Night of Thunder

The last face-off in the snow, on the island.

What was he doing there? What had consumed him with the idea that with his week of training, suppleness from six months of cutting back brush on his desert property, and his anger, that he could stand against this guy? It wasn’t David against Goliath, it was little Davy the three-year-old against Goliath-san. But he’d waded in, delusional, and learned in seconds he was overmatched. Now and then, as the fight wore on, he’d unleash a good combination, his four-hundred-year-old Muramasa blade cleaving dangerously close to the Japanese killer.

But the man was playing with him. It was killer’s vanity. It was a little game. He knew he’d die when the man tired of it, when the macho chit-chat between them no longer amused him, when the magic hour came, and civilians started coming into the zone.

There was a moment where he had nothing, he’d lost everything. His lungs were blown, he was bathed in sweat, fatigued, as the other swordsman stalked him. It was all gone. He remembered the despair: why did you ever think you could do this? Why didn’t you bring a gun? Pull it out, blow a 230-grain hardball through the guy and that was it. But no, you had vanity too. You could be in this game too. Fool. Bitter fool on the slippery edge of extinction.

No, he didn’t think that. There hadn’t been time in the fight. That was imposed later by his subconscious as he reconstructed it in the dream state. And in the dream state, night after night, he saw the yakuza laugh and cut, and open him deeply. He saw his own blood spurt and felt the dizzy weakness fire through his body, felt his knees give. Then he imagined the man making a witty riposte-“Sorry, cowboy, time to catch the last stage out of Dodge” or something-and then drive forward on the horizontal (shimo-hasso) and take his head. More than once he awoke with a scream in a sweat, seeing the world go atilt and then to blur in the eight seconds of oxygen and glucose a detached brain holds to sustain itself, felt the separation, felt the loss.

Why had he survived? That was the mystery, as strange to him as anyone. He knew only that at a certain late moment, he realized he had a steel hip and he remembered some bit of samurai gibberish-“Steel cuts flesh, steel cuts bone, steel does not cut steel”-and pivoted and opened and the target was too great. Exhausted himself, the great yakuza killer took the easy way out, drove the blade through the opening and felt it torque out of control when, an inch into Swagger, it hit the metal that was harder than it was.

Bob came off the blow and cut him hard upward, belly to spine, and that was that.

You were so lucky, he thought. Gunfighter’s luck, arriving in the middle of a sword fight. Or maybe it was just that his subconscious had figured out a way to beat the guy, and it e-mailed him the info just in time. Maybe it was just that he came from fighters and sired fighters and had a strange gift for fighting. But he knew this: You will never be that lucky again. Your weakness turned into your strength and you figured it out one one-millionth of a second in time. The memory came at night and each time it came, it left his hair grayer.

The cycle banished that. It buried it. So much sensation, so much freedom, so much beauty, so much damned fun. What’s better than to be racing across the wide-open prairie with your child, who makes you so proud, and the sense that once again, you survived.

Then he’d come back and it would be Miko’s turn and they’d work with her on the horse in the ring. He’d think, Never got rich in money but got rich in daughters, and that’s even better.

He put it down when it was too much for him, and quickly called his wife.

“I’m here,” she said. “We’ve got a room in a hotel across from the hospital, and I’m here with her now. So is Miko.”

“Is there any change?”

“It’s looking good, the doctors say. She could wake up any minute. She stirs a lot, more like she’s asleep. It helps her, they say, to hear our familiar voices. So I’m very optimistic.”

“Did you-”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’m in Mountain City. I’ll try and get over there soon. I don’t think it’ll be tonight but tomorrow sometime.”

“I’ll be here all day,” she said.

“How’s the security?”

“They’re good people.”

“Okay, good.”

“Love you.”

“Love you.”

Next, he turned to Nikki’s cellphone, particularly to the CALLS DIALED folder. But somehow the thing was frozen up. None of the functions yielded information. But hadn’t she called the cops from the wreck before she slipped off? He made a note to check with some phone expert to see if that indicated something or if it was a common occurrence when phones were damaged.