“But Mom let me. You don’t think she’d send me off with someone who’d hurt me?”
Dad was silent for the rest of our drive home, and I hoped this meant that he had cooled off. But at home, he led me by the arm, with Pal and Mountie leaping beside us, to Mom in the greenhouse.
“Why’d you do it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Let Lopez take Wesley off.”
“You can’t keep the boy locked at home forever. You got to let him out and be among people.”
“But not them people,” Dad said. “You didn’t know they’d bring him back, or bring him back alive!”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I still wouldn’t trust ‘em enough to take our boy off.”
“Maria was here with me,” Mom said.
“Goddammit!” Dad slapped the yucca from Mom’s hands. “That ain’t the point.”
“Wesley’s home safe,” Mom said. “That’s the only point there is.”
I wasn’t exactly home safe. Rubin, the van, and what had happened made me anything but safe, and I couldn’t say anything. Dad would think I was a queer for sure. And I was afraid for Mom. Dad had already roughed her up in the greenhouse, and if he learned about what Rubin had done to me when Mom allowed me to go off with him, Dad would come unhinged. I didn’t even want to imagine how he would beat and curse us.
CHAPTER 11
Dad didn’t bring me to tae kwon do for the next three weeks, which was fine with me. But one evening in the middle of the fourth week, after he and Mom had a yelling match in the kitchen that made her cry, he told me to put down the electronic football game and get dressed for tae kwon do class.
“I thought I was finished.”
“I didn’t pay for a year of lessons so you could quit after you made yellow belt.”
“But the class’ll be ahead of me.”
“Then you’ll have to practice at home on your own to catch up. Now be dressed in five minutes.”
What really worried me was that Rubin might have told the other kids, especially Donnie, what he had done to me.
We entered the dojo later than usual, five minutes before class started. Mr. and Mrs. Lopez sat in the waiting area with their backs to the door. Seeing them made me nervous because it meant that Rubin was here.
“Where’ve you been, Wesley?” Mr. Bollars asked as I walked past his office.
“We took a little trip down to Mexico,” Dad said. “Just got back yesterday. He isn’t too far behind, is he?”
“A month,” Mr. Bollars said, “but don’t worry. There are two more months before the green belt test. You’ve got time to catch up.”
Mr. Bollars smiled and rubbed my head as I entered the workout area, which was full of kids, yet Donnie and Rubin were the two that stood out. I was sure that Donnie was now the leading yellow belt in the dojo. He stretched along the right wall, the leg of his dingy gi resting on the bar as he bent at the waist and touched his toes. Before my month away from the dojo I could touch my toes, but during that month Dad didn’t enforce my swimming regiment.
Rubin stood alone at the head of the workout area, awaiting Mr. Bollars’s command to start class. Rubin looked lonely as a teenager in the midst of kids; he was by himself, separated from everyone by his belt rank. For a moment, I thought of going to him and telling him to keep Space Invaders and don’t worry about the picture. And in that moment I could have faced him without fear, but I didn’t because Dad’s voice, followed by Mr. Lopez’s, stopped me. Their voices, to my surprise, weren’t hostile. But I wanted to hear where their conversation went before I let Rubin off the hook.
Eavesdropping on Mom and Dad at the house had always been easy, but in a packed dojo, it was a difficult task, especially with all the smaller kids, the new white belts, chattering up a storm. So I worked my way toward the waiting area, keeping my back to the dads while doing a few stretches. Dad’s voice was now low, which was strange for him, so I knew he was up to something. Mr. Bollars walked out of his office and Rubin called formation. Since I was now a yellow belt, I stood more in the middle of formation, while the back row, the eavesdropping row, was home to the new white belts. I made sure and got at the end of a row, but when I stuck out my right arm, there was Donnie and his freckles grinning at me.
“Thought you quit,” he said.
“You’re not that lucky.”
Donnie was about to answer but Mr. Bollars began explaining tonight’s lesson. “Tonight we’ll work on close quarters, hand-to-hand fighting.”
This was not what I wanted to hear.
Mr. Bollars, while we remained in formation, showed us, by demonstrating on Rubin, the pressure points on the hands, throat, and neck.
“You don’t have to be strong to win in close combat,” Mr. Bollars said, “you just have to know where the pressure points are. Press on the right one of those and your opponent will drop
without much exertion from you.”
Mr. Bollars paired us off to work together and I wound up with Donnie. He went first, taking my hand and pressing with all of his might on my thumb joint. When Mr. Bollars did this to Rubin, he fell to his knees. I waited for the pain but it didn’t come. I remained standing and Donnie’s face turned red as he squeezed harder and harder.
“You must not be doing it right,” I said.
Donnie still tried to make me drop to my knees and began huffing and puffing and grunting as he squeezed my hand. The area where he was supposed to apply pressure was at the base of my thumb, but once that didn’t work, Donnie started pressing all over the back of my hand. Between his noise and improper technique, Donnie grabbed Mr. Bollars’s attention.
“Right behind the thumb, Donnie. Yeah, right there. Now squeeze it.”
Donnie did, and there was a slight pain in my thumb but nothing to stop an attack.
Mr. Bollars pushed Donnie out of the way and grabbed my hand. What was a slight pain with Donnie became stronger under Mr. Bollars’s grip, but it was still not enough to bring me to my knees and definitely not enough to stop me during a fight. Mr. Bollars let go of my hand, took a step back and stroked his mustache. I cast a quick glance at the waiting area and saw Dad
and Mr. Lopez leaning close to one another. I was a little upset that Dad had missed my big moment when not even Mr. Bollars could bring me to my knees.
“Wesley,” Mr. Bollars said, “are you double jointed?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Bend your thumb back like this.”
I did as Mr. Bollars showed me, only my thumb bent back further than his. Mr. Bollars stroked his mustache and nodded his head. “That’s the problem. Some of these pressure-point holds won’t work when you’re double-jointed.”
Until then, I’d never heard of people being double-jointed, and while I didn’t know what it meant exactly, I did know that for the time being it made me withstand Donnie’s pressure point attacks on my hand. The only problem was that my throat and neck weren’t double-jointed, and those holds worked against me.
When it was my turn to attack, I squeezed Donnie’s thumb with all my might. His bones crackled and he yelped in pain. My favorite hold was the one in which I grabbed him around the base of the neck and tightened like a vise-grip, which Mr. Bollars said sent a whirlwind of confusing impulses through the nervous system. Donnie’s neck was so skinny and my hand so wide that if I wanted to, I could have choked him from the back. Instead, I clamped down on the back of his neck, he threw up his shoulders and tried to shove his neck down and even stomped his feet, but all of that wasn’t getting him out of my hold. I looked over my shoulder at Dad, but his face was still close to Mr. Lopez’s. I kept my grip on Donnie’s neck and my gaze on Dad, and Donnie screamed “Let go!” Dad, like the rest of the dojo, looked at us. Dad smiled and leaned back in to talk to Mr. Lopez.