The cannonball landing in the middle of my bed announced dawn’s arrival. Annabelle giggled, proud of herself. “Mommy, come turn cartoons on for me!”
Keep in mind, my daughter is quite capable of manipulating the television on her own. I’m pretty sure she could program the DVR. But it is always more fun to have Mommy or Daddy do it for her.
Although she could barely keep her feet, Mira slid out of bed before I was fully awake, and my girls disappeared down the hallway. I struggled out of my short nap, intent on at least trying to help Mira with breakfast this morning.
Pulling on a pair of loose sweats, I grabbed a ratty T-shirt and shambled my way out through the kitchen. Mira’s eyes were ringed with dark circles, but she threatened me with a spatula when I tried to go near the stove. “Out. I have this.”
I debated for several long moments before relenting. If she said she was all right, then she must be all right. I kissed her gently, and then Anna, before I headed out to the backyard. The cold dew on my bare feet served to wake me up quite nicely. Of course, it was a thousand times better than the subzero midwestern winter we’d just passed, so I wasn’t about to complain.
The sun was barely up high enough to shine over our neighbor’s privacy fence, casting my long shadow across the yard. I kept my face to the light but closed my eyes as I set about going through my morning katas. It allowed me to feel the warmth as it seeped into my stiff muscles, feel the life flowing into my limbs without the distraction of sight.
I could do every kata I knew without thought, simply moving through the forms for the exercise, but that wasn’t my preference. Each gesture, each step had a purpose and a function. The graceful wave of my hand here could snap bone at speed. This step to the left would block a low kick and bring me inside an opponent’s guard. Each movement was at once beautiful and potentially lethal. Something like that should be contemplated. Before a person does something he should always have a full awareness of his capabilities and where his actions might lead.
I follow the bushido, the Japanese code of honor and conduct dating back to the thirteenth century and possibly before. The samurai believed in loyalty, frugality, mastery of oneself and one’s art, and most important, honor. You might wonder how in the world one comes to call himself a modern samurai.
Well, I wasn’t always the fine upstanding member of society you see today. I had a temper, as a child. Oh, who am I kidding? I still do. But at fifteen, it was fueled by all the usual teenage angst, the slings and arrows of a misspent youth. I traveled with a pack of like-minded degenerates and malcontents, and we left destruction and violence in our wake. I wasted more nights than I like to think about, blitzed on whatever drug we could easily get our hands on, gleefully causing mayhem in the name of whatever entitlement we felt we had. I was headed down that long road that so many travel and very few escape.
The best thing that ever happened to me was getting arrested for chucking cinder blocks through business windows. Sure, you might say I was a juvenile, and therefore pretty much untouchable, but you didn’t grow up in my little Missouri town. They still believed in straps behind the woodshed back then.
There was no getting out of it. The cops caught me red-handed while my supposed friends bailed out over the back fence. I remember standing there in the flashing blue lights, fists clenched, ready to take on the world simply because it existed. These days, a kid like that would get shot, but I grew up in a different time. It probably saved my life.
The second-best thing to happen was coming before Judge Carter, a staunch advocate of alternative punishments. It was his idea to stick me in a court-mandated martial arts class, saying it would teach me discipline and control. (His opponents insisted it would teach me only a more efficient way to cause havoc, and he retired under pressure shortly thereafter. I still send him a Christmas card every year.)
I hated him, at the time. I hated the class. I hated the sensei, and all the other clean-cut, bright-eyed students. I sulked my way through, feeling they were lucky I even showed up. Any effort on my part was just gravy.
While I would like to tell you there was a tiny little Asian man in my life, a Mr. Miyagi to set me on my path, there wasn’t. Instead, I had Carl. Carl Bledsoe was as large and as black as they come. As a teenager, I had to crane my neck upward to look into his face, and he seemed an immovable mountain of solid obsidian. As an adult, I still do, and he still is. Every once in a while, I go spar with him and get my ass handed to me. I’m getting closer to beating him, though. Maybe someday I will, when he’s old and in a wheelchair or something. (Hell, he’ll probably just run over my spine with it.)
He worked out in a cut-off sweatshirt and Gi pants, his thighs as big around as my waist, and his biceps bulging like cantaloupes about to burst. Back then, I had no doubt in my mind that he could squash me like a bug and laugh while doing it. He told me so himself. Trust me-he cut me no slack. If I wasn’t on the ball, I paid for it. But amidst the sparring and the humiliation, he would also spout sayings and ruminations that sounded really cool, things I’d never heard in my sleepy redneck town. He would say, “For a warrior whose duty it is to restrain brigandage, it will not do to act like a brigand yourself.” I even went and looked up brigand, just to see what it meant. I liked the idea of being a warrior instead of a punk kid.
