Kiss Of The Blue Dragon

“Aaiiiyeeee!” he cried again, every tendon straining as he squatted and assumed a pose of steel.

“Oh, hell.” He was opening with the iron buffalo ploughs the field. That classic Shaolin kung fu move was enough to make me want to dig a foxhole. I took one last slurp of coffee and tossed my mug into the grass. “Hey, Mike, can we talk about this?”

His typically enigmatic Oriental expression, boyish for his thirty years of age, was distorted into a mask of savagery. Boy, he wasn’t kidding around. My dalliances with Bogie always pissed him off. Mike believed compubots could suck the chi out of you for days. He was trying to teach me a lesson. But while I was sporting the just-laid look, I had more energy than he suspected. The question was, what move?

I cleared all thoughts as Mike had taught me, making way for instinct. He blazed toward me—jumping, squatting, rolling on the ground and flailing. But just before he downed me with a blue dragon tail-wag move, I leaped and grabbed the twisted tree branch that was shading a bed of hostas and pulled myself up with catlike grace. Squatting barefoot on the branch, and wearing nothing more than a tank top and boy-short briefs, I pounced down on him—now the tiger—and flattened him.

“Ha!” I cried out when he sank back in defeat. I stood on my adrenaline-pumped legs. “I told you never to do that before I’ve had at least two cups of coffee.”

He sat up, not the least the worse for wear, and smoothed a hand over his shaved head. “I make sure you are awake.”

“Well, it worked. But I lost a perfectly good cup of coffee. And I’m going to have more,” I said emphatically as I combed through my sprigs of platinum hair and headed back to the kitchen.

“Wait, Baker.”

His somber request stopped me cold. It was more his tone than the words that worried me. He always called me Baker. Ever since I’d rescued him from a prison camp in Joliet, Illinois, he’d called me by my last name, thinking it was my first. The Chinese put their last names first. His was Pu Yun. Yun would be his first name, except he’d taken a classic American nickname.

“What is it, Mike? Can’t it wait for another cup of java?”

His long pause worried me. But finally he nodded. Reluctantly.

With a steaming cup of joe, I joined him in his shed at the end of the long, fenced-in garden. I always called it a shed, but it was much more than that. Mike lived in a cozy twenty-by-fifteen-foot renovated coach house. With a bare wooden floor, it was insulated but not well heated, so we had put in a potbellied stove.

In accordance with the principles of feng shui, a water pond coated with green lilies and stocked with white and red carp sat serenely outside his door. Inside, colorful painted images of a dragon, a red bird and a tortoise adorned differing walls.

I glanced around and noticed the place was unusually cluttered—Taoist amulets and talismans scrawled on red and yellow strips of paper were pinned here and there, his bag of I Ching tablets lay in the corner, incense burned before a small statue of the Buddha, and he’d been working at his suitcase-size desk on a purple astrology chart. Fact was, Mike was superstitious, as were most Chinese who’d grown up in the old country.

“I have very bad luck,” he’d said when I first brought him here five years ago. His wrists had been scarred from being chained after numerous attempts to escape from the work camp. He was skinny and looked like a concentration camp victim. “My father…his grave is in a bad place near Shanghai. Pointing east. We are all cursed, my family, because of this.”

Not if you’re one of the elite Shaolin monks, I’d thought at the time, which he was. The monks and their kung fu style of martial arts had first come to the attention of Westerners in the 1970s because of a television show. When the Chinese communist government realized they could make money off of the monks, the Shaolin Temple north of the Shaoshi Mountain opened to tourists. While Mike had made a name for himself at the Shaolin temple, he had come to America in search of social freedom.

Whether it was because of bad luck or naiveté, he had arranged his trip through a crafty travel agency sponsored by the Mongolian mafia. Mike unwittingly ended up in a prison work camp operated by the mafia on the outskirts of Chicago. He’d slaved in Illinois’s legalized opium fields for two years before I’d rescued him while taking a tour of the camp, a spontaneous act of mercy on my part.

After his escape, Mike could have returned to the Shaolin temple, but he’d felt that his imprisonment was such a bad omen that he had brought dishonor to his fellow monks. So he stayed with me, employing his fighting skills on my behalf, teaching me the kung fu style of martial arts. I’d been studying tae kwon do, the Korean style, since I was a kid.

So while Mike was a fighter, he still had the heart of a monk and often spat out cryptic sayings and insightful diatribes that had vaguely ominous, spiritual overtones.

“I had a dream,” he said darkly.

I swallowed. “Oh?”

“While you slept with that thing, I dreamed your fate.”

