The Way of the Wolf

by David Archer

  Whatever the case, he didn't manage to hold back the tears as he shook my hand. Jimmy was less emotional about it, but I could tell he was upset as well. I told both of them not to worry, that I would be fine, and then it was time to go. The girls managed to give me one more hug each before I got out the door, and Mrs. Connors actually picked me up and held me close for a minute.

  The trip to my grandparents' house wasn't really all that long, only a couple of hours, but it was the longest trip I'd ever been on in a car. I enjoyed watching the scenery go by as I looked out the window, especially the areas that were forested and wild. I remember wondering if I could interest Grandpa in going camping with me, sometime, but I thought I'd wait to bring that up until I'd been with them a little while.

  The house was fairly good-sized, and right next to the church my grandfather preached in. It actually had four bedrooms, but Grandpa had turned one into an office, and Grandma used one for craft work and the meetings she held with the ladies from the church. There was one bedroom left, and it became mine. It was up on the second floor, and all the way to the back of the house, so I had a lot of privacy. I liked it that way.

  “Noah,” Grandma said, “this will be your room, now. The only thing I ask is that you try to keep it clean, but I'll help out, too, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, nodding my head. “I can do that.”

  Grandpa brought in all of my things, which really wasn't that much. Besides the things I had taken from my house the last night I was there, the night my parents died, I had accumulated a couple of boxes of books and magazines from Mr. Wallace, and some new clothes and shoes that the state had bought for me. I didn't have a lot of toys, and had even given away most of the ones I had brought with me at Ms. Gamble's insistence that night. Toys just didn't interest me anymore. I did have some model airplanes and cars, kits that I had bought and put together myself, and they went up onto shelves in my bedroom.

  After we put everything into my room, Grandma went down to the kitchen to start making dinner. Grandpa took me out into the backyard and showed me around. It wasn't a huge yard, but there were some trees and a shed where he kept his yard tools. The weather was warming up a little bit, so he showed me his big riding mower and told me that he would teach me to use it one day soon. He said I could use it to mow the lawn, both for the house and for the church. I thought that might be fun, or at least educational.

  We sat down on a bench. “Noah,” Grandpa said, “we all understand that this is going to take some adjustment, that we have to get used to each other, right?”

  “Yes, Sir,” I said. “I'll try not to be a problem.”

  Grandpa laughed. “Oh, I don't think you're going to be any problem at all,” he said. “I just hope you can remember that it's been a long time since we had any young people living in this house. If there's anything you can think of that we can do to help make this transition easier for you, be sure and let me know. Okay?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  He sat there and looked around the yard for a couple of moments, as if he were thinking about something, then looked back at me and smiled. “Noah, you're what, about eight?”

  “I'm eight-and-a-half, Sir,” I said, and he nodded but kept smiling.

  “Well, now,” he said. “Did I ever mention that I was in the Marine Corps? No? Well, I was. I served in a few places around the world, and I was part of the invasion of Grenada, back in nineteen eighty-three. If I don't ever teach you anything else, Noah, let me teach you this. Every man has three duties, one to God, one to his Country and one to his family. The most important thing you can ever do is stand up to defend any of them.” He laid his hand on my head and ruffled my hair. I didn't know what that meant, so I just looked at him. “One of the things about the Marine Corps, they teach you how to defend yourself. Now, I know you were taking care of yourself pretty well, back in the foster care system, but from stories I hear about the schools in this town, sometimes they get a little rough. One of the men who goes to our church, he runs a martial arts school here in town, and I was wondering if you might like to go to some classes there, maybe check it out.”

  I'm sure my ears perked up all of a sudden, because among the spy novels and magazines that Mr. Wallace had given me were some booklets and articles that described different martial arts moves and techniques, and I was quite fascinated by them. I had managed to decipher some of the drawings and diagrams well enough to at least understand some of those moves, and I was meticulous about practicing them every day.

  “Yes, Sir, I'd like that a lot,” I said. Grandpa's smile got even bigger, and he ruffled my hair again.

  “Well, now, that's just great,” he said. “I think that would be wonderful. Let's go on in the house, and I'll give him a call and see when you'd need to start going. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, and I was on my feet instantly. Grandpa took my hand, and we went into the house and into his study. He picked up his phone and dialed a number, then smiled when someone answered.

  “Andy?” Grandpa said. “It's Brother Jim. You remember me telling you not long ago that my grandson was probably going to come live with us? Well, he's here, and I asked him if he might be interested in attending your classes, and he said he certainly would.”

  Grandpa talked to Mr. Andy, who turned out to be a Mixed Martial Arts instructor, the kind of instructor who trains people for competitions. He said he'd be delighted to have another student, even one as young as me. He told Grandpa that I could start the very next evening, and Grandpa said he would have me there.

  Mr. Andy turned out to be a surprise to me, because he was half-Chinese. His father was from China, and had married his mother when they were in college together, but he had grown up learning the discipline of kung fu from his own father, and so when his son was born, he considered it traditional to pass that training along.

