Then it was our turn. Terry lay down on her stomach, and I tried to flip her onto her back. I started to slide my right hand under her arm and around behind her head in the half-nelson Steve had shown, but she had her arm tight against her side. I couldn't get through without going lower down on her torso, beyond her elbow, and moving up from below, and then I encountered her, er, chest. Jamming my hand through there could be subject to misinterpretation. She was a buxom girl.
So I tried the alternate method Steve had shown, taking hold of her collar and putting my shoulder down against her side to bulldoze her over. I shoved—and she didn't budge. Who would have believed it could be so hard to turn over one feminine-type girl! As with the holddown, I had greatly underestimated the problem. But I tried. I braced my knees and shoved valiantly—and felt an odd kind of tearing in my left side. It wasn't really painful, just muscles sliding about over my rib-cage, making the area a little numb. So I kept on trying to turn her over, and failing. She was glued to the mat, smiling.
A young brown belt stopped by. The higher belts did this, acting as assistant instructors. "I can't turn her over," I complained.
"Well, you slide your hand around like this," he said, happy to show me the ropes. But he couldn't seem to get his hand in either, perhaps encountering the same complex of problems I had. Terry had her arms tightly clamped in good proper resistive style, and of course she was supposed to resist. And a man just doesn't grab a girl by the bust and roll her over. Not in public. (In dreams—ah, in dreams! Jungle, White God, running the line—for shame!) So far, our efforts had only tickled her.
Another brown belt appeared. "What's the matter?"
"We can't turn her," I said.
"No problem." He was a large, husky man. "You just take hold of elbow and knee, like this, and haul her up—" He hauled, lifting Terry abruptly a foot off the mat. She screeched and flailed her arms, understandably startled—but dropped down on her stomach again and clenched her elbows to her sides more tightly than ever.
"Well, you do have to apply a little force," the husky brown belt said calmly, picking her up again and twisting her in the air to flip her on her back as she dropped.
Something in her clothing went SNAP!
"Oops," he said, taken aback. "Are you all right?"
"Quite all right," Terry said quickly, tucking herself back together. Obviously she was unhurt. Woman wear elastic in various places, of course; that's one of the intriguing things about them.
That ended turnover practice. I now had the unenviable distinction of having been unable, even with the help of two brown belts, to turn over one girl—and my increasingly sore side indicated I had injured myself in the attempt. I was some judoka!
There were actually two classes, with a five minute break between them. I had entered the beginning class, but as an adult I was eligible for the Seniors class too. "Why don't you try it," Steve suggested. "We go into self-defense techniques, chokes and armlocks that the kids aren't allowed to do."
Well, why not? I wanted to learn judo, and this was a good way, if I didn't tear myself up too much more. So I stayed. The smaller children went home, including Penny who insisted on saying good-bye personally with a hug; but a few more adults appeared, so it was a group of similar size. As usual, I had no partner.
This time a man approached me. He was Mr. Campbell, an orange belt who looked to be about my own age, and he was the club treasurer. He seemed very nice—but the truth was, all the people in judo seemed nice, and I knew I would want to continue coming for social as well as physical reasons. Aspects of judo, such the forward rolling breakfall, terrified me, but I liked the people. I had not really expected such friendliness and helpfulness in a martial arts class.
This time Steve demonstrated the seoi-otoshi technique, or shoulder drop, in which he turned as in the o goshi but kept his right hand on Uke's lapel—I remembered that the thrower was always Tori, the other Uke—and stuck his right leg back. It looked easy—as they all did, when Steve did them.
Mr. Campbell was familiar with the throw, so he threw me first. Over I went, seeing the high ceiling spin by. Wham! right on my hurt side, and I also scraped the skin off my left elbow again and stung my hand and banged my head: a typical fall.
He helped me up. "Sorry—I didn't realize you weren't used to the falls yet. Are you all right?"
"Fine," I said dizzily. "I seem to have landed wrong."
"It takes time to learn," he said. "I'll just load you next time."
"Load me?" That sounded bad.
