Dancing Carl

by Gary Paulsen

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  To R. J.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  1

  In the summer, in McKinley, Minnesota, when you are twelve there is so much to do that almost none of it gets done except fishing.

  It isn’t that McKinley is big, or busy. It’s only got twelve hundred people—not much more than when my great-grandfather Marshall Knuteson homesteaded the town site. I was named after him and everybody calls me Marsh except Willy who is my best friend and always just says hey when he wants me. He also says there are only nine hundred people in town but Kayo Morgan who owns the grocery says there are more to attract tourists.

  I have never figured out why having more people would bring tourists in but I don’t own a grocery, either, so there it is. But it’s not a big town.

  And there’s no real business either except some logging in the winter when the swamps are frozen enough to skid the big logs out of the woods. Also there are a few farms but they’re small because of the dampness in the soil which turns to mud in the spring during planting. The mud sticks the tractors so bad they have to use work teams of horses to pull them out and what with running back and forth with horses to pull tractors out you really couldn’t call it farming. So you couldn’t call McKinley a busy town, either.

  But in the summer, for some reason, all the get-done things seem to come at you. The yard needs raking down and mowing with the push mower. Dad doesn’t like the rotary power mowers because they rip rather than cut. The garden needs weeding—all the time—the back yard fence needs mending and tightening because Willy Taylor’s pony can’t stand to stay out of new corn and leans on the wire. Trash needs to be burned and the front fence needs painting or the rot takes the wood and the flower beds need cleaning from the cats and the storm windows have to come down and the screens go up or the mosquitos carry you off and, and, and . . .

  It doesn’t have to be a big town or a busy town to keep you jumping in the summer. And then, right in the middle, to make it worse Willy Taylor comes by and he’s got his rod over his shoulder and some night crawlers and angleworms in an old cottage cheese carton and that pretty much takes care of finishing whatever chore you’re doing.

  Willy has a way of talking so you think just ahead of what he’s saying. He’ll stop by the yard when I’m mowing the grass and he’ll stare down the street with his shoulders kind of over and down the way he has of standing, holding the rod in one hand and the worms in the other. Then he’ll smile and say, “The grass won’t grow much between now and dark.”

  And what he really means is that the fish are biting and while you can always mow a lawn the fish aren’t always biting.

  Out south of town there is an old iron and concrete bridge across the Poplar River. In the spring it runs with suckers, which aren’t much good for anything but fertilizer and pet food although some folks smoke them and swear by them.

  But in the middle of the summer the water in the Poplar settles down to tame and the suckers head back into the lakes and the mud and the fishing on the bridge gets good if you’re serious.

  Willy and I live there in the summer, or so it seems. Every afternoon we try to get down there, or almost every afternoon.

  Using a small hook and a piece of worm you slide the hook down gently alongside the concrete pilings, right along the edge of the cement. That’s where the big rock bass wait and if you use a light line and light leader it can be fun catching them. They’re scrappy. But it’s even more fun eating them when they’re battered in egg and cornmeal and fried just past moist in a hot pan the way my mother cooks them.

  Sometimes we sit in the summer sun down there all day. There’s hardly any traffic on the bridge because it leads out to farms and farmers don’t come into town that much. It can be pretty private and when Willy gets to talking it’s fun to feel the sun and just listen with one finger on the line waiting for that raspy feeling that means a rock bass is mouthing the bait, sucking it in and out the way they do before they take it.

  It was on a summer day like that with us down at the bridge fishing that the story of Carl started, even though Carl is all winter and ice. Or part of the story anyway.

  It was hot and they weren’t biting but it didn’t matter. The sun was keeping the mosquitos down and we had our shirts off getting tanned and Willy snorted.

  “You know, McKinley isn’t like other towns.”

  Considering that Willy was like me and neither one of us had ever lived anywhere except McKinley it hit me that Willy couldn’t know what other towns were like but I kept my mouth shut. If you got set to argue with Willy you had to make sure you had some big guns. It wasn’t that he was always right, though he usually was—it was that he read so much that even when he was wrong he could throw in so much extra stuff that you felt lucky to get a word in. So I didn’t say anything, but I thought it. I knew he’d go on anyway.

