Martial Artists

by Roland Jackson

Winner, Waasnode Short Fiction Prize, selected by Jonathan Escoffery

Not a one of them guys were black. Or Brown. And Teacher was pale, not Asian. Which I had grown up thinking was a thing. Marcus, Draigo, the myriad who came and went, dudes that didn’t last. All white. All that I saw from the beginning. But Porter had invited me in in a way where I didn’t have to worry as much about that, and I felt immediately that what they were studying I was welcome to and that there was brotherhood there as well. Ordering our last round, my back turned to the lot of them, thinking maybe no thank you, that whole first year of training and big dark desert nights and drinking I’d relied on him to say to me not to worry about’em. “They’ll either come around or they won’t, long as you train right.” Whoever she was behind the bar may have only been in town a week but he’d of known her, and covering the round, tipping accordingly, he’d watch her walk away. And to me he’d say, “Long as you train right you’ll always have that to take with you.”

*

Every one of us has since credited him: Porter and his descriptions, the energy he brought to the table. His talk of self-defense, dirty Judo, Chinese, American boxing. His talk of “Jackslaps” and “holes in the wall,” and “big grown men crying.” It excited me. When I met Porter he was Elder, senior to all students but Teacher, and was the School’s chief recruiter. He was a tall, charmer of a man, a practitioner in his mid-thirties showing those of us who were circling our twenties why this was Tao, how this was the way. So he knew how to talk that talk as well. His background in Shotokan Karate, what Teacher referred to as “Hollywood,” came from his time prior to the School. His reach was formidable, and he had sharp, penetrating kicks.

The first night I heard him I only eavesdropped. Off from work and drinking by my lonesome I heard him say, “A belt is a belt is a belt,” good for holding up your pants and something we as a school didn’t pay into. A week later I found them at the same bar, same time, late, and he sat me down.

“We are all of us adults, working full-time jobs. We train five nights a week, sometimes six.”

Then he said, “Tomorrow. 7:30.” Told me where and everything.

*

I met Teacher a week into my training, was trained up until that point by Porter.

Teacher was a man of action and not words, or at least not many. At the school where Porter made our introduction, I took a knee. When I rose to meet his hand he said with Porter standing right beside me, “Scream car-ra-tay and I’ll toss you right out of here.” It wasn’t long before I was instructed to take a shorter stance. Which was against what Porter had been showing me. When I missed a step, was too loose in my maneuvering, Teacher demonstrated. Cleared my feet right out from under me, drilling me to the concrete floor. How none of it hurt is testament to his power. A linebacker with the shoulders and might of a brown bear, the man knew what he was doing. When he demonstrated on Porter and chopped his feet out from under him it was clear that a throw and a fall had within them a series of decisions. And that they could all be taken from you.

“Too loud,” he said as we all helped Porter to his feet, “don’t show as much.” “Breath in…breath out the mouth,” he would say. Of course there was more to it than that.

*

Before I talk about what the training was, our actual training, the fights we served to rednecks and loud mouths who maybe should have known better I should explain about my folks. Who having only a base knowledge of my whereabouts— being in Arizona, being black in Arizona—were terrified.

Usually their question was this: “When are you coming home?”

If they asked me what I was doing out there, I in my excitement to avoid whatever else it was we weren’t talking about would tell them how I’d just worked a nine-day spike, nine days on, five days off, cutting fire line and felling conifers of assured hazard in painted red canyons deep in the Arizona wilderness. “Just me and the mountains and the crew,” I’d say. I’d go on, steering the conversation. Doesn’t rain much until it does—hard—and then the desert’ll stink of rain. Flash floods and cactus flowers in bloom and so unreasonably beautiful you really can’t make this up, I’d tell them, the colors I’m seeing, the calm I’m feeling. Long as I made my numbers, I explained, nobody bothered me. Which was mostly true. If they dismissed me it was with their face, which, yes, I read into and, no, I didn’t forget. Only once did someone outright treat me as something that didn’t belong or know what was what. Ask, who’s white, your mom or your dad? Say, they’d never heard of a black sawyer before.

I screwed the cap on my gas tank, eyed’em, began chugging in the bar oil. I had at least a couple more trees in me, was three miles from a road you could drive on reasonably.

