Thomas Perry - The Face-Changers

Jane shook her head sympathetically. “There are people who make a good living by teaching scared women a few quick moves that might buy them ten seconds to get away. Good for them. But they also manage to imply to a lot of gullible ladies that lesson number six hundred and forty-seven will make them formidable enough to overpower a serious attacker. It doesn’t work that way.”

“Why not?”

Jane seemed to contemplate her for a minute. “What’s the simplest way to put this? Athletic-equipment companies have been studying this stuff like crazy for years, trying to design gear especially for women. It’s a gold mine, so they’re working hard. One result I saw was a baseball glove they had developed just for women. It had to be smaller, but also compensate for the fact that the average American woman has fifty-five percent less strength in her hand than the average man.”

“You’re telling me I should give up? It’s completely hopeless?”

Jane shook her head. “No. I’m telling you that pretending a woman is a man with long hair will get you killed.”

“What won’t get me killed?”

“Recognizing what you can do, and practicing.”

“Practicing what?”

“A man has more upper body strength than you can ever have, so you never compete with it. Practice staying out of his reach. A woman is more flexible. We can bend and stretch more, kick higher. If you work hard at a few moves, you can become very fast. But above all, you fight dirty.”

“I’m willing to do that, but what do I do?”

“Think about it clearly. If he hits you once, the fight is over. So you always hit first. Each movement of your body must be a surprise, and it must be capable of disabling him—if possible, permanently. You want to put out an eye, dislocate a kneecap, crush a trachea. Always use a weapon if you can. Never let him suspect that you intend to fight until after you’ve done the worst you can to him—not the worst you think is necessary: the very worst.” Jane paused. “That’s most of it.”

“I don’t want most of it. What’s the rest?”

Jane shrugged. “That comes with time. It’s mostly learning how a man fights with a woman. If you watch boxing on TV you’ll see men dancing and circling, bobbing and weaving, keeping their guard up. That’s what they do if they think the other person is their equal. They know you’re not, so they’re very sloppy. Usually they don’t even try to hit you—just grab you and you’ll give up. That gives you one enormous chance. Use it wisely, because there won’t be another.”

For three days Christine practiced in the middle of the living room. Jane told her, “Learn just one sequence of moves: six punches delivered just as fast as your arms can move—left-right-left-right-left-right to his nose, eyes, throat—then the side kick to the knee, pivot, and run. Always the same.”

Christine was insulted. “Always the same? I mean, it seems too simple.”

“If you were going to do it twice, it would be. But you’re not. You only have to surprise him once. You practice it until your body simply does it without bringing your mind into it. He has to make decisions, you’re already in motion.”

Christine practiced in the living room while Jane watched. It reminded Christine of a dance rehearsal, with the choreographer studying everything she did. A few times Jane jumped up and corrected her. “Not just arms,” she said. “Your arms aren’t enough. Up on the balls of your feet, and explode off your back foot. Your whole body has to deliver it, and it has to be a poke, like a piston, not a swing.” Jane did it all with such speed and force that Christine felt a little frightened of her. She tried to imitate the moves precisely. Jane watched with tentative approval, then said, “See his face in front of you. Faster. Harder. Body, not arms.”

During these days in Cleveland Jane tried tracing the license number of the car that had brought Christine to Sid Freeman’s. She claimed her car had been dented in a parking lot and a witness had left a note with that number on it. The Minnesota Department of Motor Vehicles gave her the name of the company that the car had been rented from. Jane decided not to call the company: knowing the false name the man had used to rent it would get her nowhere.

Jane called the Los Angeles county clerk’s office to find the owner of the apartment complex at 19942 Troost Avenue in North Hollywood. In exchange for four calls and a fee, Jane learned that the owner was a corporate entity called 19942 Troost Management and its address was the bank that held its checking account.

On the fourth day, Christine walked quietly to the doorway of the bedroom and stopped. Jane was facing away from her, throwing clothes into a suitcase. After a second or two, when Christine was sure she had not shifted her weight or even breathed, Jane said, “I’ll be back in two days.”

“Where are you going?”

“To meet someone.”

After Jane was gone, Christine sat in the middle of the living room and stared out the window at the upper branches of a tree slowly swaying against the cloudy sky beyond it. She thought about Jane on an airplane. Pretty soon the silver airplane would rise up to pierce those clouds like a little needle. Christine was already alone.

The silence of the apartment was suddenly palpable, and it forced her to think. She kept coming back to a nagging worry that was almost like guilt. She had let Jane save her life, then spent all of this time with her. Had she remembered to tell her everything? Probably it wasn’t worth anything to Jane, she assured herself. And Jane wasn’t the problem. Christine was the one who had to be afraid. She had only a few secrets left.

30

Something just below Violet Peterson’s chest was clutched again by the throbbing of the drums, quickened and carried along with their rhythm. The wild, falsetto voices of the singers rose and fell and made her throat contract with theirs as she waited in the crowd. This was the part of the doings that she had found she loved the most. It brought back the amazement that she had felt as a small child, when the sound of the drums had held her in some space between physical and emotional, and the wailing male voices that were clearer and a pitch higher than the voices of normal life had seemed to come from somebody far older and more important than her uncles and cousins.

Violet glanced at her watch. It was seven o’clock, and the Entry was beginning. She saw the four men of the honor guard moving up into the big circle. The first of them carried an American flag; the next, a blue one with pictures on it she couldn’t make out that she supposed must be the flag of Oklahoma. Then there were two men carrying feathered staffs. They all wore Cherokee gear—beaded buckskin shirts, tall horsehair roaches on their heads with feathers jutting out at angles. She recognized some of the medals pinned to their shirts: two—no, three—purple hearts, a silver star. The one with the American flag had a few she had not seen before.

She had gotten used to the way powwows went. It seemed unsurprising that the honor guard was always made up of combat veterans, because that was the way people had done things in the Old Time. Next came the traditional male dancers, mostly older men who wore not replicas of costumes but the family heirlooms of twenty or thirty nations. Tonight, in this group, there were plains shirts made of deer that had probably died before Custer, embroidered with trade beads and porcupine quills, and bear-claw necklaces and eagle-feather war bonnets. Then came the grass dancers with long fringe, then the fancy dancers, wearing iridescent colors that didn’t exist a hundred years ago and bells and turkey-feather bustles and hoops and war paint.