Hey, Sophie!

About a month ago, I ran an excerpt from Hey, Sophie!, a young adult novel I wrote for a client that will likely never see publication. Here's a bit more, taking place later in the story, with Sophie heading out into the bayou by herself to investigate the mysterious stranger who lives there:

HEY, SOPHIE!

© Stirred Water Studios

Chapter 8

Twenty minutes later, Sophie remembered why.

She would have sworn that she had taken the right channel, the one that led straight to the Dog Rock. She had followed the signs Juan had pointed out to her...well, at least she thought she had, but instead of the widening channel, the waterway began narrowing around her. Realizing she must have taken a wrong turn somewhere along the way, Sophie spent several minutes trying to turn the small boat around in the tight waterway before she thought to just turn herself around and start paddling in the opposite direction.

Which brought her right back to where she started before she turned around: Lost!

Everywhere she looked looked exactly like everywhere else. Trees, gobs of hanging, mossy vines, water, rocks...nothing that even remotely resembled anything familiar. The air was hot, heavy and smelled like rotting cabbage. Creatures she couldn’t even imagine, and, frankly, didn’t want to, were shrieking and chattering away in the trees.

She was trying very hard not to panic. She may not know much but she knew panic was bad.

Something wet and heavy fell from an overhead branch and landed on the floor of the boat by her feet. She looked down.

It was a lizard.

Sophie shrieked.

So much for not panicking!

It was green and shiny, dotted with small brown spots and about eight inches long. And even though it was just sitting there at her feet looking up at her, its little tail swishing back and forth, its tiny tongue flicking in and out of its mouth, Sophie yanked her feet off the bottom of the boat. She held the paddle in her hands like a club, ready to fend off the little creature if it leapt for her throat.

“Scat!” she ordered.

As if understanding it was upsetting her, the lizard scurried back to the far end of the boat. It perched there, staring at her.

“Oh boy,” Sophie whispered. Now she was lost and under siege by a lizard. How much worse could it get?

Splash-thunk!

Sophie froze. She had heard that sound before, the last time she was out here. And didn’t you think she would have learned her lesson after that?

The sound was far away. Maybe it was something else, a branch falling from a tree into the water. A creature jumping in for a quick dip. A...

Splash-thunk!

...Flat-bottom boat being poled by T-John. Who was, of course, exactly who she came out here to find. But, funny, now that she’d found him, she suddenly wasn’t so anxious to confront him. Sophie looked around, trying to avoid the stare of the little lizard sitting opposite her in the boat. Now, she thought, that she’s in the middle of nowhere and the boogey man was getting closer and closer, this is when she starts believing Juan’s bayou lore. Okay, maybe T-John wasn’t some sort of immortal zombie or whatever, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be a psycho-swamp-killer with a normal lifespan. Coming out here was dumb. Dumber than dumb. Epically dumb.

Splash-thunk!

No doubt about it. The sound was getting closer, and Sophie could also make out the first bit of toneless whistling drifting across the water.

It was time for a plan and Sophie formulated one in an instant:

Run!

She settled for instinct and plain old guesswork, picking a direction and starting to paddle as fast as she could while making the minimum amount of noise. What was she thinking, anyway? How was she supposed to interview someone who couldn’t speak? She didn’t know sign language or even if T-John knew how to write out his answers. Dumb!

She didn’t for a minute believe she’d be able to outrun T-John, but she hoped she could at least find a nice, safe hiding place until he passed by. Just don’t think about anything but paddling, she told herself. Just shut up and move!

Desperation made for a good teacher. Sophie was soon handling the pirogue like a pro, taking turns and investigating side channels for a safe place to duck. For a while, the rhythmic splash-thunk and atonal whistling almost faded from hearing—but either T-John was deliberately tracking her or she just kept blundering into his path. It always seemed to catch up with her again.

Sophie started to swing around into a narrow channel, but a rat-tailed gray opossum surged in ahead of her and began swimming in an endless circle, blocking her way in. Maybe it was protecting its turf or whatever, but Sophie had no desire to pick a fight with something that looked a lot like a house-cat sized rat. She finally had to back up and take another direction. Well, what difference did it make? She didn’t know where she was going anyway.

