The Way

by Joseph Bruchac

  “I guess it’s time,” Uncle John says, “for me to explain a few things.”

  Chapter 13

  BROKEN MIRRORS

  The fool forgets

  what he forgot to remember.

  —Pendetta Satu

  Once again, I sit and wait. Uncle John sits next to me, and I have copied his exact posture: legs crossed as I sit on the ground, back straight, my hands relaxed in my lap, my eyes closed. Breathing deeply in. And out.

  I know Uncle John is going to explain “some things” to me. But I also know—now that I’ve known him for four whole weeks—that he is going to do it in his own time. And his time is Indian Time, not clock time.

  People who aren’t Skins get confused about what Indian Time really is. Some just think it means that Indians are always going to arrive late. But that’s not it at all. It’s that many of us remember that “time,” in the sense of clocks, is something very new. The oldest, truest form of time is both deeply universal—like the rising and setting of the sun—and as real as the movement of the seasons. True time can’t be measured or experienced by clocks because it is also a deeply personal, subjective experience. Have you ever noticed how when you are doing something unpleasant, the time just drags? A minute can seem like hours. But when you are having fun, time seems to fly by. You just got started, and all of a sudden it’s over.

  Dad told me a story about time, about how our old people came up with a name for the clock. We didn’t have clocks before the Platzmoniak, the French people who colonized the northern coast of the Northeast, arrived. But we saw how important their watches and clocks were because they were always looking at them. So we had to make up a word that would describe just what this new ticking thing was that the hairy-faced men in their black robes worshipped as much as they worshipped their wooden statue of a poor, tortured man.

  How do they use this new thing? That is what our ancestors asked themselves as they watched the French Jesuits. And they saw that those Europeans used the clocks to tell them when to go to bed and when to get up. Strange, for we just went to bed when it was dark and rose to greet the sun. They used clocks to tell them when to eat. Stranger still. We just ate when we were hungry. Strangest of all, they used those clocks to tell them when to pray. And we prayed whenever we wished to give thanks to Creation, which was often throughout the day.

  So the Abenaki word our ancestors came up with for the clock became this: papulkweezultozik, which means “that thing which makes much noise but does nothing at all of any real use.”

  From what I’ve learned thus far, it seems to me that the ancients who first developed martial arts had an understanding of time like that of my Abenaki ancestors. If you put your mind in the right frame, you can slow things down or make them go quickly. I’ve even been able to do a little of that myself. Take my bus ride to school as an example. It used to seem like the trip lasted forever. I dreaded it because I always thought that something bad would happen to me whenever I got on that bus.

  Not an irrational fear. More like prophetic knowledge. Or a conditioned reflex, like a dog that cringes whenever the person who’s abused it comes into the room, even though cringing will probably attract even more abuse.

  But once I started to relax and breathe, I stopped cringing. I stopped mentally writing irrational scenarios of the bad things that were about to happen to me that were as much of my fantasy life as those daydreams about being a hero. And the bus ride that used to take forever became bearable most days and hardly even noticed on others.

  I couldn’t believe how fast things had changed just by my changing my attitude. It’s as if one minute I was the target and then, somehow, I was the bow and the arrow.

  I have to admit that not having Grey Cook on the bus for the first two days after Uncle John started teaching me how to relax helped. It gave me time to get used to thinking of myself in different terms, to look into the cloudy mirror and not see a hopeless wimp. Grey didn’t show up again until Wednesday of that first week. The bus pulled up, and there he was at his usual window. Instead of looking away from him like I usually did, ducking my head down and hunching up my shoulders, I just kept my focus on the whole bus and kept my back straight, waiting for the door to open. I saw Grey with my peripheral vision, but didn’t stare at him.

