The Way

by Joseph Bruchac

  To my teachers,

  may I be worthy of them

  To my students,

  may I be worthy of them

  —JB

  Text copyright © 2007 by Joseph Bruchac

  Cover photo copyright © Getty Images, Chad Baker/Ryan McVay

  Design by Shae I. Strunk

  All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be

  reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—

  electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior

  written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief

  quotations in an acknowledged review.

  Darby Creek

  A division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  241 First Avenue North

  Minneapolis, MN 55401 U.S.A.

  Website address: www.lernerbooks.com

  Cataloging-in-Publication

  Bruchac, Joseph, 1942-

  The Way : a novel / by Joseph Bruchac.

  p. ; cm.

  ISBN 978-1-58196-062-4

  Summary: Cody LeBeau is the new kid at school and the new target for the bullies. He’s Abenaki, like most of the school, but still doesn’t fit in. Things begin to change when his uncle comes to town for a martial arts competition and he and Cody begin training together.

  1. Martial arts—Juvenile fiction. 2. Self-confidence—Juvenile fiction.

  3. Abenaki Indians—Juvenile fiction. [1. Martial arts—Fiction.

  2. Self-confidence—Fiction. 3. Abenaki Indians—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B82816 Way 2007

  [Fic] dc22

  OCLC: 84842708

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  9/1/11

  eISBN: 978-0-7613-8537-0 (pdf)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-6823-8 (ePub)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-3159-1 (mobi)

  Contents

  Chapter 1 Ninja Dreams

  Chapter 2 No One Sits with Me

  Chapter 3 Just Another Day

  Chapter 4 A Stranger Comes to Town

  Chapter 5 What Uncle?

  Chapter 6 Shaking Hands

  Chapter 7 Give Me Your Hand

  Chapter 8 Our Deal

  Chapter 9 Running

  Chapter 10 Paying Attention

  Chapter 11 Need to Know

  Chapter 12 No Style

  Chapter 13 Broken Mirrors

  Chapter 14 And People Change

  Chapter 15 Up the Hill

  Chapter 16 Inside

  Chapter 17 Time to Run

  Chapter 18 Lockdown

  Chapter 19 Red Stripes

  Chapter 20 Two Fingers to the Sky

  Acknowledgments

  It has been a long time since I was in high school as a student. I could not have written this book without the assistance of those young men and women who helped me understand a little of what life is like as an American high school student in the 21st century.

  Special thanks, in particular, to the Saratoga Springs High School students in Mark Oppenneer’s classes who answered so many of my questions with such detail, intelligence, and good humor.

  Chapter 1

  NINJA DREAMS

  The traveler passes.

  The road remains.

  —Sensei Ni

  No one even notices me. No one ever notices a ninja until it is too late. Those terrorists don’t realize whose school they are messing with. They haven’t reckoned with Cody LeBeau, who has long been secretly studying every mysterious form of deadly unarmed combat. Just when those bad guys are about to start bumping off kids, I scream like an angry eagle and come flying in a la Bruce Lee in Return of the Dragon or Tony Laa in Ong Bak, Thai Warrior. It’s happening so fast that even I don’t know exactly what’s happening—except that I am knocking the guns out of their hands and subduing them one after another. Soon every single terrorist is lying at my feet, and everyone is staring at me in wonder. Even Maya.

  Maya is this girl with long dark hair who I have sort of noticed from time to time. She’s in my English class. I’ve seen her reading poetry, but she’s not an Emo. You know the ones I mean. Those emotional kids who listen to the most dramatic, depressing music and wear their hair so it hangs down over their faces as they walk around sort of weeping over the unfairness of the world. Kind of the opposites of the preppy girls and the chirpy cheerleader chicks.

  Maya doesn’t seem to fit into any one clique, though. She’s pretty much friendly with everyone in a non-gushy way. She’s even nodded to me now and then. I kind of like the way she pushes back her hair with one hand while she’s reading and does this little pouty thing with her lips that shows she is really thinking hard about the words on the page.