“Look, Mike, I didn’t ask you to do that, and he is not a thing. Bogie is a…a…” My voice trailed away. I rubbed my forehead. I didn’t even know what to call him. Truth was, I should be making love with a real man. Maybe Lola was right. I heaved a sigh. “So what happened in the dream?”

“A blue dragon…she rose out of water and…”

“Yeah?” I prodded when he frowned down at the astrology chart. “So?”

“You are so impatient, Baker!” he snapped.

I was stunned into silence. I’d never heard Mike lose his temper before. I slowly put my cup down on the table. “I’m sorry.”

He frowned and nodded, not looking at me. “Blue dragon must fight two-headed eagle.”

I waited, afraid to interrupt.

“Something has happened, Baker. A storm gathers. Our time together may be at an end.”

He looked at me as if for the last time. I shivered with foreboding. A sudden wind blew up, rare in the north side of the city. The skies opened and warm rain descended unannounced. Big, fat dollops hit the roof, the sidewalk, cleansing them, leaving behind a humid, silver scent. Mike and I exchanged looks. He’d once told me blue dragons had power over rain.

Jeez. I was getting downright superstitious myself. I took my coffee cup and left without saying another word. I didn’t need to. Superstition aside, I had a funny feeling the Chinese gods were about to fling some ox pies our way.

Chapter 5

To Lola with Love

Irony sucks.

At least it did when I went to see Lola on Howard Street in the Rogers Park neighborhood to make sure she was okay. I arrived thinking I understood the extent of my mother’s shenanigans and left realizing I didn’t know the half of it.

Two blocks east of the public transportation station, Lake Michigan lapped on the sandy shore in the glare of the moonlight. I couldn’t hear the waves, but I remembered them from my childhood—remembered intrepidly diving into water that was cold even in July.

Back then I’d wanted to be a mermaid when I grew up. I used to practice holding my breath under water so that one day I could live in the lake, but I always had to come up for air. That was my first clue that I might be destined for something else.

I was six, and the lake was an oasis from Lola’s parlor, where mobsters of every ethnic origin came to have their fortunes told or, more likely, bets placed. One year later, when Lola went to prison for bookmaking, I was yanked out of there by the Department of Children and Family Services. Since I didn’t even know who my father was, D.C.F.S. plunked me into foster care, if you could call it that, in one of the sprawling suburbs, a concrete oasis known as Schaumburg. I didn’t see the lake again for two years. By the time I returned I didn’t believe in mermaids anymore.

I brushed the memories aside as I exited the superconductor platform onto the grimy street. I turned left and walked one block until I saw the red neon Fortunes Told sign blinking outside Lola’s second-floor window. The T had shorted out so it read Fortunes old. That was for sure.

More childhood memories came flying at me, and not all of them bad—Lola and I holding hands as we walked to the corner ice-cream shop, trying not to step on cracks; laughing together when she tried to curl my hair and it ended up looking like she’d put my finger in an electric socket; lying in my lumpy bed at night, listening to the sounds of traffic and gunfire, so grateful I had my mother to keep me safe.

Even then I must have known it wasn’t going to last. I’d cherished the chaotic and neglectful life I had, not knowing it could be better. And later, when I knew it could have been, I yearned for it still. You never stop missing a mother when she’s gone, even when you can’t stand to be near her.

I picked up my pace. I’d been worried about my mother ever since her visit and Mike’s ominous dream. I felt guilty about blowing her off. Why I worried about a woman who could outsmart the devil himself, I didn’t know. That is, not until I drew close enough and saw that the police had cordoned off the sidewalk in front of her brick apartment building. The cops had used old-fashioned yellow police tape. They didn’t waste decent laser barriers in a neighborhood like this. Not when they’d probably be stolen. There were a couple police aerocars hovering on the street outside.

I ran the last few feet and ducked under the police tape, fully intending to dash up the crumbling concrete steps to the second-floor apartment.

“Hey!” shouted a patrolman from his car. He turned off the engine and the squad car sank a foot to the pavement with a hiss. He climbed out. “You can’t go in there!”

“I’m a relative!” I shouted over my shoulder.

Just then an older cop came out of the door. By the time I met him on the small porch, he had drawn his taser. “Stop right there. Who are you?”

I looked up into his deeply lined face and my mind sizzled with a long-forgotten memory. It came like the flash of a July Fourth sparkler. I recalled the night the police had arrested Lola for bookmaking twenty-one years ago. The officers who handcuffed her had been placing bets in her parlor for years. I hated the hypocrites. For a long time I loathed the sight of a police uniform.

“Who are you?” the big, square-framed cop demanded as he hoisted up his sagging pants.

I no longer felt like explaining. I pulled a trick Mike had taught me.