She raised her paddle from the water and listened. Chirping, screeching birds. Jabbering, screeching animals. Chittering insects. Croaking reptiles and amphibians. Your basic nature. Not a swamp-psycho to be heard.

That was good. Sophie could use a few minutes to rest and gather her wits. Maybe figure something out.

But no such luck. She heard a nearby splash and looked around, the paddle held at the ready to defend herself. A short distance away, something furry and gray, about the size of a large house cat, swam through the water towards the boat. A long pink and white tail trailed behind it. Her first thought was that it was some sort of giant mutant rat, but as soon as it climbed from the water onto the top of an exposed tree stump, she recognized it as an opossum, which, from the looks of it, could have been the same one as before. Could it be following her? For all she knew, opossum was Latin for “giant stalker bayou water rat.” The opossum shook the water from its fur and began a staring contest with her.

Sophie swallowed hard and the heard another sound, a rustling from above.

“Oh, please, oh, please,” Sophie groaned. “Let it not be vampire bats!”

She glanced up, quickly, in case it was something she didn’t want to see. But this was just a pelican. Another pelican. Was there something about her that attracted these big, white sea birds? It stretched its wings and clicked its big, pointed yellow bill at her.

“You wouldn’t happen to know how I can get home, would you?” she asked it.

The pelican squawked in response.

Sophie sat in the boat and looked from the gecko to the opossum to the pelican. They looked back, nobody moving for several moments, giving Sophie a definite case of the fremeers all her own.

“So,” she said to them, “I suppose you’re wondering why I called you all here today.”

Splish!

Sophie froze.

Splish! Splish! Splish!

Something else was in the water.

Something. Big! Coming closer.

Sophie looked left. All clear. She swiveled her head to the right. Ditto.

Splish!

Behind her!

She didn’t want to look, but she knew she had to--if only to see what exactly it was that was going to be having her for a mid-day snack.

Slicing through the water like a torpedo about to sink a battleship she’d seen in old movies, Sophie saw the knobby-scaled back of an alligator speeding straight towards her. A white alligator! Juan said albino gators were good luck, but she wasn’t feeling so lucky as it closed on her faster than she could imagine, the massive, oblong head rising from the water, opening its jaws to display row after row of very long and very sharp teeth.

Sophie gasped, clutching the sides of the boat in both hands, hypnotized by the sight of what looked like hundreds of teeth coming to crunch down on the fragile little pirogue. She really, really wanted to scream; but try as she might, Sophie couldn’t make a sound.

She could only stare, frozen in fear.

And those big jaws kept getting closer until they filled her vision, now close enough that Sophie could have reached out and touched its snout.

Which was when the gator stopped and, with a big smile and a wink said in a friendly, deep voice, “Hey, Sophie.”

Kansas City, There I Went

In September 2005, I was invited to Kansas City, Kansas to participate in a brainstorming session for a company developing some new intellectual properties. I accepted the invitation for several reasons: (1) I was being paid, (2) it was for a company for which my brother-from-another-mother Rick Stasi worked, and (3) Kansas City barbecue, particularly a place called Zarda (Rick periodically ships me bottles of their sauce for home consumption).

The session discussed several properties, but one in particular interested me: Hey, Sophie! They had a bare bones concept: 14-year old New York girl is forced by circumstances to go live in the Louisiana bayou with a grandmother she hardly knows. It’s a fish-out-of-water story, with elements of the supernatural and even time travel thrown in and, when all was said and done, they wanted me to develop the story and write a series bible and a young adult novel, the first of what was hoped to be a nine-book series.

I started Hey, Sophie! in October and wrapped it up in April 2006 but due to a set of circumstances that would in themselves make a fascinating novel if I could ever unravel the chain of events, it and the rest of these IPs died on the vine. Which left this YA novel, all written and that I’m moderately pleased with, just sitting there, unpublished and not likely to be...there’s nothing I can do with it because it doesn’t belong to me (I was just, legally, at any rate, the work-made-for-hire writing monkey on it).

But here’s an excerpt from a chapter of Hey, Sophie!, wherein Sophie, who’s miserable being where she is and far more accustomed to riding the subway than rowing around the bayou in a pirogue (which isn't a dumpling, but a kind of small Cajun canoe), finds herself doing just that with Juan, the kid next door to whom she had previously been entirely rude:

HEY, SOPHIE!