  Anyway, getting back to my fantasy. Maya is staring at me. Looking up at me, her dark eyes wide.

  “Oh Cody!” she says, touching my arm. “I never knew that you were so incredible.” Then she gasps. “You’re bleeding!”

  I reach up to touch my chest. My warm lifeblood is flowing in a crimson stream down my perfectly tailored white shirt that has come open at the top to expose my bulging pectoral muscles, built up from all those days of secret training developing the iron-palm technique that has failed to protect me from the armor-piercing bullet fired from the last evildoer’s gun just before I knocked him out with a perfectly executed backfist. (I don’t have a white shirt now, but since I have one in my fantasy, I am clearly destined to own one. I’m not so sure about those pecs, though.)

  “It is nothing,” I reply with a regretful but manly smile. “All it hit was my heart. I am just glad I was able to save everyone.”

  Then everything goes black. But only for a moment, because then I am at my funeral. Everyone is there, everyone I ever knew. The kids are all wearing black armbands, crying and carrying signs that read:

  CODY, OUR HERO

  WE MISS YOU, CODY

  and

  YOU WERE THE GREATEST

  “I tripped him in the lunchroom,” Brett says in a choked voice, “but he gave his life for me. He was the finest man I ever knew.”

  “I will always love him and never forget him,” Maya says between sobs.

  The principal is holding up a plaque. Everyone goes silent.

  “He saved us all,” Mr. Ross rumbles, his voice filled with deep emotion. “So, in his honor, we are renaming our school.” Then he reads the words: “CODY LEBEAU HIGH,” and everyone cheers—briefly—before they go back to sobbing again.

  Mom and Dad are there, of course. They are holding hands and weeping over my grave. My martyr’s death has brought them back together.

  “I am so proud of him,” Mom says.

  “Yes,” my father agrees. “I am proud, too.” He pauses and shakes his head. “Even though he was such a screw-up and a loser.”

  Screw-up? Loser? What are those words doing in my fantasy? Why, in fact, am I hearing them out loud?

  “Hey, screw-up! Wake up, loser,” a sarcastic voice yells.

  I open my eyes. The bus is in front of me, the door open. Mike, the driver, exasperatedly beckons to me with one hand while Grey Cook—the tall, skinny Koacook kid on my bus who has already, after only my first two weeks of school, pegged me as the easiest and almost daily target for his verbal abuse—is leaning out a window. He’s making another hand gesture in my direction that is even more pointed than Mike’s weary wave.

  “Yo, loser,” Grey hoots, “nappy-nap’s over. Climb on duh bus.”

  Fists of impotent fury clenched at my side, I climb on, but not without stumbling on the second step and scraping my knee.

  Yet another glorious, new day.

  Chapter 2

  NO ONE SITS


  WITH ME

  Expect nothing.

  Rejoice when you get it.

  —Sifu Sahn

  The one good thing about the ride to school is that I can have a little privacy. No one ever sits with me on the bus. It’s a new bus with lots of room in it. All the buses in the district are new because of the casino. It has pumped so much money into the community as a whole—not just the Koacook Tribe—that they don’t have to make do with a fleet of aging and overcrowded yellow clunkers like the perennially backfiring rusty cattle cars they called buses back at my last school. They only had a dozen buses for the whole junior high, and they packed them like cattle cars, chugging from one trailer park to the next. I had to get up an hour and a half before school because the bus ride was so long.

  That wasn’t as hard for me as it was for some kids. Mom always got me up early. “My grampa told me you have to greet the new day along with the first songs of the birds,” she would say back then. But these days she finds herself going to bed just as I am getting up. The newest hires at the casino get stuck with the graveyard shifts and the hours no one else wants. This week hers are from 8 P.M. until 5 A.M.

  “My morning bird songs are now lullabies,” she said this morning.

