The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [182]
"Of course. Very poor taste, being born like that." Emilio looked briefly at Anne, but his eyes slid away. A mistake, he realized, to speak of this. He had tried so hard to understand, but how could a child have known? He shrugged again and steered the talk away from Elena Sandoz. "My mother’s husband and I used to play a game called Beat the Crap out of the Bastard. I was about eleven when I worked out the name, yes?" He sat up and threw the hair out of his eyes with a jerk of his head. "I changed the rules for this game when I was fourteen," he told them, savoring it, even after all the years.
D.W., who knew what was coming, grinned in spite of himself. He’d deplored the random violence of La Perla and worked hard to find ways for kids like Emilio to settle things without knifing somebody. It was an uphill battle in a place where fathers told sons, "Anybody give you shit, cut his face." And this was advice given to eight-year-olds on the first day of third grade.
"Our esteemed Father Superior," he heard Emilio tell the others with vast enjoyment, "was in those days a parish priest in La Perla. Of course, he did not condone unpleasantries among family members, however tenuously related. Nevertheless, Father Yarbrough did impart a certain wisdom to young acolytes. This included the precept that when there is a substantial difference in size between adversaries, the larger man is fighting dirty simply by intending to take on a much smaller opponent—"
"So nail the sumbitch ’fore he lays a hand on you," D.W. finished, in tones that suggested the sagacity of this was self-evident. He had, in fact, taught the kid a few little things in the gym. Emilio being small, surprise was necessarily a prerequisite to some maneuvers. The subtlety came in making the boy understand it was okay to fight in self-defense when Miguel came home mean-drunk, but it was not necessary to take on a whole neighborhood of taunting kids.
"—and while there is a certain primitive satisfaction in decking an asshole," Emilio was telling them with serene respect for his mentor, "this should not be indulged in without temperance and forbearance."
"I sort of wondered where you learned to do what you did with Supaari," Jimmy said. "That was pretty amazing."
The conversation drifted off into stories of a priest Jimmy had known in South Boston who’d boxed in the Olympics and then D.W. started in on a few sergeants he’d known in the Marines. Anne and Sofia started lunch and listened, heads shaking, to tales of certain illegal but remarkably effective hockey moves available to alert goalies in the Quebec league. But the talk came back to the Jana’ata Handshake, as Supaari’s attack on Sandoz was known among them, and when it veered toward Emilio’s childhood once more, he stood.
"You never know when an old skill will come in handy," he said with a certain edgy finality, moving toward the terrace. But then he stopped and laughed and added piously, "The Lord works in mysterious ways."
And it was impossible to tell whether he was serious or joking.
THE CRUISE DOWNRIVER from Kashan seemed to Supaari to go more quickly than the trip out from Gayjur. The first day, he simply let his mind go blank, his attention absorbed by the eddies and drift-wood, the sandbars and rocks. But the second day on the river was a thoughtful one, full of wonder.
He had been deluged by new facts, new ideas, new possibilities, but he had always been quick to grasp opportunities and willing to take friendships where he found them. The foreigners, like the Runa, were sometimes startlingly different from his people and often incomprehensible, but he liked Ha’an very much—found her mind lively and full of challenge. The rest of them were less clear to him, only adjuncts to the sessions with Ha’an, translating, illustrating, providing food and drink at bizarre and irritating intervals. And to be honest, they nearly all smelled alike.
He would buy the rented powerboat outright when he got back, Supaari decided, watching a good-sized river kivnest breach and roll