Authors: John Donohue
you get just before a fight is joined—you’re not positive about
what will happen, but sense the invisible jangling of energy that
telegraphs danger.
“
Si, senor
,” Art said in his best Mexican accent. “Better for
you here, where you are safe, I
theenk.
”
He meant well, but was more wrong than any of us could
have known.
126
10
Targets
I live in Brooklyn. Immigrants from Europe spawned here
after making the scary trip across the gray expanse of the Atlan-
tic. Later waves of newcomers journeyed across different seas,
mixing with the Irish, Scandinavians, Italians, and Jews. Today,
there are places in Brooklyn where you can still get canned
reindeer meat and markets where shopkeepers speak only in
Mandarin.
It’s no real surprise that Yamashita ended up here. His
dojo
is in Red Hook, inside an old warehouse. The building is made
of worn orange-red brick baked before the turn of the century,
and it sits on an ugly street in a neighborhood that was grump-
ily becoming gentrified. Just finding it is an adventure. In the
old days, getting home safe was not a given. In retrospect, I
think my
sensei
originally chose the location on purpose—it
tended to winnow out the faint of heart.
I live in Brooklyn partly to be near the
dojo
. But there are
other reasons as well. The Burkes have deep roots in the bor-
ough. Rheumy-eyed women, bent with age, still wander these
streets and remember my father when he was a child. The Irish
American diaspora didn’t end with a flight from the city to the
suburbs; some of us have found our way back.
The house I live in on 61st street is part of the transitional
zone between Sunset Park and the more upscale section known
as Fort Hamilton. Many of the families in my neighborhood
go back for three generations and the area still has the feeling
127
John Donohue
of a community. The block is made up of narrow, attached
houses, their brick faces seasoned with time and peppered with
urban grit. They are all essentially the same and only the front
porches offer any variety or clue to the owners’ personalities.
Some porches have been enclosed, as if to shut out the streets.
Others embrace it and sport bizarrely green outdoor carpeting
and lawn chairs. A few flower boxes are in evidence here and
there, and in season bright geraniums and pansies sprout and
seek the yellow light of a Brooklyn summer.
Inside, each building has a classic railroad flat configura-
tion. You enter through an outer and inner door into a small
foyer. Three short stairs to your left lead to a landing, then
turn right and climb up to the second floor. A hall directly in
front of you stretches to the rear—a long, dim tube that ends
at the kitchen. In years past, my landlady, Mrs. O’Toole, would
invariably be there. You’d walk in and smell the odd perfume
of her home: old plaster, the faint hint of steam, the smell of
onions and meat cooking. The kitchen was a bright, distant
rectangle, the room where she held sway, murmuring to herself
like a harmless witch and tending a stove that seemed to be
perpetually in use.
A pocket door to your right opens on the living room, with
a broad window facing the street. This half of the house par-
allels the hallway and is divided by heavy mahogany pocket
doors into two small bedrooms and the larger dining room at
the rear, next to the kitchen.
It’s all mine now. Mrs. O’Toole had outlived all her relatives
and, when she died, she left me the place because, as the note
in the will said, “he’s an odd sort of fellow and his family must
worry he’ll never amount to anything.” I was grateful for the
gift. Kindness is rare enough, no matter the motive.
128
Kage
Sarah had her own place in Manhattan, but after our time
apart we were eager to be together. She stayed the night and we
decided to spend the next day just knocking around. At dawn,
I slipped out of bed, leaving her nestled in the sheets. I pad-
ded quietly to the room at the rear of the second story of the
house that I had turned into a makeshift
dojo
. I gazed groggily
out the window, across the elevated section of the expressway
in the distance, toward Staten Island. The sky was still dark
over there, and the lights on the top of the Verrazano Bridge
twinkled.
I sank to the floor and stretched, my body slowly warm-
ing but my mind still sluggish with the last vestiges of sleep.
Eventually, I picked up a
bokken
and went through some basic
routines. Later in the session, I’d use the
katana
that waited in
lethal repose on the rack on a small table nearby. But I have a
basic rule of thumb: never use a live blade when you’re still half
asleep.
I’ve come to like the dawn, its quiet and the hushed sense
of possibility. Part of that potential is increasingly revealed for
me in the act of training. It’s become a constant companion in
my life. I used to think that following the martial path was a
journey that had specific destinations in view: achieving a black
belt, gaining admission to a prestigious school like Yamashita’s,
or perhaps mastering a weapon and its techniques. But I was
confusing the road markers for the journey. Now, I have come
to realize that an essential element of what I do is not lineal, but
cyclical. You strive and endure and train, and, at the end of it,
the curtain parts. You see more clearly into new territory and
understand what will be asked of you anew: effort, endurance.
And more training.
I sensed something behind me in the quiet of the room.
129
John Donohue
It was Sarah, wrapped in a robe, watching me silently with an
expression that seemed somehow sad. I put down my sword
and went to her, but she moved away.
“Finish,” she said, shaking her head. Then she shuffled away.
Later, after lingering over coffee and the morning newspa-
per, we went out, heading toward 8th Avenue and the super-
market. Sarah still seemed subdued, but outside the day was
coming alive. At any given moment, there’s a lot of movement
on my street. Buicks rock through the neighborhood, their
speakers pulsing like the heartbeat of an animal. Kids shout.
The gates in the wrought-iron fences that front each home
creak and clang as people emerge for the day. I was happy to be
back home—happy to be with Sarah. All those things together
are probably why I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.
