Once You Break a Knuckle (2 page)

When he shook hands he clasped them with both of his. —You made it.

My old man let his duffle bag slide off his shoulder. —I thought about staying home.

Herman pushed him. My old man caught the wrist and tugged. Herman beamed. —You are nervous is all, he said, and nudged me with his elbow. —Your dad is a little scared, just like you were.

—I was never scared, I told him. My old man tapped his fist against his palm.

—When do you leave? Herman said.

My old man eased his sunglasses off his face and held them in front of his chest. I thought about calling him Agent Crease, but Herman wouldn't get it.

—Tomorrow morning. My flight is at ten.

Herman ran his fingers against the grain of his barbed-wire beard. —You will enjoy it.

—I hope so.

—Make sure you check out their judo clubs. It is very popular.

—It won't be the same.

Herman clapped my old man on the shoulder. —It will be better.

He stood there with one hand on my old man's shoulder and peered up at him. The white cotton around his stonemason's fingers dimpled. He smiled. —But I must go. They are forcing me to ref. We will talk later. Before you go.

Then he wheeled around and moped to the
joseki
, the administrative table, where he was accosted by a pack of men in blazers. They shoved a dress tie at him.

Young
judoka
rampaged around the mats, climbed on the bleachers, shoved each other down and called it practice. Somewhere in this mess of bobbing heads and white belts were the ones I was supposed to coach. A kid I recognized came running off the mat with wet circles around his eyes. He accused another kid of punching him. I told him he could complain when his head hangs off backward.

My old man smiled beneath his moustache. He had put his sunglasses back on.

THE
JOSEKI
SUMMONED
me over the loudspeaker. I was screaming like a bookie at a pit-bull fight because the kid I was coaching kept charging his opponent. The other coach – a redneck named Ferman who made his
judoka
call him Sir – was yelling to his kid to use my kid's momentum against him.

I picked my way through the
judoka
rimming each mat and presented myself to the
joseki
. Herman was there with
a rolled-up schedule in one hand and someone's misplaced green belt in the other. He told the girl at the table that he had been reffing for the last four hours and wanted a break. She shook her head and shrugged because she really had no say in the matter.

—Sensei, I said. —You called?

He threw the green belt at the girl and tucked the schedule into his blazer. —Will, he said. —Nobody's in your division.

—So split one.

—There's nobody to fight. Under seventy-three is empty. You win gold.

—I want to fight.

—That is too bad.

—It's the last tournament before my old man goes to Kosovo, I said.

Herman tapped his chin with his thumb. —I can put you in the next division. I can put you in under eighty-one. What did you weigh in at?

—Sixty-eight.

He licked his fingers and flipped through registration sheets. —No, eighty-one is also empty. Under ninety. We will put you in under ninety.

—I might as well fight my old man.

Herman fumbled for the schedule in his chest pocket. He held it out in front of him at arm's-length, tilted it sideways. —He is in the senior open division. It is him and one other
shodan
.

—Put me in.

—It is the senior division.

—I know.

Herman crumpled the paper up and shoved it back into his blazer. He was the only person at this entire tournament who would accept this idea. We approached the head table and Herman asked the girl to pencil me in. She told him that she couldn't do that without the consent of the competitors in the category. I told her she could tell the other guy but for God's sake not my old man. She told me it was against policy. Herman told her for God's sake not his old man. He had the green belt in hand again and he brandished it at her. She paged the other guy to the head table.

Judo tournaments grow more intense as they continue. Tottering kids give way to adolescents with a degree of skill, white-belt wrestlers give way to teenagers with the competitive edge. It took hours for the tournament to progress to the masters and the seniors – the old guys who rub A535 onto their biceps and calves after each fight.
Joseki
called my old man's division to standby.

He asked if I'd help him warm up. I told him no problem and he looked at me funny. We started with
uchikomi
and a light
randori
– repetition of technique and a little sparring. He asked how the coaching was and I bitched about it. I bitched about not being able to fight. He told me there were lots of tournaments.

