Free A Devil in the Details by K. A. Stewart Page B

gravy.
    While I would like to tell you there was a tiny little Asian man in my life, a Mr. Miyagi to set me on my path, there wasn’t. Instead, I had Carl. Carl Bledsoe was as large and as black as they come. As a teenager, I had to crane my neck upward to look into his face, and he seemed an immovable mountain of solid obsidian. As an adult, I still do, and he still is. Every once in a while, I go spar with him and get my ass handed to me. I’m getting closer to beating him, though. Maybe someday I will, when he’s old and in a wheelchair or something. (Hell, he’ll probably just run over my spine with it.)
    He worked out in a cut-off sweatshirt and Gi pants, his thighs as big around as my waist, and his biceps bulging like cantaloupes about to burst. Back then, I had no doubt in my mind that he could squash me like a bug and laugh while doing it. He told me so himself. Trust me—he cut me no slack. If I wasn’t on the ball, I paid for it. But amidst the sparring and the humiliation, he would also spout sayings and ruminations that sounded really cool, things I’d never heard in my sleepy redneck town. He would say, “For a warrior whose duty it is to restrain brigandage, it will not do to act like a brigand yourself.” I even went and looked up brigand, just to see what it meant. I liked the idea of being a warrior instead of a punk kid.
    I was way too cool at the time to admit I was intrigued, of course, so I mocked Carl and called him some names I refuse to repeat now. But I remembered everything he said, and I wondered where he’d learned it.
    One day, after my usual halfhearted efforts, he tossed me a video as I headed out the door.
    “What the hell is this?” I wrinkled my nose, turning the case over in my hands. It was some old black-and-white movie, and I sneered.
    “Kurosawa. The Seven Samurai . Watch it. It’s in Japanese, but it has subtitles.”
    “You give me a movie, then expect me to read?”
    He grinned, white teeth flashing against his ebon skin. “Trust me.”
    I watched it, just so I could tell him how lame and stupid it was. Then I watched it again. After about the fifth viewing, I knew parts of it by heart. My favorite scene involved the samurai who masqueraded as a monk to disarm an enemy with his bare hands. My mom told me The Magnificent Seven was based on it, so I had her rent that and watched it, too. It wasn’t as good, in my opinion, but I could see the parallels between the two movies, the themes that carried over. Here were men with honor, who used their powers for good (so to speak). I was fascinated.
    When I took the movie back to Carl at my next weekly class, I felt so educated and worldly. After all, I’d watched a foreign film! Carl quickly proved me wrong.
    “If you want to truly understand bushido , and the way of the samurai, you have to read—a lot. Samurai were educated men, not just trained thugs.”
    The first book he gave me was Hagakure. He quizzed me over it as we sparred, forcing me to use my mind and my body at once. I can honestly say, I got so caught up in learning about this foreign and exotic culture, I forgot to be a hoodlum.
    Once we moved past hand-to-hand techniques and on to weapons training, he gave me The Book of Five Rings , and my studies continued. They still continue. Every time someone comes out with a new translation of one of the classic texts, I’m there. Sometimes, someone even writes something new, relating bushido to modern life. Countless businesses cite it in their ideals, alongside Sun Tzu’s Art of War .
    I admire people who try to keep the code. Honor and duty are fairly good concepts, no matter what credo you maintain. But I am the only practicing samurai I know. Even Carl can’t say he ever used his training in actual combat.
    The world has changed a lot since the days of the samurai. The rules have changed. So what does being a samurai mean for some gangly white boy in today’s modern America? It means when in a darkened