The Way Page 3

  But he also went and lived in the mountains far from any human beings, where rare birds ate from his hands. There are times I wish I could do that, just get away from everything in the modern world and be like my ancestors, connected to everything. Here’s one of Li Po’s poems about that:

  Ask me why I dwell among green mountains,

  I laugh silently; my soul is serene.

  Peach blossom follows moving water.

  Another heaven and earth exist beyond the world of men.

  Anyhow, getting back to my time in the library, which is where I am spending the last half hour of this disastrous day, keeping my swollen nose, my blood-stained shirt, my ugly backpack, and my Bozo sneakers out of sight of all prying eyes by sitting slouched in a beanbag chair half under the furthest back table behind the bookshelves, I feel the presence of someone nearby and look up from my reading of The White Pony, an Anthology of Chinese Poetry to see that I am, indeed, not alone. (Bet you thought I was never going to finish that sentence.) It’s Mrs. Masters. She’s holding out a box of tissues. I grab one just in time to catch the glob of blood that was about to plop from my snout onto the page.

  She doesn’t say anything, which is kind of unusual. Mrs. Masters talks more than most of my teachers. Contrary to popular belief, librarians are not the silent type. Having been to more schools than most, I consider myself an expert on the topic. Librarians are always talking about the books that excite them and trying to hook reluctant students into reading by reading aloud to them. But not today. Mrs. Masters is just looking at me. I finally crack first.

  “What?” I say. It comes out hostile, different than I mean it.

  “You’re a good kid, Cody,” she says, ignoring my crabbiness. “Give yourself a break, okay?”

  Mrs. Masters taps her index finger on the table. It’s a sort of nervous habit that she does when she is thinking. Nobody reads body language like me. Like when she runs her fingers through her tightly curled, short, blond hair and tosses her head back, I know that what she is reading behind her desk isn’t school-related. It’s one of those women’s magazines she sneaks in. Cosmopolitan, usually. She hides it in the same drawer with her stash of dark chocolate.

  Tapping her finger that way, though, means she’s just found some pearl of wisdom to bestow upon an unsuspecting teenager, usually as a result of something she’s just read. She taps her finger and nods, then closes whatever book or magazine she has in her hands.

  “Every story,” she says, “always seems to start one of two ways.” She holds up the thumb on her right hand. “Someone goes on a journey.”

  I nod again. That’s been the sum total of my life story so far. Someone goes on a journey and then another and then another and then . . .

  Mrs. Masters taps on the table again. Not her “I’m thinking” tap. This is her “pay attention” one. Then she holds up the thumb on her left hand. “Or a stranger comes to town and changes everything.”

  I don’t nod this time. I don’t quite get it.

  I wait for the punch line, but that’s it. Mrs. Masters gets up, message delivered, and goes back to her desk. Two minutes later the bell rings. I wait till the hall is clear, and then I slink out to my bus, wishing I had a ninja master’s ability to cloak himself in invisibility.

  The bus trip home is uneventful this time. Grey—the jerk—isn’t on board, for one. Probably attending some after-school club. His father will pick him up in his huge new Humvee that gets about two miles to the gallon. He’ll take him out for ice cream on their way home. I’ve seen them cruise by, Grey looking all superior, and his father behind the wheel in control of the universe.

  I hate them both.

  That thought startles me. When did I start hating people I don’t really know?

  I trudge up the short walkway to the door of the trailer. It swings open before I can get there. My mom’s not only awake, she’s beaming at me from the doorway. She has on a new blouse, and she is positively glowing.

  “Cody,” she says in a happier voice than I’ve heard since I don’t know when. “Your uncle is here!”

  Chapter 5

  WHAT UNCLE?

  One cannot fill

  a cup held upside down.

  —Sensei Ni

  “Your uncle is here.”

  “What uncle?”

