Just as I am thinking that, something draws my attention. I sense more than see something way off to my left. A disturbance in the Force, to use an overworked Stars Wars metaphor. It’s like there’s a black cloud over there. Without moving my head, I shift my eyes toward the other back corner of the room and see the look on Jackson Teeter’s face. It’s a look of pure hatred, not directed at me, but at the front of the class where Ms. Taker has her back turned. He’s nodding to the beat of whatever death-rock group he’s imprinted in the digital memory of the MP3 player that’s jammed into a front pocket of his flak jacket. Then Stump lifts up his right hand, points his index finger at our teacher, lifts his thumb, and drops it down like the hammer of a gun as he mouths a word.
Bang.
Chapter 11
NEED TO KNOW
The wise man knows what he knows.
The sage knows what he does not.
—Sifu Sahn
“How many people does this seat?” I ask.
Mom and Uncle John and I are standing at the top of the huge new stadium-style arena at Koacook Moon. We’re looking down the endless rows of seats cut by aisles that radiate up from the center like bicycle spokes. Aside from some maintenance men sweeping the floor below, we’re the only people in the place.
“Eighteen thousand screaming fight fans,” Uncle John answers me in a drawl that’s an imitation of either Michael or Bruce Buffer, the two brothers who’ve become the most famous fight announcers of the twenty-first century.
In the center of the arena, an eight-sided ring surrounded by metal netting about eight feet high has been set up.
“That’s where it’ll take place?” I ask. A dumb question that my uncle actually dignifies with an answer.
“In the Octagon,” he says. “Too bad I’m an Abenaki and not a Navajo, or I’d feel right at home in there.”
The three of us smile. Indian humor. The traditional homes of Navajo people are eight-sided buildings called hogans. We Abenakis lived in round wigwams.
“Better hurry,” Mom says. “We’re supposed to be there at seven P.M.”
I’m not sure who we’re meeting for dinner. I don’t even know who got the invitation, Mom or Uncle John. But all three of us have been included. Uncle John has loaned me a bolo tie to go with my best blue shirt. Aside from the fact that his shirt has embroidery around the sleeves and the pockets, he and I are dressed the same, from our cross-trainer sneakers on up to our twin bolos with a bear design in the center of the beadwork.
“My two guys,” Mom says as she links her arms between us. Hearing her say those words tugged at my heart. On the one hand, it makes me feel taller. On the other hand, she used those exact words the last time she and Dad and I went out together. Three years and 4TPA.
Leaving the arena, we walk down a hallway lined with pictures of the members of the Tribal Council and their families. I find myself recognizing some of those faces. They either look like kids I’ve seen in the halls or, in some cases, are those exact kids themselves. Like the one we just passed of none other than Jeff Chahna. In full football uniform.
I reach up to my eye and study my reflection in the glass that covers Jeff Chahna’s photo. Even though it was three weeks ago, I still remember him punching me as if it was yesterday. Of course, my eye’s not even tender anymore, and the discoloration is long gone. It usually takes at least a week before you look normal again after getting a black eye. (Trust me on that, years of experience.) But this time it only took three days for it to disappear. Maybe because of all the running, deep breathing, and other physical activities Uncle John had me doing.
“Take care of your body and it will return the favor by taking care of you,” he said just yesterday.
Then he rolled up the right leg of his sweat pants and showed me the network of scars around his knee. “Courtesy of an IED, improvised explosive device. They said I’d need a whole knee replacement or I’d never walk again. But my body said something different. With the aid of half a year of physical therapy.”
That’s the closest Uncle John has come to telling me anything about his experiences as a Marine. I’ve asked him twice about it. The first time was when I got home from school the second night of his stay.
“What was it like in Iraq?” I asked.
“Cody,” he said, “you don’t need to know.”
End of subject.
The second time was a week later.
“Can you tell me anything about your experiences as a Marine?” The same question, of course, but different words.