© Stirred Water Studios

Chapter 5

The canoe drifted freely, going nowhere in particular. Juan pointed to a rock jutting up from the water about twenty feet to their right. “See that rock? Take a good stare and tell me what you think you see.”

Sophie squinted at the rock as they drifted by. It was...just a rock. A big, wet boulder. Well, okay, Sophie thought, that bulgy part there looked kind of like an animal’s leg...a dog’s paw. And that curve there could be a dog’s back and, just like that, Sophie saw it.

“A dog!” she said with delight. “Like a beagle, standing looking at that tree there. See, there’s his nose and muzzle and his tail and everything.”

“We call it the Dog Rock, and his tail’s a sign to follow right to the channel we came in by. She leads right back out to the lake right north of your grandmere’s house.”

He next pointed behind Sophie. She turned to see two large old tree trunks that had fallen across one another to form a giant X in the water. There was room under the bottom triangle of the X for their little pirogue to pass through. “That’s Hue’s Spot, ‘cause it was Robierre Hue who toppled those trees trying out his new chainsaw ‘bout twenty-five years back. But row through Hue’s Spot and keep going dead west, just follow the sun, and you’ll hit Yvonne’s Wharf over t’Warrenstown in about an hour. Other signs’ll tell you what direction you’re headed, how far you’ve gone, and how much farther you got to go.”

“Any chance of finding any of this on Mapquest?” Sophie said miserably.

“Don’t make a bahbin, girl. You’ll learn your way in no time, I gar-an-tee!“

“I don’t even own a bahbin, whatever it is,” Sophie said.

“It means don’t pout--and from the look on your face, you own plenty of bahbin. Come on, Sophie, admit it, ha? The bayou’s not so bad.” Juan’s face suddenly lit up and he pointed with the paddle off to one side. “Oh, Sophie, look at that!”

At first, Sophie wasn’t sure what it was she was looking at. It was a chunk of something, a log maybe, stripped of its bark to show the white wood, drifting along the still water less than a dozen yards from them. She blinked. Did that log have...eyes? And, wait a second. The water was absolutely calm. Their canoe hardly moved without Juan’s paddle in the water, but that log was making pretty good time on its own.

Sophie blinked again. Okay, not a log...

An alligator.

A white alligator!

At least six feet long from pale nose to pasty tail.

Sophie screamed. Juan shushed her; and the air around them filled with the screech, twitter, and cry of a thousand birds. The ‘gator ignored her and kept swimming.

“You doin’ it again, Sophie!” Juan warned. “That ‘gator just mindin’ his own business.”

Sophie leaned as far back away from the receding alligator as she could without toppling over the side. “Right--and his business is eating people.”

“Now you just bein’ silly, Sophie,” Juan said, dipping the paddle back in the water. “Gators don’t practically never attack people. Anyway, girl, don’t you know albino gator’re good luck.”

“To who?”

“To us, to whoever sees ‘im. They’re as rare as hen’s teeth, girl.”

Sophie never took her eyes off the alligator, just making sure that it didn’t sneak back to eat the boat and them. “Do hens have teeth?”

Juan sighed. “No, Sophie. Hens do not have teeth--and there ain’t a whole lot of albino alligators neither.”

“Okay, so I feel lucky we’re still alive and he didn’t eat us, so why don’t we go home and...”

Juan’s eyes went suddenly dark and he held up his hand, silencing her.

“Huh? What’s...?” Sophie started to say in a whisper; but Juan made a shushing sound and quickly, but gently, moved the paddle in the water. He looked scared. And if her been-paddlin’-round-these-parts-since-I-was-in-diapers guide was afraid, Sophie decided she was perfectly justified in being terrified.

“Juan!” she hissed. “Is it a gator?”

As he rowed towards a thickly wooded outcropping, he whispered hoarsely, “Listen!”

Gripping the sides of the boat, Sophie frantically swiveled her head around, trying to hear anything unusual among the chatter of birds and the squeaks of small animals.

“I don’t,” she started to say, then stopped. She heard it now, a slow rhythmic splash and thunk somewhere near. And something else. Whistling! It didn’t sound like a tune of any kind Sophie had ever heard, just a series of random low-pitched notes. It was kind of creepy.