Town was built by sawyers who were black. And it’s mom’s who’s white, dad’s black. But I had no interest communicating it to’em that way.

*

Porter wasn’t there for my first night witnessing what our actual training looked like but the next night when I saw him, met up with him at Scalia’s for Fish Fry and beers he knew all the story. I was surprised at the details he had already. “Anyone worth their weight in salt knows you break a bottle up; it’s the downward strikes that’ll throw glass in your eyes. Whoever he was it sounds like he knew what he was doing, Marcus did good to not get pinched there. And otherwise nothing broken, it sounds like, no bones. Which is good: keeps ‘merica’s good ole boys dressed in blue from sniffing around.” Of course I appreciated that.

All of my first year training I committed to the school. Occasionally I followed, watched Marcus. Who Teacher commented on as someone who was applying himself. A few of the times I watched Teacher. How I pretended like being an accomplice didn’t matter is a shock to me now. I asked Porter about his experience “earning rank,” but all he said was, “You worry about you now. When are you planning to pull the trigger?” I knew a guy like me beating up a guy who didn’t look like me, someone white, didn’t happen. At least not without consequence. I knew all that.

But when the Jackson fellow was lynched in Indiana—my words, no other words to describe it; pulled over and murdered—I found myself becoming a little more involved. Case was big enough for those of us in Arizona to hear about it—I’m talking about the days before cell phones and Youtube, when we had only the autopsy to go off of—but of course I still got calls from Grenada, Senatobia, Chicago. Family calls telling me things that weren’t news but were.

I found myself waiting for the murderers to go to trial, unsure if they even would. Waiting, I worked my forty—my forty plus—and trained. But a week after the report and neither work nor training had cleared my head. One night I went so far as to talk about it with Porter.

“This is recent,” he said.

“This is recent,” I told him.

Spooling out the details feels as wrong to me now as it did to me then, the talk and purpose of it, murky. The gruesome oak trees, the capturing friction, and the suspension of black bodies. What I can say now is this: There was a motorcycle, and he was speeding—some, not a lot.

The following night Porter met up with me. Having missed class he called me up, and I met him at one of our easy bars on 66. We had our round and were sitting down, and he was soon listing the details I couldn’t. The four officers and only one of him. How they removed his helmet and that it was unscathed, same for the bike’s kickstand, and that having finished they sure as shit attempted a reattachment of that helmet, the staging of an accident being the goal.

Amber lights above us failed to flicker. Drinks were ordered and levers along the bar were pulled. People drank and drank and left.

I was impressed he’d done his research. And within that impression I filled the silence between us with assumptions. That I had been heard, understood, that he, Porter, could understand how a man I’d never met and whose complexion was maybe only a hair darker than my own could impact my life so deeply.

“You been sleeping,” is how my father would put it to me later. “Mountain air lulled you into thinking shit don’t happen.”

*

There was never a doubt in my mind for what the outcome would be. But that fall when I saw my father’s number ringing out from my machine I felt defeated. I knew the verdict was in.

It was dark out still when I fired up the truck. I drove west, not checking the message, forfeiting vacation to work on with our other crew, who I knew were still in town. I was due for work the next day for a nine-day spike, way south of town. But I needed the saw, the labor. The adventure of chainsaw and tree on a thirty-degree slope of burn.

Truck climbed that last 1000 feet in a hurry and no problem. Our dink of a foreman eyed me between the falling snowflakes. Wary, he was, confused.

“You’re with us?”

Nine hours later I was ringing that bell at the school’s front entrance, all wet and caked in sawdust, my beard and shirt collar reeking of ash and oil.

Then Teacher had my elbow. Pulling me aside like I was nothing. He said he was buying.

*

The bar was old and rundown, full of whoever, guys in orange vests and red ball caps, locals, I suppose. Big ole hunting ads and beer ads hanging on the walls, one of those corpuscular rooms Porter liked to call’em, ever dimly lit.

I sat there starring from one head mount to the next, all big grey bucks, whitetails and antelopes, glancing out the one window. Outside showing a steady stream of snow. Flakes falling fat and wide.

Place had only the one TV and eventually Teacher stepped up, got a hold of that clicker. And it didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for. Had the volume up with the captions on, the newscaster belting out, “White Officers not guilty,” and a minute later, “Now the news,” as if Jackson somehow weren’t.