  Grey had been my tormenter ever since I’d started riding that bus in late August. Seeing him had made my stomach feel like it was a washing machine entering the spin cycle. But the funny thing was that by observing him this new way, feeling calm and unafraid, I was actually seeing him more clearly than I had before. I saw, for example, that he had a red bruise on his cheek, and I remembered then how often I’d seen marks like that on his face. Grey wasn’t an athlete, so he hadn’t gotten those bruises on the football field, like the scrape marks on the faces of the jocks. Where had they come from? And as soon as I asked myself that question, I knew the answer. They’d come from someone in his home. His father.

  My parents, even at their worst moments of disagreement, had never hit me. They tried to live by the old teachings of our people. Never strike a child. If he does something wrong, talk to him or tell him a story. Physical abuse can break a child’s spirit, twist that child’s heart. That’s the way all of our people tried to do it in the old days. But I’m old enough and I’ve seen enough to know it’s not that way now. Because of all the pressure of the modern world, because of drinking and all the anger and frustration some Native people carry around with them like a huge burden-basket full of poison, it’s not uncommon for Indian kids to be abused by their parents.

  And this time, I saw as I got on the bus, it had been even worse for Grey. He didn’t just have a bruise on his face; his left arm was in a sling. This day he was the one with hunched shoulders and his head down. He didn’t let loose a single insult at me or look up at me at all as I got on and took an empty seat.

  As more kids got on, the bus filled up. One of them, a sophomore guy whose name I didn’t know yet, said “hi” and took the seat next to me again. Since I’d stopped acting like a whipped puppy, the space next to me was no longer being avoided like I had the avian flu. I said “hi” back at him. He probably didn’t hear me over the sound of his music. Hip-hop as usual. Kanye West turned up so high I felt the throb of the music.

  When we got to school, Hip-hop Kid was slow getting out of his seat. As a result, I was sliding over just as Grey Cook came up behind me. My seat was on the right side, so even though his left arm was in a sling, it was easy for him to swing his other fist hard at the back of my head.

  But instead of him hitting me, something else happened. Almost without my telling it to do so, my left hand floated up in that motion I’d been practicing again and again, maybe a thousand times since Uncle John first showed it to me: The Student Offers the Master a Cup of Tea. My circling hand intersected Grey’s awkward punch, directing it off to the side and then down. Grey stumbled forward. He might have flipped over the back of the bus seat if I hadn’t finished that circle by bringing the palm of my hand up to his shoulder to stop his fall.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him, looking into his confused, hurt face and wondering how I ever could have been afraid of him. I waited until he nodded. Then I turned and got off the bus, my steps as calm as my breathing.

  In. And out.

  Uncle John lets out a deep, strong breath. I do the same, trying to match the length of his, but falling far short. In the Black Tiger breathing he’s been showing me, you inhale for a slow count of thirty, hold your breath down in the area around your diaphragm for another count of twenty, then exhale for a second slow count of thirty. In terms of clock time, that means every full breath takes more than a minute. Do sixty of those, and more than an hour has gone by.

  “Last night at dinner,” Uncle John says, diving straight in, “did you understand what the Tribal Chairman was talking about?”

  I shake my head no. I didn’t understand much of anything about last night. Why did Mr. Chahna say he’d deci
ded to make an exception in Uncle John’s case, in spite of his record? Why did the TC keep calling my mom by her first name? And why was she so friendly with him?

  Uncle John looks into my eyes. “I’ll let your mother explain her part of it. I’m grateful for her using her influence to speak up for me the way she did.”

  I nod.

  Uncle John looks down into his hands as if they are holding a book he’s about to read from. “Started when I was seven,” he says. “I was an angry kid. I went to a tough school with kids of all kinds. I hated it when other kids put me down for being Indian. I was always getting into fights. So my adopted parents decided I needed some kind of physical discipline, and they enrolled me in a tae kwon do school.

  “My first sensei said I had a gift—at least for the physical and mental parts of it. I soaked it all in like a dry sponge dropped into a pond. I kept on until I had my black belt. Then I took up Kempo. Then capoeira, Northern Shaolin, judo, pencak silat, Brazilian ju-jitsu . . .” He ticks off a long list of names on his fingers, moving from one hand to the other and then back again.

