Dean looked at him for a long, heavy second. “Okay,” Dean said. It was a whisper, barely audible over the hum of the vending machine in the corner, but the finality in that single word was absolute. Dean slowly turned his back on Trent. He began walking toward the glass front door. Trent barked another laugh. “Yeah, keep walking, old man. Don’t come back. Tell your kid he’s off the team.” Dean reached the front door. He didn’t push it open. Dean stood at the glass. He looked out into the empty, darkened parking lot. The world outside was quiet, peaceful, entirely ignorant of the violence that was about to be birthed inside the neon-lit room. He didn’t want this. He really didn’t. He had spent years going to therapy, sitting in fluorescent-lit VA clinics, learning how to breathe through the memories of cordite and copper. He had promised himself he would never let the monster out again. But as he stood there feeling the phantom pain in his knee, thinking of his son’s blood on the blue vinyl, he realized something fundamental. Some men do not understand words. Some men only understand consequence. Dean reached up and gripped the heavy brass deadbolt on the door. Click. The sound was sharp, mechanical, final.
Dean reached up to the plastic sign hanging in the window. He flipped it from open to closed. Then with slow, deliberate movements, he reached up and pulled the cords on the Venetian blinds, dropping the heavy plastic slats down, blocking the view from the street. The dojo was now cut off from the world. It was a sealed box. Behind the counter, one of the younger guys stopped laughing. “Hey, what is he doing?” Trent f, his bravado faltering for a fraction of a second before his anger masked it again. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Open that door and get out.” Dean turned around. He reached down and began unlacing his heavy work boots. He pulled them off, setting them neatly by the door. He peeled his gray t-shirt over his head, folding it slowly, and set it on top of his boots. Beneath the shirt, Dean’s torso was a map of tragedy. He wasn’t built like a bodybuilder. He had the thick, dense core of a lumberjack layered with a thin sheen of functional fat over coiled muscle. But it was the scars that made Trent hesitate. A jagged puckered starburst of scar tissue sat just below Dean’s left collarbone. A through-and-through from an AK-47 round. A long silver keloid scar dragged across his ribs on the right side. The result of a knife fight in a lightless mud hut that Dean still dreamed about.
