"You were good," he said.
She looked around, surprised at his voice, then smiled perfunctorily, and looked back toward the table.
"Really good," he said.
"I hope the judges think so."
"What do you need to qualify?"
"Nine-point-three," she said.
They watched and waited until the judges posted her score. They gave her a nine-point-four. She squealed with joy as she jumped into the air. Remo was the closest person to her so she threw her arms around him and hugged him. He felt her firm breasts press against his chest and smelled the sweet cut-grass scent of her hair.
"Oh," she said, suddenly recoiling, realizing she was hugging a stranger. She put her hands over her mouth, then lowered them. "I'm sorry," she said.
"I'm not," Remo said. "Congratulations."
"Thank you. Are you competing?"
Remo nodded. "Eight hundred meters. I qualified, too."
"Congratulations back. What's your name?"
"Remo Black. Yours?"
"Josie Littlefeather," she answered, watching closely for a reaction.
"Pretty," was all he said.
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"Thanks. And thanks for not making some smartass remark."
"One wasn't called for," Remo said. "Listen, since we're both celebrating, why don't we do it together? I'll spring for a drink."
"Make it coffee and it's a go," she said.
She walked to a nearby bench and shared hugs with a half dozen other gymnasts, all of them smaller and younger than Josie was. She put on a wraparound skirt and slid her feet into a pair of sandals and was ready to go. She looked more like the average girl on Main Street than an Olympic athlete, Remo thought, and then decided that with his t-shirt, chinos and loafers, he looked like an outboard motor mechanic.
As they walked from the gym, Josie wrapped a silk handkerchief around her neck.
"I could use a shower," she said.
"So could I, but coffee first. I've got a curfew."
"Don't we all?" the woman said.
She had wanted coffee, but with every step they took away from the mammoth Emerson College Fieldhouse, the thought of food penetrated deeper and deeper into her mind.
"Food," Josie said. "I want food. Swooping large amounts of food, piled on my plate."
"A carbohydrate junkie," Remo said.
"Yeah. Everybody I know, after an event, it's roll out the pasta. Well, you know how it is."
"Sure," lied Remo, who had heard about carbohydrate depletion but knew nothing about it since his diet was largely restricted to rice and fish and occasional fresh vegetables and fruit, all Chiun's Korean food staples and all so damned tasteless that Remo truly didn't care if he ate or starved.
They found a Szechuan restaurant two blocks away from the college and Josie Littlefeather insisted that she wanted Chinese food. As they walked inside,
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the pungent odors flooded Remo's nostrils and he remembered with a touch of hurt that he was never again going to eat noodles with cold sesame paste or spicy-hot General Chien's chicken, or sliced giant prawns in smooth red garlic sauce. However, he made sure he ordered all of them for Josie Little-feather and he sipped at water as he watched her eat like a gleeful satisfied animal and he recognized that she ate as she performed on the beam-with joy. And Remo realized also that he found very little joy in his life since learning the secrets of Sinanju. There was no joy in sex and no joy in food and there was never any joy in killing because it was both art and science and its purity was its own reward. In making him more of a man, had Sinanju made him somehow less of a human? He wondered. And he wondered, too, if it had all been worth it.
Josie started off eating with chopsticks which she maneuvered well, but found incapable of holding at one jab the amount of food she wanted to stuff into her face, so she resorted to a soupspoon.
"We're going to swap life stories, Remo Black," she said, "but my mouth is going to be full so tell me yours first."
Remo did. He made it all up. He invented a family and a hometown and a past and told her that he had always wanted to complete in the Olympics but it wasn't until he had hit the state lottery of ten thousand dollars that he was able to quit his job in the auto junkyard and go into training.
"Sure, I'm older than the rest of the runners, but I don't think that's going to stop me from making a good showing," he said.
"I admire you," she told him, chewing unabashedly. "You know what you want and you're not letting anything stop you from trying to get it." Which Remo knew was a crock because what he wanted was to yank the bowl of noodles with sesame
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paste away from her and drop it into his mouth in one large sticky lump, and he was letting just the memory of Chiun's training stop him from doing that.
He contented himself with, "How about you? Do you know what you want?"
She nodded. "I'm an Indian. I want to give my people something to be proud of."
"What tribe?"
"Blackhand. A reservation in Arizona." She looked upward toward the ceiling as if her life's memories were written on the grease-saturated Celotex. "You know what it's like. People who are-well, limp. Even the children. Once warriors. Now they make a living selling junk blankets and doing phony rain dances for tourists. I can't change that, but maybe I can give them something to hang their pride on." She looked at Remo with an almost-electric intensity. "I want that gold medal. For my people."
Remo felt something close to shame. Here was a woman-not a girl like most of the other competitors but a woman-who had spent God knows how many years trying to get to the Olympics, and to him it had all been a piece of cake. Winning a gold metal would be no more difficult for Remo than walking across an empty street.
At that moment, he made up his mind to help Josie Littlefeather win a gold medal for her people. And for herself.
She was talking to him. "And why do you want a gold medal, Remo?"
He shook his head. "It's not important, Josie. Not half as important, or noble, as why you want it."
Her laugh lit her face. Her eyes twinkled and she nodded her head in a mock curtsey. "Is that what I am? Noble?"
"Noble and beautiful and I'm going to help you get that medal," he said. He took her hands in his
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and squeezed them. He did not recognize these emotions. He had not felt this way in years, perhaps too many years, and he didn't want to think about the other women who had made him feel that way before because they were all dead. They were monuments to Remo's life and work. And they were all dead.
"Are you entered in anything else?" Remo asked.
"Yes. The overall. But balance beam is my best. Have you ever been on a balance beam, Remo?"
"Surely you jest," Remo said. "I was born on one. And when I'm through with you, watch out, world. Nothing but tens."
She squeezed his hands back. "Heavy promise, white man."
"If I lie, you can hang me on your belt. Look. That fieldhouse must be empty by now. After all, you've been eating non-stop for six hours. Let's go back there and take a look at that balance beam of yours."
She nodded. "After this buildup, you'd better not disappoint me and fall off the damn thing."
If Josie Littlefeather had been a judge, watching Remo's performance on the beam, her only complaint would have been that she could not give a score higher than ten.
Remo had kicked off his Italian loafers, hopped up onto the beam in the empty gymnasium, and done work she had never seen before, not even in her dreams. He executed front flips, back flips, double fronts, and double backs. He moved so swiftly and surely that sometimes there appeared to be more than one Remo on the beam. He finished with a dismount she had never even seen attempted before, a two-and-a-half somersault. And Remo did it from a one-hand hand stand. He finished with his feet together on the mat and raised his arms to eleven