Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit by Harry Crews

Author:Harry Crews [Crews, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780688023720
Google: gQbzAAAAMAAJ
Amazon: 068802372X
Publisher: Quill
Published: 1971-04-15T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

John Kaimon was not sure what happened next. And next. And next. It was a dream, a thing remembered in parts and pieces, most of them improbable, many of them clearly impossible.

He remembered a pill that turned into a strawberry on his tongue.

But that would have happened in the karate kitchen—if it happened anywhere. And yet he remembered it happening in the pool. The old brown belt’s shattered eye stared straight up into the bottomless sky. George lay softly in himself. There was terror in the pool. The men in their bright varicolored underwear scattered before him like quail. But they couldn’t get away. He had them in the deep end.

“We came to love, we came to love,” cried the boy with the purple eyes.

“I’ve tried it,” said John Kaimon softly and struck the boy down with an elbow to the solar plexus. The boy made no effort to defend himself, apparently didn’t know how, walked right into the blow, almost as if he had wanted it. A kyai exploded over the pool, a kyai as loud and formidable as Belt’s had ever been. It was the girl. He looked up and Gaye Nell Odell’s face was a rage—red, teeth bared—utterly opposite from the face she had used to inflict the passionless rape upon him.

And in the midst of all that, he remembered a strawberry on his tongue.

He rolled his tongue around his mouth. The strawberry was gone. It tasted now of sleep. He lay naked on the tatami mat and looked at the window where light ran in crooked veins through the room. It was very early in the morning. The tatami mat on the other side of the room was empty. He was hungry. Faint with hunger. He stood up and remembered Belt pointing his rigid trembling finger at him saying:

He ran five miles.

He ran five miles without knowing where he ran.

He ran five miles without knowing who he ran with.

He ran five miles, puking, choking on his own vomit.

He shaved his own head.

He broke the casts from his own hands.

He went into the pool and killed seventeen men.

Belt said it like a catechism. His students stood with him and listened. They stood in bright sunlight and did not move. Sunlight? But how could that be? Only the night separated him from the pool and the queers of yesterday. How could they have been in the sun? And yet he remembered standing ankle-deep in the hot sand of Dania Beach, staring out at the granite jetty—liquid and waving in the rising sun—listening to Belt’s droning voice.

He went into the pool and killed seventeen men.

He had not, of course, killed seventeen men. But by some outlandish chance or intuition or luck or whatever, he had—when he struck George unconscious with a hammer-fist blow to the forehead—used Belt’s favorite metaphor: “I’m going to kill you all.”

John Kaimon was so angry at the time that he had meant it literally, not knowing or caring if George was simply knocked out or really dead.

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