  Mr. Andy had learned well, and by the time he got into high school, he had developed an interest in other forms of the martial arts as well, learning karate, judo and other techniques, including the Jeet Kune Do that was developed by the famous Bruce Lee back in the 1960s. His interest piqued just about the time that MMA began to become popular in the United States, and he proved to be one of the first to accurately predict how successful it would be. He'd opened his first studio more than fifteen years before, and had already expanded twice. Some of his students had gone on to become professional competitors, while others were teaching in studios of their own.

  Like other things that have managed to catch my attention, martial arts is suffused with routine and logic. Each move has a counter move, and my emotionless mind was able to soak up the various progressions like a sponge soaking up water. I went to class three nights a week, and by the beginning of my third week there, Mr. Andy told Grandpa that I was the most natural student he'd ever had. He suggested that they begin to groom me for the Olympics, and my grandfather beamed with pride.

  Suddenly, my training became far more intense. Instead of sparring with one opponent my own size, Mr. Andy would choose two of his students to attack me simultaneously, boys or girls who were bigger and more advanced in their training than I was. The first few times, it resulted in me getting kicked or knocked down, but like always, I learned from each experience. By the end of my fifth week, he added a third and a fourth opponent, because two wasn't enough anymore.

  Grandpa thought I was great, and he loved coming to watch me in class. At home, he would have me practice my katas regularly, every day, until I had each one down perfectly. I didn't mind, because I enjoyed the physical activity and knew that every move I practiced made me even more efficient in the studio.

  In the beginning of my fourth month in the studio, Mr. Andy presented me with a black belt, making it clear to everyone present that I was the first student he'd ever had to progress so far, so quickly. Some of the others were openly jealous, and I was often attacked without warning, but the intense training I had received, combined with my logic-driven thought process
es, caused me to develop the ability to sense an attack before it came.

  No, we're not talking about some sort of spider sense; when I took time to analyze what was happening, I discovered that I had become so sensitive to my surroundings that I would react to vibrations in the floor, such as when someone moved quickly toward me, to perturbations of the air such as might happen when a fist or foot was aimed at me, to the slightest sound that might be out of place—before an attack could truly begin, I was already responding to it, and within a short time, I became confident in this ability. It was almost as if I had some sort of built-in radar, and a little radar operator sitting in my head, ready to call out a warning whenever the next blip appeared on his screen.

  It didn't take long before other students began refusing to even spar with me, especially the older kids. They felt that I was an embarrassment to them, because they couldn't manage to lay a hand on me most of the time. Once in a while, one of them would get lucky, but I would shake it off and come back to put them down rather quickly. By the time my sixth month began, there was no one left to spar with but my instructors.

  Mr. Andy had hired a few other instructors to work with him, some of them out of his own classes. They were exceptionally good, and two of them, a man named Hank and a woman named Jill, were fairly small. Mr. Andy started assigning them to spar with me, and it helped me to develop my skills even further, but it wasn't long before even they weren't offering me any real competition. Hank suggested that Andy should try me, himself, and everyone laughed until I said I thought it was a good idea.

  With all of the students gathered around in a circle, Mr. Andy and I squared off and bowed to each other. I had just turned nine, and a growth spurt had taken me to just over five feet tall, while Mr. Andy stood at six feet, even. We were nowhere near evenly matched, neither in size or weight, but I had already been winning sparring matches against everyone else, so everyone was dying to see what would happen. I knew that a lot of those watching were hoping to see me get put in my place.

  I launched myself at him as soon as he signaled me to attack, but he was expecting me to strike low, to try to take him off his feet. His eyes were scanning the field between us, but I could tell that he was watching the floor, waiting for me to drop and try to spin a kick into his legs. Had I done that, he would've anticipated it and simply jumped over me, so I played him against himself. A flip and a handspring threw me into the air, my legs scissoring as they wrapped around his head, and then I curled my body around him, which took away his balance and flipped him onto his back. A quick punch to his jaw stunned him, and I was back on my feet while he lay on the floor shaking his head.

  Grandpa was on his feet, cheering, and I glanced in his direction. He had brought my grandmother along that night, as he often did, even though she had made it clear she didn't like coming to the studio. I had heard her tell him more than once that she didn't like watching me spar, because it always made her feel that there was something unnatural about me. That evening, when I had just put Mr. Andy down for the count, what I saw in her eyes as she looked at me was absolute terror.

  Things had been changing for some time, and just as I was able to anticipate a physical attack, I could tell that something was coming at home, too. I think it all began months earlier, when Grandma would try to draw out my emotions. She was always telling me that she loved me, and pulling me into her lap and hugging me, which I didn't mind even though it didn't really mean much to me. I could sense, though, that she was always disappointed in my responses. I would say, “I love you, too,” but the look in her eyes told me that she knew it was simply words, that for me, they had no true meaning.

  Did I love my grandparents? Well, if we take the most common definition of the word love, that it exists when the happiness and welfare of another person are essential to your own, then I suppose you could say I did. While I didn't know what happiness was for myself, I was fairly good at recognizing it in others, so I was always glad when it appeared that those close to me were happy. I naturally wanted good things for them, just as they did for me.