  “It’s the grownups,” he continued. “In McKinley the grownups are different.”

  Well. I couldn’t let that one go by. “How could you know that? And how are they different?”

  Willy held up his hand for silence and stared at his line as if he had a bite but I knew he was just thinking, buying time.

  “I read a lot, that’s how I know,” he said after a moment. “In McKinley people are kind of old-fashioned. Take your dad, for instance.”

  “My dad?” Actually my parents are probably the least old-fashioned people in McKinley. Dad even talked about getting an Edsel. “My dad isn’t old-fashioned.”

  “Sure he is. Doesn’t he stick with that old push mower instead of changing over to the new rotary kind?”

  Like I say, Willy always comes out on top. “That’s not so old-fashioned.”

  “Sure it is. And the rest of McKinley is like that. There are lots of people in town who still use the old push mowers. They rebuild them and keep them going. And they take care of their own families, too.”

  There was a jump, I thought—from push mowers to families. “How does that make them old-fashioned?”

  “They don’t let the state do it, like everybody else in the country. They take care of their own. And from what I read, that’s pretty old-fashioned ...”

  And I think he was going to say more but he got the rasp that meant a bite then and when the bass took the hook he set it and landed it and the rest of the afternoon was spent fishing.

  But what he was talking about McKinley being old-fashioned became part of Carl’s story because Carl was one of those people the town sort of took care of themselves rather than let the state do it. Or at least that’s how it started and went until it all turned around and Carl took care of the town. Or at least the rinks.

  The rinks.

  In the summer everything just splashes out, out into warm days and warm nights and mosquitos and some rain and sun and taking Willy’s cousin’s canoe down the Poplar camping until there isn’t any summer left and nothing really to remember except a kind of warm feeling of fun and no rea
l purpose.

  But in the winter there are the rinks, only the rinks and hockey and skating and that is all. Unless you count school, which is more or less just always there. But there isn’t anything else to do in McKinley in the winter and the rinks become a central place in town.

  In the winter people who were off on summer vacations come back and everybody meets at the rinks and everything that was loose and unorganized becomes tighter. Winter does that to everything in northern Minnesota—brings it in.

  But for the people in town the rinks do more than just organize, they become the winter part of the town that means everything. The rinks are the town in the winter, even for the grownups, and that’s what made Carl so important.

  That’s why when Carl came to the rinks and danced and fell in love with Helen and moved so only Helen and some of the kids could understand at first, that’s why it affected the whole town.

  The rinks are everything in the winter. And that winter Dancing Carl became everything at the rinks and taught us about living and being what we were and loving all mixed into the cold and ice-blue flat of the skating rinks.

  It was some of it a sad time and some of it a very happy time and a lot more of it a hurting time but most of all, like Willy Taylor said when it was all over, it was the best time there ever was to be twelve moving towards thirteen.

  2

  In the summer the rinks are a dirt parking lot for tourists who are too tired to drive on through McKinley to get to the good tourist places up north. It isn’t much. Just a gravel pad down off the main street at the north end of town next to Pederson’s Hardware—which is really Johnson’s Hardware but has always been called Pederson’s for the original owner. Old man Pederson was a shirttail cousin or great-third uncle to me but I never knew him. He left before I was born.

  The town more or less keeps the gravel level and now and then people driving through who want a short rest will stop. But there is nothing to keep them—all the good muskie fishing is up north—and they always leave after a few hours. Of course they don’t know about the rock bass at the bridge, but that’s for the best—they’d just fish it out.

  On the east side of the area there are a couple of wooden outdoor bathrooms, pretty well kept up and smelling of strong lime all the time. Cully Fransen is the caretaker in the summer and he’s a good worker even if he doesn’t think straight all the time and has to stay in when it rains or snows. He’s not old but something is burned out in his brain and they keep him on in the summer and pay him a little something. I’m not sure what happened but it was something to do with some pills his mother took before he was born.

  I asked Dad about Cully one time at supper and he looked at me for a long time before answering.

