First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  I towed Clary back to the overturned pram, boosted her up and clamped her hands around the stubby keel. Clary is normally a pretty tough lady, but that day she was gritting her teeth and rolling her eyes like a bad trip on O-dyne. She was also beginning to freeze in that cold water, being a lot smaller than I was.

  The waves were like long-fingered ghosts pulling at our legs, pushing at our arms and chests. While the wind sang in our ears, the waves chanted: “Come with me ... go with us ...”

  Clary must have heard that song, too. Out of her throat came a tiny whimper, “No-oo.”

  Then I started talking to her, talking around my chattering teeth and shuddering lungs, about holding on and how soon somebody—Mother, Father, the man who rented us the boat and wanted it back—would certainly be looking for us, even with the rain and wind and all.

  For six hours it went on like that. We held on while the storm passed and the water smoothed and the golden light of a summer evening broke over the shoreline, some miles away. Clary sobbed quietly with fright and the cold, and I gabbled about holding on and rescue coming soon.

  Toward the end, when the cold was really beginning to get to me, so that my fingers and feet were like amputated stumps, my body stopped shivering and went hard inside. A white flame burned deep inside my chest. I thought it was my soul. Its light was without a flicker, like the cold white flash, edged with all colors, that I had once seen deep inside Mother’s wedding diamond. I knew then that it would take a lot more than fifty-degree water and a summer rainstorm to put out that flame.

  I talked to Clary about the white flame and told her she had one inside her, too. The way she screwed up her face with concentration showed she was trying to believe it and not doing very well. I fanned that little fire with words until she admitted that, yes, she had one too.

  It was almost eight o’clock and getting dark when the police patrol boat from the Town Dock found us. An old man in oilskins—not my father—pulled us off the turtled hull of the pram and wrapped us in blankets. He looked like the fisherman’s statue come alive.

  Mother was waiting on the dock and publicly cried over her draggled, shriveled babies for ten minutes. However, in our station wagon on the drive home she straightened and set her mouth.

  “You’ve made a spectacle of yourself,” she said to me. The tears in her eyes turned into a gleam of contempt.

  “I just—”

  “Please don’t tell me what you were doing in that silly little boat. I don’t want to know. Clearly, you were careless and got in over your head—although I can’t imagine where you thought you could sail a boat like that. You not only risked your own life but your sister’s as well.”

  “Momma,” Clary started, “he was just—”

  “I meant it when I said don’t tell me.”

  Mother took a breath, as if to begin again. “You are a Scoffield. And a Corbin. It’s your responsibility, James, to set an example for those about you. Live so that they can see how it should be done. Not so they have to come along and pull you and your sister out of the water. That’s a weakness.

  “Now, you’ll never do a thing like that again, will you?”

  “No, Momma,” we chorused.

  There was more, but I forget most of it. What stood out was Mother’s absolute belief in politesse oblige. Her family, her social set were destined to civilize the crawling masses who were not fortunate enough to be Scoffields. Or Corbins. As Clary and I grew up, the simple lessons of right and wrong were too obvious for Mother. Instead she taught us to distinguish grandeur from gaucherie, seemly behavior from eccentric bombast, beaux gestes from rude gaffes, and personal freedom from plodding conformity.

  Of course, it was remarkably stupid of me to try sailing an open pram out to the Georges Bank. If she had known that was my plan, Mother would have whinnied that high laugh of hers and called me an utter fool. Thanks to Clary it remained a secret between us until we were all too old to care. But I never forgot.

  Somehow, in the excitement of finding and bringing us children back to port, all the grownups forgot that I had broken the rule of the boat rental place about staying in the harbor. Everyone, that is, except the owner. He tried to sue my family for the loss of the pram. Father in turn sued him for negligence in renting to obvious minors. The matter dragged listlessly through our respective lawyer’s offices until the family moved to California.

  For political or environmental or some other unreal reason, the oil never came in on the Bank. So Father was off to the other side of the country. Mother went happily because she remembered trips to California—Santa Monica and the LA Basin—as a girl and she thought the Monterey coast would be almost as nice.

