Under the Rose (25 page)

‘
Diosito!
’ Rafael reverted to Spanish.

‘Faked!’ decided Martin after a quick glance. ‘Half of all accidents are.’ Then he told how teams of bogus victims, paramedics, lawyers and doctors – ‘or’, with a foxy grin at Tom, ‘chiropractors’ – divvied up insurance money. Later, privately, he offered to cut Tom in, as he was apparently in a position to do. There was a lot, ‘And I mean a
lot
,’ said Martin, to be made. ‘If you don’t grab it, others will.’

Tom was less shaken by the dishonesty which he knew to be rampant than by Martin’s failure to see how genuinely
he
,
Tom, cared about honour. Karate, he always scrupulously taught, was as spiritual as it was physical. It was why he had chosen, decades ago, to perfect himself in an art which, at the time, few Americans understood. ‘Kara’ – ‘empty’ – referred not only to the fighting man’s hand but to his need to empty his inner self of ego, leaving it as straight, clean and hollow as a green bamboo shoot. Clearly, despite years of training, this message had not reached Martin. Was the fault Tom’s?

Had he, softening, let his own egotism back in? Undeniably, he had mellowed and was sometimes startled to recall a self who had favoured interning peaceniks and keeping fags and women in their place. These aims baffled him now – which did not mean that he thought right the same as wrong.

‘Stop right now!’ In a panic of refusal, he tried to shut Martin up. ‘Stop! You mustn’t say things like that around the dojo!’

‘OK then! Have it your way!’ Shrugging, Martin opened the door of Tom’s office in which this talk had been taking place. ‘Well,’ he exclaimed. ‘Just look who’s outside!’ Amused, he tilted his chin towards the car park where Gary was clearly on the watch. ‘Your protector’s worried, Tom! Afraid I’ll stir you up and get you really mad. Give you a stroke maybe? I’m still the badass in this Castle of Virtue!’

Tom
was
mad. Stung, he warned, ‘I ought to turn you in. How do you know I won’t? Ten years ago I would have.’

‘Ten years ago I wouldn’t have told you.’

Tom turned that over in his mind. Martin had intuition: a thing you had to respect. Seeing idealism die, he had adapted and that, like it or not, was evolution. It was how humanity survived. He’d surely survive better than Gary who couldn’t see beyond the tip of his own argument. Words, to Gary, were only words and films films. He and Tom battled over this and last Monday, when Tom was probing the significance of the videos he had watched over the weekend –
Batman
, which he’d seen for the tenth time, and
Bladerunner
– Gary had cut
in with a ‘Tom, those are films! That’s all they are!’

Tom couldn’t let this pass. Mindful of the jibe about his not living, he had argued with more assurance than he felt, ‘No, no! Films tell you what the trends are. That’s why you got to watch them. With all the brains and money that go into them, they have to reflect current thinking. Violence is going to take over. That’s their message. Breakdown. It’ll be every man for himself. I don’t worry. I have my guns. I’ve always been a rugged individualist. I’ll stop being a chiropractor if they bring in socialized medicine. I wouldn’t work for that. I’d get another job. Adaptation is the name of the game. Individualism. Being self-sufficient.’

For Gary this was the sort of day-dreaming which had brought down Rafael.

Was it?

Wrapping an old T-shirt round a broom, Tom buffed the dojo floor while casting an occasional glance up at the dragon-and-knight images on its walls. He hadn’t really looked at them in years and, now that he did, was surprised to find the dragons – robotic, feral, breathing fire – more impressive than the knights. Martin, with his fiery accidents, was a sort of dragon. Or a Merlin: a faker who even faked himself. Tom guessed that he took steroids, for his muscles were oddly swollen. Poor Rafael, though he had shown the valour of a knight errant by single-handedly giving three nasty guys their comeuppance, did not look at all like the knights in Tom’s blow-ups.

These bestrode their space. Their muscles thrust past armour-plating whose scaly bristle made them too look dragonlike. The effect was futuristic and mediaeval: a blend Tom enjoyed. It was as though the future held the best of the past in store: Paradise Two, a sequel to Eden. Later, would come the Fall.

‘It’s coming,’ he kept telling his class. ‘There were several films about it recently.’ He mentioned the actresses’ names.
‘Great-looking gals!’ As his listeners savoured this, he pulsed with their breathing pattern. Gals interested him most at a remove. ‘There’s a trend.’

‘Tom, those are
films
!’

‘No! Films’, Tom had insisted, ‘are real!’ He corrected that. ‘They anticipate reality. The thinking that goes into them does.’

