Poison Flowers

by Nat Burns

  In spite of her reputation.

  Lifting her cell phone from the bench seat, she pressed a button and saw that three more calls had come in during her short drive to the dojang. And this all before seven a.m. She sighed again, wondering how best to handle the situation. She really had no desire to talk to her, feeling like they had already said everything that needed to be said. Yet she had sounded frazzled, like something was wrong.

  Frowning and steeling her resolve, Dorry snatched her duffel off the seat and left the truck, cell phone in hand. She unlocked the thick steel door and entered the back hallway of the dojang. Back here she could smell the cleaning fluid used by Ella Mae who cleaned for her three nights a week. Progressing along the hallway, pausing only to toss the duffel full of her street clothes on the couch in her office, she was soon inundated with the welcome smells of rubber mats, steel and sweat from the dojang.

  She pulled her belt from the pocket of her dobok and fingered its worn, shredded edges. She’d had this belt a long time. Many years. She remembered her first belt, a yellow one as was standard for the discipline she had always followed. She’d been fourteen at the time, a young girl reeling from the death of her mother. In the martial art she’d found solace and a sense of family, a sense of accomplishment. Feelings that losing a mother to cancer had stripped from her.

  Then when Francie had died…when everything had been lost to her…she’d come back to the art with renewed vigor, finding solace in the familiar.

  And now there were the phone calls that were renewing those feelings of loss, feelings best ignored. What did Izzie want from her?

  Without thinking about it, her movements practiced and economical, Dorry wrapped the soft belt three times about her waist and then settled it into a familiar knot at the front of her uniform. She slid from her sandals and stood facing the Korean and American flags that adorned the wall at the front of the dojang. She bowed and spoke the motto of her dojang as a sort of ritual prayer:

  “Courage first. Power second. Technique third.”

  How she loved this room and this building. Deciding to stay in Schuyler Point had been tough, but it was her home; everything dear and familiar was here. Once her mind was made up to stay, she had simply dug in her heels and focused on making The Way of Hand and Foot a success. She’d kept prices low and pretty much lived at the dojang to ensure that success. And it had worked, a sure sign from the universe that she had been meant to stay in the town she’d been born and bred in.

  Dorry strolled over to a long black bag mounted vertically in a back corner of the room. Suspended from the ceiling by a strong rope anchored to the concrete floor, this bag had seen many years of abuse. Heavy silver tape was wrapped around it for strength, and even frayed by wear, its massive bulk easily overpowered that corner of the room.

  Dorry removed shoe and hand pads from a nearby cabinet after laying her cell phone on top of it. Donning the gear, she tried to clear her mind of everything. She tried. Oddly enough, her thoughts kept straying to the altercation on Dundun Beach. Kept lingering on her remembered image of the woman. Remembering the powerful arms that had held her close.

  Dorry scowled, angry that her thoughts had betrayed her when she needed surcease. If she wasn’t thinking about Izzie, she was thinking about this one, this redhead. All Dorry wanted was to be left alone. She’d been alone for years now and that was just the way she liked it. She glanced at the wall behind the bag and read the bright placard she’d placed there when outfitting the dojang. It was her favorite quote, from Aristotle.

  We are what we repeatedly do.

  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

  She nodded in silent agreement. She’d become good at being alone. She’d be damned if she’d let anyone change that.

  Still, she checked her phone one more time. No new calls. Perversely disappointed, she slammed the phone back onto the cabinet, then attacked the body bag with a deep anger bordering on lunacy. Dust enveloping her as it flew from the bag into the still morning air, she kicked and punched until she was exhausted, her muscles quivering from exertion. She put one palm on the bag, steadying it as she gasped for air. She eyed the phone and scowled before beginning a second round of attack.

  Chapter Nine

  I don’t know why they didn’t want me. Mama always said it was because they loved their career best and I would have come in a distant second. A distant second. As if I was even in the running.