And he answered the same, but used different words. Because that time he waited a good, long time, just sitting there silently before saying, “Cody, you really don’t need to know.”
Mental note to self: Do NOT ask that question again.
Uncle John doesn’t limp even a little on that leg that was so badly injured. And he runs twelve miles every morning and spends another five or six hours in the local gym every day. He boxes and wrestles with some of the other men who are working out there, plus he does free weights. And after all that, he never seems too tired to spend time with me. Nothing has ever seemed to bother him.
Until just now.
“How many more miles till we get there?” Uncle John asks as we continue down that endless hallway. It’s a humorous remark, but I can sense a tone in his voice I haven’t heard before. Is he actually nervous? I shake my head. He can’t be. Not Uncle John.
Mom pats his arm. “It’s okay, John,” she says. It’s a similar gesture and tone of voice she’s used with me when I’m sure the world is going to collapse around my ears. I want to ask where we are going. I need to know what the big deal is and why we’re here heading toward the casino’s big dining room. But I don’t ask.
“Here we are,” Mom says in a voice that sounds strained. Jeesum Crow! She’s nervous, too. What is going on?
We walk into the dining room where the maître d’ comes right up to us before anyone can say anything. He’s probably seen Mom countless times before because she works here sometimes waiting tables. But he acts as if she is royalty.
“This way, madam,” he says, with a little half-bow. “They’re already at the table.”
Mom lifts her head, like it is no big deal, and sails after him. We follow, but not before I really look at my mother, trying to imagine how someone who doesn’t know her might see her. And I realize how great she looks tonight. I’ve never seen that dress or the jewelry she’s wearing, and she found time sometime today to get her hair done.
We go around the corner of a room divider erected to create a private dining area with only two tables in front of a huge window looking out over the shore of the lake. The best seats in the house. A big Koacook guy who has to be in his forties gets up from his seat. He’s wearing a tailored Italian suit that makes the clothes Uncle John and I are wearing look out of place. But there’s a big smile on the man’s face, and he is reaching out to my mother.
“Louise,” he says, taking her hand and holding it for what seems to me like too long a time. “I am so glad you’re here. Let me introduce you to my son. I don’t think you’ve met him before.”
He reaches toward the young man who is also standing up. He’s wearing a suit, too, and looks like a slightly less-wide copy of his father, who is the tribal chairman of the Koacook Nation.
Maybe Mom hasn’t met him before, but I have. And so has my nose.
“I’m pleased to meet you,” Jeff Chahna says.
Chapter 12
NO STYLE
Do nothing, see nothing.
Want nothing, find nothing.
—Master Net
So much happened during that dinner that it’s as hard for me to understand it. Even now, twenty-four hours later, I’m still a little confused.
I guess I can get back to all that later. Here’s where I am today.
In terms of learning The Way, even after three weeks of unlearning bad habits, I am still a long way away. Right now, I’m standing o
n one leg, my back straight, my weight-bearing knee slightly bent, my hands drawn back to my side in the chamber position. I’m trying to relax and stay in balance and not think about the pain I’m feeling in my calf.
“Stop trying,” Uncle John says from behind me. “Be nowhere.”
The first time he said that was after we’d been training together for a week. His first week of basic lessons might have seemed weird to someone who hadn’t read as much as I have about the martial arts over the past six years. What he was teaching me to do were the things that everyone does every day. The big four, as he called them: Breathing, Walking (which includes running), Listening, and Seeing. Yes, I know, every two-year-old kid knows how to do all four of those things.
“In fact,” Uncle John said, “most two-year-old kids breathe and walk and listen and see better than adults or even teen-agers. That’s because they realize they are learning. They’re paying attention to the world around them. They haven’t developed all the bad habits of imbalance and inattention that adults pick up as they grow older. Adults forget how little they really know. And the more they forget, the further they are from The Way. But young children start out on The Way because everything is new to them. When you start to study any of the martial arts,” he held up his hand and began to tick them off on his fingers, “boxing, wrestling, karate, kung fu, tae kwan do, aikido, capoeira, pencak silat, ju jitsu, muy thai, tai chi, arnis, sambo, you have to begin with your mind as open as that of a little child.”
