man with minimal effort. You can control someone’s whole body with
two fingers. It’s about knowing where the weak points are, and how to
exploit them.” He grabbed my wrist and folded it, bending my fingers
downward so they reached uncomfortably toward the inside of my
forearm. He continued to add pressure until I twisted slightly,
wrapping my arm behind my back to relieve the strain.
“See? This is a weak point,” he said. “If I fold it any more, you’ll be
immobilized.” He grinned his angel grin. “I won’t, though, because it’d
hurt like hell.”
He let go and said, “Now you try.”
I folded his wrist onto itself and squeezed hard, trying to get his
upper body to collapse the way mine had. He didn’t move.
“Maybe another strategy for you,” he said.
He gripped my wrist a different way—the way an attacker might, he
said. He taught me how to break the hold, where the fingers were
weakest and the bones in my arm strongest, so that after a few minutes
I could cut through even his thick fingers. He taught me how to throw
my weight behind a punch, and where to aim to crush the windpipe.
The next morning, the trailer was unloaded. We climbed into the
truck, picked up a new load and drove for another two days, watching
the white lines disappear hypnotically beneath the hood, which was the
color of bone. We had few forms of entertainment, so we made a game
of talking. The game had only two rules. The first was that every
statement had to have at least two words in which the first letters were
switched.
“You’re not my little sister,” Shawn said. “You’re my sittle lister.” He
pronounced the words lazily, blunting the t’s to d’s so that it sounded
like “siddle lister.”
The second rule was that every word that sounded like a number, or
like it had a number in it, had to be changed so that the number was
one higher. The word “to” for example, because it sounds like the
number “two,” would become “three.”
“Siddle Lister,” Shawn might say, “we should pay a-eleven-tion.
There’s a checkpoint ahead and I can’t a-five-d a ticket. Time three put
on your seatbelt.”
When we tired of this, we’d turn on the CB and listen to the lonely