"I won't complete the throw. Like this." And he went into the throw again. My feet went up sickenly, and I tensed for the worst—and then he set me down gently, upright. Hey, this was much better! After this I would remember the key word: LOAD. Then it was my turn. Following his directions, I stepped around, turned, and heaved. My right wrist bent backwards painfully, and he did not budge. A complete failure.
"Try it again," Mr. Campbell said. "This time bend your knees. You have to get down low, to pick me up."
Oh, yes—I always forget that detail. The knees really didn't seem very important. So I humored and spun around, bending my left knee as I threw my right leg down almost to the floor behind him. "Wrist stiff!" he warned, and I jerked my fistful of lapel forward and heaved.
And he went up like a feather, over my shoulder, and landed resoundingly on the mat.
"Beautiful!" he cried, getting up. He wasn't hurt at all. I wished I had that secret of safe landing!
"You jumped," I said unbelievingly. I knew I couldn't have done the throw all by myself.
"I didn't jump. You threw me."
So just getting down that extra couple of inches had made all the difference. Another valuable lesson learned. Mr. Campbell was shorter than me, so getting down really counted. And now I really liked this throw, my first successful effort with a partner my own weight. Seoi-otoshi.
Steve ended the class with some testing for promotion. He looked down the line. "Angel," he said.
A girl came out. She chose a partner and stood before Steve. "Ippon seoi nage," he said.
She took hold of her partner, whirled around, and threw him over her shoulder. Wham! In the still hall, the landing was like a crack of thunder. Steve made her do it twice more, and it remained just as impressive.
"Morote seoi nage," Steve said.
Angel whirled into a throw that seemed just about like the first one. Slam! The boy struck the mat. I was amazed at the repeated impacts he withstood. I would have been crushed to a quivering hulk, yet he took fall after fall without concern. It reminded me of the dwarves bowling on the mountain, and I was Rip Van Winkle watching their game of nine pins. Just one big human in this instance, crashing like thunder again and again. Boom-boom-boom, seeming to land so hard that bones must splinter, yet without damage.
"Tai otoshi," Steve said, heedless of the carnage. "O soto gari. O goshi." How could anyone even remember the horrendous names? Yet Angel performed them all.
I was impressed and dismayed. Here was one nondescript girl selected from the class (later I saw her in street clothes, and she was quite striking; it was the gi that made all women sexless), a mere white belt—and she seemed to know all the throws in the book! How could I ever master all this? She even did three hold-downs I didn't recognize.
Angel made her yellow belt promotion. But I wondered whether there was even any point in my remaining in the class. It would take me years just to master the yellow belt techniques—and I couldn't even take a fall yet!
Chapter 3
Sword and Stone
I faded in and out as I floated down the Amazon River. At times I was quite lucid, admiring the crocodiles that hopefully paced my raft. At other times the pain was so bad that I wished the reptile's hopes would be fulfilled. I was dying anyway; why prolong the agony?
Something grabbed me. Instinctively I fought, knowing it was useless and pointless; I could never overcome a crocodile in water. But I wasn't in the water; huma
n hands were holding me. They were Indians, jabbering in their own language. I didn't know whether that was good or bad; I didn't recognize them. They might help me—or eat me.
They helped me. They portaged me overland for many days. We could not understand each other, but it hardly mattered, because I did not remember who I was or where I was going. Sometimes I was able to walk; at other times I could only lie and moan. A pretty maiden tended to me then, seemingly amenable to my every need—except the need to be free of pain.
Then I found myself in the city of Manaus. How I got there and how I left there—blanks.
Time, confusion, travel—whom did I meet, who helped me? More blanks—and I was on a tramp steamer, and it must have been in the ocean, for there was no land in sight, and the swelling waves added to my discomfort. You might think that slow undulations would lull me to sleep, but they made me feel seasick. Yet I had to eat. The food was exceedingly greasy and overspiced, but I had suffered illness and hunger on the route and lost much weight, and now that food was plentiful I could not be choosy.
About three AM I woke with a sensation of fullness, heartburn, indigestion, and general malaise. Not seasickness, for it had happened often before I was on the boat, and this was worse. I heard myself screaming. The ship's doctor was a drunk; he gave me some sort of medicine and a shot of morphine, and I relaxed.
