Moody Chastain

Moody Chastain is DL’s father, a former Texas troublemaker who remade himself as a soldier and military policeman without leaving violence behind. His life moves from reckless freedom to military discipline, then into a home marked by his abuse of Norleen and his failure to understand what martial training means to DL. The same man who takes his young daughter to the dojo becomes someone she must get away from to feel safe.

From Texas delinquency to military service

As a young man, Moody was a daredevil around Harlingen, Brownsville, and McAllen. He later spent time with a small gang around Mobile Bay, then returned to Texas and resumed his old habits: driving at extreme speed, firing guns indiscriminately, and passing cocaine around. A family-friend deputy sheriff offered him a choice between immediate enlistment and prison later. The approaching war was not discussed; when Moody asked about shooting, he was told he would have weapons of every kind and that others would decide whom he had to shoot. The assurance that he would face no legal trouble appealed to him, and he enlisted.

At Fort Hood he met Norleen. They married in the little wooden church where they had first met, shortly before he left for war. Crossing the Atlantic aboard a crowded ship, surrounded by steel and sick for days, Moody realized he was terrified. The immense horizon and unfamiliar openness left him feeling trapped: for the first time, he could not simply jump into a truck and drive toward a frontier. He endured the fear by imagining the worst and making himself worse than it. In a vision of his role, he would torture the violent, take from the greedy, and give drunks enough to stagger. He chose military policing, drawing on the roughness of his earlier life.

Military policeman and martial artist

Moody became an MP in London. On his first patrol near Shaftesbury Avenue, he wore a pristine white belt and equipment; military slang called a policeman dressed that way a snowdrop. After surviving the war, he served at the Military Prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, where DL was born just after the conflict.

Although Moody had fired often during the war and had wounded and killed, weapons at a distance came to seem abstract and cold to him. In peacetime, he wanted a more personal form of force. Authorized to use violence—to smash heads and wrench shoulders—he found no satisfaction until he discovered judo and jujitsu, then fashionable in the postwar years. He trained wherever he was stationed, sought out leading schools on both coasts, and eventually instructed a group of students part-time. When DL was five or six, he began taking her with him to the dojo. She later guessed that Norleen may have sent her along to keep an eye on him.

Violence inside the family

As DL grew up, she noticed Norleen leaving home for what she called errands; only later did DL wonder whether these might have been visits to lovers. Moody also brought the emotional force of his work home. After one particularly violent quarrel, DL challenged her mother for submitting to him, while Norleen, tearful, kept her need to talk away from her daughter, whom she believed she was protecting. When Frenesi asked whether Moody beat Norleen, DL answered that he did, and that he had never hit DL.

That distinction did not make their relationship easy. Moody would not spar with his daughter, even when they had reached the same size and rank, and refused to get in the ring with her even in public at the dojo. DL believed she could have hurt him; her restrained smile and pushed-out jaw made the refusal a source of anger. Yet she also insisted that what she felt for her father could not be allowed to interfere with professional discipline or damage her spirit. Her account holds resentment and a martial code in the same frame, rather than resolving one into the other.

A father losing his discipline

By the time DL’s truancy brought the school authorities to Moody directly, his military career had lasted about twenty years. Being confronted before his subordinates provoked him. For a week and a half he began shouting before he had even crossed the threshold, and his tirades carried on through dinner and prime-time television and beyond. Norleen usually stayed quiet; sometimes she impulsively brought coffee into the middle of a furious scene.

Moody did not strike DL, who by then was capable of injuring him. But he had begun to slacken after years of service: he spent less time at the gym, track, pool, and dojo, gained weight, and settled into a domestic routine with a personalized coffee cup hooked on his right index finger. Old friends from his fighting days visited, and he traded stories with them, while his own enthusiasm for unarmed combat ebbed. DL could not make either parent understand where her commitment to martial arts was taking her. She told them about the dojo but concealed Inoshiro Sensei, having promised to keep his identity secret. Moody’s suspicion of her association with an Asian man made that concealment more charged.

DL’s departure and Moody’s remembered image

DL came to suspect that Moody had known about her connection to Inoshiro Sensei from the beginning. The family home felt to her like a marsh of invisible intrigue, with unspoken presences moving beneath a respectable surface. She realized that she felt reasonably well only when away from her parents and learning to fight. Despite his lust, volatile temper, and impatience, Inoshiro Sensei had become a refuge from the threat she sensed in the orderly housing complex. DL left home while neither parent was there, packing what she needed, making sandwiches from the refrigerator, and taking a bottle of Chivas Regal from the military store for her teacher.

Moody also appears in Frenesi’s memory of DL as a young woman. As Frenesi speaks hopefully about changing the world, DL’s face seems to take on the imagined face of her young father, a spectral hero arriving to save her amid the tumult of revolution. Later, photographs shown between the women confirm the resemblance. The image gives Moody a heroic glow, but DL’s other memories complicate it: his past supplies the shape of a rescuer, while the violence and fear within his own household help explain why escape and self-command matter so much to her.