  That is what I’m thinking. But Mom’s words have surprised me so much that I don’t just think that question—I say it out loud. Not only that, but my tone is suspicious, defensive, and sarcastic. It’s the tone of voice that has become Cody LeBeau’s typical verbal response to the increasingly mean and disappointing world around him.

  Great, I think. I’ve become the stereotypical sullen teenager of a B-movie.

  Of course, knowing that doesn’t stop me from still acting the part. Neither does the hurt look that is starting to show on Mom’s face.

  This is the first time I’ve hit her with this side of me. Until now I’ve kept my bitter waves of emotion closed behind such meaningless responses as “I’m fine” or “Everything’s cool” or the all-purpose “Okay” whenever she’s asked me how I am and how things are going.

  Mom recomposes her face. “Your Uncle John,” she says.

  “I don’t have an Uncle John,” I snap back.

  Oh wonderful! I’m not just letting loose a wave of hostility. It’s turning into a tsunami.

  Still, I’m sure I don’t have an uncle named John. Since my dad’s younger brother Louis got blown up in Iraq three years ago, I don’t have any uncles left. I know that in the old days, our people had extended families nearby in the village or even in the same wigwam. Grandparents, brother and sisters, lots of cousins and uncles and aunts. But this is the twenty-first century, and the only place you find families like that now is among Indians still living on their own rez.

  Kids who are lucky have at best a mother and a father and maybe one or two siblings. But I’m not lucky. I’m a modern, semi-orphan, Indian nomad from a sort-of-broken home. If you can call a rundown, five-room trailer a home.

  Mom closes the door behind her and sits down on the steps. She holds out her hand to me, and even though this angry, stubborn part of me that seems to have taken control fights it, I find myself reaching out and grasping her fingers. Conditioned reflex. Some of the tension lets go of me, and I sit down next to her.

  She looks close at me and notices my swollen nose and the blood dried under my left nostril. She was so excited that she hadn’t even noticed till now.

  “What happened to you?” she asks, soft concern and worry mixed in equal parts into her voice.

  “Nothing much. I just ran into something hard.”

  All true. My getting punched is nothing much. Par for the course for Cody LeBeau. And Jeff Chahna’s big, bony fist was, for sure, something hard.

  Usually Mom would not let it go at that. She’d keep grilling me. But not today.

  “Cody,” she says, “I never told you about your Uncle John, my little brother, before because it’s . . . a complicated story.”

  “A brother?” I ask. Mom’s hesitant way of saying it has convinced me I am ready to hear her story.

  “After your Grampa Matthew disappeared, Grama Christine waited for him. She never got married again.”

  “I know that.” I can’t help interrupting. Part of me wants to jump up and run away. But Mom tightens her grip on my shoulder. Even Dad, who was a tough trucker, was never able to break her grip when she took hold of him. Strong hands run in her side of the family. Mom and Dad used to joke about it—until she just stopped holding on to him.

  “Listen,” she says. “Grama Christine . . . my mother—” Mom stops. She’s tugging at her hair with the hand that isn’t holding me, and she’s biting her lip. What she has to say is hard for her. I can sense that this is the point where I could interrupt, shut her up with a wise-ass remark, keep her from spilling a family secret that I never suspected. But instead I am holding my breath.

  “Cody,” Mom whispers, “
four years after my father went missing, my mother had another child.”

  “How could she have another child if her husband wasn’t around?” I realize it is the world’s dumbest question, so stupid that even a ten-year-old wouldn’t ask it. But I just blurted it out. I can feel my ears getting red.

  Fortunately, Mom lets my embarrassment go unnoticed. “She was lonely,” she replies.

  “Oh,” I say.

  Mom sighs. She’s gotten it out now.

  “She . . . met another man. She never even told me the man’s name. From what little Mother did tell me, he was Indian, too, but he was just traveling through, and she never saw him again. The result was my brother, my half-brother. Your Uncle John.