The one he chose for me was tall and barrel-chested and I didn’t at all like the look of his arms. But after he started up about our man in Indiana, calling him amongst other things dirty—“He was speeding yeah? No? Well, probably guilty of something. I mean, where’d he get that bike to begin with?”—I wouldn’t let it escape my notice that his stepping outside to smoke that cigarette had put him all by his lonesome.

Teacher had that look about him, all shit-grin eating. Ordered me a belt and said it would be there for me—after.

*

What my father would think, what the whole of my father’s side of the family would think—if they only knew. And how Porter had been so casual in talking and boasting made no sense to me then. For a long time after the violence hung on me.

I had never hit one of them so hard as to render’em unconscious and this

scared me. Not the connection. That part was magic. Same for the brief exchange. Me: “What does it matter, what bike he had?” Him: “You got something you want to say?” Arms at his side, cigarette at his side, the entire frame of him butting up just enough to show me everything I’d need and how vulnerable his mouth was. After, he whimpered on the ground half in and half out of consciousness—the Manzanita tree branches he reached after failing, the earth he leaned back into, pawing at it. That for me was a bit much. He was alive, though. And I left him at that.

Next day I was gone. The folks I worked with, me, and another mess of dead conifers. When I returned to class the pats on the back were deliberate and heavy and welcoming, and as the Brothers shook my hand—how can I explain this?— my hand went on top of theirs, no longer at the forearm.

In fact, Teacher had us spar that night, the fun stuff, and facing off against Porter, it wasn’t long before he caught me out with that tall jab, jab, kick combination of his. Knocked the wind out of me good, gave me a hand to get back up, and said, “About how it went down the other night?” But we were smiling.

*

I’ll say this: it wasn’t all rednecks and violence.

Teacher, who was nonetheless a god damn maniac, would eventually open up enough to sometimes teach me and a few of the Brothers who had been there longer how to play Healer. The bones we broke we set back into place. We manipulated and sometimes squashed joints in from their dislocated selves. It was eye-opening—we are all of us carrying so much trauma.

Having earned rank I set my sights on a kind of full immersion devotedly practicing what all I’d learned, the healing, the violence. By my third year in Arizona I’d moved closer to downtown, some hole in the wall off of 66 right near where I’d first heard Porter talking about the school, and I would go home, change, find a bar, find someone in need. Next night return to class, do my push-ups and ask questions. That was all it was for me, I was hardly a quick study. Weeks, months would go by without incident. But eventually I’d be reminded. Jerome was a man I’d come to know, mostly in passing, and who affectionately referred to me as I did to him as the town’s other black guy. At night he peddled roses on the cheap, and seeing this in that all but white town hurt my heart. Seven maybe twelve years earlier he’d come here to live. There are no accidents, I thought. And this was enough to lead me back to Jackson. Jackson, and if he were laid before me in that horribly broken state; white cops and if they’d seen me riding shotgun, riding a damn bicycle, money to spare, me prowling and pummeling one of theirs. Folks coming to Teacher, coming to me in some kind of relatively awful state, unable to turn their neck or raise their arms in certain directions, and we’d heal-em. Send’em away comfortably, hands above their head, hands behind their back, whatever they needed. But the goal for me was Jackson. Who was different. And no mountain or canyon or training was fixing that.

*

Yes, it was personal for me, how and where we trained, and I don’t think Porter ever understood that. Teacher figured as much—orchestrated my rank knowing as much. But if he cared about me bashing in blue eyes and blonde white faces he never would say. Somewhere in my second year my shoulder had started dislocating, and the second time it happened, bad but not awful, I showed right back up to class and I think Teacher had all the clarity he needed. I was loyal. Which was greater than any brawl he might have put me through. In me he had found someone who’d keep going, someone who would show up battered and batter others still, someone who would pay his dues and keep showing up. And Teacher lived for that shit.

*

Sometimes I intervened. Said no to a few of the ones Teacher pointed us toward. Some Navajo “fella,” another time said no to some blue collar Mexican. And I never drove into Indian country. Porter noticed.