  Emotionally, however, I felt nothing, and it gradually dawned on me that, because of their deeply religious beliefs and philosophies, I simply didn't fit into their perception of how the world should be. I overheard conversations that I am certain were never meant for my ears, conversations in which the words “demon” and “possessed” seemed to be closely associated with my own name. My grandmother thought there was something actually evil about me.

  “James,” she said to my grandfather, “think about it. He was there, he was there in the room when Bill killed Julie. There was something going on there, something evil, something demonic. Are you going to tell me that it's normal for a nine-year-old boy to not even know how to laugh at a joke? To not even know how to hug someone?”

  “You're being ridiculous,” Grandpa said. “Noah is just a child, you know that, and he's been through hell. That doesn't mean there's anything evil inside him, and I want you to stop saying that. He's our grandson, and we just need to be patient with him. We need to pray for him, and help him to come through this.”

  “That is not our grandson!” Grandma shouted at him. “I don't know who or what he is, but whatever is inside that child is not human! Whatever demon possessed Bill, whatever monster got inside him and killed our baby girl, it got loose when Bill turned the gun on himself, and I believe that it's inside Noah!”

  I could hear her crying, but their voices got softer. Grandpa was probably trying to calm her down, but that was only one of many conversations that I heard like that, so by the time she watched me defeat Mr. Andy, I knew that Grandma had already made up her mind about me.

  A few days later, I was up in my room, reading. Grandpa had gone over to the church, to work on his sermon for that Sunday, and Grandma was downstairs, getting ready to make dinner. I heard the doorbell ring, and a moment later I heard a man's voice. I didn't recognize the voice, but whoever the man was, he sounded very upset. I heard Grandma tell him to calm down, but then he yelled something about not being able to take any more, and it sounded like he was angry.

  I'd never forgotten what my Grandpa had said about duties. Without even thinking, I was off my bed and down the stairs, and as I came out of the hallway into the living room, I saw this strange man with both hands clenched into fists and raised high in the air. Grandma had her hands over her mouth, and looked like she was about to scream, so I launched myself through the air and caught the man in his stomach with a flying dropkick. He bounced off the wall and collapsed onto the floor, gasping for breath.

  Grandma suddenly began screaming, and she ran out of the room. I stood over the man on the floor, not attacking, but prepared in case he got up and became violent again. I was still there two minutes later, when Grandpa came running into the room.

  “Noah, what on earth are you doing?” Grandpa asked me.

  “I heard this man yelling at Grandma,” I said, “and when I came downstairs, he had his fists raised at her, so I took him down. You should call the police.”

  Grandpa went to the man and helped him get to his feet, looking at me with shock in his eyes. “Noah, he wasn't raising his fists at your Grandma, he's just all upset about something. He goes to our church, and when people in our church have problems, they come to talk to us. There was no reason for you to attack him, Noah, no reason at all.”

  I was sent back to my room while Grandpa tried to deal with the situation, but I had seen the same look in his eyes that I had seen before in Grandma's. He was afraid of me, then, and I knew it was going to be a problem for me.

  Grandpa called me into his study the next day, right after I got home from school. I could tell something was wrong, and I suspected that I was about to undergo another major change.

  “Noah,” Grandpa said, “there's something I need to discuss with you. A couple of things, actually, and I don't want you to get upset about any of this, okay?”

  “Okay, Grandpa,” I said. I s
at there and waited for him to continue.

  “Noah, Mr. Andy called this morning, and he says that he thinks he's taught you all he can. He—he feels like you should maybe be looking for another instructor, somebody better than him.” He paused and looked at me, to gauge my reaction.

  “Okay, Grandpa.”

  “Well, there's—there's also something else,” he said. “There's—I'm getting older, you know that, right? And your grandma, she's not a whole lot younger than I am. Well, you see, we've been having some health problems lately. Yeah, we've been having some health problems and they're getting a little bit more serious, lately, and—and I'm afraid that we're not going to be able to keep taking care of you. I, um, I called around today, and—and I'm afraid the only thing we can do for you, right now, is put you back in foster care.” He was watching me closely.

  “Okay, Grandpa.”

  My grandfather actually shuddered when I accepted it so easily, but to me, it was simply a logical decision. I didn't really believe his story about health problems, because it was the first I'd heard about them. That simply meant that he had a reason for wanting me gone that he wasn't willing to divulge, so I had to assume that it was connected to the conversations I'd heard between him and my grandmother. To be honest, I was fairly certain that he was simply giving in to her demands, that it was actually she who wanted me gone, but it didn't matter. There had been parts of living with them that I had found at least somewhat enjoyable, including the martial arts and the fact that I had talked Grandpa into buying me a weight bench—heck, I even liked going to church and Sunday school, because the stories were fascinating, and watching the people trying to fit into what they believed was quite educational—but if that phase of my life had come to an end, then I would simply accept it and move on.

  I reached out and patted Grandpa's arm, and he actually flinched, jerking his arm back from my touch. “It's okay, Grandpa,” I said. “I'll be okay.” I got up and went to my room, to begin packing my things.