Sorcerer's Apprentice by Charles Johnson Read Free Book Online Page B

Iguana. Beneath him, Berkeley heard the ancient Tortoise stir, clearing a rusty throat clogged from disuse. Only he would survive the spreading fire, given his armor. His eyes burning from the smoke, the watchdog tried to explain his dream before the blaze reached them. “We could have endured, we had enough in common—for Christ’s sake, we’re all animals.”
    â€œIndeed,” said Tortoise grimly, his eyes like headlights in a shell that echoed cavernously. “Indeed.”

CHINA
    If one man conquer in battle a thousand men, and if another conquers himself, he is the greatest of conquerors.
    â€”The Dhammapada

    Evelyn’s problems with her husband, Rudolph, began one evening in early March—a dreary winter evening in Seattle—when he complained after a heavy meal of pig’s feet and mashed potatoes of shortness of breath, an allergy to something she put in his food perhaps, or brought on by the first signs of wild flowers around them. She suggested they get out of the house for the evening, go to a movie. He was fifty-four, a postman for thirty-three years now, with high blood pressure, emphysema, flat feet, and, as Evelyn told her friend Shelberdine Lewis, the lingering fear that he had cancer. Getting old, he was also getting hard to live with. He told her never to salt his dinners, to keep their Lincoln Continental at a crawl, and never run her fingers along his inner thigh when they sat in Reverend William Merrill’s church, because anything, even sex, or laughing too loud—Rudolph was serious—might bring on heart failure.
    So she chose for their Saturday night outing a peaceful movie, a mildly funny comedy a Seattle Times reviewer said was fit only for titters and nasal snorts, a low-key satire that made Rudolph’s eyelids droop as he shoveled down unbuttered popcorn in the darkened, half-empty theater. Sticky fluids cemented Evelyn’s feet to the floor. A man in the last row laughed at all the wrong places. She kept the popcorn on her lap, though she hated the unsalted stuff and wouldn’t touch it, sighing as Rudolph pawed across her to shove his fingers inside the cup.
    She followed the film as best she could, but occasionally her eyes frosted over, flashed white. She went blind like this now and then. The fibers of her eyes were failing; her retinas were tearing like soft tissue. At these times the world was a canvas with whiteout spilling from the far left corner toward the center; it was the sudden shock of an empty frame in a series of slides. Someday, she knew, the snow on her eyes would stay. Winter eternally: her eyes split like her walking stick. She groped along the fractured surface, waiting for her sight to thaw, listening to the film she couldn’t see. Her only comfort was knowing that, despite her infirmity, her Rudolph was in even worse health.
    He slid back and forth from sleep during the film (she elbowed him occasionally, or pinched his leg), then came full awake, sitting up suddenly when the movie ended and a “Coming Attractions” trailer began. It was some sort of gladiator movie, Evelyn thought, blinking, and it was pretty trashy stuff at that. The plot’s revenge theme was a poor excuse for Chinese actors or Japanese (she couldn’t tell those people apart) to flail the air with their hands and feet, take on fifty costumed extras at once, and leap twenty feet through the air in perfect defiance of gravity. Rudolph’s mouth hung open.
    â€œCan people really do that?” He did not take his eyes off the screen, but talked at her from the right side of his mouth. “Leap that high?”
    â€œIt’s a movie” sighed Evelyn. “A bad movie.”
    He nodded, then asked again, “But can they?”
    â€œOh, Rudolph, for God’s sake!” She stood up to leave, her seat slapping back loudly. “They’re on trampolines ! You can see them in the corner—there!—if you