Sorcerer's Apprentice by Charles Johnson Page B

hurried into the bathroom, lifted her skirt, and lowered her underwear around her ankles, but kept the door wide open, something impossible to do if Rudolph was home. Actually, it felt good not to have him underfoot, a little like he was dead already. But the last thing Evelyn wanted was that or, as she lay down against her lumpy backrest, to fall asleep, though she did, nodding off and dreaming until something shifted down her weight on the side of her bed away from the wall.
    â€œEvelyn,” said Rudolph, “look at this.” She blinked back sleep and squinted at the cover of a magazine called Inside Kung-Fu , which Rudolph waved under her nose. On the cover a man stood bowlegged, one hand cocked under his armpit, the other corkscrewing straight at Evelyn’s nose.
    â€œRudolph!” She batted the magazine aside, then swung her eyes toward the cluttered night-stand, focusing on the electric clock beside her water glass from McDonald’s, Preparation H suppositories, and Harlequin romances. “It’s morning!” Now she was mad. At least, working at it. “Where have you been?”
    Her husband inhaled, a wheezing, whistlelike breath. He rolled the magazine into a cylinder and, as he spoke, struck his left palm with it. “That movie we saw advertised? You remember—it was called The Five Fingers of Death . I just saw that and one called Deep Thrust.”
    â€œWonderful.” Evelyn screwed up her lips. “I’m calling hospitals and you’re at a Hong Kong double feature.”
    â€œListen,” said Rudolph. “You don’t understand.” He seemed at that moment as if he did not understand either. “It was a Seattle movie premiere. The Northwest is crawling with fighters. It has something to do with all the Asians out here. Before they showed the movie, four students from a kwoon in Chinatown went onstage—”
    â€œA what?” asked Evelyn.
    â€œA kwoon—it’s a place to study fighting, a meditation hall.” He looked at her but was really watching, Evelyn realized, something exciting she had missed. “They did a demonstration to drum up their membership. They broke boards and bricks, Evelyn. They went through what’s called kata and kumite and…” He stopped again to breathe. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. The reason I’m late is because I wanted to talk with them after the movie.”
    Evelyn, suspicious, took a Valium and waited.
    â€œI signed up for lessons,” he said.
    She gave a glacial look at Rudolph, then at his magazine, and said in the voice she used five years ago when he wanted to take a vacation to Upper Volta or, before that, invest in a British car she knew they couldn’t afford:
    â€œYou’re fifty-four years old, Rudolph.”
    â€œI know that.”
    â€œYou’re no Muhammad Ali.”
    â€œI know that,” he said.
    â€œYou’re no Bruce Lee. Do you want to be Bruce Lee? Do you know where he is now, Rudolph? He’d dead—dead here in a Seattle cemetery and buried up on Capital Hill.”
    His shoulders slumped a little. Silently, Rudolph began undressing, his beefy backside turned toward her, slipping his pa jama bottoms on before taking off his shirt so his scrawny lower body would not be fully exposed. He picked up his magazine, said, “I’m sorry if I worried you,” and huffed upstairs to his bedroom. Evelyn clicked off the mushroom-shaped lamp on her nightstand. She lay on her side, listening to his slow footsteps strike the stairs, then heard his mattress creak above her—his bedroom was directly above hers—but she did not hear him click off his own light. From time to time she heard his shifting weight squeak the mattress springs. He was reading that foolish magazine, she guessed; then she grew tired and gave this impossible man up to God. With a copy of The Thorn Birds open on her lap, Evelyn fell heavily