  It was nicer.

  Jennifer Corbin settled into the art galleries of Carmel the way a tent caterpillar settles into an apple orchard. Father sailed the offshore fault system, dropping charges and scaring the people.

  We lived in a mock adobe house—gunnite shot through chicken wire and troweled until it looked half-melted, like cake frosting on a hot day—in Pacific Grove, right outside the gate of the Asilomar center. That house had two and a half tons of glass sliding in doors and windows, all on ball bearings, and an acre of ultra-white carpeting you couldn’t walk on but had to keep to the clear plastic runners. I didn’t spend much time there.

  Pacific Grove was west of the action, and I don’t remember how I got around. Too young to drive and but-nobody rode what buses there were. I hitched a ride with friends or clean-looking strangers, I guess. Most of the time it didn’t lead to trouble. And when it did, I could handle it.

  My place was Cannery Row, fifty years after Steinbeck, when the canneries were gone except as building shells. And in these, like bold hermit crabs in weathered surroundings, were established the latest designer bars, the tourist galleries, the street artists, the rock bands, and the pushers. It was like a permanent, genteel carnival. Just perfect for a boy turned thirteen who could think this slice of plastique was adult life.

  And then, for two weeks every summer, Mother retreated to Copenhagen; for two weeks in winter, to Venice and Florence. Clary and I ate ice cream in our hotel, picked up Danish and Italian from the local television, and never asked about the giggles and thumps coming through the wall from Mother’s room. All thirteen-year-olds are hardened realists. I told Clary that Mother was playing adult games in there. I suppose she was.

  The taste for drama, like the taste for love, has come and gone with most boys by the time they reach thirteen. It died especially fast for boys coming of young age in mid-’80s America, when drama was lighted with phosphor images of kung fu fists and hurtling cars, when love was sticky with rock video, zip-tab cola, and pinches of coke. I remember being a coldly rational child, too old for my years. I parceled out my emotions and my flights of fancy the way a miser parts with gold.

  For example, we used to play football, shirts versus skins, in a narrow park with an inconvenient pathway—a strip of bare, packed dirt—running right across the widest part of the field. The game was supposed to be touch football, but everyone got to tackling when the runners kept ignoring the two-hand fanny slap and no one called them on it. I watched as one of my teammates, a skin, took a tackle on the edge of this dirt, rolled, and came up with a red patch looking like shiny paint across his shoulders. It proved his manhood, presumably.

  Two plays later I had the ball and found myself bearing down on the same edge of path with one shirt just a stride and a half behind me and two more closing from the grass side. No slap on the rear was going to satisfy them, and flying face-first across that dirt was going to hurt enormously. And for what? A scratch game of football, the teams chosen and their loyalty bonded with the casual point of a finger. So I stepped out of bounds deliberately and, to keep the man behind from tackling me anyway, got down on one knee.

  “Coward!” yelled the first side blocker.

  “Faggot wimp,” tossed in the second.

  The one behind punched my shoulder as
he ran by.

  It was just a friendly game.

  Given no strong directions, a poor boy will function as the economists’ Rational Man. That is, he will capitalize on his opportunities according to his nature—engaging either in dealing and light-finger if he’s a talker or strong-arm and territorial warfare if he’s a doer. A rich boy with no direction, however, will go precisely nowhere. And that’s where I was headed.

  That summer, I was hanging around a locksmith’s shop, going on calls with him, doing some cleanup, nothing he was actually paying me for. The training he gave me in return—just letting me watch, examine his tools, and occasionally try my touch—was probably a breach of his code of ethics and illegal to boot. He thought I was just a clean-cut kid from Asilomar, and I thought I was going to be an international jewel thief.

  That was the summer, too, that I started karate—another facet of my secret agent self. Just about everyone in my class at school took a six-week course in quote self-defense unquote. Some of us followed it up with a short-lived enrollment at Kan’s down on the mall. But I stayed with it four years, in the end becoming a part-time, unpaid teacher for Sensei Kan.

