Enzan: The Far Mountain (23 page)

It seemed to break through the subtle air of disgust Chie wrapped around herself for protection. She swallowed. “Like me?”

“Like us,” I said. The two of them stood there, silent as the stones all around us. Easy to see they were related. I held a hand out. “I’m sorry, Chie.” Yamashita was watching the two of us—our body language, the way we related to one another.

“Enough,” he said. “Whether you caused this situation or whether it would have unraveled on its own is neither here nor there. Really, Burke, after all this time …”

“What?” I said, a tone of annoyance creeping into my voice.

“When the sword is drawn …” Yamashita began.

“There is only the sword,” I answered with a resigned sigh.

Yamashita nodded. “The roshi is focused on … other things, Burke. You and I must be focused on the here and now.”

I took a breath. How many times had he called me to attention over the years? I could hear the echo of the dojo command,
yoi
. In my mind’s eye a row of swordsmen in blue stood a little straighter, quivering with anticipation at the command to get ready. They were human springs tightening down and eagerly sensing the approach of some sort of release. And I was one of them.

“OK,” I said quietly.

“We are here,” my teacher said, waving his hand around the room. “It is only a matter of time until they realize this.” He smiled. “But the storm that traps us here also keeps them from reaching us.”

“For a time,” I added.

“Oh, certainly.” He looked at me, a hint of wryness on his face. “Nothing lasts forever, Burke. But it does give us time to prepare.” He looked around the dark meditation hall and his black eyes glittered with candlelight. “They think they have us in a box,
neh?
In reality, it is a maze. A large building with many rooms and hallways. We should use that to our advantage, Burke.”

I nodded my understanding. “They say the storm will last all through tomorrow. It should give us some time to prepare … maybe hunt up some weapons.”

Yamashita smiled grimly. “A zendo—probably not a place rich in weapons, Burke. But we will do what we can.” Chie was pale with tension and exhaustion. My teacher nodded in her direction. “For now, I think some sleep. The two of you have had an interesting day.”

“And you?”

“Oh, my day has been interesting as well,” he admitted. “But it is not over yet. I think,” and he paused here, gazing off as if he could see through the walls, beyond the storm, to the forces that would converge around us. “I think I will go to the kitchen.”

Chie stirred. “How can you think of eating at a time like this?”

Yamashita looked at me and smiled. It was a look I had never seen on his face before: amusement blended with deep affection, as if to say,
my granddaughter, she’s so cute
.

I didn’t respond, just smiled back at Yamashita, a silent message passing between us about how little the different generations understood each other. I took Chie out of the room and up the stairs. She let herself be led, one more silent form drifting down the cold hall of the zendo. I put her to bed and never told her why Yamashita was going to the kitchen.

It was where they kept the knives.

Chapter 23

The monastery clicked and creaked in the darkness. Outside the snow sifted down and smothered everything in its path. I lay on the narrow bed, eyes closed. The barometric pressure danced along with the storm. I slowed my breathing and gradually worked on letting the tension seep out of me. I ignored the aches and worked on softening, feeling my body’s warmth grow around me while cool air lay across the blanket surface, held at bay for a time. I was eager for sleep.

But something was wrong. The sense of unease was real, but its exact source was difficult to articulate: a subtle shift in the sensory field, stillness where there had been sound, or a spike in sound where there had been the steady hum of night noise. My eyes flew open and I knew there was someone at the door before the knob even started turning.

It was Chie, draped in a blanket, looking small and lost and incredibly sad.

“Burke,” she whispered, testing to see if I was awake.

I sat up and the soft, warm cocoon dissipated, sliding off me along with the blankets. “Yeah.” I rubbed my face in my hands, the skin ripped-feeling and tender to the touch.

“I don’t like this place,” she said. “The noises.” She slid through the door and closed it behind her. “There’s someone watching.”

That made me sit up straighter. “You saw something?”

She shook her head. “No. Just a feeling.”

I nodded. “Strange building. Lots of noise. It’s easy to get spooked.”

She came and sat next to me. “Can I stay here tonight?” She bit her lower lip as she asked, looking all innocent and defenseless. Part of me wondered how much of it was an act and how much of it was genuine. But most of me just wanted to go to sleep. “Sure,” I sighed. “But I’m not sleeping on the floor.”

She gave me a small smile, and her eyes showed a knowing glint. “I don’t take up much room.”

I sank back on the bed, pretty sure I had been conned. But maybe on some level her fear was genuine: she went to the door and fiddled with the knob. “The doors don’t have locks here,” I told her. “It’s a monastery.”

“It creeps me out,” she said. “I mean, what if someone tries to get in during the night …”

I sighed and got up. The floor was cold against my bare feet. I took the wooden chair and wedged the back of it up against the doorknob. “There,” I told her. “That should do for tonight.” I climbed back into bed and pulled the covers up, lying on my side with my back almost touching the wall. She lay down next to me, wrapped in the blanket she had come in with. Small adjustments and the faint creak of an industrial mattress. The distant hum of the blizzard. Eventually we settled down. Her breathing grew quieter. But she must have been cold, because she moved closer. Her hips moved slowly against me.