But next day it was back, the pain spreading from my right side into my back and stomach. The skin over the region of my gall bladder was swollen and sensitive. My body was turning yellowish, and in the mirror I saw the whites of my eyes becoming yellow too. This horrified me, as it reminded me of the dread addiction to the drug Kill-13, where the whites turned red. I had fought the purveyors of that drug, and thereby lost my fiancée; the whole series of associated memories was anathema. But in this case it was not addiction, but jaundice: the bile from my gall bladder was blocked off, and spreading throughout the body instead of the digestive system. Another symptom was in my stools: dead gray, no brown. An ugly thing to contemplate, in more than one way.
Half delirious with pain and morphine, I lay on my bunk and heard the captain discussing my case with the doctor. "He's going to die. You'll have to operate."
"Cap'n, I can't operate! I do not have a proper license or instruments."
"And you're a drunken bum. I know. But we don't have any choice. We're not much as a ship or crew, but we're human."
"We don't have anesthesia."
"We have plenty of rum."
"I never did this kind of surgery before."
"You'd rather just weight him down and dump him over the side? You know he can't live unless you operate. Now. What kind of murder do you prefer?"
They were rough men engaged in illicit trade, but decent in their fashion. And so the doctor agreed to operate, reluctantly. I had no say in the matter, which was just as well. Because as he anesthetized me by forcing me to drink cup after cup of cheap Dark Bacardi Rum, he imbibed a fair quantity of that anesthetic himself, and he told me his life story. It was not reassuring.
He was a slight fellow in his forties, with protruding eyes under rimless glasses. He had a three day beard and a lot of hair around his body, and his breath was bad. "I lived in Cuba," he explained. "When the revolution came, I was in my third year of medical school. I had trouble with the Minister of Agriculture of the new regime, because I had taken his wife away from him, and he had me jailed. I learned the rest of my medicine by practicing in prison." He poured another round. He seemed to be determined to keep pace with me, but I was drinking to get dead drunk so I couldn't feel the knife. Had I been sober, I might have found the situation more alarming. But I wasn't sober; that was the point.
"When I was freed," he continued, "I left the country, faked papers, and won a job as ship's doctor. The captain knows this, but he's satisfied, because it means I'll never tell the authorities about his contraband. Where else could I get a job?" He sighed. "But I don't know how I'll get through this time." He poured another round. "I haven't operated on anyone since my prison days, and even then it didn't matter much whether my patients survived. I don't have any instruments, just kitchen knives."
I laughed. I thought that was very funny. Surgery with a kitchen knife! Hilarious! Which meant I was just about drunk enough.
When the time came, four crewmen seized my arms and legs and tied me to a bunk. One of them looked at the doctor and his setup and had to go on deck to heave his own digestion over the side. But I was crazy wild drunk, not afraid at all, thinking it all one big game. After all, I didn't have to do the surgery, or even watch it. But just to be sure, they put a funnel in my mouth and nearly drowned me in more rum. I remembered seeing an old man tortured by being funneled full of water—but then some censor in my brain clamped down and all my past was blank again.
Then I saw the knife, and abruptly I was sober. The doctor was trying to sterilize the thing in the flame of a guttering candle. It was a common vegetable paring knife, not large, but a terrible vision. The doctor's hand was shaking.
But he had guts, because he came at my guts. I would have bolted, but I was securely tied down, my abdomen exposed. The blade sliced into my quivering flesh. I screamed and bridged. "Don't do that!" he exclaimed, backing off as I felt the hot flow of blood down my side. "You'll make me cut up your whole intestine!" After that I screamed, but did not move my torso much. My mind sheered off into the vivid remembrance of other pains, other tortures, physical and mental. The time Kan-Sen put a thumbscrew on me... Illunga half-castrating me with a kick to the groin... Mirabal's electrodes shooting current through my chest... Chiyako.
