It was on a grass berm behind the school’s weedy baseball field that the Bear decided to consummate our incipient relationship. I’d studied him enough, and was experienced enough, to recognize even before he did that this would be the place and time. So when he nudged his friends and pointed at me, it was almost comforting, like watching an actor dutifully playing his part in a drama the conclusion of which I already knew. He swaggered over to where I was standing and demanded, what are you looking at? It was so much what I’d expected, I think I might have smiled a little, because although I didn’t respond, for an instant I thought I saw doubt pass across his features like the shadow of a fast-moving cloud. But then it was gone, and he was again accusing me of looking at him, the one line of inquiry apparently having exhausted his creative capacity, and he threw out his arms and lunged at me, just as I’d hoped he would.
As his arms circled my back and he started to pull me in, I shot my hands forward and dug my fingers into the back of his neck, my elbows braced against his chest. I felt him jerk in surprise but he only knew the one move and it had always worked before, so he didn’t stop—he locked his hands and started to squeeze, but now I was squeezing, too, my biceps tightening with the effort, my forearms corded, bringing his head alongside mine, and as our left cheeks connected I dug my face in, bit into his earlobe, and ripped it free with a jerk of my head. He screamed and suddenly he was trying to push me away, but I was clamped onto him like pliers and I bit him again, this time on the back of the ear. Cartilage crunched and tore loose and my mouth was filled with hot, coppery blood, and a primal frenzy swept through me as I realized how I’d made him bleed. He screamed again, lost his balance, and fell onto his back. I spat out what I’d chewed off, reared up, and started raining punches down onto his face. He covered up blindly, in a panic. Someone tried to grab me but I slipped free and darted in for another go at his ear. This time I couldn’t find it—there was too much blood, and not enough ear—but just the feeling of the renewed attack made the Bear shriek in terror and scramble from beneath me as the other kids pulled me loose.
We both stood, the Bear crying now, his eyes wide in disbelief, his left hand groping shakily at the mutilated stump on the side of his head. The two kids who were holding my arms let me go and stepped warily to the sides, as though realizing they’d been standing too close to a wild animal. I looked at the Bear, my fists balled, my nostrils flaring, and felt a bloody smile spread across my face. I took a step toward him, and with a hitching, anguished squeak, the Bear turned and fled for the safety of the school.
The Bear’s parents made a fuss, threatening a lawsuit and excoriating my mother for raising such a wanton, savage child. The school held disciplinary proceedings, and for a while it looked like I might be expelled. But the hearings turned to a discussion of previous incidents in which the Bear had been involved, and of how he was so much bigger than I was, and I sensed in the official expressions of disapproval something pro forma, something of a whitewash. Eventually, I realized that some cabal of frustrated teachers and outraged parents had been secretly pleased at the Bear’s comeuppance, and had used the hearings as the means by which they could achieve an outcome that had already been decided. It was the first time I’d seen such a thing, but later, I came to understand the dynamic is common, occurring, for example, every time the government appoints a blue ribbon commission to investigate the latest scandal. In the end, my encounter with the Bear blew over. Surgeons were able to save what was left of his ear. He grew his hair long to cover his deformity, and he never came near me again.
I learned two things from my encounter with the Bear. First, the importance of surprise. It didn’t matter what size, skills, or other advantages your enemy had if you didn’t give him a chance to deploy any of it.
Second, that there’s always an aftermath. Following the fight, I’d been lucky not to have gotten in more trouble with the authorities. Meaning it was better to take care of such matters in a way that couldn’t be attributed to you. Winning the fight wouldn’t mean much if you got pummeled afterward, legally or otherwise.
At the top of the stairs, I turned left onto the nameless narrow street fronting Saboru, with its eccentric mountain hut façade and profusion of potted plants around the door and under the windows. The light hadn’t yet entirely leached from the sky, but the area was already thick with shadows. A few knots of pedestrians passed me, probably heading home from work, or perhaps for a beer and yakitori in nearby Kanda. I knew my pursuers were close behind me, but they wouldn’t be comfortable yet—the pedestrian density wasn’t quite right. They’d be waiting for an especially congested area, where there would be so many people and so much tumult that no one would notice what had happened until several seconds after the fact. Or for an especially empty area, where there would be no witnesses at all.
I had a knife, a Benchmade folder, clipped inside my front pants pocket. But I would use it only for contingencies. Knives make a lot of mess, all of it laced with DNA. Guns, too, create an evidence trail. For sheer walk-awayedness, there’s really nothing like bare hands.
Past Saboru, the neighborhood grew more residential; the yellow streetlights, fewer and farther between. Within a block, the sparse clusters of pedestrians had evaporated entirely. Over the incessant background screech of cicadas I could just hear a set of footfalls from ten meters back. Coming, no doubt, from whichever of them was keeping me in visual contact. The secondary guy would be about the same distance behind the first, needing only to maintain visual contact with him. If they narrowed the gap between them, it would mean action was at hand. I wasn’t going to give them that chance.
There was a small parking lot on the left side of the intersection ahead. I had noted it on one of my periodic tactical explorations of the city’s terrain, and liked it because among a cluster of dim vending machines to its rear was the entrance to a series of alleys, more like crevices, really, leading back to the street we were walking on now. In fact, I’d just passed a locked gate that led from one of the alleys, though I doubted my pursuers would notice it, or, even if they did, would understand its current significance. From the sound of the lead guy’s distance behind me, I estimated that I could make it through the alley to the inside of the gate at about the same time the first guy would be pausing at the parking lot’s corner, trying to figure out where I’d gone, and the second guy would be passing the gate.
I made a left into the parking lot, and then, the instant I’d turned the corner, accelerated and turned left into the entrance to the alleys. Another left, past a row of garbage cans, and I was at the inside of the gate I’d just passed. I paused, my back to the wall, covered in darkness, and watched as the secondary guy passed my position. I waited several seconds before gripping the metal rail at the top of the gate and moving it slightly to confirm solidity and soundlessness. Then I hopped up, eased my belly over, put a hand on each side, and rotated my legs around, landing catlike on the street side. There was the second guy, just a few meters ahead, approaching the edge of the parking lot. He was moving so slowly it seemed he was aware his partner would have stopped just around the corner to look for me and was trying to give him time. I wondered for an instant how he could have known his partner had paused—maybe just a sensible precaution when turning a corner?—but it didn’t matter. What mattered is that I was closing in on him, and that for the moment I had his back.
I traded stealth for speed, knowing I had only an instant before he might check behind him, and in fact as I reached him, he was just beginning to turn. But too late. I leaped into him, planting my left foot in the small of his back as though trying to climb a steep riser of stairs. His body bowed violently forward and his head and arms flew back, and a startled grunt, loud enough, I was aware, for his partner to hear around the corner, forced itself from his lungs. As he plunged to his knees, I wrapped my left arm around his neck, trapping his upturned face against my abdomen, secured my left wrist with my right hand, and arched savagely up and back. His neck snapped as easily as if it had been made of kindling, and with a similar sound. I let him go and he crumbled to the ground.