by Gary Paulsen
It turned out to be a pleasant afternoon, and Pooder stayed out of trouble mostly because of the ways the glider folks herded him away from the gliders and distracted him with energy bars and sports drinks. Late in the day, we climbed on our bikes and started home and I remember being relaxed and feeling good.
But coming off Murchinson’s Hill, you pick up some serious speed, and as the road turns to asphalt and comes into town toward the library, it’s a smooth, long, straight, downhill grade, so even if you wanted to slow down (which Pooder never did, of course), it’s almost impossible. As we hit town, we were smoking, absolutely smoking, along. I leaned back in my recliner-type recumbent seat and felt the wind whip through my hair and thought I wouldn’t mind if a good downhill grade went all around the world forever and ever.
Until we arrived at the corner of the library where the road took a sharp turn that had been hidden a bit by elm trees and I looked up to see Peggy on her bike just leaving the library.
Directly in front of me.
She would have been in the crosshairs, if I had been looking through a submarine periscope.
Dead center.
I knew that if I collided with her at this speed I’d kill her and probably myself and the resulting explosion of my bike’s light-absorbing-black metal and pink-and-moss upholstery would decimate the landscape. I remember thinking, as I was hurtling toward the nightmare of killing or at least seriously injuring myself and the woman I loved: At least I won’t die wearing pink bibs.
So I laid my bike over.
It was the only thing I could do, and to be honest, I didn’t do it so much as I couldn’t prevent it from happening.
Just took the bike down to my left and skidded for about twenty feet, barely missing the back wheel on Peggy’s bike—I think I may have kissed her rear tire, judging by the busted lip and bloody nose afterward—amidst a great shower of sparks and dust and some words that Pooder said later were “very short, but quite well stated and descriptive.”
I came to a stop just to the side of Peggy, who had stopped her bike and was standing straddling it, looking down at me, sprawled in a stinging heap of tangled limbs and twisted bike, flashing on the mental image of Pooder’s bruises from the water-skiing incident and wondering, briefly, if my set would be more impressive because terra firma is, objectively, much harder to hit at high speeds than good old-fashioned H2O.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
I was at that moment worrying that I might lose some teeth, had a first-class case of road rash where I had ground the asphalt with my left hip, and was spitting blood. But I managed a short nod and croaked, “Just fine.”
Which Pooder said was such an obvious lie, he was amazed I didn’t burst into flame.
Peggy looked away, bit back a smile, then turned back to me. “I saw you on television.”
Of course you did, I thought. That makes it perfect. I’m here on my disaster of a bicycle, rendered down to a puddle of gore, and first time we ever speak, you remember me from television, which, prior to this stellar moment was, perhaps, my finest hour of degradation. Of course she saw me on television. How could she not?
“I thought that was so cool.” She looked off again, then back to me, sighed. “The way you and your dad stay true to your beliefs, living without impacting the environment, is very cool and responsible and kind. We should all be living like you and your father, Carl.” Another pause, then one foot up on the pedal, still standing but ready to go. “Maybe later we could meet up and you could tell me more about how to make it work. You know, how to live right.”
And, then, with another smile and a quick wave, she pushed the pedal down and was gone. I watched her leave, or started to because my right eye was rapidly swelling shut—apparently my entire face had grazed her rear tire—but I was numb to any pain even though I was still spitting blood and leaning over so I wouldn’t drip it on my new shirt, which had somehow survived my crash landing in pristine condition.
“I never,” Pooder said, “and I mean never in a thousand years, saw that coming. I mean, out of nowhere, you’ve found a way to get girls to like you without being lookatable in the least. Who knew that all you had to do was plow your face into the road and bleed a little and, boom, you’ve got yourself a date. Seriously. Just like that. And she appeared to know your name. What are the odds?”
I floated home on a cloud of bliss. Bloody, still numb from the successful chat with Peggy, and giddy with the promise of better things to come.
But as soon as I entered the trailer, I saw it. Sitting there on the kitchen table.
My father had found my experiment journal.
SUBJECT AND PEER REVIEW EXPERIMENT SUMMARY
The effort I had put into training my dad had seemed to be working over the past few weeks. I mean it wasn’t that Dad had started going crazy shopping online or suddenly grubbing for money.