  “Everyone knew about it, of course. Even though Mom didn’t keep the baby. She was still hoping that Grampa Matthew might return—and how could she explain this child to him? One of her best friends who lived out in the Midwest and didn’t have children of her own took John in. She and her husband raised him and gave him their last name.” She pauses. “Awassos. John Awassos. So he stayed a bear.” She forces a smile and tugs even harder at her hair.

  “Oh,” I say, trying to smile, but not really succeeding. It’s a weak attempt at humor on her part. Our family is bear clan. Awassos, the last name of my supposed new uncle, means “bear” in our language.

  “My half-brother was the family secret.” Mom lets go of that lock of hair before she tugs it out by the roots. “And like most family secrets, everybody knew it and talked about it behind our backs—and then pretended they didn’t know about it to our faces. That’s why Mother finally told me. I heard people whispering about it when I was thirteen, and I asked her about it. And she told me the truth.”

  Mom squeezes my shoulder even harder. “I never told you about it because it all seemed so . . . complicated. Especially with everything else happening in our lives.” She waves her hand to the side, her gesture taking in the pathetic trailer park, the hostile territory of Koacook, our aimless wandering from place to place, everything we’ve lost, and everything I know I’ll never have. “I thought I’d wait till you were older. I know that doesn’t make any sense. Does it?”

  I shake my head.

  We sit there in silence for a while. Part of me wants to comfort my mom, and part of me feels like it’s being sucked into a whirlpool. But there’s a question I have to ask.

  “Why is . . . ?” It’s hard to say the words because they stick in my mouth like glue, but I manage to spit them out. “Why is my uncle here now?”

  Mom takes another breath. “He and I have been writing letters to each other for a few years now. He started writing them as soon as his adopted mother finally told him about me. When you and I lived in Chicago, I even met him and we had coffee together.” Her voice is getting happier again. “It turned out that we were alike in so many ways, Cody. And just knowing I had a brother I could talk with . . . it was . . . it was great. It was like finding another part of myself, a part that was living an exciting life. But because he was in the Marines, he was only home for a short time. He’d been a Marine since he was eighteen.”

  Mom looks over her shoulder toward our trailer door and the person who is apparently waiting on the other side of it. “I should have told you about John,” she says, turning back at me. “But I guess I was being selfish. It was as if he was a hidden part of my life that I couldn’t share without losing it. I know that’s strange. But his letters were so interesting. They kept me from going crazy.”

  I look at this unfamiliar woman sitting next to me. Is thi really my mother?

  “If you want to read some of his letters,” she says, “I can let you see some. The ones he wrote me from Kuwait and Afghanistan and Iraq are amazing. Even after he was wounded, he still kept writing.”

  Mom thinks she is explaining everything to me, but I’m just feeling more confused. I have to interrupt again. “So why is he here now?”

  Mom stands up. “He’s been waiting inside until I told you about him,” she says. “Why don’t we just let him tell you why he’s here?”

  Chapter 6

  SHAKING HANDS

  Open hand.

  Where does the fist go?

  —Sifu Sahn

  The tall, broad-shouldered man standing at the far end of the cramped space we laughingly call our living room makes our trailer seem even smaller.

  “John,” my mother says, her voice sounding happy again, “this is the nephew I’ve been telling you so much about.”

  I cringe inwardly at those words. Whenever you get introduced that way, your first thought is that whatever has been told about you is probably wrong. Then your second thought, which makes you cringe even more, is that whatever has been told about you really has described your weak, pathetic, self-pitying self. If I weren’t being pushed ahead by my mother, I’d bolt out the door, climb a tree, and live out the rest of my life with the squirrels. Except I would probably be lousy at that, too. All the other squirrels would make jokes about the clumsy new guy with no tail who keeps falling off limbs and can’t crack nuts with his teeth worth a darn.

