The Way

by Joseph Bruchac

  But I can’t retreat now. “I could sleep on the couch, I guess. Then you could use my bedroom.”

  “Cody,” Mom says. “Thank you for being so generous. But are you sure?”

  “It’s okay,” I answer. I nod. Maybe one or two times too many.

  Uncle John grasps my shoulder. “Thanks,” he says. “But let’s not make any quick decisions. We can talk about this at dinner. I’d like to take you and my big sister here out for a bite to eat. Okay!”

  “Okay,” I agree. Maybe I’m not going to have to give up my room after all. “Dinner sounds good.”

  “Better wash your face first,” Mom says. “And change your shirt. The one you like is on top of the laundry basket.”

  In the bathroom I look at myself in our mirror that is so old it is half frosted over, and my reflection is all blurred at the edges. I can see clearly enough, though. My nose is still swollen, and I realize that Uncle John must have noticed the blood that was caked under my left nostril and the stains on my plaid shirt where I bled all over it. What must I have looked like to him?

  I wash my face and drop the stained shirt into the wicker laundry hamper that takes up half the space inside our midget bathroom where you bang your knees on the sink getting up from the toilet and you have to bend over like a contortionist to get into the shower. All of the excitement I’d been feeling has escaped from me like a wild bird that just strayed into your room and then escaped out the open window.

  Even if Uncle John is as cool a person as he seems to be, the kind of uncle every guy might like to have, it isn’t going to take him long to recognize me for who I truly am. He may think he likes me now, but wait until he gets to know the real me.

  Cody LeBeau, the loser.

  Chapter 7

  GIVE ME YOUR

  HAND

  The bird’s flight follows

  the path of the sky.

  —Master Net

  We’ve gotten halfway through dinner and I haven’t said anything stupid. Amazingly.

  It’s been easier than I expected, despite the fact that I came out of my room absolutely certain that I was about to embarrass myself in front of my new uncle. Especially because I wanted so much to show him that I was someone he’d like to have as a nephew. I’ve discovered that whenever I try really hard to do something, I tend to goof it up. My recent karate class fiasco being a case in point.

  After years of watching martial arts in movies and on TV and reading every book on the subject that I could get my hands on, I finally took a free after-school karate class last week at the Y. And I sucked big-time.

  It wasn’t just that I couldn’t do anything right. I was so awful that I couldn’t even do anything wrong! When the sensei tried to show me how to take the horse stance, I kept losing my balance. Whenever I attempted a kick, I ended up on my back. And when I tried doing a Ki-yah, the yell that you do when you throw a strike, I sounded like a rabbit with a hernia. I even managed to punch myself in the face and give myself such a bloody nose that I had to sit out the last half of the class. You should have heard the other kids laugh when that happened. Even after the sensei told them to stop, some were still snickering at me.

  Karate brings together a balance of body and mind. Yeah, sure. Except I proved myself to be the kid who doesn’t have either one. The few Japanese words Sensei DiGiorno tried to teach me kept jumping out of my head, even though I knew I’d heard most of them already with all the stuff I’d watched over the years—not to mention all the reading I’d done.

  As I trudged home that evening, I made one of my mental memos to self: Find a garbage bag large enough to hold two shelves of books on the martial arts, arranged alphabetically from Aikido to Wing Chung Kung Fu. I knew there was no way I could ever, not in a million years, attend that karate class again. Like I said, the perfect recipe for me messing up is for me to really want to succeed.

  But dinner has actually been fun so far. Going out to eat turned out to be staying in. We’re having dinner right here in our trailer, which is just fine by me. In part it’s because this is the first time I’ve been able to sit down for dinner with Mom in ages. Usually at this time of the evening, she is off to work, and I’m nuking something she’s left for me in the fridge and trying to find something worth watching on the four channels we can get on our hundred-year-old, non-cable-connected, thirteen-inch TV that’s so old that its white plastic case is sort of melting around the edges of the screen.