“Did you ever wonder what’s the point of all that train-
ing, Burke?” She asked as we wandered through the store.
Sarah looked at me pointedly. I shrugged and put some cans of
tomato paste into the cart.
“I dunno. What do you mean?” I said. She didn’t answer
right away, just wheeled the cart slowly down the aisle. Sarah
reached stiffly for a box of lasagna noodles. I followed, wonder-
ing what was behind her question. I thought about the look on
her face this morning.
She continued, “Well, here you are working so hard at
something. All these years… And it’s sort of, I don’t know…”
“Abstract?” I offered. “Archaic? That’s probably half the
attraction for me.” I smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back.
“No.” She shook her head emphatically. “Maybe in some
places you could say that. But not in Yamashita’s
dojo
. It’s much
too serious.” We wandered over to the cheese section. She
picked up a packet of mozzarella and looked at it, but I don’t
130
Kage
think that was what she was seeing.
“Well,” I countered. “You know something about this from
your own experience—The coordination of mind and body—
The Way—All that stuff.”
“The Way…” she said reflectively. “The Way to—what?”
It was a good question and a hard one to answer in some
ways. You hope that the training gives you a better insight into
yourself, that the archaic discipline of the martial art makes
you more able to deal with the world in the here and now. But
the reality is that martial artists are like everyone else: some are
good people; some are idiots. The process is supposed to make
you a better person through the alchemy of training, but in
many
dojo
there are individuals who have walked the path for
years and are still idiots. They’re just highly-skilled idiots.
“For me,” I finally told her, “it’s complicated. I enjoy the
physical action and the way I can lose myself in it.” I shrugged
again. “And there’s Yamashita…”
She tossed the cheese in the basket and I pushed it down
the aisle. One of the wheels turned sideways and the cart shud-
dered a bit before I got it lined up just right.
Sarah sighed. “I know. But sometimes, Burke, I see you in
the
dojo
and the look in your eyes—I’ve seen it before. There are
times when you are—not there. I was afraid that you wouldn’t
come back in time to stop yourself from hurting a student.”
I almost replied that that was a good thing, but I wisely held
my tongue.
“I don’t know,” she concluded as we paid the cashier. “I
wonder whether training like that doesn’t bring something bad
out in a person.”
“Oh, come on, Sarah,” I protested.
“Come on, yourself. Think about it. I mean, I respect
131
John Donohue
Yamashita and his training. It’s a big part of your life. It’s a
good part of your life…”
“There’s a ‘but’ coming,” I said warily.
She cocked her head and looked at me. Her gaze was remote
and objective. “There’s a terrible sadness in him, Burke. I mean,
a master of his caliber, out in the US, buried in Red Hook?”
I shrugged. “He’s got his reasons, I suppose.” Privately I
wondered whether someday he’d ever share them with me.
“You’re travelling blind, Burke.” She reached out to touch
me, her eyes glistening with emotion. “He’s swallowing you
up.”I felt a jet of anger. Was she jealous? A faint voice way in the
back of my head wondered whether she was intuiting some-
thing that I couldn’t see. But I ignored it and shrugged off her
touch.
“You used to have your university job—awful as it was—it
kept you aware of the rest of the world. Now your whole life is
Yamashita. And violence.” She swallowed. “I worry about you
and I worry about me.”
I didn’t know what to say. In retrospect, perhaps she was
more sensitive to a whole range of forces that flitted around us,
waiting to pounce. We wandered back to the house in silence.
The lookout probably picked us up when we went to the
store. They certainly had enough time to set up. Once again, I
was too focused on internal things and not alert to the growing
threat around me.
It’s not an excuse mind you, just an explanation.
Sarah, still deeply annoyed, pushed into the house clutch-
ing her grocery bags, and moved away from me down the hall
toward the kitchen. I fumbled with my own bags at the door,
132
Kage
watching her recede from me.
Somehow I must have registered the sounds behind me—
the clank of the gate, the scuffle of footsteps—but I reacted too
late. They pushed in behind me with the force and efficiency
of long practice, sweeping me into the foyer. I spun around to
face them.
There were three men, al Hispanic looking. They formed
an arc in front of me. Two shooters stood expectantly, pistols
hanging at their sides. They were thick and experienced looking,
calm presences on either side of a man wearing a black raincoat
and knit cap. He was younger, leaner, and appeared unarmed.
I could see the dark vinelike curl of a tattoo climbing his neck
and thought he also had tattoos on his temples that looked like a
devil’s horns, but the cap partial y obscured the ink.
We could al hear Sarah in the rear of the house. The man in
black looked to the shooter on my left. “
La mujer
,” he said softly,
and the man began to move past me toward the kitchen.
I started for him and shouted out a warning to Sarah. The
man in black came at me, a knife appearing in his hand like a
sorcerer’s trick. It wasn’t some cheap brittle street blade. This was
a combat weapon, double-edged with the flat sheen of quality
steel.The ones with knives always come at you first—it’s why they
choose knives in the first place. They like the action, the inti-
macy of attack. Above al , they like the smooth purr and wet
sensation of cutting.
The guy heading for Sarah eluded me. I had to let him go. In
that enclosed space of the hal way, my world had narrowed down
to the two other men as they launched their attack. I knew in an
elemental way that this wasn’t about robbery. It wasn’t a typical