The Entropy of Bones Read online

  But she says I can only go if I learn to fight. He was halfway through another blind swipe when Narayana froze and broke posture entirely.

  “Why me?” he asked. I took his help onto the deck and looked at the man as though he were feverish.

  Um, not a lot of Indian men I know spend their afternoons chopping fruit with machetes. Or call it training. He smiled and sat on his ever-present cooler. It was attended to with religious fervor, never to be absent of its holy sacraments of Jack Daniel’s and Coca-Cola. Sometimes I think those two ingredients were the only spices to his life the United States offered Narayana.

  “But why do you want to practice for what I am practicing for?”

  Because no one fucks with you and you don’t even know it. I have never seen you nervous or out of your depth. Ever. I still remember when that group of yuppies almost crashed into you out by San Rafael and how you went all pirate and jumped on their ship. Yeah, that right there. I gotta learn how to carry myself like that.

  “You want to hijack ships?” he asked in earnest. My mom told me he used to be a pirate. I thought it was a joke until I looked online and found out booty was still getting plundered and cannons were still being fired on the open seas. Only now it was the poor, the desperate, and the insanely brave who dared become pirates. I saw Narayana differently after that.

  No. But I want people to know I can and will in a second if the situation calls for it. I want to be like you.

  Something about the reflection of the light from his blade to his face made Narayana look menacing in that moment. He saw me flinch and let the machete down on the deck gently. He turned and went to his ratty green-and-yellow lawn chair and poured himself a Jack and Coke. He offered me one, but I declined. That earned me a little more respect in his eyes. Still, Narayana sat and watched the sun go down behind San Francisco before he said anything in English.

  “You do what I say? Everything. Anytime. Never a ‘no’ from you to me. You become mine. I lend you to your mother. If she’s drowning and I’m drowning, you save me. I don’t recommend this path for anyone, being under me. Go find a dojo, something like that. They teach you how to fight good.”

  That I had to think about for a second. Was good good enough?

  What’s the difference between some dojo guy teaching me and you? Like what’s your style? You do kung fu? Tae kwan do?

  “There is no name to what I know,” Narayana said, taking a long sip from his cup. “Kung-fu, your muay Thai, these arts teach you how to break bones. What I do breaks the memory of bones. People do not heal from the wounds I inflict. There is no humanity in what I teach, only fire and sharp flexible pain. I travel the world for sixty-eight years, and this is the only discipline that makes me humble before it.”

  Get the fuck out of here. I laughed. My mom was thirty-three. Narayana looked maybe five years older than her.

  “The practice,” he said, showing off his taut skin.

  Chapter Two: The Practice

  Each brother had a different idea of what to do with the pot thieves.

  “Blow their fucking brains out,” came from Shotgun, of course. He always had a reason to be pissed. In this case, it was the identity of their thieves. If not friends, two of the white guys were at least drinking buddies. He almost kicked one of their heads off as soon as he saw the man passed out and covered in early morning dew.

  “You kill them?” Roderick asked me.

  I could, I offered. Figured you had more options if I delivered them alive.

  “Dumbass brought his driver’s license along,” Shotgun joked as he rifled through what Dale had pilfered.

  “Fair point,” Roderick said, turning his gaze back to me. Dale’s silence was unsettling his brother, but Roderick couldn’t understand why. He’d only heard of what I could do. I realized Dale was the only one who’d seen me do my due that close and not get touched. The only person except Narayana.

  “So we disappear them. Leave people wondering,” Roderick stated, slipping on massive black gloves and a steel grimace.

  Thought you didn’t want war? I asked casually, not moving as he approached the big Mexican.

  “Won’t be war.” Roderick reached in his lumberjack jacket and pulled out an axe that could only be hidden by his frame. “They’ll be a question mark.”

  Shotgun started hiccuping seizing so hard he fell over face forward. We all stopped. Dale was the first to realize his nephew was laughing. Finally, the older man spoke.