  Karate is the ultimate bore. You practice each move—which itself is made up of smaller, more precise moves of muscle and tendon—over and over until your arm or leg glides like a programmed robot. Then you combine the moves into sequences, and the sequences into extended imaginary fights, the katas. It’s more like ballet than fighting.

  Don’t think that, because I could put up with all this minutiae, I was obsessed with karate. No, it was just part of my tender self-image. Mastering finicky details like keeping my wrists straight and my feet parallel in a step-and-punch seemed like little enough to pay for my internal fantasies.

  I never gave myself one hundred percent to anything. Not to any discipline, any ideal, any art, any person, any love. It was all just a friendly game, remember? And none of it mattered more than my personal integrity and my own sweet hide. That distancing, that distinction between myself and the world around me, was the secret of my strength in the years to come.

  You may not like that. You don’t have to. This is my life we’re talking about here.

  Sensei Kan was a tiny man, all muscle. He taught about one class in four himself, the rest going to senior students while he walked the dojo floor, observing, correcting tiny flaws, encouraging. Of course, he taught the advanced course in the evening for brown belts and above. To me he was just this presence, a small smiling shadow, until I earned brown—in about three years—and was invited to join those evening classes.

  What I remember most about Sensei Kan was his movements. They were so fluid, like water over a stone. Sensei seemed like a middle-aged man to us—at least forty—and although he was Korean he spoke perfect English without an accent. He wore a belt, a black one with red Chinese writing down the end. The school brochure claimed him to be an eighth degree in karate and a fourth in judo, but Kan never talked about his belt. Only about his teachers and their lessons.

  He ran a tight class and made you sweat, which was okay, but we thought he was a little heavy on the bow-and-smile, respect-for-all-living-things crap. Or we called it crap.

  Once two boys went out on the floor to settle a grudge in full-focus sparring and started throwing for-real kicks without the padding. Sensei Kan was on the other side of the dojo, sitting cross-legged with his back to them, watching a kata group go through their exercises. In two seconds, he crossed the distance to the sparring square in a white blur and waded into the middle of a murderous bridge-kick and back-hand exchange. He tripped both of the angry boys onto their asses as if they were just standing around. And for the next free period he lectured the whole class about how we were brothers upon the Way and should have no animosities among us. And we all thought: yah-yah, yack-yack.

  The first time Kan sparred with me, I believed it was because he had seen how really good my feet were. I had practiced a roundhouse and back-kick combination until I could lift a flowerpot off a six-foot wall and crunch it before it hit the ground. I was puffed up, touchy about my skills, a real brat.

  It was his head fake that caught me.

  We were sparring in the warmup before class. I was in a modified straddle stance, Kan in a tight side stance with his hands cocked at the ready.

  “Don’t look at me,” Sensei whispered—for the second time. Being new to the advanced section, I didn’t know that two warnings were Kan’s limit. In the next instant, the young-old man’s eyes locked with mine and his head started to unscrew.

  The eyes never lost their focus, just panned left, out across the floor with the same seeing-but-not-alive gaze that a department store dummy has. Sensei’s head was held as level as a white china teacup. I watched, fascinated, as the cords of his neck twisted and overlapped, until the chin was pointing back over his shoulder. It was the same smooth, sinuous flow that a snake makes in the sand.

  Sensei’s arched foot was suddenly tucked under the lapels of my white gi jacket. The breath went out of my chest like cream poured out of a pitcher. The clacking in my ears was my own knees striking the hardwood floor.

  Putting it together later, in afterimage, I saw how the head fake had blended into a shoulder fake, a body fake, and a 360-degree roundhouse kick that had caught me in the solar plexus.

  Perfect.

  But the admiration came after; right then, the problem was oxygen.

  With gentle hands Sensei supported me under the arms and forced my head forward to help me breathe.