Putting away his broom, he wondered who would come to class today. Not Martin, not Jim, not Rafael. Then the door was pushed open and there was Gary with a gal whom Tom recognized as Rafael’s wife, Elena. Small but feisty, at one time she’d started training here, then decided she’d be better off in a women’s self-defence class. Tom, not really wanting women around, had been relieved. He liked her though, and she had been very good about visiting his mother in her last months. The two, surprisingly, had grown close and Elena had spent whole days with the dying woman.

Greeting her, he asked about Rafael and was told he was bearing up.

It turned out she needed a favour. With Rafael in jail, the bank had foreclosed their mortgage and taken their house, so now they had nowhere to store their furniture. It was in a truck outside. Could she leave it here?

‘Just for a bit,’ she begged and explained that she hoped to rent a place soon.

‘It could go upstairs,’ Gary told Tom, ‘in your mother’s old apartment.’

Six months earlier, Heppy, Tom’s mother, had died, leaving a clutter of Norman Rockwell plates, flimsy side-tables with sugar-stick legs and knickknacks so alien to Tom that, after shipping what she’d asked him to ship to cousins in Salt Lake City, he had given the rest to the Salvation Army. Only the room, where she had spent her last months, was intact. She’d had a house in Pasadena until her arthritis got bad and Tom brought her here where he could keep an eye
on her during the day. She had died upstairs. Maybe it was as well to crowd out her ghost.

‘Sure,’ he agreed.

So instead of a karate class, there was a furniture-moving session with everyone who turned up for training pitching in. Tom relished the sociability, as neighbours dropped by, containers too big to move were broken into and objects piled on his strip of lawn. As in a garage sale, private things were incongruously displayed. A chest-expander lay between a picture of the Virgen de Guadalupe, a juicer and a bathroom scales. A long package was possibly a rifle, and a box of cakes was an offering from the girl whose misfortunes had sparked off Rafael’s troubles. Elena introduced her: Juana. They were cousins. Tom, though he hadn’t met her until now, knew her story from Rafael and the
L.A. Times
.

He tried not to stare. She couldn’t be more than sixteen.

‘Just fourteen when it happened,’ Rafael had told the class. Gangsters, he explained, had kidnapped her from her village in Mexico, then smuggled her here to LA to be a sexual slave.

‘Slavey?’

‘Slave! She was a
slave
! They paid her nothing and kept her locked up.’

‘Your having us on!’

‘No.’

‘What sort of gangsters?’

‘Small-time ones. They own a bar in East LA where they made her work.’

The scenario seemed to belong to another place and time. Tom imagined the young Liz Taylor as Juana whose age suggested a fanciful romp with periwigs and tricorne hats. ‘Yer money or yer life, yer ducats or yer wife!’ Or an ad. ‘Pray, take these instead,’ cries the captive girl, offering brand-name chocolates to the heavies who lower their muskets, lick their lips and accept the bargain. In a darker mood, your thoughts could slide to the stolen children whose hearts and kidneys
are allegedly sold to rich or desperate First World parents.

The reality was less harrowing since, by the time Rafael heard of it, Juana had been found. Her family, into which he had meanwhile married, had known who to blame –
pistoleros
who had moved to Los Angeles – so her brother, though himself a child, had set out in pursuit. Making his way across the border then, though he had neither money nor English, to the LA
barrio
where people from his part of Mexico lived, the boy had succeeded in picking up the trail of the men who, with violent thrift, were using and abusing his sister as maid-of-all-work and whore.

‘So he got her home? Back to Mexico?’

‘Yeah, but it took a while.’

‘What a feat though! Like Samson and Goliath!’

‘The newspapers helped. They made a story of it.’

‘How old did you say he was?’

‘About like the kid in
The Thief of Baghdad
?’

‘Or
Les Misérables
.’

Without movie-world lore, the thing would have been too alien to understand. As it was, the class had to look with a new eye at their old pal, Raffo, who must, they now saw, have a Mexican border slicing through his mind: a division as hard to negotiate as a Rio Grande in flood.

‘
Pan Mexicano?
’

Juana was offering cake. Oozing cream from a sugary slit, it looked even less salubrious than the ones with which Rafael’s Mom had failed to tempt Tom twenty years ago. Juana had removed her jacket and revealed blue-veined arms. A waif. A Dickens girl. Her skin, he saw from close up, was poor. Probably ate the wrong diet and needed further salvation. In a film, the make-up people would have provided this and Tom, to his amused surprise, imagined himself transfiguring
her, as the orphaned Little Lord Fauntleroy had been transfigured, in a lace-collared velvet suit. Instead, he accepted her cake and a coffee – Elena must have unpacked her own percolator, for he never drank the stuff – then walked off to find somewhere to rid himself of both.