  But before I get too lost in my fantasy of a tree-dwelling life, the stranger in my living room turns around in an easy, graceful motion that is surprising for someone that big. He smiles at me. It’s not a broad smile, one that shows all his teeth like a phony politician, but there’s real warmth in it. Not only that, his smile is accompanied by a familiar little nod. It is exactly the way my mother nods when her smile is for someone she is truly happy to see. In fact, the lean face of John Awassos is so much like my mom’s, especially in his eyes and the set of his jaw, that my heart tells me for sure that he really is her brother.

  He holds out a hand. “Cody,” he says.

  Just that. Just my name. But it’s the way he says it, in a voice that is about a mile deeper than mine (which lately sounds like a rusty gate being forced open). It’s as if he enjoys the sound of my name, as if he is telling me something about my name I’ve never known before. Like that my name is cool. It makes me wish I could record the way he says my name so if I ever have to introduce myself to someone ever again, I could just say “I’m . . .” and then play back his mellow radio announcer’s version of “Cody.”

  All that goes through my head in the two seconds it takes me to reach out my hand. His grip is gentle. That tells me he’s been raised Indian. One of the first things my father taught me—mostly just by doing it—was the right way to shake hands among our people. When Indian men shake hands, they never make it a contest of strength. They don’t try to prove how tough they are like so many non-Indian guys do by trying to crush the other person’s paw. You just relax your hand in the other person’s grasp.

  I look up at his face. The smile’s still there, as well as an attentive look that tells me he’s waiting for whatever I’m about to say. I quickly look down. Meeting someone’s eyes and holding them is disrespectful—just the opposite of how it is in the Anglo world.

  “Kwai, kwai, Uncle,” I say in Abenaki. “Oli. It is good that you are here. I am glad.”

  “Kwai, kwai, Nephew,” he answers me, his right hand letting go of mine and sliding down to take my wrist in an old-style handshake. “Oli. I am glad to be here.”

  As he takes my wrist and I grasp his, his sleeve falls back and I notice not just how muscular his forearm is, but also the tattoo on the inside of it. I’ve never seen a design like it before. It’s the paw of a bear with a circle inside its palm. And within that circle is another circle that is half black and half white. Like two fat exclamation points nestled together.

  Uncle John releases his grip on my wrist and turns his palm up. He points at the tattoo with the little finger of his left hand.

  “This is me,” he says, cocking his head toward me as if to make sure I am paying attention.

  His little finger traces the outline of the bear paw. “Awassos. Bear. My name and my clan.” He jerks his chin in my direction. “Yours, too.” I nod, and his f
inger continues to the design with the bear’s paw. “The circle inside the bear paw, that’s what is all around us.”

  I don’t quite understand that. I know I should. But I don’t nod.

  Uncle John looks at me. “You don’t understand that? Oli. Good. First, because the less you know, the more you learn. Second, it tells me you believe in telling the truth. If you say that you know what you don’t know, then you may never know.”

  He chuckles at my even more visible confusion as his finger comes to rest on the night-and-day-colored design at the center of his tattoo.

  “And this?” he asks.

  “I think it’s a Chinese symbol,” I answer.

  “Ktsi oli, very good! Yin and yang.” He pulls his sleeve back over his arm. “That’s enough for now.”

  “Are you just visiting?” I ask. It’s no longer the hostile question it would have been only five minutes ago.

  Mom has come up closer now and has her hand on my shoulder.

  “If it’s okay with you and your mother,” Uncle John says, “I’m going to be camping out here for a while.”

  “If Cody doesn’t mind,” Mom says.

  I look at her. Why is she dumping this on my shoulders? Much as I’m starting to like this new uncle, I’m not really sure I want him staying with us. This is all happening too fast. But I also know what Mom wants to hear.

  “It’s okay.” I shrug my shoulders. “We’ve got plenty of room.”

  The half-cough/half-laugh that Mom tries not to let out from behind my back reminds me how ridiculous that last statement of mine is. Our trailer is so small that Uncle John’s head is almost scraping the ceiling. Just yesterday I’d been complaining that I didn’t have any elbowroom.