It may have been almost a reflex on her part. She may have been genuinely frightened, but then again she was also someone who compulsively used her body to get what she wanted. And I wasn’t made of stone.
Yamashita’s granddaughter
, my conscience reminded me.
The nympho
, reminded another part.

“Chie,” I said in whisper. “Enough.” The movement stopped and I tried to move even further back against the wall, but there was only so much mattress space, and it was hard to avoid touching her. Her small body lay there next to mine and the world moaned and creaked around us. Eventually, I heard her slip into sleep, but I lay there with my eyes open.

In the darkness, I sensed something once more. I watched intently. The knob turned with painful slowness until the latch gave. There was a stealthy push, as gentle as wind, and the chair rose up, jamming itself against the knob. The door settled back and the smooth pattern of nighttime resumed. I eventually slept, but it was an agitated rest, threaded with a recurring dream that I lay there awake, waiting for dawn to come.

The morning was dark with a snow that seemed like it would never end. The roshi was worried about the oil burner, a massive block of iron and valves that rumbled on its basement slab like an archaic locomotive straining to leave the station.

“We’ve been using the fireplaces to take some of the pressure off the system,” he told us all in the morning gloom. “We’ll need to clear the paths to the woodpile.” Fortunately he was well supplied with cut wood. The roshi systematically harvested the property’s forests, creating a sustainable source of income for the zendo. There were mounds of neatly stacked hardwood under lean-tos behind the main building. All we had to do was tunnel through what looked to be at least four feet of snow.

There was sweet hot tea and oatmeal for breakfast. We sat together, monks, visitors, and castaways, on long benches that paralleled a long, scarred wooden table. The roshi and his monks had already chanted the first office of the day, but instead of donning their robes they were dressed in baggy heavy pants and sweaters that drooped around them like the inescapable gravity of the mundane. After the Robe Sutra, when their voices moaned with longing for enlightenment, they now began the search for snow shovels. Was it Thomas Merton who described monks as in the world but not of it? Today, they were in it for sure.

A bright-eyed middle-aged woman bustled around the room, ladling out globs of oatmeal. I sat there, hands wrapped around a mug.

“Hi, I’m Sue,” she said. I looked up. She was middle aged and carried about thirty extra pounds on her, but it was packed on evenly and she moved with lots of energy. Her blue eyes twinkled.

“Hi, Sue,” I said and introduced myself.

“What brings you here?” she asked, cocking her head. “Blown in by the storm?” She was nice enough not to comment on the condition of my face.

I smiled. “Sort of yes, sort of no.” She waited, ladle poised. She was one of those people who seemed genuinely interested in other people and their stories. Go figure.

“I know Yamashita Sensei,” I explained. I’m not much of a conversationalist in the morning.

“Oh, the old Japanese gent,” she said, her eyes round with amusement. “He’s the roshi’s special guest.”

“What brings you here, Sue?” She was so chipper; it was forcing conversation out of me.

“Oh,” she waived the ladle. “Just searching … I spent some time at Tibet House in New York, ya know?”

“Sure,” I said. The Tibetans and I were old friends. “
Sustainable Happiness
,” I told her, and her face lit up. It was the title of a book written by one of the teachers there. It was a good one.

“Yes,” she said. “Great stuff. But the Tibetan approach is sort of …”

“Dense? Complicated?” I supplied.

She beamed at me. “Exactly. So when I heard about the zendo here, I thought why not check it out? Seems a bit more straightforward, ya know?” I smiled at that. In my experience the search for enlightenment was like the search for cold fusion: simple in theory, difficult to achieve. “Anyway,” she continued, “I decided to come up for a short retreat. Who knew I’d get snowed in?” Something started gurgling over on the stove, her head jerked up, and she was gone. But she left a smile on my face.

The guy from the Tenth Mountain Division came in and grunted himself onto the bench. He explained to me the plan of attack for the day. The main building was like a broad, asymmetrical V with the point flattened out by the main entrance, the shorter left arm thickened by the hondo and the suite of rooms where Yamashita stayed. The longer arm of the V contained the monastery’s offices and classrooms, the roshi’s quarters, and the bedrooms on the second floor. The interior space of the V was a series of outdoor meditation spaces and the meticulously tended rock gardens that Zen temples are famous for. Now it was just an expanse of white, with the occasional dip and hump suggesting whatever was buried beneath it.

There were paths that stretched from the building at each end of the V’s arms, both slanting up at an angle toward the woodsheds. At least that’s what he told me. It was a good fifty yards from the doors to the woodsheds, all of it thick with drifting snow. We were going to clear both of the paths. There was a lot of snow, and it was still coming down. Dry and feather light, it would be relatively easy to shovel. But there would still be a great deal of work. There was a lot of snow to move, and there was so much of it that we would have to clear wide swaths for pathways, otherwise the drifts created would start to sift and tumble back in on us.