We were out, looking around, drinking not training, my rank and position at the school clear, when Porter puffing his chest and everything said, “I’m saying, if Jerome was running his mouth, if Teacher said, ‘That one,’ you wouldn’t—”

It was his hunch and left-leaning limp that reminded me of Jerome’s age. And that he was never getting out of here. I don’t know that he saw me but I saw him, I watched him, shuffling through the entrance of a bar across the way. Then I turned back to Porter.

Eventually the bartender scooped up our empty pitcher. Asked neither Porter nor I if we cared for another. And just like that there was nothing between us. “Jerome’s not one to run his mouth,” I said. “And I think you know that.”

*

Some of it was work related, my being out of town all those weeks—Pops was right about that mountain air. Out of all of us core practitioners Porter was the only one who brought in new blood. In large part, it was him who kept the rents paid, Porter who kept the lights running. But we all knew who he was. Tall. A charmer. A mouth and a reach and that damn jab-jab-kick combo of his.

Before the end I had only one instance of realizing how weak he really was. Stuffed his kick, stepped inside his reach fast enough to trip him on his momentum. I didn’t even lay a hand on him. By then he’d been off and on coming to class, I’d be there for each of my five days off and he was nowhere, gone for a week’s worth of class. The following week he’d return with some new recruit. Push-ups and snake-body exercises, I seen him skip reps, unable to keep up, his face ever-animated. Our training was simple: “Breath in, breath out the mouth.” It's the guy whose face says walk-in-the-park, that's our fighting stance. And Teacher and I both told him that.

Eventually his recruits were useless, just a body. Someone he’d been drinking with. The single mothers he fucked and whose kids he convinced into signing on to become junior marital artists. To me they felt hardly worth the rent, though that part Teacher would have disagreed with. Long as they paid Teacher didn’t mind one bit.

It was the ease of it all that bothered me. That privilege I saw in Porter, his cruising in and out of the school, never learning our techniques. Figuring he could—whatever.

*

Still. We all gave Porter plenty of room. Gave him the lead, ever he came to class. Porter was Elder and that was that. But I felt disappointed.

*

Finally things came to a head. December came, cold, snowy, windy, one of our lower yields for the year. Wrenched my shoulder on a Monday and jacked up Marcus's knee on the Wednesday is most of what I remember. Teacher, who’d done the both of us in, treated us with needles. Which helped. But for Marcus there was a terrible minute there where he didn’t cooperate, sprawled out and writhing on the school’s cold carpeted floor, and Teacher didn’t stop. We didn’t own the building and we were never not in danger of losing the school. When it came to money Teacher was just that much more emotional. The kids’ class was our bread and butter and going good. Parents desperate to get their screaming seven and eight-year olds some out-the-house exercise. But we weren’t there for the kids, Teacher reminded us, reminding Marcus there on the ground with his knee all separated. We were responsible for bringing in guys who wanted to study. Aggressive adult males. “It falls to you,” Teacher said, staring at me and twisting Marcus’s last needle up and down and up.

*

What I saw, what I felt all the days I wasn’t working was murder. Jackson, reminders of. Red sunsets and blue mountains and clear night skies with stars glittering from horizon to horizon and you knew he hadn’t seen a lick of ‘em. Off work I’d scout the same canyons we were felling, aiming for elk and deer with blind luck, instinct, and curiosity, one time so fully in elk had a hundred head of’em racing past me at a full gallop. I’d drive into town and see Jerome peddle all winter, snow be damned. Man wearing sneakers, pant legs caked in snow. All of that I’d bring with me to the school, red flushed and tearful, and I would punish my every training partner. My folks would call to check in on me, to ask me how I was doing.

“We are worried about you,” they would say.

They would ask me when was I coming home? Truck needed work, was the usual excuse. Fine enough for in-town driving, I told them, but that it couldn’t get me beyond that just then. I was doing fine, I told them, my days and nights were full. It would be six years in total before I’d come home. Each year telling them something along the lines of “Few more sidejobs, couple more Saturdays of work.

Then I’d be ready for a visit.”

*

I may have even seen Jerome on my way to the school that night—seen him in my mind’s eye, or seen him out, hustling white tourists. It began as a not unusual night, one of the winder nights in that dark winter. We’d trained at the school, a good handful of us, had a good workout, no one too badly hurt. Class ended but we stood around the entrance, dressed normal with the back of the room dark. I knew there was something. Teacher poured shots of snake wine, which we pounded. Then he locked the door.

