that you had to admire: they all had a terrific sense of ceremony.

“You mean blowing it to smithereens,” someone yelled out from behind the ramparts, but Frank didn’t crack a smile.

“Give us a countdown, Lieutenant,” he advised me, then took his place behind a car.

I counted down and pressed the button. A huge flame
shot out of the rocket—not unlike what had happened to GI Joe a year earlier—and the rocket blasted off the pad, but then, in a curlicue of smoke and fire about ten feet in diameter, hooked right over, dived into the ground and exploded.

“Heeeeehah!” the D brothers and their friends yelled, clinking their beer mugs together in a grand toast and moving back to their lawn chairs. I was walking over to the smoking hole in the ground that had only moments before been a carefully painted rocket when Michael rushed up alongside me, patted me on the back and said, “It’s too bad about that, but it was death with honor! Honor was maintained, even to the ultimate sacrifice!” Glad that for a change he was patting me on the back instead of punching me in the stomach, I decided the loss of the rocket was worth it.

At last I had won Michael’s approval, but was not able to enjoy it for long. Two days after the sacrifice of my rocket I rode my bicycle to his house and sat out on the back porch with him while he blew up a model tank submerged in an inflatable swimming pool. So that was what the underwater-fuse devices were for. Suddenly an older boy, with a shock of white hair and freckles, whom I had never seen before got on my bicycle without a word and started playing roughly with the gear lever. “He’s wrecking your bike,” Michael said. Realizing that I had to act or lose my new status as someone worthy of his company, I called out to the older boy, “Hey, cut it out!”

The boy stopped fiddling with the gears, sized me up and laughed out loud. “Big talk, little man,” he said, and, as if to show me how unimpressed he was, started moving the gears even more roughly than before. Against all better judgment, but emboldened by my new alliance with
the youngest member of the Immortals, I shouted after him, “Big man, little talk!” I turned and smiled nervously at Michael, hoping he would be pleased, but he was pointing behind me. Before I could turn around I felt myself being lifted by the collar and being spun around. The older boy held me in the air for a few seconds, put his face right up against mine and said, “That was a big mistake, punk.” Then he threw me off the porch.

I landed on my arm with a loud crack. The boy jumped down, grabbed my busted arm and started twisting it to make sure I got the message. I think my screaming must have taken him by surprise, because as I recall he departed pretty quickly. The result was that I had to wear a cast for six weeks and Michael lost all interest in me because I obviously had to be some kind of idiot not to know the first rule of preteen suburban anarchy: Never provoke people who are bigger than you.

Given this background, it should come as no surprise that I viewed Michael’s appearance at my lakeside practice site as a stroke of misfortune. I expected him to challenge me to a fight instantly; I was on his turf displaying combat skills, so what else could I expect? Instead his eyes narrowed to slits and he asked, “You know karate?”

“Oh … um … Actually it’s kung fu.”

“Yeah? Where’d you learn that?”

“A place called the Chinese Boxing Institute.”

Michael’s face registered interest mixed with skepticism. “You study with Sensei O’Keefe?” he asked.

“Yeah.” How did he know about Sensei O’Keefe? The Chinese Boxing Institute was three towns away.

“Lemme see some kicks.”

I did my best series of front, side, roundhouse and
jumping spinning back kicks, and to my surprise and delight Michael looked impressed.

“One of my brothers took lessons with that guy for a couple of months,” Michael said, still eyeing me suspiciously. “He quit, though. He said he didn’t feel like getting killed. O’Keefe killed some guy in a fight, you know. He had to do time for it.”

I couldn’t believe it:
I was learning kung fu from a man who had intimidated one of the Dempsey brothers!
Instead of shocking or worrying me, the news that Sensei might indeed have killed someone only added to my sense of having suddenly become very powerful. It was intoxicating beyond my wildest dreams.

