Chapter Two: The Fox and the Rabbit

      On a walk with his student, a Zen master watched a fox chase a gray rabbit across their path. The rabbit hopped in frantic zigzags, and the fox streaked closely behind. The animals disappeared into the underbrush.

      The Zen master said, “That rabbit will escape the fox.”

      The student said, “But the fox is bigger. It’s stronger.”

      “The fox is running for his dinner,” his teacher said. “The rabbit is running for his life.”

      ~

      Nina was a thief, technically, although she never defined herself that way. Apart from being negative-sounding, it was relative. The way Nina saw it, if you stole a wallet, people called you a thief. If you stole an election, they called you President.

      Nina instead thought of herself as a kind of pool shark, except she didn’t play pool. It wasn’t her fault that they underestimated her. Men shouldn’t be hitting women anyway, I mean, really, what kind of world was this? She was an enforcement officer, collecting small fines from men who violated the social contract. Every animal steals to live. Nina liked to pay her rent on time. She liked to be fiscally responsible.

      Nina shoplifted, too, but only stuff on sale. Meat, bound in butcher paper, sunk into a handbag. Filet mignon, fresh tuna, an artichoke. Socks, stockings, underwear, olive oil. If she thought she was being watched, she stood in line to pay for a single box of spaghetti, and walked out cradling a full purse of supermarket makeup and shellfish. She wondered which other shoppers among her were also harboring hidden Oil of Olay and vials of saffron. She suspected a higher incidence of shoplifting for embarrassing things like athlete’s foot powder, vaginal itch cream, Beano, or extra-small condoms, so she made sure to purchase those kinds of things outright if needed, in case security cameras were trained in those directions.

      No, stealing was sponsorship. Fighting was the passion. She never stopped, never tried. During dry spells, she missed it like it was lost legs or a drifting lover. She knew what she loved.

      Of course, like most careers, it’s harder for a woman, and easily complicated by standards. Nina had a code: she never hit first. Her teacher Jackson often used to quote an Okinawan proverb, Karate ni sente nashi—there is no first attack in karate—and Nina took it seriously. Anything after the first strike, she figured, was fair game.

      Besides the first strike rule, she didn’t fight kids, women, the homeless or elderly, gangbangers, and crazy people. For practical reasons, she also avoided drug addicts and her neighbors. Basically, she tried not to fight anyone she wouldn’t have sex with.

      It took work. Nina exercised every day to exhaustion. She dressed trampy, hung out in questionable areas of town. Certain streets, all she needed to do was stand with her back pressed to the wall, knee up, and someone came along demanding a date or worse. On the same streets the next night, nada. The odds sucked. Because she couldn’t get around it, no matter how hard she tried: people were essentially good. And she wasn’t as good as she used to be.

      It was probably temporary, just a series of dumb mistakes resulting in minor injuries—a dislocated jaw, bruised ribs, shiners. They added up. Last month outside a 7-Eleven in the rain, a biker grabbed her and she punched him in the mouth. His front teeth broke and embedded themselves in her hand. He smiled, and blood streamed from his mouth in a silky rope. He hit her, and hit her again, and didn’t stop until she ducked and he broke his fist on the wet wall behind her. She heard the bones crack like small thunder, and still he cocked his fist again, a blinking robot. She ran straight home and lay damp and sweating under the covers until the sun came back up.

      Men on meth were the worst because they felt no pain, had no morals. She tried to avoid them, but you couldn’t always identify them if they bathed. She wore precautionary leather, but she still bore scars on her ribs and arms. She had been cut five times. Her nose was crooked and blunt from breaking. She had fractured four ribs and a pinky. Her jaw was permanently askew and clicked when she chewed. When she groped her skull, her fingers found dents and scars she didn’t remember getting.

      Sometimes she wondered if she had ever seriously hurt any of them.

      Perhaps she should go on medication, and take one of those drugs that sound like superheroes (Effexor! Lexapro! Zoloft vs. Celexa!). She couldn’t go on like this forever, winning. Or, at least, not losing. It was mathematically impossible. She wondered if she’d soon start losing when she should win, and if these shitty times were, in fact, her glory years.

      Sometimes she opened her desk drawer and counted all the wallets she had taken over the years—folded leather piled one on top of another, mounting evidence that her number was almost up. Nina had survived over ninety street fights. She knew exactly what she was made of.

      Her old teacher, Jackson, once said, “The smart thing is never the brave thing.” He was five-foot-six. He grew up on Oahu near the military base. On his way home from winning a cockfight, four drunken marines jumped him. He fought them all off, never once letting go of his chicken.

      Jackson told Nina that her mother was once assaulted in Okinawa by two Americans. One of the men kissed her, his hands at her throat. She bit off his tongue and spat it at him. It’s impossible to know what a person is capable of until that moment comes and passes—who or what they’ll sacrifice. That person doesn’t know, either.

      What will you fight for?

      ~

      There’s a lot to learn. When Nina was a teenager, Jackson used to take her to Denver on long day trips. He introduced her to Asian men in dirty parts of town who showed them their minor miracles.

      One was an Indonesian guy who practiced a monkey style. The story was, when he was young, his teacher threw him in a cage with a wild monkey. The monkey went crazy and tore the boy up. The teacher pulled him out just in time, saying, “Now you know how the monkey fights.” Okay, whatever, but this guy did fight like a monkey—crouching low, thumping people on the head, crawling all over Jackson’s hunched back. In the monkey man’s village in Indonesia, everyone carried knives, and