I was way too cool at the time to admit I was intrigued, of course, so I mocked Carl and called him some names I refuse to repeat now. But I remembered everything he said, and I wondered where he’d learned it.
One day, after my usual halfhearted efforts, he tossed me a video as I headed out the door.
“What the hell is this?” I wrinkled my nose, turning the case over in my hands. It was some old black-and-white movie, and I sneered.
“Kurosawa. The Seven Samurai. Watch it. It’s in Japanese, but it has subtitles.”
“You give me a movie, then expect me to read?”
He grinned, white teeth flashing against his ebon skin. “Trust me.”
I watched it, just so I could tell him how lame and stupid it was. Then I watched it again. After about the fifth viewing, I knew parts of it by heart. My favorite scene involved the samurai who masqueraded as a monk to disarm an enemy with his bare hands. My mom told me The Magnificent Seven was based on it, so I had her rent that and watched it, too. It wasn’t as good, in my opinion, but I could see the parallels between the two movies, the themes that carried over. Here were men with honor, who used their powers for good (so to speak). I was fascinated.
When I took the movie back to Carl at my next weekly class, I felt so educated and worldly. After all, I’d watched a foreign film! Carl quickly proved me wrong.
“If you want to truly understand bushido, and the way of the samurai, you have to read-a lot. Samurai were educated men, not just trained thugs.”
The first book he gave me was Hagakure. He quizzed me over it as we sparred, forcing me to use my mind and my body at once. I can honestly say, I got so caught up in learning about this foreign and exotic culture, I forgot to be a hoodlum.
Once we moved past hand-to-hand techniques and on to weapons training, he gave me The Book of Five Rings, and my studies continued. They still continue. Every time someone comes out with a new translation of one of the classic texts, I’m there. Sometimes, someone even writes something new, relating bushido to modern life. Countless businesses cite it in their ideals, alongside Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
I admire people who try to keep the code. Honor and duty are fairly good concepts, no matter what credo you maintain. But I am the only practicing samurai I know. Even Carl can’t say he ever used his training in actual combat.
The world has changed a lot since the days of the samurai. The rules have changed. So what does being a samurai mean for some gangly white boy in today’s modern America? It means when in a darkened parking lot, the samurai takes the extra moment to see that a young woman gets to her car safely. It means he watches a lost child until her mother returns for a tearful reunion. It means he sees to it that the local vandals are caught and prosecuted. Yeah, the neighborhood watch took on a whole new meaning when I moved into the area.
I still study the notable names of Japanese bushido. Every day, I choose some quote or teaching to meditate on, most lately revisiting the works of Miyamoto Musashi and his Book of Five Rings. I practice battojutsu, the art of drawing and sheathing a sword. Don’t laugh; it’s harder than you think. I practice kendo and jujitsu, both for combat and for exercise. I also practice down-and-out redneck brawling. It’s the one thing enemies never seem to expect from someone they view as a trained combatant.
But most important, I practice honor. All I want is for my little girl to say, “My father was an honorable man.” I’ve seen people aspire to less.
For nearly two hours, I put my body through the rigors of my own training, as well as the physical therapy assigned by my doctor. I stretched to cool down, feeling the scar tissue down my left side pull slightly. After almost four years, it rarely bothered me anymore. No one could guess that something had tried to carve my heart out through my rib cage.
My left hip was aching when I finally sat down to meditate, and the angry muscles in my right calf were twitching spasmodically. Neither had healed as I would have liked. I was lucky to still have the right leg at all. I had never dreamed that the Scuttle could inject poison through its legs, too, so it hadn’t occurred to me to negotiate around it. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.
I cleared my mind, moving past the pain to a place of peace, and focused on my breathing. The sun was higher, beaming over my bare shoulders. It promised to be the first truly hot day we’d had this year. Spring was nearly over, brief as it was.