“Beginner’s mind,” I replied.
Uncle John smiled. “Good. You read that in a book about Zen meditation, didn’t you?”
“Unh-hunh.”
“Ever try it?”
“Nda,” I said in Abenaki. “No.”
Uncle John held out his right hand and placed it on my brow. As he held it there, it seemed as if his hand got warmer and warmer until it was almost burning. Then he slowly drew his hand away and swung it out in a slow, wide, graceful circle before looking back at me.
I nodded. Whenever Uncle John made one of what he called his “too-long speeches,” he would follow it up with silent teaching. His gesture was reminding me, without words, that I had to stop just living in my head. I had to open my mind and my body to the Circle. Knowing a bunch of facts doesn’t do much good if you don’t understand how they connect to the world around us. I lifted my right hand to my brow and then slowly tried to copy that same slow, sweeping gesture.
By our second week together, we had settled into a routine. Each morning I would put in that half hour of training before school, but Saturdays and Sundays were the best. On Saturdays we can keep going until mid-morning when Uncle John has to leave for the part-time weekend mechanic job he found at a local garage. Just enough hours a day to pay for his gym fees and still have enough left over to help us out with the groceries and utility bills. On Sundays we could train together until Mom tells us it’s time for us to go to St. Anne’s. Uncle John was raised Catholic, just like Mom and me, and we never miss going to church for the late mass.
It was during our second Saturday that Uncle John showed me the hand techniques for the first time. I’d been sort of prepared for learning how to strike. My reading had taught me that karate means “way of the fist” in Japanese, just as tai chi chuan means “supreme ultimate fist” in Chinese. So I knew I’d be learning punching techniques, ways to fight with my hands and my feet. After all, Uncle John himself was a professional fighter. He thought he had a chance to win that $120,000 challenge and be the “last man standing” in the two-day long War at the Shore, as the upcoming mixed-martial arts tournament had been dubbed by the Koacook Fight Commission.
But, as I was learning, Uncle John didn’t do things the way I expected. That second Saturday, after our morning run to the sunrise, a run that we did every day whether it was rainy or dry, warm or bone-chilling cold, he had looked me over as I stood in my usual place next to the picnic table. My feet were shoulder-width apart, my knees a little bent, my back straight, arms loose at my sides, head up. I was relaxed and breathing and, to be honest, a little impatient.
When were we going to get to the punching and kicking that I knew it was all about?
Uncle John cocked his head as he looked at me. “What?” he asked.
It’s a trick question, I thought. He’s testing me. I bit my lip. There had to be some kind of question I could ask him that might lead to the answer I wanted, something that would show him I was ready for the next stage in my training. Then it came to me. After two weeks together, I still didn’t know what exact style I was learning. Even though I had read that most martial arts schools begin by teaching you how to count in Japanese or Chinese or Korean or Indonesian, I hadn’t been given any consistent vocabulary in an Asian language. Instead, one day he might give me a word in Chinese, another day one in Japanese. But the only language other than English that we used with any regularity was Abenaki. So I was burning with curiosity. I’d been told more than once not to ask, but to observe. But now that Uncle John had actually said “what?” here was an opening. There was a way I might find out, a question I could use to figure it out on my own.
“What shall I call you?” I asked.
“Hunh?” Uncle John replied.
“I mean, should I call you ‘Sensei’ or ‘Sifu’ or, uh, ‘Pendetta’ or—”
“How about just calling me Uncle John?” Then he laughed. “Cody, I get it. You want to know what style I’m teaching you, right? You think if I answer ‘Sifu,’ it’ll be Chinese. If I answer ‘Sensei,’ it’ll be Japanese? Right?”