  But not tonight. Mom has gotten permission to go to work later than usual. And the food is really good. Really different, too. Uncle John, it turns out, is a great cook. In no time at all, he made us some kind of stir-fry and then served it with brown rice. Yes! He’s brought a sack full of things with him, not just the main ingredients like the rice and the tofu and veggies, but also spices and oils and even a personal wok—his own private cooking pan—that he told us he always travels with. It is black cast iron and not coated with Teflon, which he said isn’t good for your health.

  “Traditional ways are often the best,” he says with that cool smile of his. “That’s why I always like to take an old-fashioned wok.”

  Both Mom and I groan at that pun. Most kids might not have gotten it, but Mom likes songs from old movies, and she’s always humming that one that goes, “Let’s take an old-fashioned walk . . .”

  It’s so easy with Uncle John here, the three of us around the table. Not tense like it was whenever “the three of us” meant Dad and Mom and me. As I think that, I feel guilty. Why did I feel tense when my father was here? Am I being disloyal to him by liking my new uncle, whom I never even knew about before today? I can feel the clouds settling around my head again. They’re thick and gray with rain. The rain is cold and so heavy that I can’t see through the darkness. I’m plodding along down a dark road with no end in sight, my feet slogging through the mud that is sucking my feet into it . . .

  “Cody.” Uncle John’s voice pulls me back from whatever depth I’m sinking into. How can he do that just by saying my name? I look up at him.

  He makes a little circling gesture, ending with his right hand being held out toward me. Cool! I imagine myself making that same gesture. In fact, I move my hand, which is below the table where I’m sure he can’t see it, in what I think is that same gesture. But I’m wrong on both counts.

  “Give me your hand,” he says, reaching both hands toward me.

  I pull my hand from under the table, and he takes it in both of his.

  “Now relax.”

  I let my arm and hand go limp, and he guides them through the gesture he’s just done, a circle that begins with an open palm held out—like you’re telling someone to stop—and then ends with that same hand palm up, as if you’re holding something in it.

  “Now, you do it.”

  I move my hand the way he showed me, and I’m amazed. For a moment it looks almost as graceful as his hand did, more like a bird in flight than one of my clumsy paws. As soon as I think that, my hand movement gets jerky. I slam my wrist into my half-empty water glass and knock it right off the table.

  “Oh no!” I blurt out, closing my eyes. Our old brown carpet is so worn and thin that I know it won’t cushion the impact. I brace myself for the sound of shattering glass. But I don’t hear that. All I hear is a word.

  “Cody.”

  I open my eyes. I blink. I can’t believe it. Uncle John is holding the glass I just knocked off the table. It’s even still half full. I feel as if I should say something. Thank you? How the heck did you do that?

  But I just stare.

  Uncle John nods and puts the glass down in front of me.

  “Try it again,” he says. “Take a deep breath. You’re doing fine.”

  I take a deep breath. I’m doing fine. I will try it again.

  But first I pick up the water glass and take a big drink from it. I need to check that I’m awake and not having some kind of dream. The water is real. I taste the minerals in it and feel it going down my throat. I c
arefully put the glass down— on the other side of my plate this time—and slowly, carefully, try to repeat that hand gesture.

  “Oli,” Uncle John says. “Good. Now just feel the air as you do that. Do it without trying to do it right.”

  I don’t understand what he means, but it works. My circling motion gets easier and lighter. It’s as if my hand doesn’t belong to me anymore, but also as if my hand is more my own than it’s ever been before. It’s moving faster, but I’m not consciously making it speed up. I feel the air. It makes me feel as if I am almost floating up from my chair as I do it. Finally I let my hand flutter down to rest on the table.

  “Ktsi oli, Cody,” Uncle John says. He reaches back to pick up a cup from the counter in the kitchen nook behind us. Easy enough to do in a trailer that’s only about as wide as his big shoulders.