  “You believe me when I tell you not to look at your opponent?” Sensei asked with a lilt that I heard as a smile. “You aren’t fast enough yet to look at him. Look past his shoulder. Use your peripheral field to see movement. Not eyes. Not hands. Not feet. … Movement.”

  When I could stand, still hunched over, the young-old man walked me to a sideline bench and sat me down, directing my weight and balance as easily as pushing a cart.

  “You are quick.” Sensei squinted at me with those Asian eyes that belied the English voice. “Good coordination. Good moves. When you learn to see without looking, you will be as fast as your body promises.”

  Right at that minute, with the ache in my chest still blossoming like a gong tone, I began to realize something. The sensei had just called me a brown-belt asshole, a pizza-breath kid, and not such hot shit after all. Hell, he had shown me that. And it hadn’t hurt, not inside, as a rebuke from any other adult would. From Sensei Kan, I could accept it.

  Then the sensei had said something nice about me. Not extravagant praise, but an acceptance, an honest appraisal. As if I were a horse we were both admiring but didn’t particularly plan to ride or buy. It was just true and no reflection on either of us.

  With the gong fading now, I had put a few of the pieces of my cocky, sixteen-year-old life together. I still held a handful of puzzle parts with tabs and hollows, colors and shapes that in no way fit together. But I had made a start.

  Chapter 2

  Granville James Corbin: Personal Kill

  The year I made brown belt at Sensei Kan’s karate studio was also the year I met Alice Wycliffe and lost my heart.

  A number of rapes had scared the women at the high school and everyone was thinking self-defense again. Alice came into the dojo with two of her girlfriends. They were all from the cheerleading squad, but alongside them Alice was like a gold sovereign tossed in with two old nickels.

  They all had pretty faces but, compared to Alice’s, the others were out of focus, with a nose too long or a chin too short. They all had slender legs, tight asses, and jutting breasts but, compared to hers, the other two were lumps and bumps, fat calves, and callused elbows. They all had clean, layered blonde hair, but Alice’s made the other girls’ seem like old bird’s nests.

  Today I can still remember what she looked like.

  Sensei let the girls observe a class and they walked along the edge of the oak-plank practice floor with their leather pumps making tappit
y-tap sounds, like a team of horses on cobblestones. Everyone else in the room was barefoot.

  Seeing this absolutely beautiful girl from across the room, I suddenly felt foolish. The white cotton gi, even when it’s freshly washed and pressed, is a loose-fitting pair of pajamas, like something worn by a walk-on from Lord Jim or Gunga Din, with sagging knees, short coat, loppy lapels. The belt ties just under your navel, above the second chakra, which is your sex. The loose ends flap around your groin. And all I was wearing under this baggy suit was a jockstrap with a nut cup. We’d been working hard, I was sweating, the cotton was sticking to my ass, and it was definitely two days too long since I’d had the whole rig washed.

  And here came the most beautiful girl in our high school, probably the most beautiful on the Monterey Peninsula, maybe in the State of California, into the dojo where I happened to be class leader that day. Sensei Kan brought the girls over toward me and, with his twinkle, introduced them.

  Alice actually put out her hand, a slender, clean hand with four beautifully shaped fingers and even a nice-looking thumb. She was standing close enough that I could smell her scent, something-lemon, which meant she was close enough to smell me, overworked-horse.

  Mother once told me that as a baby I was a knockout. But all babies have the same sweet-Buddha face: rounded cheeks and forehead, clear eyes, gentle smile—at least when they are sleeping well.

  With the years, however, I got to watch in the mirror as my face changed to the contours of a painted wooden puppet, something crafted in Europe for the sophisticated New York art market. My blue eyes had pinched up, I thought, above ruddy apple cheeks. My chin and nose had sharpened—one like the point of a ballerinas toe slipper, the other like a knife blade. My lips and mouth grew wide and worked constantly between a rubbery smile and a bowed pout of anger. I had red hair that thickened and curled until, under some lights and all summer long, it looked like a clown’s string wig.