  “You want to be serious for a god damn second? Might be helpful!” Roderick shouted.

  “I’m sorry.” The redhead giggled as he stood with a piece of paper pilfered from a thief and walked toward his uncle. “But you got to see this.”

  We waited until Dale read it, then watched as he fell into hysterics as well. Fortunately, he retained enough composure to speak.

  “It’s a medical marijuana card.”

  Roderick laughed so hard I could actually make his mouth out underneath the beard. After another minute he prepared himself to butcher his enemies again.

  “How long can you keep them unconscious?” Dale asked me loud enough to interrupt his brother’s murder chop. The other two looked at me with a newfound confusion

  I don’t know. About a day and a half. After that it’s probably easier to kill them than keep them alive. The Dragon’s kiss to the back of neck supposedly worked even when someone was already unconscious, but it was a one-time strike.

  “You have a plan?” Shotgun asked.

  “I’m thinking Chabi’s right. We disappear these offenders, more will come. Chabi came through covert style. Not a one of them saw her clearly. To them, they came to do what they’ve done dozens of times before. Only this time . . .”

  “Only this time what?” Roderick asked impatiently.

  “Exactly. We get to decide.”

  “You ain’t trying to punk them or something?” We all looked at Shotgun, who felt stupid as soon as he asked the question.

  “I wouldn’t fuck these morons with my worst enemy’s dick. But you’re picking up some of what I’m laying down. If we can humiliate and confuse them, then our land will be . . .”

  Scary, I volunteered.

  “Exactly.”

  We did end up stripping them. At 2:30 the next morning, after Dale, Roderick, and Matt were seen at their usual spots, we dropped the weed thieves off, naked, in an alley near the St. Helena golf course, bound together by torn strips of their own clothes, knotted so tightly together they had to call for help to get free. I heard one guy went back to Mexico, one of the white kids joined the military, and another started taking community college classes. The rest drank their fear away for months. None of that mattered for me. I was stuck on the smiling faces of Shotgun and his uncles. I hadn’t been around their type before; criminals, no doubt, but not bad people. Just willing to do whatever was necessary to protect what mattered: family.

  Dale demanded that he drive me home. I’d stayed long past my usual hour. Of course I could’ve run home but he’d been holding his tongue around me since the attack. Dale had been both close and cautiously distant, like he had something to say but didn’t want his family to hear. His black Monte Carlo was at least eight years old but smelled new. It purred like it was just off the showroom floor and almost lulled me to sleep. We rode in silence until we got to highway 1 by the coast.

  “I had a friend. He was in Kosovo when all that madness started. He was on the ground counting bodies, if that means anything to you.”

  Not much, I said trying not to be too rigid.

  “Let’s just say it left a mark on him. He came back to the Bay about five years ago. Did the citizen soldier thing the best he could, but a few drinks deep and he’s putting the hurt on someone. Usually it was someone who had it coming. The bigger the better. He just didn’t have fear anymore, you know?”

  Yup, I said, smiling inside.

  “This one time, he tells me about going to see some fights. Illegal, off-the-radar
type. Tells me this little girl, fourteen, maybe fifteen walks in the cage like she’s walking up to a fast food counter, not a care in the world. This girl, according to my friend, disassembled grown hard men like toys. Said he’s never seen anyone move as quickly as her, as precisely. First time I saw you in the woods with Matt, I got a sense of what he was talking about. But yesterday morning, the way you took those men . . . I understand why my friend felt fear when he saw that girl fighting.”

  I only did what you asked. I didn’t want him scared of me. That image of his brother and nephew grinning, toasting, laughing.

  “I know. I know. I just didn’t know anyone could move like that. Not you, I mean anyone. Any person . . .”

  I wanted to tell him about Narayana’s training and the body discipline that was addictive to me. But as we pulled into the parking lot I caught movement from inside the Mansai.