Sophie held on for dear life as Juan paddled around the stand of trees as if trying to outrun the fast-approaching whistler. When they were on the far side of the trees and shielded from view by the thick foliage, Juan brought them to a stop. Only then did he turn and look at her, raising a silencing finger to his lips. He gently parted the brush and pointed through it for Sophie to look.

The splash-thunk and atonal whistling drew closer.


On the one hand, Sophie didn’t know if she really wanted to look; she had visions of some hockey-mask-wearing movie villain rowing by in a coffin, using twin axes as oars. On the other hand...well, she was just too curious for her own good not to look!

Sophie followed Juan’s finger, peeking through the reedy underbrush.

And, considering she was expecting the worst, what she saw wasn’t particularly frightening at all. It was a large man on some sort of shallow flat-bottomed boat that he pushed through the water with a long wooden pole.

The man himself was tall, probably over six feet. But it was difficult to tell much about him at all the way he was hunched over, his head bowed and covered by long, greasy hair. He was dressed in worn dark clothing and wore a black cloak tied around his neck. Watching him, Sophie felt a wave of sadness pass through her. The way he stood, the air of loneliness about him...Sophie didn’t know what it was about this person, but she didn’t get the sense he was anyone to be afraid of. Still, Juan seemed to think he was and he ought to know.

Right?

As he passed the trees behind which Sophie and Juan hid, the man turned his head ever so slightly, just enough so Sophie could see one eye looking at her through the hanging curtain of stringy hair.

Sophie gasped and yanked her head back, her heart thumping in her chest.

But the man kept going, poling his boat past them and disappearing down a channel to the right of the Dog Rock. Neither Sophie or Juan moved until he was long out of sight and they could no longer hear his whistling over their own shallow, frightened breathing.

Finally Sophie said, “Who the heck was that?”

“That was T-John,” Juan said, as though that explained everything.

“Don’t make me beg you, Juan,” Sophie begged.

“T-John, he the old mystery man of the bayou. When we call someone ‘T,’ it mean petite, you know, like small.”

“That guy wasn’t so ‘T,’” Sophie said.

“No, ma’am, he ain’t. And he ain’t none too friendly neither. Folks round here say T-John been living alone in his shack in the bayou forever. Papa Pierre the oldest man in town, over one hundred years old, they say, and he remember T-John polin’ that very skiff through these same waters when he was a boy and his papa remember the same thing.”

“Oh, come on,” Sophie said. “No one’s that old. What’s so dangerous about T-John that we had to hide from him?”

“Well, my papa say to stay away from him and that good enough for me,” Juan said with finality. “Ever’one know you keep your distance from T-John.”

“But why?”

“You ask him!”

“Hey, I’m just visiting. How come no one’s ever bothered just asking him what’s going on?”

“T-John don’t talk. He mute. Ever’bod’ know that, too.”

“Gee, excuse me for not reading the handbook, okay? I’m not up on all this stuff. Mute swamp hermits and Big Foot’s a little out of my experience.”

“All y’all got to know is you don’t go tuggin’ at a gator’s tail,” Juan said. He turned his back to her and lowered the paddle into the water. “C’mon, I best get you home.”

“Geez,” Sophie said. “I think someone’s taking their bayou lore a little too seriously.”

Juan shot her a dark look over his shoulder. “Maybe someone ain’t takin’ it serious enough.”

They traveled home the rest of the way in silence.

That night, Sophie slept with a light on in her room.

Jew-Jitsu: The Hebrew Hands of Fury

A little something from JEW-JITSU: THE HEBREW HANDS OF FURY by Rabbi Daniel Eliezer and Paul Kupperberg, photographs by Robert Simses.

Coming from Citadel Books (November 2008). Feel free to pre-order your copy today on Amazon.com (Order here). Really, I wouldn't mind!

JEW-JITSU: THE HEBREW HANDS OF FURY

Introduction
Du oifn fun der mensch

© 2008 Paul Kupperberg

Rabbi Sausalito Ben Venuto of Sicily was once asked by a student, “Rabbi, why is it that the wisest of men, when asked a question of Torah, always pauses before he speaks?”