  “Second step,” he says. He balances the cup on his palm, pours water from his glass into it, and then—don’t ask me how—he actually circles his hand all the way around on his wrist so the cup is carried under his arm, up toward the ceiling, and then back again where he started. Without spilling a drop.

  “The Student offers the Master a cup of tea,” he says, as if that was some kind of explanation. “But don’t try that yet.” He puts the cup down. “Anyhow, I’m getting way ahead of myself. Let’s back up.”

  He looks over at Mom.

  “As your Uncle John said, he’d like to stay with us for a while. If you are sure that it’s okay with you,” she says.

  Yes! I think. I also intend to say it, but my tongue doesn’t seem to want to work. So I just do my typical idiotic head nod—three or four times like one of those toy drinking birds you balance on the edge of a glass.

  “You don’t have to give up your room, Nephew,” Uncle John says. “Though it was generous of you to offer. When I said I’d be camping out, I meant just that. I’ve got all of my gear stowed behind the trailer. I can set up my tent back there under those little cedars. I’ll be out of sight and I’ll be comfortable. In fact I’ve gotten so used to sleeping outside that I prefer it. My sleeping bag is good for forty-below. I just need to use your facilities, take a shower now and then, keep my toothbrush and my razor in the medicine cabinet.”

  Sleeping outside under the stars. How cool is that? That’s something Dad always said that we ought to do one day, just the three of us, go camping together. When he was home for any length of time from his trucking work and when I wasn’t in school and when we had enough money to buy a tent and some sleeping bags. Lots of “whens.” But never any “nows.”

  Mom and Uncle John are both looking at me and waiting. I drag myself back and nod at them. It’s fine if he camps out back. But then I think about what that means, staying in a tent. To me, even in a tent in our tiny backyard, camping out means staying just a little while. Like over the weekend.

  My voice comes back to me. “How long?” I ask.

  “About ten weeks,” Uncle John says, “if that’s not too long—”

  “Why ten weeks?” I blurt out before he’s even finished his sentence.

  “Because that’s when the big tournament takes place,” Uncle John says, as if it explains everything. “The War by the Shore.”

  I look at him blankly.

  Then he lifts his big right hand, spreads his fingers wide, and slowly curls them into a fist, knuckles cracking as he does.

  “I’m a fighter,” he says.

  And, all of a sudden, I understand.

  Chapter 8

  OUR DEAL

  To climb a mountain take

  one small step.

  —Pendetta Satu

  I’m in bed, but I can’t sleep. I look over at the clock on my nightstand. The lighted digital display reads 1:00 A.M. What started and kept going as a lousy day has turned around so drastically that my head is spinning and I’m wide awake. I can’t wait for it to be morning.

  My bedroom is the one with the window, high up on the wall, that looks out on our little twenty-foot-by-thirty-foot backyard. Mom tried making it into a garden, but it was so shaded by the cedar trees and the trailer that nothing survived but weeds. Until our visitor arrived, the only things we had out there were a couple of pots with dead flowers in them, a rickety wooden picnic table, and a tool shed not much bigger than one of the lockers at school.

  I push back the covers and get up on my knees to look out the window. I can see the top of Uncle John’s tent, but that’s it. We set it up after cleaning up the dinner dishes and seeing Mom off to work, both of us waving to her as she backed her ’94 Toyota out the driveway and then took off to the usual accompaniment of knocking rods.

  “Tomorrow,” Uncle John said, “I need to do a little work on that engine.”

  Then, because it was already almost eight o’clock and getting dark, we turned on the back light and went to put up his tent. In fact, I did most of it myself. It was really easy because it’s one of those tents that open up sort of like an umbrella. What took the longest time was unpacking and getting organized—which Uncle John did with great care and slow deliberation, one item at a time.

  “Get organized before you get going,” he said. Those were his exact words. When I got back into my room, I wrote them down in my earth science notebook. (Lots of empty pages in there.)