An hour in and Porter stumbled, and not from the booze. He just didn’t know what we’d been studying.

It was then that Teacher pulled out the knucklers. Horrible gloves, albeit great for your knuckles. And that shit-grin eating face of Teacher’s told me in no uncertain terms who I’d be facing off against first.

For a while I danced around, avoiding the inevitable. Then he popped me good. Three times. Each one right on the nose. And like that Porter’d triggered the training. When my head shot forward for the last time, I got my feet, my shoulders, chin, and breath. All over him were openings. The solar plexus, his nose, and liver. The other side of his nose. That combination folded him, and when I pinned him down and found I had time to think again I decided to apply the hold. The new one. Whose counter was simple—long as you’ve been training.

I popped his knee out because I knew I could pop it back in, because I knew it would get him to get his act in gear and get to training. We were grounded on the school’s cold, carpeted concrete, Porter because he had no choice. Under my control was Porter’s ankle and knee and I felt the need to make myself clear. To be heard. Understood. Anyway, it was a pop and a snap. And I’ll hear that shit for the rest of my days.

But having made myself clear I was eager to separate from him and to care for him. I turned to one of the newer Brothers and told him to turn up the goddamn lights, told him I needed to see what was happening. The best place to set those kinds of injuries is right there, right on the spot and with the lights showing the long state of crumpled Porter I knelled beside him again gently gaining a more comfortable work position.

I knew better, but it was then I felt Teacher’s palm at my shoulder, Teacher saying, “Let’em stand himself up.”

*

And if you can believe it for a while there he did get down to training again, like the old days, he and I, back to when we were Brothers. Squatting in horse-stance for hours, Porter with his new knee taking a modified stance, shorter, less tall, the both of us no talking. Just the three of us, him and me and the training. I gave in to working more days in town. Running miles of lines of forms each evening, much as we were able, and next morning hauling lumber and pounding nails and training all over again.

*

The last fall we trained together I was treating a ranch hand for a slipped disc. Leading into the ranch was a quarter-mile driveway, nothing but mountains on either side, Aspens green and gold, and I got around to asking would he mind if we used the land. Porter and I went there to do our routines. Punch. Step forward. Pivot and punch and step forward. We got it so those things were wired into us, no thought, breath in, breath out, move. When the ground was frozen and the leaves were down Rancher had had enough.

“Doesn’t bother you doing the same things over and over?” To which we both said, “It’s our training.”

We applied ourselves, Porter and I, setting the other man’s ki, smashing each other’s centerline, rousing the body’s natural defense mechanisms. The fight-orflight binary became pain means I’m alive, period, the body and mind and spirit saying so. Things were happening around the country—white people realizing the things that had been happening all the time. But I had my training then and I imagine Porter did as well. Chaos felt like calm. *

The infection that has surely forever touched Porter began at his ankle, not his knee. It was something Teacher couldn’t fix.

Some of the training I think did help. Our training. But the times he threw those high devastating kicks he’d have to pull them back in time to catch himself. He’d lie there, rocking back and forth, clenching his knee. Dirt, carpet, whatever we were standing on. He couldn’t train like that. Wasn’t supposed to to begin with, and, anyway they were never a part of who we'd trained ourselves to become. He just couldn’t help himself.

Teacher was sympathetic until he wasn’t. First snow hit and the injury just got worse. Shaking in agony for what felt like months, coming to Teacher for help. He’d come in on a Friday, to the adult night class, and Teacher walking him out of the medicine room would say, “Why didn’t you rest it?” Saturday morning he’d manage his way through the snow, limping through the door, still ringing the bell, and right in front of all them kids Teacher would stop the form to say, “Well, if you’d been training more…” and “It’s just like we practiced,” knowing who Porter was and that he hadn’t learned anything. He’d sit Porter down at the entrance and treat him there. He’d add, “Maybe too much Hollywood, ey?”