  I stared out across Sawyer Lake, my mind rehashing Mama’s anger last night. She’d been drinking again and I really hated that. She got mean when she drank bourbon…or anything else, for that matter. Any alcohol. She would go on and on about how everyone had betrayed her and how I always had to be hidden from sight. That we had to be so careful. That we could never be seen together.

  If people found out about me then the woman would never pay more money. As if she ever would anyway. I think she figured out of sight, out of mind. Maybe it would be best to tell everyone about it. Get it all out in the open.

  I wondered sometimes if Mama was just making excuses because she didn’t like the way I looked. Or how I acted.

  I sighed and shifted my position. Sawyer Lake was one of the few freshwater lakes in Schuyler Point, and Mama and me used to come here once in a while when I was little. But only during times when no one else was there. Today the little lake beach was peppered with fat little families, mommies, daddies and pudgy, whiny-faced children. I hated all of them.

  Last Tuesday the beach had been deserted and I had been bad. Bad like Mama didn’t want me to be bad. I had been over to Lucy’s house. She had given me vodka and then painted my face like hers so that my eyes were black all around and my eyelashes thick and heavy with mascara. She left for work but since I had that day off, I’d come out here.

  No one knew about it, but that day I had put three of my little glass bottles in the trunk.

  I loved my little bottles. They were just beer bottles that I kept down in the basement. Every now and then I would go down there, usually when Mama was at work, and I would carefully fill them with lots of saltpeter and fertilizer, bought at Anderson’s Hardware, and then top them off with kerosene from the heater tank. Sometimes, depending on where the bottles would go, I would add some pebbles or pieces of broken glass. Usually I fixed the fuses in with white paraffin, but I had used red candle wax on these because we were out of paraffin.

  The ones I had used Tuesday held broken glass. I had just wanted to kill fish, that was all, and I had, a ton of them, but when the little Koffman girl had run up on the beach, bleeding, earlier today…well, that was just gravy.

  Chapter Ten

  Marya settled in quickly at the Schuyler Times. She pitched in as a runner that first hectic day, doing whatever hack job was necessary to get the second section of the paper together. The next day was pretty much the same as everyone worked to finish off the front section, and Carol Say, the pregnant receptionist, introduced her to her new co-workers.

  The staff was larger than she had expected, two staff writers besides herself and about a half dozen or so additional employees.

  Marvin Torn, who covered the political beat, wore a tie and a three-piece suit to work and was meticulously groomed. Dallas Myerson, a tiny slip of a lady, very proper, handled the social and activities beat. Marya was going to be the paper’s feature reporter, an assignment which pleased her greatly. She enjoyed writing about people and their lives and abhorred the endless council meetings that a regular top-half-of-the-front-page news reporter such as Marvin had to cover.

  Carol, the receptionist, was consistently sweet and made her feel very much at home that first day. Carol was married to Buddy and he was there at noon bringing lunch and hovering.

  Other staff members included copy editor Denton Hyde, a distinguished older gentleman who dressed in immaculately pressed trousers and Oxford shirts. He was unusually quiet, perhaps shy, but seemed to know the newspaper business inside and out. She came to admire h
im and his quiet advice within the space of just a few hours.

  Plump, gray-haired Emily Davies was the business manager for the newspaper. She controlled the advertising accounts with an iron hand, but otherwise was an earth mother to everyone. Carol told Marya that Emily brought in at least two homemade cakes or pies a week, urging all of them to eat.

  The production crew, responsible for putting the printed stories on the newsprint page in coherent fashion, was made up of two rowdy, jolly, joking men whose working styles seemed to mesh like clockwork. Wallace and Craig, whose last names she didn’t catch in the din of the pressroom, liked to tease the girls of the office, tossing bawdy remarks back and forth across the layout tables as they flashed scissors and X-Acto knives with alarming speed and intensity.

  Three other employees, who were mysteriously in and out at any time, were Connie Doalin, who worked in advertising and circulation, Skip Pleasants, who wrote the sports page on a part-time basis, and Kenny Bond, the paper’s sole photographer.