  I jumped out of the truck before it stopped rolling and jumped the small gate that separated the parking lot from the dock, even though it was unlatched. I moved across the long rectangular patch of grass faster than I ever did before, abundantly conscious of the possibility of Narayana. I knew it was him. I had no idea how I felt about him being on the ship . . . until I saw it wasn’t him.

  Standing at the entry to the cabin, it took me a second to see the man that he barely was. Light skinned and skinny. A wisp of a trench coat with a giant anarchy symbol spray-painted on the back of it. He was the culmination of every bad fashion choice from the ’90s. Under his black bandanna was a face both familiar and confounding. He rummaged through my things, distracted, annoyed, but comfortable. I would make him regret the violation.

  Who the fuck are you? I used my Voice on him. But it was like shouting into a windstorm, the usual . . . resonance I got from most people simply wasn’t there.

  “I’m looking for the tools of my trade, that’s all.” The bastard only barely paid attention to me. He was ignoring me. Me?

  I jumped the last flight of stairs and came for him cleanly, squarely with the Retiring Flame—left elbow strike, exhale, right side kick, hips forward, inhale, spin on the front leg to get the full power of the hips into the back leg. I aimed at his neck. As I moved I checked for counterstrikes and reversals, the whole nine. The hit was going to be clean. But I missed. There was no neck, only air. I don’t know how I did, only that I missed. Where there should have been an unconscious fashion misfit, there was just the sound of wind. But he had moved. I caught his attention.

  “What the fuck are you?” His breath was slow, like low tide moving from shore.

  The wrong one to fuck with, I barked. But when I charged him, again in perfect form for Descending Rooster—inhale, C-step, right elbow strike to the chest, left punch to solar plexus, knee to the groin, exhale, stand with three-fingered strike to the eyes prepared to see a blood-filled hole where his right cheekbone used to be, he disappeared, literally, before I could reach him. Not only from sight, but from memory as well. I felt his presence slipping out of my memory so clearly. I could do nothing to fight it. When Dale came down the cabin steps, guns drawn, no more than a minute behind me, I could not for all the coinage in the world tell him what I’d been fighting.

  At twelve years old, in black khaki shorts and a gray wife-beater, I found myself walking into that disaster with a funny-talking diminutive Indian. If his half-English half-ramblings about his days during the pirate wars were any indication of Narayana’s stability, his driving skills made the same point. He pushed his rusty Cutlass Royale to ninety like it was twenty-five and treated other drivers the way he treated other people: they were to look out for him, not vice versa.

  I went with the old Indian to Gringo’s Last Chance at Heaven Bar and Grill in deep El Sobrante, or El Slob, as most folks called it. Just off of San Pablo Avenue, the bar was the last of its breed in the gentrifying neighborhood. It offered no hipsters, no baristas, no mixologists, and no one under the age of fifty. Imagine a one-room bar where the two-decade-old reject pop music is loud, the toothless caesarean-scarred chicks are easy, and the broken bottle fights are bloody. Now add a Montana rancher amount of buckshot into the walls, age everyone by forty years and rid them of any decency.

  “Now, Raj, you know . . .” The bartender started as soon as he saw me.

  “AH AH AH,” Narayana barked like an epileptic dog as he approached the bar. “You know Marko.”

  Marko shook his head then sized me up before speaking again. “He your uncle or something?”

  Something, I said, climbing on to a stool.

  Sweet pussy! Narayana shouted after taking a shot of whiskey.

  Jesus! I said.

  “Never drank here.” Marko laughed. “I’ll tell you this for free, little girl. Whatever Raj is selling right here, pass on it. You don’t want what’s coming your way.”

  Gotta learn to fight.

  “Why?”

  I’m going to public school. It sounded lame even then but it was all I had.

