Come on, Grandma. Show me something I've overlooked? Tell me why they did it. Was it the Way of the Viper? Some mystical Oriental thing? Some secret of the Five Triads? Hypno-assassins sent to do the bidding of Dr. Fu? Lobotomized Dacoits on a mission of vengeance? I've seen this movie, he thought, and I walked out on it.
“The most secret of all the combat ryus...” And an all-vanquishing force...” He knew Ukie's mumbo-jumbo could be largely discounted. But still there might be something. Ukie might even believe some of that garbage himself, he bore that sort of a psychogenic profile—at least superficially. The congenital liar who has created so many lies to becloud his real activities, nature, motivation, purpose, past, the haze of pseudepigrapha becoming murky pseudoreality. Ukie might not be able to differentiate between the imagined and the real.
But Jack knew enough not to discount the possibility of otherworldly forces, whether or not they might be connected to the martial arts and sciences. He would never NEVER forget the lesson learned from seeing the man in Kowloon. He had witnessed something, no matter how much he'd like to erase it, that would stay forever pressed between the crevices of the brain. The man in Kowloon had been a practitioner of what might be called a ninjitsu life. Jack could still see his image as vividly as if he carried the man's photo in his wallet.
His philosophical antecedents included such luminaries as Sun-tse, Sun Yatsen, Chiang Kai-shek, with a little help from their friends at Run-Run's fantasy factory. But this was a serious oh mighty Buddha yes serious student and disciple. Eichord would never forget the way he was able to brain-freeze himself into a frightening autohypnotic state as he snapped through a fierce dance of the final forms, psyching himself up to the point where you can drive needles through the skin or sledgehammer blocks on the forehead. But those are tricks and the man in Kowloon was no trickster.
And for reasons that were explained to him but his Western mind could never grasp, the man took a very sharp-edged ceremonial sword, and in a chanting, shouting throng of Triad brethren he took his hand like so—the fingers forming a claw—to snag the wet and slippery tongue in his mouth and pulling it out to its fullest extension the man from Kowloon proceded to ... Oh, Jesus, he could see it even now, the sawing action of the blade, the tongue bloodying as the sword bit in but no leverage and it seemed impossible to sever completely and yet the man's whole life was resting on this his life of dedication his stature not on earth not in the secret brotherhood but the honor or lack of it that would go with him to the grave and beyond and so it was that with the fiercest human determination Eichord had ever seen the man's adrenals sluicing out the hyped adrenaline, sending the signal to SAW HARDER to his tunnel-visioned brain cells, he was able to saw through the thick blood-squirting pinkness and sever his own oh God even now he tried to wrench his mind off it and look at the old woman with her sad and sullied whiteness exposed to the black, unforgiving lens of a crime photographer's soulless camera all he could see was the man in Kowloon.
All the more horrific afterward as he stood there so stony, resolute, squinting, focused, shaking with concentration and energy and power and will, a proud and unblinking conqueror, oblivious to any loss or a mouth filling with blood, single-minded beyond any worldly suffering of wounds or tombs, eyes seeing beyond reality, penetrating through to his acutely personal mental vision, some ethereal discernment, some perspicacious vista of Bushido-samurai-kamikaze-ninja heaven where only the relentlessly tough will go.
And Eichord thought how easy it would be, with a mixture of irritation and wistfulness, how easy it would be to drink away the remainder of the day. Hum away the rest of the afternoon and evening. He'd hummed more than his share. He'd had plenty of hummers. How nice it would be to just fold his tents now and succumb to the lure of the bottle's promise and just slip right on in there with the melting cubes. Grab all the gusto you can get because too much of a good thing ... And he got through the day but it was close. It was waiting. Hovering. Waiting to take him down.
Driving back to the motel that night he learned it was getting closer to King's birthday and in Texas it looked like it might be a biggie. A thirty-five-year-old maintenance man was charged with ninety-six counts of murder in the terrible Puerto Rican hotel fire. A woman in Ft. Worth had thrown her infant son out of a fourth-floor window because voices had kept whispering in her ear to do it. Back in the shop two state guys from the attorney general's office were trying to turn the Grave-digger case into a racially related series of crimes. By tomorrow they'd be color-coding graphics for a presentation. Somebody somewhere was working up a monograph filled with facts like both the names Lee Harvey Oswald and William Hackabee each contain fifteen letters—that kind of goofy shit.
Jack switched the radio off and tried to get into his ultimate cheerleader fantasy. He pictured Noel down in her spa and she calls to him and he goes downstairs and there she is standing with her back to him, wearing a little short skirt and cowgirl boots, and slowly she eases the skirt up on those great legs and ... “Mister,” she tells him, “I ain't wearin’ nothin'."
But he couldn't get into it at all. January 13 had been that kind of a bad mammer-jammer.
Garland
“You know,” Noel Collier told Ukie's brother rather breathlessly, “I was so surprised. I probably acted like an imbecile.” He shook his head no, smiling warmly, and she had the oddest feeling—as if he was understanding and anticipating everything she said, not just being polite. “I guess you're used to that."
“Sure. Over the years. Twins do get special attention. And when we were growing up it was a bonding thing. It's just only in these later years after we quote matured unquote that we started—what else can I call it? Growing apart. Falling apart.” He gestured sadly. “I lost him years ago, I suppose."
“It happens."
“I tried for years to hang in there through his unpaid bills, the messes he'd make, the jams he'd get into. I'd try to follow around behind him with a broom sweeping up as much as I could. But then his behavior became so ... God, what do you say? Outrageous? Sick! He needed help and he wouldn't hear of it. He had the sexual problems—which I would try to talk about and couldn't understand.” He shook his head again. “I mean he's not that ugly he couldn't have women—"
“He's a good-looking man,” she said before she realized that she had just told him she thought he was good-looking too, and she blushed bright crimson, from surprise more than from the frankness of her admission.
But he didn't appear to pick up on it and said, “He wanted to be an entertainer for a while and he tried a fling at that. That was really the downfall. He was working these awful strip clubs and topless places and I caught his act—if you can call it that—a time or two and the crowds were a bunch of drunks waiting to see naked girls and they wouldn't listen to him, and he wasn't funny. And the odd thing is, he used to be a kind of charming guy and funny in conversation, you know, and he sort of went off the deep end. He just fell apart.
“And you know how it is—when it's someone you care for. I don't know if you've ever been around when somebody you really cared about just began to disintegrate before your eyes but it's a paralyzing experience. You want to help but you can't, you know?"
“I do, I think. I watched a marriage partner with the same kind of a perspective. Someone I had cared a lot about in the beginning...” Before she knew it she was telling him all about herself. It was the oddest sensation, Noel the defense lawyer putting herself on hold, so drawn to this man just as she was his brother. Wanting them to know each other well. To understand the shared secrets. To be able to help in a meaningful way.