Joseki
called, —On deck: Dan Simmons and John Crease.

My old man and I finished warming up. I grabbed him a red sash and told him to put it on. He'd been to dozens
of tournaments but never fought in one before, so he was familiar with the details, but things are always different doing than watching. Whoever's name is called second wears the red sash so the referees can identify him.

The Dan Simmons fellow was a black belt in his mid-twenties. Short, clean-shaven, straight hair – he looked like a military cadet who pumped iron to get stronger, not better looking. Probably weighed thirty pounds less than my old man. I watched him do some
uchikomi
against the wall and informed my old man that he would probably try a
seo nage
, a shoulder throw. I told my old man not to be scared. He said if I didn't stop patronizing him he'd make me pay. I warned that idle threats spawn malicious foes. He told me not to quote Shakespeare.

Joseki
called my old man and Dan Simmons as “now fighting.” I wished him luck.

It was a long, brutal fight. Dan Simmons tried a few tricks by swapping to a left-handed grip midway through. This lost him the match because an opposite grip only works if you are stronger than the other guy, since you're both grappling for the same lapel, and one person is left clutching a paltry piece of fabric on the outside of the shoulder. My old man blocked his
seo nage
with a display of brute force. Dan Simmons was fast – he was young – and he expected to win the fight that way, but my old man is not as slow as he looks. He stepped around Dan Simmons's sweeping legs, his bobbing knees, and though he didn't throw him, my old man, at the end of the match, won by decision.

All in all, a decent first-ever fight.

My old man dabbed his forehead with a yellowed training towel. He squirted water into his mouth from a Judo B.C. water bottle that read:
No Pain, No Gain
. Five straight minutes against a guy half his age was enough to make him see that he was not as young as he remembered. He placed his forearms on his thighs and leaned forward. His back rose and fell with every breath.

Joseki
called the two “now fighting” names over the loudspeaker. Then: —On deck, John Crease and Will Crease.

Maybe I'm dramatizing, but the crowd quieted – a third of them, after all, were from our club – and the lights flickered, and my old man lifted his head from his position of crumple and fatigue. He looked at me and I could hear him telling me how I would pay for this when he was a little rested and not as sweaty and after he'd rubbed on the A535. Herman ran toward us to watch the fight. He had that same green belt in his hand.

Then my old man smiled. He dropped his head between his knees and then threw it back and chuckled.

The kids on the mat finished fighting. They bowed off.
Joseki
called: —Now fighting: John Crease and Will Crease.

I stepped up. I donned the red sash. My old man stood and placed his hands on his hips and bent backward. I did my customary hop and slapped the outsides of my thighs. He didn't have a customary opening because this was his first tournament. The ref motioned for us to enter the mat. We bowed and moved to the first line, bowed again
and stepped forward. I could see the rise and fall of his chest, the sweat beading on his forehead near the border of his hair. I could almost hear the whistle of his breath through his nostrils. On the sidelines I didn't hear anyone yelling. I didn't look. Never look.

The referee yelled
hajime
.

We are both right-handed. We are both standard grip fighters. I tried to catch his right in my left but he was fast and his massive hand, those massive fingers, curled around my lapel. You only become fully aware of a person's
measure
when you fight him, as though this most base of human activity is the standard by which all people are judged. I clasped his lapel, the sleeve of his
gi
, could sense his patient grip, the complete absence of slack in his arms.

Watching judo is watching two people move in circles until one falls down.

I kicked at his feet a couple times, tried to hook his ankle for a lame win. This pissed him off and he kicked me right back. He was solid and he outweighed me. I tugged, hard, on his lapel and his head bobbed down. I tried to keep him bent over but he didn't like it. He straightened and there wasn't a damn thing I could do to prevent it.