  It was amazing how much equipment he had in his backpack and his two duffel bags. Not only did he have a ground cloth and the tent, a foam pad, his sleeping bag and his pillow, but he also had a little fold-up canvas chair, a lantern, and a whole tool kit, including such things as a combination hatchet and hammer and different-sized wrenches and screwdrivers—which were in the top of the first bag he opened. In fact, one of the first things he did when we went out into the backyard was to use that tool kit to fix our old picnic table so he could spread his things out on it.

  Of course, I haven’t finished listing all the things he unpacked. There were his clothes. But not a lot of those. Aside from what he wore—black jeans and a loose, long-sleeved hoodie with a black T-shirt under it—he had only three changes of clothes that were exactly the same as what he had on, plus two pairs of sweat pants and one shirt patterned like a Pendleton blanket, the kind they put around someone’s shoulders during an honoring ceremony. As far as footwear went, in addition to the boots he was wearing, he had a set of cross-trainer New Balance sneakers and a pair of black highly polished dress shoes. And, of course, he had extra socks and hankies and underwear. What else was there? Two towels, two washcloths, and two black ball caps, one plain and one of them with a bulldog and the words “The Gracie Way” on it. His entire wardrobe made just three small, neat piles on top of the picnic table.

  “Look at all this clothing,” he said. “I surely do drag a lot around with me. In some of the places I’ve been, only a wealthy man could have this big a wardrobe.”

  Was he kidding? Even I owned ten times as many clothes as this! He saw the skeptical look on my face.

  “Did you know that John Muir hiked across America for years with nothing but the clothes he wore and a paper bag to carry a change of underwear?”

  I didn’t. “Wow,” I said. I also made one of my mental notes to self: Find out more about John Muir.

  What else did he have? A shaving kit and a pretty sizable bag that had everything from bandages to vitamins and bottles labeled in what I guess was Chinese. He had a wicked wrist-rocket slingshot.

  “Good as a bow and arrow at short range,” he explained. “Rabbit, turkey, grouse.” He slapped the lock-blade knife that hung in its sheath on his belt. “Plus a good knife to dress your game.” While he was camping out as he hitched his way here, he’d pretty much fed himself on whatever he could forage or hunt when he was in the countryside. “And in every city,” he said, “there’s always free food to be had if you know how to dive.”

  That confused me a little. I didn’t know you could get food by diving.

  The one bag he didn’t open was the one I was most curious about. He’d let me carry it over to
the tent after we got it set up, and it was heavy. He carefully placed it in the back of the tent.

  “Training gear,” he said. “I’ll show you what I have tomorrow.”

  Then he sat down in his folding canvas chair and gestured for me to take a seat at the picnic table.

  “So,” he said. “Remember what part of our deal is?”

  I nodded and felt my heart start to pound. I was both pumped up with anticipation and feeling my usual doubts about being able to do anything right. The deal about Uncle John’s staying with us while he was training for the big mixed-martial-arts tournament at the Koacook Casino was that he would pay for his room and board. He would do this not just with whatever money he could earn doing odd jobs, but also by helping us out. Fixing the picnic table, doing repair work around the trailer—which really needed a lot of that—and getting Mom’s car running right. And part of that deal was that he would try to repair the one thing around the house that is truly a hopeless case. Me.

  Uncle John had agreed to teach me whatever he could about the martial arts.

  A hundred scenarios ran through my head. Would he be like Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid and have me do things like painting or building a deck, simple everyday motions that would build muscle memory and strength and would translate into lightning-fast proficiency in blocking and punching? Or would he fasten weights to my legs and tell me to jump up and down, adding more and more weights each day until the day came when he took them off and I found myself able to leap right over the tops of buildings? Maybe he’d just start off by having me punching and kicking sandbags and heavy beams of wood until my knuckles were broken and bleeding, all the while building devastating power.

  Whatever he did, Uncle John was sure to do something dramatic that would demonstrate the great power of his style to me. All the old kung fu teachers in the movies did that.

  Master, how can that crane hand be effective against an enemy attack?