  I smiled back at her, as if it really was a funny joke and not another example of how upside-down our lives have become since Dad decided to make his life as an over-theroad trucker separate from ours.

  A year before we moved here, Dad started looking off into the distance whenever he was home. He and Mom stopped making eye contact. I read their body language like it was an open book. Even though I wanted to scream when he said it, it didn’t surprise me when he said he’d signed on for more long-haul assignments. Trucking lettuce from the San Fernando Valley to Boston. Turning around for another four-day run and not ever coming home. Not when Mom and me were living up near Green Bay. Not even down here to the Koacook Rez—even though we’re just an hour’s drive from Beantown.

  It doesn’t feel much like a family now that it’s just Mom and me. The only relatives I know now are from Mom’s stories about them.

  I wish I’d known Mom’s grampa. Just from the stories she’s told me that he passed on to her, he must have been really cool. But he died of diabetes way before I was born. So did my grandparents on both sides of my family. Well, not exactly. Actually only one of them died of diabetes, and one of my grandmothers lived to see me as a toddler. Grandfather LeBeau was taken by cancer, and Grand-mother LeBeau died in a car accident. Mom’s dad, Grampa Wadzo, was, we assume, a casualty of that long-ago war that was fought in Vietnam.

  Did you notice that I said that we assumed Grandfather Wadzo died in Vietnam? He went MIA during the withdrawal of American troops in 1972 and was never found. Mom was born three months after he disappeared, and Grama Wadzo was only eighteen years old. She’d married him while he was home on leave. She must have loved him, though, because she just kept waiting for him to return, and she never got married again.

  Grama Wadzo was the only one of my ill-fated grandparents that I ever met. I am pretty sure I remember her holding me when I was two years old. Grama Christine. A warm, round face smiling down at me. She lived just long enough to get snuffed out by a heart attack at the ripe old age of forty. Nowadays nobody seems destined to survive past the age of forty on either side of my family.

  Mom says that back in the old days, before people ate all this sugar and white bread, when we lived off the land, our people lived a very long time. To live for over a hundred winters was no big deal. Some of them were like those Taoist monks in China who lived so long they were called Immortals. Like Pai Mei in Kill Bill. Brown rice and green tea and exercise and deep breathing. That was their secret for living two or even three hundred years. None of that candy and junk food and soda pop in their diet. Like the stuff that they sell in the vending machines just outside the cafeteria at Long River High.

  Memo to self: Add brown rice to grocery list. I think they have that, at least, in the Price Giant. (As soon as Mom has the car paid off and she’s gotten ahead on the rent for the trailer, she says she plans on budgeting extra money so we can get some of the items I’ve been lecturing her about from the one health food store in town. But for now I can make a first step toward immortality with brown rice. And get Mom on that diet, too. She’s almost thirty-five, which means she is getting perilously close to the point where she’ll be living on borrowed time.)

  I usually do the grocery shopping since Mom is so tired after those long nights waitressing and serving drinks to semi-catatonic retirees who are wearing out their rotator cuff muscles in their right shoulders by pulling the lever on the slot machine they’ve chosen to feed for six hours straight. The theory, Mom says, is that as soon as you stop feeding a machine, it’ll pay off for someone else. Some of those folks— and not the oldest ones either—actually wear adult diapers while they’re playing so they don’t have to get up and go to the bathroom.

  The bus’s wheels thud over something in the road. I hope it’s just a piece of tire and not something that was alive. I stare out the window. Nothing much to see yet. The sun hasn’t come up over the hills. But I might catch a glimpse of a deer’s eyes reflecting the lights from the bus. There’s a lot of deer around the reservation. I read in the Koacook Courier that they’re eating up all the imported ornamentals that some people have planted as hedges around the neatly mowed yards that surround their big, new houses. There are no natural predators like wolves and mountain lions any more. The tribal council has been trying to get more Koacook tribal members to do bow hunting to cut down the numbers. But no one here is interested. Why hunt deer when you have enough money to buy porterhouse every night? A lot of deer, though, get hit by cars. So I am always thinking about them as we roar along the newly paved road through the predawn hour. I’m sending them mental messages to stay back and not step out to get whacked.