He tugged me and I moved in whichever direction he wanted. He tried to trip me and I stepped over it. Speed and balance. The Gentle Way. I reacted, my feet
fwa-thump
ing on the mat, hooked at his legs, the excess length of our belts whipping around our hips and the red sash some rogue colour among the black and brown. He
tugged me again and I moved with it so he put himself off balance backward. This was judo – this was using his momentum and his force against him. Then I was doing my
harai ogoshi
, my Sweeping Hip Throw, and I had all two hundred and twenty pounds of him pinnacled on the fulcrum of my hip.

This was it. He was tired and old and in the air. I was fresh and young and the balls of my feet were balanced on the mat, my knees bent and my calves tensed and quivering. If I threw him hard enough, if I hurt him, just a little – a sprained wrist, bruised rib, minor concussion – he would miss his flight. He would not go to Kosovo. He would stay in Invermere away from the snipers and the land mines, and he would fight me again.

But then I stopped. I was stopped. He brought his policeman's arms down in a bear hug and my balance disappeared. My momentum slouched away. He rag-dolled me into the air and then I was on the ground, pinned beneath his weight, and the referee raised his arm halfway to full, yelled
waza ari
, half-point.

I tried to twist before he could lock it in. His hands found each other and I could hear someone on the sidelines yelling,
SQUEEZE
. He tucked his head down against mine and his sweat streaked against my cheek. Sourness, the split of his lapels. The referee yelled
osaekomi
– hold down started. I couldn't budge him. I hooked his head with my foot and tried to leverage him back, but he just clenched his teeth against the heel in his face. Pain is only weakness leaving the body.

The horn sounded. Twenty seconds done. The referee called
ippon
and my old man's arms slackened. I lay on the ground and stared at the rafters of the gymnasium. A pair of sneakers hung over a metal beam. People on the sidelines laughed and cheered. Herman stroked his Austrian beard, the green belt discarded. Of course it is not fitting that the son should defeat the father.

MY DAD WOULD
go to Kosovo. He would be shot by a Serbian man while apprehending him for spousal abuse, something he was doing only because the Kosovo police were short-handed. The bullet would enter his torso just above the second rib on his left side and puncture the lung, and he would feel it compress into a ball the size of a discarded tissue. His fellows would gun the Serbian down, rush my old man to the hospital. They would reinflate his lung and he'd recover.

He would keep the bullet. It is not an easy thing to look at.

Even the referee smiled. I stayed on the ground. My old man laboured to his feet and reached down and I caught his hand. He hoisted me up. He patted my back. The referee awarded him the match and we bowed off the mat.

—Dammit, old man, I said.

—Someday, boy, he said, and grinned, the two of us alone in that roaring gym.

THE PERSISTENCE

The morning he decided to put things back together, Ray walked five kilometres along the highway in the hours when everything was grey except the mountains lightening in the east. It was one of those mean days in November – sub-zero, wet – so he couldn't wear a scarf or a ski mask because his breath would condense on the wool and freeze, and then he might as well have been breathing an arctic wind. It was still dark, five-thirty, but the sky over the Rockies had reddened, which meant today might be one of those days he'd carry with him to the grave – red sky in the morning, sailor's warning.

Ray drew a cigarette from his chest pocket and fumbled it in gloved fingers. He had four, maybe five left, and too little money for another pack. It always bothered him how smoking didn't warm him like he expected it to. He removed one glove to light the thing and burned the ends of his fingers with the match, stupidly, like a fourteen-year-old trying to be cool. Nerves, maybe. This valley, maybe. He'd been absent three years, had spent a
little time in Cranbrook, a short stint in Calgary, but the places were deadly similar. Too frequently he bumped into things from the past: a person he recognized, some guy with a sledge seesawing over his shoulder. Relics, anchors. They made him think of
her
.

But all threads lead home, and so does every missing cent and every angry creditor.

The Kootenay Valley stunk of gossip; even the two Calgarians he'd chatted with on the Greyhound were up on local banter, about a cop getting shot in the chest overseas and a tinbasher haunted by the ghost of his dad. He knew people who existed solely for gossip, and given the chance he would bury them all.