  “You could find just about any form of the martial arts you wanted in Los Angeles, and my adopted parents never said no whenever I wanted to try something new. Seven black belts in as many styles. I even joined the wrestling team and won the sectionals at 137 in my freshman year in high school. I had it all together as far as mind and body go. But mental and physical—those are only two parts of the Circle. The spiritual and the emotional sides . . . I couldn’t even see them. And I still got angry.

  “Every teacher I ever had saw that anger. It got me disqualified in point-sparring tournaments when I’d knock an opponent down when just making light contact was all that was needed. My senseis and sifus all tried to help me find a way to work through my anger and aggression—and none of them succeeded.

  “Finally, when I was your age, I thought I’d found the answer. Boxing, where you can hit someone else as hard as you want. Kickboxing first; then Golden Gloves. I was even an Olympic hopeful for a while. But even that wasn’t enough for me. I thought I needed more of a challenge. So, as soon as I turned eighteen, I enlisted.”

  Uncle John takes another slow breath. “I was a good Marine. Made sergeant in record time. And because I was such a good Marine, you know where I ended up? Where every Marine wants to end up—in combat. Afghanistan first. And tough as it was, it felt right to be there, especially after 9/11. I wasn’t the only one angry then. What we did there made sense, trying to find Osama bin Laden.”

  He places his hands on his knees and I wait.

  “But after that, it was Iraq. Three tours of duty and each one worse than the one before. I finally learned where anger can take you.” He lifts his hands from his lap, turns them over, and looks at his palms. “Cody,” he says, “you don’t want to go there.”

  Where? Iraq? The place anger takes you? Then I decide it must be both.

  “The first letter I ever got from your mother was during my first tour. I hadn’t known I had a sister, and I couldn’t believe it at first. But I wrote back to her. And before long, I couldn’t believe how much we were alike—except for the fact that she didn’t have that burden of anger I’d been carrying around for so long. Your mom, my big sister, is one smart person, Nephew. She helped me realize that all I had to do was put it down.

  “But I didn’t put that anger down fast enough. One day I got angry at my lieutenant. We were all under a lot of stress, so it’s possible that he was in the wrong that day. If I’d just kept my mouth shut, it would have all blown over. But I talked back, and then the next thing I knew, he was down on the ground and I was on top of him. I broke his jaw, and when the other guys in my unit, buddies who’d stood by me, tried to pull me off him, I fought them, too. They say it took a dozen people to finally subdue me, but all I remember is being in the middle of this red cloud of rage. Of course, it ended with me being sent up on charges for striking a superior officer. I was court-martialed and found guilty. I spent three months in the brig—prison. I was on my way to a dishonorable discharge.

  “But my lieutenant—the same guy whose jaw I broke— and my buddies spoke up on my behalf. I was under stress. I’d been a good Marine before that. Because they stood by me— even though I didn’t deserve it—I was released early from the brig and drummed out of the Corps with just a conditional discharge.”

  He shakes his head. “Even though they let me out, the Defense Department still has it all on my permanent record. If you know where to go, you can find the summary of my court-martial and conviction. That’s part of what the TC was talking about when he mentioned my record.”

  Uncle John in prison? Being in the armed forces has always been a tradition in my family, like it is in most Indian families. My dad served and my grampas on both sides. And none of them ever got court-martialed. I’m trying to picture Uncle John as a prisoner, locked up like an eagle in a cage.

  But Uncle John starts talking again before I can finish that thought. “That’s not the end of my record, though. When I got back stateside, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I started drinking. And when I was drunk, I got into trouble. I never hit anyone. I just broke things. Mostly mirrors in bars when I looked in them and didn’t like what I saw. So I spent a lot of time in city and county lock-ups on misdemeanor charges. I used up what money I’d saved and started living on the street. A year went by like that. I’d get work washing dishes or repairing engines for a few days, and then I’d have enough to start again. I’d find where the other down-and-out Indians hung out, the street chiefs, you know. Then I’d wake up in the gutter with no memory of how I got there.”