Chiyako—that was the worst of all. My beloved Chinese-American fiancée, daughter of Shaolin kung fu, brutally killed before my eyes by the savage Kill-13 addict. That pain never ceased; only its encapsulation had permitted me to function normally. I had a terrible spasm, and then I was unconscious again. There was blood all over my belly, soaking the sheets beneath me. But there was also a tremendous sense of peace flooding through me, as though that blood were carrying away the horrors trapped in my body. The awful pressure was gone; the gallstone—indeed, the whole gall bladder—had been removed. Dazed-looking crewmen were mopping the blood out of the site of surgery, eyes squinting so that they did not have to look at any more of me than absolutely necessary.
"Thanks, fellows," I said.
"We're not through this yet," the doctor warned me. "You're bleeding like a stuck pig, and I haven't closed the incision."
"Want me to stop the bleeding?" I asked. I didn't seem to be joking.
"Si, Señor," he agreed absently as he prepared his suture materials. Sweat dripped from his forehead into the wound.
I concentrated. The bleeding slowed, then stopped. It was the ki, come to help me in my hour of dire need.
The doc stared. "It's the DT's! he exclaimed. "I'm seeing that wound close up by itself!"
"I see it too," a crewman said. "Maybe he's dead."
"Just sew it up," I snapped. "I don't know how long I can do this."
"He doesn't sound dead," another crewman said, awed.
Clumsily, the doctor sewed. I don't know what he used—maybe a sail-canvas stitching outfit. But I felt it drawing the wound shut. At last he was done. The operation was a success! I passed out.
I woke hours later with a raging fever. The surgery had been performed under septic conditions, and infection had set in. I had merely exchanged one doom for another.
The pain of the knife is sharp. The pain of contamination is dull. But the knife is soon finished, while the infection ravaged me for days. I couldn't eat, could hardly move; I hacked weakly on the bunk, lacking the strength to clear my congestion more strenuously.
My remaining flesh withered away. I had lost a good deal of blood before my ki clamped down, and had little reserve energy. Slowly I spiraled toward the nether terminus. There was nothing the doctor could do; he had no penicillin or wonder drugs.
I saw the four-armed black godde
ss Kali, the face of death. Then that face shattered like mud-plaster and revealed the skull-like visage of Exu, the Voodoo Satan. He had put a curse on me, and every detail of that curse had been fulfilled. Yet Exu was not my ultimate enemy. The enemy I sought was—blank. That knowledge had been wiped from my brain. Even the incipience of death would not conjure that essential information.
Yet I would not let myself drift into that dark abyss. I had a mission, transcendently important—that I could not remember. I had to live, whatever sacrifice it took.
At last the dark tide turned. My fever peaked and dropped, down a little more each day. I recovered some energy and appetite. "I prayed for you," the doctor said. "Don't laugh."
"I'm not laughing." It was still an effort to speak. I knew he had saved my life, however precariously.
"Or maybe it was for myself I prayed. But I didn't think you'd make it."
"You're a good doctor."
He swore vehemently in Spanish. "A foul lie!" But he was pleased. And my statement must have been true, because how could a poor doctor have saved me despite being in an alcoholic stupor?
We neared the coast of America. "We helped you," the captain told me. "It was a favor to one who loves you. I do not know who. But we must not let them find you aboard our ship. There would be questions, a search." He spread his hands apologetically.
"I understand," I said. Indeed I did. A search would turn up their contraband cargo. "I will remember nothing."
We shook hands. "Perhaps we shall meet again," he said, "when memory is feasible."
Delicately put. "I hope so."
So they put me ashore in a small boat without lights, at night, and left me standing on the beach. Silently the craft returned to the night. I waved once, knowing they could not see the gesture. Then my memory faded.
I turned and tramped toward the lights of the nearby city. There was nothing else to do.
One evening Mr. Campbell did not show up, and neither did any of the girls. The thing about working with such people was that they were less aggressive and more careful than the strong young men. This meant that I didn't get exhausted to the point of pain, or get hurt taking hard falls. It seemed to take forever for injuries to heal, and it was very easy to re-injure the same places before healing was complete. So my effective choices were either to drop out of judo, or to work with those who didn't hurt me. Because there was so much to learn, and skill took more practice than muscle, I stayed in and practiced carefully. Slowly I was learning to take better falls, though they frankly scared me, and I was mastering the names of the techniques.