We tried our hand at helping him back to health, Draigo and I, and Marcus, too. But anytime we got a hold of that leg the pain would start in. He was entering his forties. He was 6’2, a big tall man in desperate tears. We’d manage to cut off some of the pain. But it wasn’t clear to me whether his stuff was out its socket or just plain torn up. He had a bill from the hospital. “MRI with contrast needed, possible infection. Cost of surgery…” He didn’t have insurance. And none of us had that kind of money.

*

A couple of times, both times I was with Marcus, we’d be at a bar, and sure as shit I’d see one of’em, I would immediately recognize the face of a guy we’d battered in. How they never put two and two together, not many black people in Arizona, how I could recognize them while they failed to do the same I have not a clue. I imagine they didn’t believe it possible. The arrogance of it.

*

One Saturday, after the kids class, the phone rang. I was at the school, cleaning the mirrors.

The voice on the other end asked, “Can you come and help me with something?” and with some hesitation I recognized it was Porter speaking, and without asking what it was I said, “Sure.”

Turned out he was on a side-job for some homeowner, big nasty Box Elder he or I had no business getting up into. We worked it all morning with ropes and pulley blocks. An hour in and Porter was mostly just standing there. By the afternoon he could barely walk. He was trying to hide his limp.

The money ended up being good. And he split it with me, fifty-fifty. That night I treated him anyway, after he’d told me he couldn’t afford it. And at his apartment I slide my half of the earnings into his coat pocket. Which he didn’t fight me over. I expected I would hear from him the next day, something along the lines of “I’m beat,” but didn’t. By this point Porter’d long since stopped attending class. And he knew better than to rely on Teacher to treat him proper.

*

Did I care about Porter? Was his friendship a kind of light for that damn all white town? Easy: yes.

*

From Teacher, I learned the creative cycle and the destructive cycle, and that from there you make a decision. I don’t go looking for fights anymore. I know how to avoid the ones who are. Those training to be superstar maniac fighters. The dozens of unknowns you eyeball wrong in the street. Cut out in front of driving. Bump elbows with accidently on your way to the washroom. Guys waiting for something to prove. Those guys, they’re all around us. Knowing this, I keep my mouth shut. I mostly don’t talk about my training. Same for my past.

Some of us became true healers, taking on stroke victims, and incorporating acupuncture, cupping, and Tui Na. Draigo’s muscling for a medium mob operation in Rockland County, New York. Hips and fingers, he told me, what Teacher used to call “basics.” Every few years Marcus sends me one of his Chinese oil paintings. From time to time I’ve taken to healing people. Setting backs and stiff necks for the guys I work with. Their pregnant wives if they need it. Regardless of what I decide, Teacher’s given me his blessing.

*

Teacher trained cops in Coconino, Pima, and Havasu counties. Porter was out the picture and they became our chief source of revenue. They were maybe nice enough guys, but they weren’t Brothers, and showing them our techniques never sat right with me. The finer pieces of our terrible techniques I left out, ever we crossed hands. Which didn’t escape Teacher’s notice. “Those boys are helping us keep the lights on,” Teacher told me, all smiles. “Amongst other things.” That they had been there all along was something I couldn’t stomach for a long time after.

Another year passed and I was still in those canyons, running a chainsaw and not a foreman, still debating whether I should have taken Porter’s knee. With Teacher’s blessing I had long since taken the kids’ class from Porter. They’d ask about him, but that was it.

*

The last time I saw Porter, we were at the diner where Draigo was banned for life. He sat across from me hunched over his coffee. He asked me did I still hate white people. Despite my best efforts I couldn’t help but smile for it.

“I hate what’s been done to my people,” I told him.

We talked about the past. About Jackson. Who it turned out had stolen the bike.

“Odd new evidence for a case no one cared about to begin with. Though I suppose you already know all that,” he said. In the end he had the last word. He stood up, and whether he bowed or was stiff from the knee and ankle I couldn’t tell, didn’t care to ask. He was thinning out, balding, I saw.

Coming to or leaving an area you are always at your most vulnerable. Which is maybe why we, the Brothers and all who I trained with are taught to give up both hands, to shake with neutrality. I stood there holding Porter’s hand in mine, waiting for him to put the other one, his stronger one, down. I could wait him out.

Or worse. Always there was worse.

Roland Jackson lives and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with his wife and daughter. An arborist by trade, this is his first publication. Find him at rolandjackson.com.