But … and it was a huge and hugely appreciated but. I had corrected some of his more egregious conduct and I was benefiting from his improved behaviors.
Instead of hunting bargains or barter opportunities, he had started seriously looking at price tags in stores, after voluntarily entering them in the first place, learning how much things did cost in—using his word—ertogs—or Pooder’s—coin. He seemed to start to care about new things, previously unused and never discarded things, and how we might get them. He’d even said one afternoon, “You know, the truck is old and, let’s face it, the radio selection is something less than desirable. Maybe we could use it for a down payment on a newer vehicle.”
He’d started watching the want ads in papers and even went on the internet for—I would never have believed it—a job, a real job that paid actual money, and then he applied for, was interviewed, and took a job at a vehicle repair shop out near Oscar’s dump. Went to work every morning, came home from work every afternoon, and picked up a paycheck. Well, it is my dad we’re talking about, so the best he could bring himself to do was to work for a man named Wilbur O’Keefe who thought banks were evil and paid in cash and was helping Dad temper his need to rocket-power all fuel injection systems he came across. But he paid in coin, and Dad even admitted that he enjoyed the company and the work, and he kept the money in a jar in the cupboard and spent it without flinching.
And if he wasn’t happy—because, even in my joy, I couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t seem to be the same as he used to be—I firmly believed I was happy enough for both of us and that, given time, he would come around. Be his old self.
Everything, according to my perspective, was good and getting better and then I crashed and talked to Peggy and I knew I had really done it, really turned things around.
Only then it went bad.
And it was all because of a blasted squirrel. About a month ago a little devil of a red squirrel had showed up and—I didn’t believe this either so if you think I’m making it up I don’t blame you—started stealing the eggs from our chickens and taking them back to his nest under the work shed. We didn’t catch him right away—had no idea what was happening to the eggs—but at last, one evening right before hard darkness, my dad saw him wobble-running, clumsily carrying an egg, and figured out the mystery of the missing eggs: that the squirrel had been stealing eggs at night.
What’s amazing is that Carol hadn’t gotten to him first and put an end to the squirrel and his thieving ways. As thorough as she was with skunk elimination and redistribution, she would, no doubt, have reduced a squirrel to a molecular structure level. A small, scurrying animal in the dark carrying an egg from one of—how she viewed it—her private chickens? She would have vaporized him.
But the squirrel was brainy and crafty and didn’t free-range around that yard, but stuck to the safe haven of the feed shed. All the chicken and hog feed in paper sacks sitting there, making a nice balanced diet, in addition to the pilfered eggs, behind a door and walls that Carol couldn’t get through, but a skinny little squirrel could.
Carol couldn’t get
in the shed, but my father could. And did. And surprised the peewadden out of the squirrel. Panic ensued and the squirrel jumped from the chicken-feed sack to an old sawhorse that happened to be close by and from there—pure madness now—to my father’s shoulder. That’s the part of the story I knew.
The part I didn’t know was that the squirrel then did a spring-jump up to the exact place where the roof rafters join the wall, where he landed on the journal’s hiding spot, which fell to the ground in front of my father.
Who picked up the little notebook.
And read it.
Damn squirrel.
“I think it’s time we had a talk” is what my father said, sitting next to the notebook on the table, when I returned home after a thoroughly excellent day of hang-glider watching and Peggy-talking and smug-isn’t-my-life-working-out-grand thinking.
I panicked and told a big lie: “I don’t know what that is.” A burst-into-flame-and-go-straight-to-Hades lie.
“Oh,” he said softly.
I would give a million dollars to not ever hear that “oh” again. A whisper from inside him, from his soul place.
What have I done? Oh god, oh god, oh god—a prayer. What have I done?
“I thought I could, you know, change how things went around here. Just a little. Just enough so that girls would look at me, well, not all the girls, only one.”
“Peggy.”
“Yes, Peggy.” I must have written about her in the experiment notebook.
“I wasn’t going to say anything, but that’s not what quality people do, just sweep things under the rug and pretend.”
“When did you find it?”
