It was just a day. Just an ordinary day.
The truth is, after that talk with Beth, I guess I got a little blissed out, a little-how can I put it?-goofy. I remember going from class to class, doing my work and everything. But I don’t remember too many of the details. I guess it was mostly me sitting in my seat, sort of looking at my hand, sort of turning my hand this way and that, admiring the phone number written on it. Goofy, like I said.
After school, I went home for a while and did some homework. Then, just like every other Wednesday, I took my mom’s car-the Ford Explorer-and drove out to the Eastfield Mall for my karate lesson with Sensei Mike.
The karate school isn’t much to look at. It’s just a small storefront in the mall. There’s a sign over the window that says Karate Studio in black letters. That’s the only name it has.
It’s a simple set-up inside too. There’s a small anteroom where you come in and take off your shoes-there are no shoes allowed in the dojo itself. There’s a small office next to the anteroom with a desk and a computer and a phone and all that. And there’s the dojo-an open carpeted space for practicing-with a punching bag hanging in one corner, a big American flag hanging on one wall, and a wall of mirrors opposite that. Also, wherever there’s space, there’s a lot of cool swords and axes and other weapons hanging on pegs.
Sensei Mike owned the place and ran it. There were three or four other teachers who worked there, but Sensei Mike was the best. He was the coolest too. In fact, Sensei Mike was probably the coolest person I knew. He was-I don’t know-maybe thirty-five years old or something. He stood about six feet tall, slim but with broad shoulders. He had a lot of neatly combed black hair that always seemed to stay in place even when he was sparring or working out. His face was long and lean, with a lot of lines chiseled into it. He had a mustache, a real big soup-strainer that hung down over the sides of his mouth. Under the mustache, you could see there was always a sort of smile playing at the corners of his lips. The smile was in his brown eyes too. He always seemed to be laughing about something to himself.
Sensei Mike had been in the Army for a long time. He’d been in the War against Terror, fighting against the Islamic extremists both in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
“I’d still be over there,” he liked to tell us, “but I had to come back and knock some sense into all you chuckleheads.”
Actually, the truth was more complicated than that. I knew this because I looked Mike up on the Internet once and found some news stories about him. The truth was: Mike came home because he was wounded in action and had to have a piece of titanium put in his leg. The news stories said he’d been working with a task force that was helping to build a school in Afghanistan. The task force came under attack by more than a hundred Taliban fighters. Mike had to battle his way to a big.50-caliber machine gun that was mounted on an armored truck. He was wounded and surrounded by the enemy on three sides, but he used the big gun to hold them off, and the task force was saved. The president gave him a medal for it and everything-I mean, the actual president, as in the President of the United States. It was a pretty cool story. I couldn’t get Mike to talk about it, though. I tried to once. I asked him about it, but he just shrugged and said, “There’s not a soldier out there who wouldn’t do what I did and better. I just happened to be the first chuckle-head to get to the gun.”
Mike was the teacher on duty that Wednesday. After some warm-up exercises and some katas, he set me to sparring with Lou Wilson. Now, the main thing you have to understand about Lou is that Lou is big. Very big. Not very tall or anything, just about my height, but broad and thick and heavy and strong. If I had to compare him to something, it’d probably be a cement mixer. When you’re sparring with Lou and he comes at you, it’s like standing in the middle of the road while a cement mixer comes barreling your way.
That said, I’d always had good luck sparring with Lou. I generally got the better of the fight. Lou is a really nice guy, really friendly and all, but, just being honest here, you’d have to say he’s not all that strong in the brains department. Doesn’t have a lot of smarts, not in school and not when it comes to fighting. He comes at you like a cement mixer all right-and you dance out of his way and pepper him with punches and kicks. And then he comes at you like a cement mixer again and you do the same thing again. And that’s pretty much the way our sparring usually goes.
Only not today.
Now, we always try to do things safely in the dojo, and sparring’s no different. We wear soft gloves and a helmet and shin pads and, of course, a hard cup for protection. Sure, you can get bruised ribs or a fat lip on a bad day, but in general, no one’s going to hurt you too much.
The one exception to that rule would be if you were to-oh, let’s just say for example-get run over by a cement mixer. Which I was. Or at least it felt as if I were.
I’m not sure exactly how it happened. When we started out, it was the usual scenario. There I was in my sparring gear, and there was Lou in his. Sensei Mike stood between us, wearing his black gi and his black belt with four red stripes-a very high ranking. He had Lou and me face each other in the front position. We bowed karate-style to show that we respected each other and that we were working together to learn karate and not trying to do any real damage.
Then Sensei Mike said, “On guard.” We both leapt back and put up our fists in fighting position.
Sensei Mike lifted his hand between us. Then he dropped it and said, “Go!”
And, as always, here came Lou the Cement Mixer. Rumble, rumble, rumble. And I did my usual dancing out of the way, peppering him with a couple of good jabs to the side of his helmet and one sharp roundhouse kick into his stomach above his belt. And then here came Lou again, rumble, rumble, rumble. And again, I danced out of the way and hit and kicked him.
Now, mind you, the blows didn’t bother Lou any. If you wanted to bother Lou, I really think you’d have to sneak up behind him and hit him with a brick. That might annoy him a little, anyway. As it was, I got to show off my karate style-and Lou just came a-rumbling at me again.
And I remember thinking to myself: Boy, if Beth could see me now, she would be really impressed.
Then, right after that, I remember thinking, I wonder why I’m looking up at the ceiling with stars twinkling in front of my eyes and birds twittering in my ears?
As nearly as I can reconstruct it, what happened was this:
Once again, Lou came at me, rumble, rumble, rumble. Once again, I was getting ready to dance out of the way. But instead of dancing out of the way, I started thinking about Beth and how impressed she would be if she could see me dancing out of the way. Lou, finding to his delight that instead of being somewhere else I was standing in front of him thinking about being somewhere else, decided that this might be a good opportunity to throw a roundhouse right to the side of my head. Which he did. Whereupon I went down on my backside, and cue the twinkling stars and twittering birds.
Of course, I jumped back up to my feet right away- just as soon as I realized I had left them. I didn’t want Sensei Mike to think I couldn’t take a punch-even if it was a punch from a cement mixer. I started dancing around again immediately with my fists up in front of me, trying to pretend that a chorus of boings and dings wasn’t still going off inside my head.
Luckily, about two seconds after that, Sensei Mike stopped the fight. He laughed and slapped me and Lou both on our shoulders.
“All right, chuckleheads, good job. Salute the flag and go get dressed.”
Lou and I punched our gloves together-a way of shaking hands.
“Nice punch,” I said. “You really tagged me with that one.”
Under his helmet, I could see Lou beam with pride. Then we both turned and gave a karate-style bow to the American flag.
There’s a changing room at the back of the dojo, just big enough for one person. I waited for Lou to finish, then I went in and stripped my gi off and climbed back into my street clothes. There’s no shower or anything in there, so I don’t usually wash up until I get home and my mother gets a whiff of me.