  The Schuyler Times was a small weekly of about twenty-four pages total, so, although the pace was hectic, the work was over quickly and the photographic plates of each page safely off to the press in Myrtle Beach by eight o’clock Tuesday evening.

  Marya was sitting with Marvin, Dallas and Emily, enjoying a cup of the heavy office coffee and the glow of having helped put another paper to bed, when a familiar name was mentioned.

  “Hey, Marya, has Ed given you the Dorcas Wood assignment yet?” Marvin grinned at her like a schoolboy.

  She shook her head in the negative. “No, what assignment?”

  “I don’t know why y’all can’t leave Dorry alone,” Denton said in his soft voice. He sat to one side, perusing the Richmond, Virginia, paper.

  “Well, she’s just bein’ silly, is all,” piped Dallas in her lilting drawl. “There’s no sense in a body bein’ so selfish.”

  Marya’s curiosity was piqued. “Selfish? Selfish, how?”

  Dallas laughed and winked at Emily. “I guess you’re just goin’ to have to find that out for yourself now, aren’t you, hon? That’s part of the job. All the new reporters have to interview ol’ Dorry. Why, she’s just a legend in these parts. Isn’t that so, Marvin?”

  “Sure is,” Marvin agreed, adding, “all you have to do is go to that karate place of hers and ask her for an interview. We want a regular lifestyle feature. You know, what made her get involved in karate and stick with it. Most women give it up quick, just can’t make the grade against the guys, but she’s been at it for more than twenty years. That’s pretty impressive if you ask me.”

  Marya bristled at his mocking tone but kept her composure. Having earned five belts in taekwondo, she knew precisely how hard it was. She also knew that all women didn’t simply give it up when confronted by harsh conditions. That was not what the sport was all about.

  “That’s it? That’s the assignment? How hard can it be?” She looked expectantly from face to face.

  Dallas and Marvin exchanged amused glances.

  Denton rustled his newspaper and folded it neatly. “Don’t let them tease you, Miss Brock. Dorry’s had a lot of…well, let’s say notoriety, in her life and has no love of reporters. The media have not been kind to her. I am positive she will not talk to you.”

  Marya sighed and stood, smoothing her trousers. “Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Actually, I had planned to stop by her studio anyway to check on something else, so I’ll take the assignment.”

  “Good luck!” Marvin called after her. She heard Emily laughing as the door to the newsroom swung closed behind her.

  To her delight, she found Dorcas Wood’s dojang easily. It was located south of town on Rosemont, Schuyler Point’s main street, just before it turned into the main highway leading to North Myrtle Beach. It was a low, wide, severe building, but someone had obviously done a lot of work on the structure. It was landscaped and freshly painted and a large central sign bore the English translation of taekwondo as the name of the dojang, The Way of Hand and Foot.

  She parked her car in the crowded parking lot and, fetching up her slender reporter’s notebook, strode confidently toward the door, expecting to impress this Dorcas Wood completely. As soon as she entered however, her righteous conviction began to evaporate, blown away by so much mystic wind.

  The front lobby was wide but not deep. A desk, uncluttered and simple, stood to the left. Mounted on the wall in front of her, on either side of the two black-enameled doors leading into the dojang proper, were ten framed pictures. Their familiarity tugged at her, and she was drawn over to them as if riding on well-oiled wheels. The pictures, painted in the Chinese calligraphy style, with a brush and black ink, stretched along that entire wall, five on each side of the door, each in a matching shiny black frame.

  She knew these, as did every martial artist worth his salt. These were the legendary ox-herding pictures, graphic representations of the Zen master’s search for Buddhahood.

  The first image showed a tree-bordered field of grass. To one side swept a graceful willow tree; a sparkling river, bounded by large boulders, raced through the picture behind it. Off to the far right side, almost unnoticed, stood a small girl child, one tiny hand lifted to her mouth in indecision.