My quote for the day came again from the Hagakure. “There is a way of bringing up the child of a samurai. From the time of infancy one should encourage bravery and avoid trivially frightening or teasing the child.” I thought on that quote a lot-pretty much every time I looked at Anna. Yamamoto said that parents shouldn’t make their child afraid of the lightning, or dark places, because cowardice was a lifetime scar. But I knew what was waiting in those dark places, and I had a hard time coming up with a justification to leave my daughter ignorant. Granted, at five, she was too little to understand. But when she was older, if I was still around, what would I tell her? I had yet to figure out the answer.
I don’t know how long I’d been sitting in meditation, working the white river pebbles between my fingers, when I heard the scrabbling of claws on stone. I opened my eyes to find a bold squirrel sitting atop a rock not three feet from me. It looked to be a healthy little thing, all fat and sassy, with slick red fur and gleaming button eyes.
I tilted my head to the left. It mimicked the movement. I tilted my head to the right; it did the same. With a sigh, I raised my right hand and flipped it the bird. It repeated the gesture and burst into little rodent snickers. I threw one of the stones at it, and it ducked.
“What do you want, Axel?” My peaceful meditation was officially over.
“Just paying my usual morning visit.” The squirrel scampered off the rock and zipped over to perch on my water bottle, guaranteeing I wasn’t going to reach for it. “I hear you’re working from home this week.”
The first time I’d seen this trick pulled, I’d expected it to speak in squeaks, like the cartoon chipmunks. Instead, the squirrel’s voice was a pleasant tenor and sounded too much like my own. It was creepy. With a groan, I pushed myself to my feet. “I have a client in town, yes.”
“Any chance you’re wanting an edge? A little boost to put that victory in the bag?” The creature’s eyes gleamed an unnatural red for just a moment. “Just a little wiggle of the fingers, a little mojo extraordinaire, and you can be the demon hunter you’ve always wanted to be.”
“Shame on you, Axel. Selling out one of your own?” The eerie little creature followed me as I grabbed my T-shirt off the patio table and pulled it on. A glance through the glass door told me Mira and Anna had disappeared into the depths of the house, and I placed myself where they couldn’t see the possessed squirrel if they came back to the kitchen. There are things I’m just not ready to explain to Anna.
“Spilled milk. You’re worth it.” It zoomed up the back of the wrought-iron chair, tail flicking spastically.
“First, they won’t accept my challenge if I don’t have a soul to offer. Second, you know I’m not going to take you up on it. Don’t you have something better to do than annoy me?”
“Nope. You’re it. As long as I’m hounding you, I don’t have to do anything else.” I swear, the squirrel grinned. I didn’t even know squirrels had those muscles. “And I am, if nothing else, a being of leisure.”
Now that Axel was off my water bottle, I retrieved it to take a long drink. “That’s the same as being lazy, right?”
The squirrel pouted. “You are an uncultured cretin, you know that?”
“That’s the rumor.”
Axel hopped to the top of the patio table. “It’s my move, right?”
The top of the table was worked in a checkerboard pattern. I hadn’t picked it out on purpose, but it turned out to work quite nicely as a chessboard. The pieces were stone, heavy enough that a breeze wouldn’t knock them over. I’d been playing against Axel for a couple years now.
He knew very well that it was his move. After a few moments of studying the board, he nosed a bishop forward a few spaces. “Your turn!”
Damn. He’d put me on the defensive with that one move. I was going to lose this one if I didn’t start paying attention. “I’ll think about it.”
Vicious barking broke out on the other side of my neighbor’s fence, and the possessed squirrel flinched. The thick boards shuddered as the mastiff on the far side tried to smash its way through to get at the demonic presence in my yard. “Tybalt, stop that! Get back over here! Sorry, Jesse!” my neighbor called over the fence.
“S’okay, Ellen. Have a good day at work.”
“Filthy smelly mongrel…” The squirrel’s eyes began to glow red again, and I thumped him on top of his furry little dome with one knuckle. Axel gave a very squirrelish yelp of pain, then zinged under the patio table to glare at me, rubbing his head.
“Ahht! You know the rules, no touchy. You don’t want the dogs to chase you, quit possessing the local wildlife.”
“I could always visit you in my true form. I could eat that dog’s heart and spread its entrails over their trees like garland. Think your neighbors would like that?” He was angry now; his tail was twitching all over the place. He really hated dogs. They felt the same about him.
“I think if you don’t want me to have Mira ward the yard, you’ll behave.” After the talking cockroach incident, she put protective wards on the doors and windows. Axel hadn’t come anywhere near the house since.
The squirrel burst into a stream of profanity in both English and Demonic, ran a couple laps around the patio, then fell over dead as the demon vacated its little body.