The kidnappers, Raffo had told the shocked dojo, had gone scot free. They must have done a deal with the police though, naturally, he didn’t know details. Maybe they were stool pigeons? Part of an undercover anti-drug-or-smuggling-squad? Juana was sure some of the clients she’d been forced to service were cops. By now the newspapers had lost interest – or been warned off?

Vigorously kicking the air and, with it, the dreamed-up faces of
pistoleros
, the class considered their society’s loss of virtue. When had the rot set in? Kick. With President Kennedy’s death? The cover-up? Kick. Water- or Irangate? Kossovo? Kick, kick and kick again! Somewhere faith had been lost. Mislaid. Roundhouse kick.

‘Again with the other leg,’ encouraged Tom. ‘Add a backfist to the face, elbow strike, upper block and back kick. Pulverize the opposition. Yell
kiai
! Turn. Keep together! More spirit! And again!’

Few of us, he reflected, were the straight bamboo shoots empty of selfishness that we would have wished. The scourges and avengers. The new brooms. Excited advice, though, was lavished on Rafael – most of it, Tom saw with hindsight, unwise.

He tried to recall what he’d said himself, but was interrupted by Elena who wanted to be shown how to use the barbecue. Next came a debate over who should go to the store for refreshments and what they should buy. Beer? Mineral water? Juice? Tom didn’t join in.

There was a debt owing to that girl. ‘A debt outstanding!’
Hearing the words hammer in his head, he wondered if they were his? His words to Raffo? They had a boom which reminded Tom of his father more than fifty years ago. A pillar of pin-striped darkness looming up to make him cry. Acrid-smelling. Fuming and unpredictable. ‘Young man,’ it scolded, ‘you owe … owe …’ What? To whom? ‘To me,’ boomed Pop and slid menacingly into focus. ‘And you’ll pay, young man! I’ll see to that. Don’t cringe! Cringing doesn’t impress me. I have a duty to bring you up right, even if your mother spoils you. A duty to society!’ Stiff collar. Stiff-judging mouth! Huge, terrifying fist! Slamming down, it blocked out the light as Tom fell on his back and his ears rang from the blow. Strong smells of alcohol. Once Pop dislocated Tom’s shoulder. Then, somehow, he died and Tom and Mom came West. In the train, she sang a rhyme which Tom misinterpreted:

Bang! Blow Pop away! Pop-the-Weasel! Wasn’t that what had happened?

Maybe the voice in Tom’s head was an echo of his own? ‘This city’s lost its virtue!’ That was his all right! He must have been remembering the lost, radiant, Pop-free LA in which he grew up: clear air, innocent leafiness, sun spraying like yellow petals and nothing to be afraid of. Even in the canyons the only danger was from coyotes which would eat a baby if its mother was an airhead and wandered off, leaving it on a rug. There had been one such case, he recalled – but things went wrong in Eden too. Eden. The jacaranda trees seemed to unravel the sky when their blossoms opened in a blaze as blue as the sea – which was there too, rippling like shaken silk. Warm and salty. Luminous, unpolluted and safe.

‘We’re safe,’ his mother whispered, ‘safe, safe, safe and we’ll never go back! Never! We’ll stay here together.’

So they did. She wasn’t the sort of mother who’d leave him alone on a rug. Nor he her.

Elena, back from the store with charcoal and lighters, paused to watch Gary fix the barbecue and to tell Tom how much more culture meant to Mexicans than it did to people here. ‘That’s why Rafael is so impressed by your studies. He used to tell me how when you talked of the things you cared about, it went right over the heads of the class. It went over his head too but he loved listening. And he admires your beliefs. He says you are one of the last men to have principles the way the great Americans did. Ah, good! Gary’s got the fire going. I’d better bring the food.’

Dusk found Tom sitting at the head of a table – Elena’s table which had been set up in his mother’s dining room – picking at take-away Mexican food. From politeness, he let
fajitas
and
chile relleno
be piled on his plate, though he remained proof against beer.
Dos Xs
. The two women were to spend some nights here. Gary had brokered the decision while Tom was ringing the hospital where Jim turned out to be less badly injured than had been feared. He was in stable condition and could have visitors soon. Tom asked about his eye but the gal at the other end of the phone was slow-witted and didn’t seem to understand.