I rolled my shoulders and my body clicked and groaned. I flexed my fingers, anticipating the heft of the shovel in my hand.
I hope we get more than oatmeal for lunch
.

Yamashita sat beside me. Tenth Mountain gulped his tea and left. My teacher watched me stretch and take inventory. “How are you?” Yamashita asked. He wasn’t making conversation. It was an operational question delivered in a quiet, matter-of-fact way. We both knew he wasn’t wondering how well I’d be able to shovel snow.

“I’m good,” I told him. I saw the skeptical look in his eyes. He had an intimate knowledge of the toll a fight takes on a body. I shifted on the bench and amended my reply. “Well, I’ve been worse … it should be OK.” He gave me one of his penetrating looks, but then nodded. We both knew the reality of a fight: it’s not being ready so much as it is being willing.

We sat for a time, shoulders touching, watching the monks organize for the day. It was comforting to sit like that for a moment. I could feel the warmth of his body next to me, the solid presence of him. I sat up a little straighter, feeling more confident. He had that effect on people, Yamashita. When I first met him, I was simply captivated by his mastery of a martial art. Over time I learned perhaps his greatest skill was not what he could do with a sword, but how he could enthrall people and call out the best in them.

“Someone tried the door to my room last night,” I told Yamashita. I said it quietly so as not to be overheard.

“Mine as well,” he murmured back. “They want to know where we will be located during the night. This is good.”

I looked at him. “How’s that good? It means there’s someone here, on the inside, keeping tabs on us. And we don’t know who it is.”

“True. But their activity tells us things,
neh?
”

I considered what he was saying, then smiled. “It tells us they’ll plan on attacking at night.”

“Yes,” Yamashita said. The room was getting crowded as more people drifted in for breakfast and he spoke in a murmur. “It’s not terribly original, Burke, a night attack, but at least we know we have some time before we have to worry about anything happening.”

“And the storm is going to delay their response,” I added, “so we may have another day or so.”

Yamashita pursed his lips. “It is possible. But I am not counting on it. They probably think the storm has trapped us here, but I think the snow can work to our advantage.” He gestured to the monks as they began handing shovels out. “The snow will erode their ability to move. The paths you make today will most probably channel them into predictable vectors of attack.” His eyes crinkled with pleasure and he sipped at a mug of steaming tea. If you didn’t know better, you’d think he were one of the monks: placid, otherworldly, and harmless. But you would be wrong. He shared something of their focus and their immediacy. But his air of contentment had other sources, including the stout butcher knives he had liberated from the kitchen the night before. “What a great gift to know when and where an attack will come, don’t you think, Burke?”

“
Hai
, Sensei,” I said, smiling.

We moved snow all day, taking shifts with the limited number of shovels available, grateful for the breaks when we could stand up and massage lower back muscles that were rigid and burning with hard use.

There was an undercurrent of mild hysteria as the snow continued: would the oil burner hold up? Would the food run out? When would the roads be plowed? Some of the visitors looked at each other and I could tell they were regretting whatever had motivated them to come to the monastery in the first place:
We wanted to get away from things for a while, not be trapped here
. On the bright side, it made them eager to take their turns with the shovels.

And this was a good thing because, truthfully, the monks were not the best shovelers in the world. They were diligent and mindful as you would expect, but a life of meditation and prayer does not build strong bodies twelve ways. So over time those of us with more aptitude or simply more claustrophobia took over for increasingly longer shifts. We split off into two groups: one focused on getting to the woodpiles, the other working out from the main entrance toward the parking lot.

Toward late afternoon the wind started to die down. It was a relief because until that point the wind had constantly shifted and blown fine snow crystals in your face and down your neck. Some people wrapped themselves in scarves and hats, only slitted eyes peeking out between the wool. But I knew despite the cold they would eventually be sweating with the effort of shoveling, overheating, and tiring themselves. I opted for a light jacket, some thick mittens, and a hat. It meant the skin on my face burned from the icy needles of windblown snow, and when I slowed down, the cold started to seep into my bones. But I endured the misery in the pursuit of a greater goal. It seemed, it occurred to me, to be a recurring theme in my life.

Late in the day, I called my brother.

“What’s up?” I asked him.

“Whattaya think I’m doing?”

“Shoveling snow.”

“Hah. No way I am touching a shovel until the fucking snow stops falling.” I could see him, holed up in the converted garage space he uses as a home office. It’s covered in cheap sheets of dark paneling. There’s a dilapidated, stained couch and a few listing easy chairs. A pressed-wood desk warping under piles of paperbacks and knickknacks. Mickey’s room is where old furniture is banished in disgrace—too ugly to live but too stubborn to die. There are family photos framed on the wall, along with newspaper clippings from some of his more famous cases. There’s even a signed dust jacket from the book a crime reporter wrote about us. Our fifteen minutes of fame got Mickey a crimson book cover. The black lettering of the title was shaped like it had been sliced with a knife. It was inspired by reality: there had been fighting with blades and at the end of it I got to go home from the hospital with a long scar down my back.