“Dammit, Axel!”
Just once, I’d like to start my morning without having to bury some furry corpse. I’m running out of places to stick them in the yard, and I secretly harbor the fear that they’re all going to get up some night and come knocking on the sliding glass door a la Pet Sematary. Like I said, I don’t do zombies.
The neighbor’s dog fell silent the moment Axel disappeared, proving that the demon really had departed. I went in search of a shovel.
We had a strange relationship, Axel and I. His job was to con me out of my soul, something he went about with the bare minimum effort. And my job… I liked to think it was to make his life even worse than Hell. We enjoyed baiting each other, playing the occasional game of chess. Sometimes, we even talked philosophy. I can’t even imagine how old he is, but it gives him an interesting perspective.
His name isn’t really Axel, of course. It’s a “Sympathy for the Devil” reference, and he really didn’t strike me as a Jagger. I don’t know his real name. I never want to know.
I didn’t know his true form, either. He was too intelligent to be a Scuttle or a Snot. The most Snots could manage was the occasional menacing belch. I was pretty sure he was a Skin; possibly even a Shirt. The beast and humanoid demons were equally nasty to deal with, for various reasons, but Axel could fit either profile.
I’ve been told there is a fifth class of demon, above even the Shirts. Those would be the actual angels who fell from Heaven once upon a time. I don’t know anyone who has seen one. It may be our own champion version of an urban legend.
This of course begs the question, do I believe it? Y’know, I can probably believe there’s a God out there-big G and everything. But why he’d want to take a close personal interest in this ant farm down here, I don’t know. There are demons, so I suppose at least at one time, there had to have been angels. But this is Missouri, the Show Me state. So until I see it, I’ll file it in the maybe pile.
Regardless, Axel was no angel. I was certain of that.
Mira was getting shoes on Hurricane Annabelle when I finally made it back inside. I frowned a bit. “You girls have big plans today?”
“I’m going to work with Mommy!”
Mira nodded. “Yes, but we’re not going to color in anything but our coloring books this time, are we?”
The red pigtails bobbed as Annabelle nodded. “I promise.”
I scrubbed the dirt off my hands in the kitchen sink. “Mir, I could probably take her today. You can just sit behind the counter at the store and rest. Dee could do the heavy stuff.” I should know better. Nothing is going to get my wife to stubborn- up like my implying she can’t do something.
“I’m fine, and Anna and I are going to have a fun day.” It was that “Are we clear?” voice. You know, the one that does not invite further argument. “What are your plans for the day?”
“I guess I’m going to head over to Marty’s, see if he’s got my gear ready. I’ll probably have to go out late tonight, too.”
“You still need to get your mother a present, while you’re out,” she reminded me.
“I’m gonna call Cole, see what he got her. I don’t want to duplicate.” If my baby brother had ponied up for something big, maybe I could just split the cost with him and it could be a joint gift. I really suck at this whole gift-giving thing.
I got the girls out the door and on the way to Mira’s bookstore, but I really wasn’t happy about it. Mira should have stayed home and regained her strength today. Nice to know my wife listens to me.
I went to pull on some real clothes and get my hair under control. The day’s T-shirt said I’M MEAN BECAUSE YOU’RE STUPID. Add jeans and a ponytail, and you had the all-purpose uniform. I tucked my cell phone into my pocket. Ivan hadn’t called back, and I was starting to get worried-well, more worried than before. The scrying was ominous, at the very best, and no matter what I’d told Mira, I didn’t think Miguel had survived that battle.
I was no shrink, but even I knew that worrying without action accomplished nothing. Since I could take no action at the moment, I decided to run errands instead. Regardless of Miguel’s fate, work was still work and staying alive was pretty high on my priority list. I’d start that process by getting my gear back from Marty. The rest… Well, everything else pretty much had to wait until I touched base with Nelson Kidd.
I didn’t figure he’d wimp out. It took guts to come so far and admit so much. People like that don’t cave. I didn’t expect anyone to back out once they’d asked me for help, but I always gave them the choice. Who knows, someday someone might surprise me.
To occupy my mind, I made a few more ticks on my mental to-do list. If Kidd was still willing to go through with it, I’d be summoning a demon tonight, and that required advance planning. You don’t just walk into a demon summoning unprepared. I’d done that. To say it didn’t end well is the edited- for-TV version. I’m damn lucky to still have my soul and all working organs and appendages.