Michael asked to see some of the forms. I noticed as I was going through the routines that instead of being nervous when he watched me, I felt as if a few thousand watts of power had just been allocated to me through the soles of my feet. I had never done the forms so well. Michael, his jaw set with determination, announced that he was going to start lessons right away.

Two days later Michael came with me for his first lesson at the Institute. After he had filled out the required forms, I led him into the office to introduce him to Sensei O’Keefe. The Master looked over the paperwork with a bored expression on his face and gave Michael a receipt for his check. Just as we turned to leave he asked, “So how’s your brother?”

“Fine,” Michael answered, visibly stiffening. It was hard being the smallest Immortal; no matter where he went, he found himself in the shadow of giants.

“Good fighter. Tell him I said hello,” the Master said,
and that was that. Michael looked annoyed, but it was a far more propitious beginning than mine had been.

In the dressing room Michael put on his brother’s oversized, faded black karate uniform and tied a red bandanna on his head to keep his hair out of his eyes. One of the men who had made fun of my eggplant costume several months before took a look at Michael’s raggedy outfit and said, “Check this out—it’s Long John Silver! Where’s the eyepatch, pirate?”

Michael said nothing, but I noticed a certain glazed expression come into his eyes. It made them look empty, like a shark’s. He didn’t take to teasing as well as I did.

After we had done our punching and kicking drills, we moved directly to the Circle of Fighting. I’d had to wait several weeks before being allowed to spar, but Sensei, who was a keen judge of character, sensed that Michael was ripe for combat. After a few lackluster matches, including mine, where, as usual, I got knocked right out of the Circle at least three times, Michael was called on. His assigned opponent was the man who had teased him about his bandanna; Sensei O’Keefe, who I could have sworn was grinning underneath his mustache, truly seemed to know everything.

Michael didn’t do much at the beginning except block; he seemed unsure of how to proceed. This was his first day at the school, inevitably he was going to be compared with one of his brothers again, and he was facing a grown man who had been studying kung fu for several years. O’Keefe got impatient quickly: “Come on, Dempsey, don’t fuck around. We don’t need the humility act.
Fight
, for Chrissake.”

Magic words.
You’ll remember this bandanna
, Michael
seemed to be thinking as he flung himself at the surprised older man. It was like seeing a mongoose attack a bear, where the mongoose apparently has no idea, or just doesn’t care, that he doesn’t stand a chance. He punched and kicked at the man with heroic savagery, and nearly backed him out of the Circle, but his opponent got over his surprise in time to gather his wits and get very annoyed. All pretense to giving the kid a break dropped, and he gave Michael a terrible beating, but a Dempsey never gives up. He kept rushing at the man, only to get kicked in the ribs, punched in the face or shoved backward. At last the man did a foot sweep that sent Michael flying through the air and landing hard on his elbow, on a thin rug stretched over a concrete floor. When he stood up he was clutching the elbow and wincing.

“Keep fighting!” O’Keefe yelled. He had a look on his face so intense that it could have melted steel.

“I can’t move my arm,” Michael said.

“Use the other, then!” O’Keefe shot back, and Michael obeyed instantly. Out of breath and with tears streaming from his eyes, he kept yelling and charging at the man only to be repulsed with a flurry of blows. His elbow was so swollen that it looked as if a tennis ball had been sewn under the skin. At last Sensei boomed, “All right! Bow to me! Bow to each other!” With that ritual out of the way, he told Michael to go clean himself up and get some ice out of the freezer to put on his elbow.

When Michael was out of earshot, Sensei grinned at his surprised opponent, who was visibly relieved that the mongoose had been called off. “Tough little motherfucker, huh?” O’Keefe asked, laughing. Then he grew serious, pointed toward the changing room and frowned at the rest of us. “Mark my words, that kid is going to wear
the black belt someday. Every man in this room could learn from that kid.”

Bill, the granite-faced man who had been my personal savior the night I came for my first lesson, raised his eyebrows and opened his eyes fully. It was the most dramatic change of expression I had ever seen from him. “That’s your friend?” he asked me.