“Couple weeks ago—the squirrel, you know.”
“Is that why you got a job and traded in the old truck and started buying things?”
“Yeah.” He sounded so sad. “I hadn’t known you felt that way. I always thought you agreed with what we were doing … All along I thought you felt the same as me.”
“I did. But then I didn’t anymore.”
“Ah, well. At least now we know.”
And he handed me the notebook and turned and left the trailer and didn’t say any more.
Pooder was only slightly sympathetic when I ran straight to him for advice. “You got what you wanted but—”
“But what?”
“But you shifted the paradigm.”
“I did what now?”
“Fundamentally changed everything from the ground up in a sudden and disconcerting way.”
“That was more than I set out to do, to be honest.”
“There’s only one thing you can do now.”
“What’s that? I’ll do anything.”
“You’ve got to reboot the system. Again. Reboot the reboot.”
“I need more than that to go on.”
“What you’ve got to do is save what’s good from the past and keep what’s an improvement in the present and add more quality—your dad will like that, he’s all about quality—as you compromise and work together, instead of in opposition to each other, toward a mutually beneficial and acceptable future.”
“And how do I do that?”
“You’ll have to figure out the specifics by yourself. He’s your dad. But we’ve got the whole weekend before school starts on Monday to fix everything. More than enough time.” He sounded more confident than I felt as we headed back to the trailer.
Dad was sitting at the table, drinking coffee and petting Carol as he looked out the window. His face was still sad, and my gut tightened for a second. But I took a deep breath and said, “Who’s up for some last-weekend-of-the-summer power-garage-sale bartering and end-of-season dumpster diving for fruit and vegetables?”
He looked up and smiled at me standing in the door.
A quality smile.
A smile of forgiveness and understanding and relief.
Wait.
Just wait until he hears about my ideas for helping Oscar inventory and monetize his junkyard/wealth of supplies, and starting a YouTube channel with videos shot by Pooder for other kids like Peggy interested in his ideas on living life the right way, and speaking to the grocery store about reducing their needless waste by starting a compost pile instead of throwing away perfectly good fertilizer, and working with the shoe store to donate the shoes instead of destroy them when they go out of style, and maybe even getting CB and Priddy to help start a local farmers’ market now that we all have lots of chicken eggs and goat milk, and rewriting that pamphlet—which had some good but not great ideas—that I know we could improve on, given our empirical data and personal experience …
Dad and Pooder aren’t the only ones who come up with quality ideas.
The End.
Which, of course, is not the end at all …
BOOKS BY GARY PAULSEN
PUBLISHED BY FARRAR STRAUS GIROUX
Gone to the Woods: Surviving a Lost Childhood
How to Train Your Dad
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gary Paulsen is the winner of the ALA Margaret Edwards Award for his contribution to young adult literature, and is a three-time Newbery Honor winner, for Hatchet, Dogsong, and The Winter Room. His books have sold more than 35 million copies. He lives in New Mexico. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Dumpster Wisdom
Two Ways to Be Rich
We Move Along
A Bicycle from Hell
A Possible Solution Involving Puppies
Training Your Puppy
The Garage Sale
Step Two
Rolling in the Grass
The Harley
Gun, Squirt, One Each
Death by Water Ski
Lose, Win, Lose
Subject and Peer Review Experiment Summary
Books by Gary Paulsen
About the Author
Copyright
Text copyright © 2021 Gary Paulsen. Title-page illustration copyright © 2021 by Dan Santat. Dog collar illustration by Trisha Previte. All rights reserved.
Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271
mackids.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Paulsen, Gary, author.
Title: How to train your dad / Gary Paulsen.
Description: First edition. | New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2021. | Audience: Ages 10–14. | Audience: Grades 4–6. | Summary: Follows a twelve-year-old boy, his free-thinking father, and the puppy-training pamphlet that turns their summer upside down.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020045653 | ISBN 9780374314170 (hardcover)
Subjects: CYAC: Fathers and sons—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.P2843 Ho 2021 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045653
Our eBooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945 ext. 5442 or by email at [email protected].
First hardcover edition 2021
eBook edition 2021
eISBN 978-0-374-31418-7
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