  The second painting was almost identical to the first except now the girl child held a length of rope in her small hands and was following an ox that was partially visible in the trees.

  In the next one, the girl was attempting to pass the rope around the neck of the wild beast, but it was a struggle, as the ox appeared to be pulling away.

  As the story unfolded in the next paintings, the child captured the wild ox and tamed it, eventually playing music on a flute with the docile creature at her feet.

  Marya strode slowly along the rank of paintings, her eyes glued to the various nuances of meaning until she reached the final one, a large circle, empty but full of the no thing, the one thing that martial artists seek. She knew then that this school was the one true school that she had been looking for since starting her training so many years ago. From the absence of trophies in the lobby, she knew that competition and winning tournaments was not what this school was about. Instead, the paintings, representing man’s battle with his undisciplined self, let her know that the taekwondo students at this dojang were on a spiritual quest as well as a physical one. Sudden happiness washed through her.

  “Hello. May I help you?” The strong voice came from her left and she saw that a uniformed woman had entered the lobby from a side door and was bent at the desk writing something in a large notebook.

  “Yes, thank you. I’m looking for Dorcas Wood.” Marya approached the desk.

  The woman raised up to look at her with cautious slowness. She lifted eyes of a clear cornflower blue. They were familiar eyes. Marya realized that she was the woman from the beach, the one who had rescued her that first night in town. These eyes were serene but wary as they studied her, recognized her.

  Marya studied her right back and realized again what a striking woman she was. And how muscular. She dominated the lobby completely. There was a type of energy emanating from her, a kind of low hum that Marya sensed more than heard.

  Unnerved by the energy as well as the calm gaze, Marya tried to focus on the woman’s appearance and found it very hard to do. She noticed that the short cap of hair was snow white, with just a wisp of darker color around the temples. Her skin bore healthy color, the ruddy tan of much time spent outdoors, and this contrast was further enhanced by those piercing blue eyes.

  The woman was dressed in a master’s uniform, black trousers and tunic, speckled with various patches of achievement and rank. Marya knew then that she was looking at Dorcas Wood.

  “Miss Wood,” she stammered, her throat inexplicably dry. “My name is Marya Brock. I’d like to study with you.”

  Master Wood’s gaze wavered a bit but remained cautious. “Have you studied before?”

  “Yes, four years under Master Hayes in Seattl
e, Washington.”

  Master Wood nodded. Oddly enough, she seemed to be studying Marya’s shoes.

  “Rank?”

  “First black.”

  She turned to the desk and opened a drawer. “Which means Kebong? Il jang? E jang? Sam jong? Sim jong?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Marya sighed, glad the forms and stylized dances of this school were the same as her old school. “All of those and currently O jong. Also the fighting forms, sabong chucks.”

  She nodded, her mouth twitching in what Marya took to mean approval, and pulled a form from the drawer. “Anything else?”

  “I’m trained in hapkido.”

  Master Wood turned her full attention on Marya, her eyes cutting through her like a knife. “Ah, the grappling art.”

  She paused a long beat. “Tell me. How does it make you feel to know that you can disable a person in seconds with this skill?”

  Marya chafed under the question, remembering all the hard work it took to learn the subtleties of movement hapkido required. Yes, it was a very dangerous art, but she owed the master no apologies. “I feel grateful I can protect myself should the need arise,” she said finally.

  Master Wood was watching her again and silence stretched taut between them. Marya waited her out. Eventually, the master handed her the form. “Everything you need to know about fees and rules is here. Please fill out the bottom part and bring it with you when you come to class.”

  Marya took the form.

  “Now, tell me why you are really here,” she said abruptly.

  Marya quaked inside, then realized the master must have seen the notebook clutched in her hand. “I…I’m to interview you.”

  “Interview me?” Her smile was brittle, her voice sarcastic.

  “Yes, for the newspaper, The Schuyler Times. About your life…”