I nodded, feeling my face get hot.
Uncle John patted my shoulder. “It’s okay,” he said. “I was like that, too. But the answer is ‘none of the above.’ I’m teaching you no style at all. I’m just helping you get your feet started on The Way. Sit.”
I let my feet fold under me so that I dropped down—not fast, but controlled—into a sitting position with my legs crossed. It had taken me two whole days to learn how to do that without using my hands or falling to one side.
“Lecture time,” Uncle John said, sitting down in front of me. “To begin with, I’m not a master. I know enough to teach you the basics, but I’m only one step on what can be a long road for you. I’m nobody. I’m only a few feet further down the path than you are. Heck, maybe I’m even a few steps behind you. I am far from being worthy of any title of honor.”
Uncle John’s eyes seemed to cloud then. He rubbed his forehead with his knuckle, a gesture I’d never seen him do before. It was as if he was remembering something that made his head hurt. Then, just like that, he focused on me again. The faraway look left his eyes and was replaced by the hawk-like intensity I’d grown so used to seeing.
“I’m only going to be here for a little while, Nephew. After I’m gone, it’ll be your job to find a teacher who can take you further along that path. It might be any one of those arts that you’ve read about, maybe more than one. But it will all be The Way. Karate, kung fu, it doesn’t matter any more than having a black belt really matters in the larger scale of things. And all those paths lead to the same place.”
Uncle John placed his left hand on his chest. “Not just a physical and a mental place, but a place of the spirit. The seventh direction. What one of my Lakota buddies when I was in the Corps called ‘The Eye of the Heart.’ It’s a big circle, Cody. It’s so big that sometimes you think you’re just going in a straight line. Some people don’t even see how it’s all connected together. But our old people knew, just as they knew that everything is sacred and everything is alive. They learned from the animals, who were out first teachers. Same thing with the first martial artists who became known as masters. You know from your reading about that, don’t know? They learned the way of the praying mantis.” He held up his hand in the imitation of a mantis claw. “They saw how the tiger moved and struck.”
With a fluid motion, he rose up to his feet, leaped in the air to throw a spinning kick followed by a double s
trike, first to one side and then to the other, with his hands turned into the clawed paws of a great cat before folding himself back down into the relaxed sitting posture he had leapt up from. It had taken only a few effortless seconds for him. But it left me open-mouthed and breathless.
“So,” he said, “if anyone asks you what style you’re learning, you can just tell them No Style.”
Then he rose to his feet, and I mirrored him as he held out his hands in one position after another, and I learned by copying. Open hand. Knife hand. Hammer fist. Crane. Tiger. Snake. . . .
Uncle John reaches down and feels my calf. I’ve now been standing here for at least a million years. “Nope.” He shakes his head slowly. “What my old tai chi sifu would say about now is,” he changed the tone of his voice, “‘Too tight. You stay there. I come back in half an hour when you relax.’” Then he chuckles. “Just kidding. You can put your other foot down now. You did fine.”
I lower my raised foot as slowly as I can. As soon as I do, the muscle in the leg I’ve been standing on contracts, and I have to sit down. It’s like having hot needles jammed into my calf.
Uncle John goes down on one knee and massages my leg.
“Relax,” he says. “Let it go into the earth.”
Easy for him to say. But the massage works, and the pain melts away, flowing down in the earth.
Everything goes back into the earth. Back into the Circle. Every leaf that falls feeds the roots of the plants. And in a similar way that both the ancient Chinese and our Abenaki ancestors taught, we can let loose of all our tension, our stress, our pain, and allow the earth to transform it back into balance and health.
Uncle John and I sit together on the earth of our backyard. It may seem like a small space, but it is connected to every other part of the earth. It is only as small as our minds make it seem to be.
Uncle John sighs.
I wait. If I say anything now, it might stop Uncle John from saying what I hope is about to come.
The Way Page 6