The Rabbi paused, narrowing his eyes and studied the inquisitive young scholar. He began to stroke his long, gray beard, nodding slowly in deep thought.

“As it is written,” said the Rabbi at long last, “the Talmud is so vast, so complex, even the wisest of the wise must naturally reflect before divining the single right answer he seeks from its multitude of layers and infinity of complexities.”

“Ah, and where exactly is this written?” replied the excited student, his quill poised at the ready to make note of the source of this rabbinical wisdom.

Rabbi Ben Venuto paused once again, then at last replied, “Let me get back to you on that.”

What does this have to do with the practice of Jew-jitsu, du oifn fun der mensch, or the “way of the righteous man,” the sacred Jewish art of self defense? Absolutely nothing, but since when is it such a bad thing to discuss a little Torah?

And, come to think of it, danger can be like the story of Rabbi Venuto. Often, it has nothing to do with anything else, coming upon us as a sudden and unwanted digression in the unfolding saga of our lives. One moment, we are discussing Torah, the next, we are engaged in mortal combat with some bulvan.

Thus, like the Talmudic scholar in whose mind rests the answers to almost six thousand years of accumulated Jewish learning, the student of Jew-jitsu must always be at the ready to answer danger with swift and decisive action. A klapn to the kop, a zetz to the kiskas, listen, a person shouldn’t be allowed to defend himself?

* * *

So what’s it all about, this Jew-jitsu?

I’ll tell you what it’s not about! Yes, there is a lot of hitting and kicking and geschreing, but that is only a byproduct of the discipline, the training of the mind and the body to become as one, to be as aware of your immediate environment as David was with Bathsheba.

It’s also not about a nice white set of rabbinical Jew-jitsu robes, or the color of your tzitzis as you progress through the ranks, or the bowing and the formality, ‘Oh, rabbi, thank you for your wisdom,’ ‘Oh, rabbi, thank you, rabbi, I shall treasure that forward hip throw for all the days of my life, rabbi,’ or any of that meshagass. No!

Jew-jitsu is about the chai (no, not like the tea, this one’s pronounced k’hí ... no, deeper, back in your throat, with that Khhuhk, Khhuhk sound. No? Okay, listen, you’ll practice later on your own, bubbee.)

Chai, in Hebrew, is spelled with the letters het and yod and means “living.” It’s part of the same word family as l’chaim, the Yiddish toast meaning “to life.” And because het and yod add up to the number eighteen in Kabbalistic interpretations of Hebrew, eighteen is a lucky number to Jews.

And that is why we follow the Eighteen Forms. Because eighteen means life and life means luck and luck, as it has been said by Rabbi Tony Faro of Las Vegas, favors the prepared son of Yisroel. Thus are those who accept the way of chai and follow the path of the Jew-jitsu macher walking the walk of life, of health, of happiness, and, go figure, maybe even a bissel knowledge.

* * *

Is that it? Is that what Jew-jitsu is really about?

Yes! It’s all about you! What more could you ask from a faith-based martial art?

But it’s also about the guy next to you, and your wife, and his wife, and your cousins, even that shnorrer brother-in-law of yours, and everyone else. Once you step into a chaider to study Jew-jitsu, you want to think about yourself, who’s going to stop you? Who else are you to think about? You’re in training! Of course you’re going to focus on yourself, so stop being so neurotic already.

People often ask me, “Rabbi Eliezer, do you have to be Jewish to practice Jew-jitsu?”

I tell them not to be such goyishe kops! Of course not! You don’t even need to belong to a Reformed temple. Jew-jitsu is for any righteous individual who seeks to right a wrong or prevent harm coming to himself or another human being. Or his property. And the property of the immediate family, some mamza comes along wants to start a ruckus, you’ll give him what for.

Jew or gentile, this book will start you on the road to enlightenment. But before you turn the page and embark on that long and arduous journey, please take a moment to pause and remember that which was written by Rabbi Zalman Lipton of London, “Sit, sit, have a nice glass tea, relax first, tell me how’s by the family, then we’ll get down to cases.”

Rabbi Daniel Eliezer
Jew-jitsu macher, 10th degree tallis with black tzitzis
Crown Heights, Brooklyn, N.Y.
3 Cheshvan 5768 (October 15, 2007)