  Narayana, last name Raj I learned that night, drank, smoked cigars, swore, and played pool like a shark. One-ball Willy, the local hero of this degenerate posse, was about to turn himself in for a three-year involuntary manslaughter bid and this was his good-bye party. I didn’t even ask how Narayana knew him. I just kept getting nervous when they’d sigh and look over at me sipping on a Coke. Every now and then the Indian would just point at me and scream “Sweet pussy!” It would have been funny if not for the toothless and unwiped patrons who actually took him seriously, patrolling by my perch near the bar and taking deep whiffs of the air, or even trying to touch my leg. I shooed them off but the drunker they got, the more they tried. Finally Narayana, who in my mind was too drunk to stand, found a seat next to me.

  “Nine drunk, two high. All horny. It’s them or you.” Marko’s sad look as he went out the back door, Narayana’s stunningly sober voice, the wolfish grins of three of the men—these all let me know Narayana was serious. Before I could panic, he was gone. Narayana had offered me up as a parting gift for the soon-to-be convict.

  I didn’t freak. Despite the toothless smiles and the vague threats, I stayed calm. My goal was to put my back to a wall and . . . what? Call someone? Who? I had no idea. My Voice didn’t carry well over cell phones. But even if someone were available, who would that someone be? Mom was most likely passed out or at work. What numbers I could remember became inconsequential as I tried walking to the bathroom, pretending that every eye in the place wasn’t on me. But a fat man with a gray bandanna tied around his head jabbed his pool cue at me, and all of a sudden, they all came.

  I tried to get away but they were on me fast, pushing my face down into the felt-topped pool table, as a balding guy’s fat fingers tried to undo my belt to slide my shorts off. I tried to climb over the table, but the fat man kicked my legs wider apart, then laughed. Something inside of me said, You’re going to get raped now.

  Something bigger inside of me said, “No.”

  As salty fingers tried to shove a pool ball in my mouth so I wouldn’t scream, I vowed to get free and kill them all. Only seconds were afforded me; the drunk fatty couldn’t deal with the delicate clasp of my belt. I stopped pulling on the man’s arms that held me from across the table and looked in his eyes, not for pity, but for seduction. Either because of or in spite of my tears, he took the bait and tried to readjust his sweaty palms. I lost no time. I spit the pool ball into my hand, freed not a moment earlier. Just as the asshole behind me was touching my underwear, I slammed the bald one’s head with the pool ball. I shot up, straightening my back as he did, and head-butted the man behind me.

  Something switched in me at that point. No rage or panic dominated. Rather the polar opposite. A deliberate and dispassionate calm overtook me. An appraisal of my situation, including my assets—scared but unharmed; weapons—one pool ball; as well as environment—only two, maybe three attackers, the rest onlookers, all drunk or high, all full-grown men—took half a second. I nodded, imagining a way to surviv
e.

  “Little bitch! You broke my finger,” Baldy shouted, shucking off his tattered leather jacket to the floor. His partner in crime joined him, ignoring his own bloody nose.

  Apologize now and I won’t break anything else, I say. Something about my calm and the Voice connected with Baldy. An approximation of regret danced on his lips, inarticulate, but nothing came out. His friend shoved him with an elbow and I knew that an apology wasn’t coming.

  I played softball for two years. Pitcher. Fairly decent aim. So I can’t lie and say I didn’t mean to brain the one who had been behind me with the pool ball. When his partner fell to the ground, unconscious and bleeding out of his ears, Baldy panicked and came for me. He broke out a blackjack and swung at me hard. I jumped on the pool table and let his drunken adrenaline-filled body go off balance. As soon as both his knees were on the ground, I jumped on his head and began pummeling the back of the man’s neck with the cue ball. I didn’t stop until the white ball turned red.

  Now who shoved that pool ball in my mouth? Everyone pointed to my first victim, a diminutive Latino who was now twitching and puking on himself on the floor.

  Word of advice, I said before I opened the door. Next time you see a girl about to be raped, don’t stand around clapping. Makes you all look like subhumans.