  Over the squawk and thud of different tunes leaking out of too-loud iPods plugged into ears headed down the road to early deafness, I can hear someone snoring behind me. I can sympathize. Why do the powers that be in this world insist that high school students have to go to school earlier than the younger kids? I just scanned an article in a science magazine about a study that proves that teenagers need to sleep later. That is why so many of us are half-asleep for the first three periods every day. Our biorhythms are just different.

  Tell that to the school board. Or to the football coaches who want to make sure the day is done early enough to get their boys out onto the practice field.

  I am going into my mental rant about education again and how messed up it is. From start to finish. It is even worse if you are Indian, because one of the first things they do is tell you that the only thing real in the world is science and all your traditional beliefs are just superstition. And what is the result of science? A world full of people fighting each other and destroying the environment.

  In the old days people learned from the natural world. Everything made sense and it all worked together. The old stories were about things like how the earth itself was shaped on the back of a turtle from the mud that the diving birds and animals brought up from the bottom. They taught lessons that really helped us. Like showing us how cooperation makes great things possible.

  Tell that to my earth science teacher. Like I did last week. He was not amused by my superstitious take on continent building.

  “That’s enough fairy stories, LeBeau,” he said halfway through my recitation of our old story of how the world was created.

  “But I’m not done yet!” I said, refusing to sit down.

  “Oh, yes, you are,” he growled.

  Yup, that was the most recent incident in which my big mouth ended up getting me sent to the principal’s office.

  I breathe on the window. It is just cold enough outside for my breath to make a cloud of mist. I draw a circle in it with my index finger. I want to go back to the circle. That is the secret in karate and aikido and all the other a
rts. The circle. Move in a circle, and you repel all your attackers. You turn their force back against them.

  I think about moving my feet the way I saw an aikido master do it in a TV show. Your two feet make kind of like a T shape. I look down at my feet and groan. I’ve done it again. I was half-asleep when I got dressed and I put on the wrong sneakers, the old comfortable ones that are the wrong brand. Nobody at school wears shoes like these. They all wear the newest expensive designer brands with the names of basketball players on them. Not only that, my feet are so big that everybody will really notice. I’m only 5’4”, but I take a size eleven. All day I’m going to be hearing such charmingly clever comments as:

  Look, he’s got his clown shoes on.

  Hey, kid, I gotta take a trip. Can I borrow one of your canoes?

  I’d be better off if I just heaved them out the window and went barefoot.

  Chapter 3

  JUST ANOTHER

  DAY

  A good explanation

  explains nothing.

  —Master Net

  It’s turned out to be just another day. Surprisingly, I managed to avoid drawing attention to my shoes. For the first half hour of the day.

  It started off well enough. I made sure I was the last one to get off the bus. I didn’t even react when Grey Cook slapped me in the back of my head as he passed my seat. I just pretended I didn’t notice because I was so busy fixing a strap on my old non-designer-label backpack. I did, however, imagine what the scenario would have been had I disclosed my mastery of the ancient arts. (Remember, dear reader, that in my imagination I am the master of them all.) In this case, Northern Shaolin kung fu wu su.

  In my imaginary scene, Grey’s slap never lands. Instead, as if I have eyes in the back of my head (the byproduct of countless hours of training), I lift my right arm and block his slap, which in my imagination is no longer just a lazy open hand, but is now a vicious, killing blow aimed at the back of my neck. Not only that, Grey is no longer a skinny kid—he has been transformed into a hugely muscled attacker wearing a black mask who’s not trying to hit me with his hand, but with a club. He’s about to hijack the school bus and hold all the Indian kids hostage until the casino pays him a ten-million-dollar ransom. (Chump change for them, I might add. The Koacook casino is—in real life and not just my fantasy world—the fourth most profitable Indian casino in North America.)