  He reaches up to pull down his lower lip. “Like the morning in Gallup when I woke up tasting blood and found these two back teeth missing.”

  My uncle lets out a sigh that comes from someplace even deeper inside him than the breath of the Black Tiger. “Then, one day, I heard a voice. It wasn’t DTs. It was my oldest teacher. He wasn’t there in the flesh. But it was his voice. Somehow, he was speaking to me. ‘Go back to what you know.’ That’s what his voice said. And it made me think about what going back really meant. It meant going back to who I really was, to being Indian, as well as to everything I’d learned in twenty years of training. It meant finding The Way.”

  Uncle John smiles. “I was in the Twin Cities then. I started going to the American Indian House there, talking from my heart. I stopped drinking. I started going to the sweat lodge. And I saw The Way for the first time in my life. It wasn’t just the way of the fist; it was the way of the heart. And when I heard the beat of the drum and realized I was listening to my own heart and the heart of the earth and that Mother Earth would always be there for me, I let go of my anger. I accepted who I am.”

  Uncle John chuckles. “Of course, who I am is a fighter. Fighting is what I know best—sport fighting, not fighting because you’re angry at yourself and want to take it out on someone else. Going up against another man who just might beat you in a fair fight if you don’t do your best. I knew that was what I wanted to do again. So I started training. I also started writing to your mother again, and she wrote back letters that encouraged me to keep trying. It wasn’t easy.

  “I tried getting back into boxing, but I couldn’t get a license, even in Las Vegas. Plus the business is so tied up with promoters and managers and trainers that you really have to know someone to get in the door. But there were Toughman Contests. After I won enough of those, I moved on to mixed-martial-arts fights. They were being staged mostly in Indian casino arenas in different parts of the country, and being Indian helped me get in. It wasn’t the UFC on Spike TV, but I was still able to earn some money by winning on the under-card. I matched up fine with anyone they put me against. I wasn’t just a striker or just a wrestler, like some of those guys. I had my black belt in Gracie jiu-jitsu, and I’d studied muay thai overseas. I was good on my feet, and I had a better ground game than most. Before long, I’d built up a respectable recor
d.”

  I looked up for a second at Uncle John’s face. I’d noticed the scar tissue around his eyes before, but hadn’t thought about how he’d gotten it. Now I knew that it was from punches and kicks and elbow strikes, that his cauliflower ears were from those years of grappling and wrestling; that the bent shape of his nose was from absorbing punishment in the ring.

  “I was still homeless,” he went on, “but I didn’t feel lost anymore. When you’re following The Way, and your feet are on Mother Earth, you’re never far from home. If you know how to take care of yourself, you don’t need much to live. I could hunt and fish and gather plants for food in the country, and when I was in the city, Dumpster diving was the way to go. You’d be amazed at all the good food that gets thrown out behind every restaurant at night. I’d earned enough from my fights that I was able to get good camping equipment. Had enough left over to pay gym fees in whatever town I was doing my training, and even put a little money aside. But I was still hoping for one big break. And when your mom wrote me about the tournament at Koacook Moon, I knew that could be my chance. And here I am.”

  Uncle John nods and bites his lower lip. He’s finished all he has to say, and he’s waiting for my response. He’s hoping I’ll tell him that I can still respect him, even after all I now know about him. But I sit here in silence.

  “Nephew?” he asks.

  There’s too much to absorb. My chest feels tight.

  I look over at Uncle John’s tent set up in the corner of our backyard. I try to picture it under the pines of a southwestern sky or in an alley where broken beer bottles crunch underfoot. How can I picture this strong, tall man as a convicted prisoner who attacked his own buddies in wartime or as a street chief, a hopeless drunk feeling sorry for himself? I know there aren’t easy answers for everything in life, but right now I’m not even sure what the right questions are.