  “He has the mind of a four-year-old,” Dad said, “in most areas. But he is an adult in some ways and can live a useful life. Why this sudden interest in Cully Fransen?”

  “Oh, no real reason.” Dad has a way of looking at you sometimes so even if you haven’t done anything wrong you try to remember if you ever did do something wrong. “We were just walking by there the other day and saw him working in the park and I thought I’d ask about him.”

  “You weren’t studying on teasing him or anything, were you?”

  I shook my head. Some people had done that, teased Cully some, but I hadn’t. It just didn’t seem right. “I was just curious. I see him there all summer, each day, and I wondered.”

  Dad nodded. “Curiosity is a good thing—it leads to education.” Dad believed in education because he didn’t get so much because he had to work on grandpa’s farm. “With Cully the township board met and decided it would be better to give him some work and a room and a little money. Better than sending him to a state institution.”

  “Doesn’t he have any family?”

  “Not anymore. He did, he had a mother, but she took legs some time back.”

  “What do you mean, ‘took legs’?”

  Dad studied me for a moment and then shook his head. “Not yet. Maybe later we’ll get into that . . .”

  And I was going to ask more about it but Mom came in with supper then and we tucked in.

  But Cully took good care of the park area in the summer, kept it clean and raked down. Which was good because the gravel parking area was really the rinks, in the winter.

  On the other side from the bathrooms, on the west side of the gravel area, there is a wooden building—actually a shack—which is closed in the summer and used for a warming house in the winter.

  All around the parking lot there are elm trees. They are huge and scraggly with thin leaves in the summer and no leaves in the late fall and the winter. But in a way they look nice, too—like they belong to the place, or hold it in like arms.

  Willy once told me that if he grew up without getting dumb somehow he was going to become an artist and come back and paint those elms. But when I asked him where he was going to come back from he didn’t know except that it was going to be across an ocean so I wouldn’t count on it. Willy sometimes gets a little excited about things that other people don’t even notice.

  But the elms are pretty, just the same, and in the winter they hold the four torn old speakers which hang around the rinks to make waltz music for the Saturday night skate-dancing the grownups do. The elms kind of fit that music, all scratchy and warbly, and they aren’t bad to see even if they’re ugly and scraggly, too.

  Nothing ever happens on the gravel in the summer. Oh, once Dennis Hendricks who is the town constable had a fight there with four mean motorcycle guys who were coming through. But they left when Dennis got mad and thumped one of them so bad his ears bled out—Dennis being built big and roughly square and awfully strong. But other than that the summers are pretty boring down where the rinks are.

  In the fall there comes a time when everybody in town gets a kind of strange feeling. It comes just after the first hard frost, in October, and gets more and more in the open as the fall hardens.

  Part of it is a reaction to winter coming, and part of it is a reaction to summer going. Willy says it comes from the people being sick of the summer mug-heat that comes late and the bad last days of mosquitos and maybe he’s right.

  The main thing is that the feeling comes and the leaves drop and there comes a day in November when all the people in town gather down at the gravel of the rink pad and they bring rakes and shovels and spend the day leveling and cleaning.

  This is not something that is planned. I never saw a word pass or anybody talk about it. One day it all just works and we all go down and rake and clean. Then we put up the board walls around where the two rinks will be. These are wooden walls stored in the basement of the town hall—a big building in back of the hardware.

  The walls lock together with wooden boards which are nailed into position and when it’s all together there are two large wooden ovals with kind of square corners sitting on the gravel pad—long way north and south, right next to the warming house. Once the walls are up, all nicked and scarred with puck marks, then some posts are put on top of the walls between the two rinks and chicken wire mesh is raised to stop pucks. The west rink is for general use, counterclockwise skating and figure skating in the middle. But the east rink is for hockey, which goes on all the time and gets rough and the chicken wire is absolutely necessary to keep the puck from shooting across and taking somebody’s teeth out, which happened with Mary-Jo Kinsky before they put the wire up. Richard Erickson made a wild slap shot and the puck went just over the board and hit Mary-Jo full on in the mouth and it was an awful mess.

  When the rinks are all done, and the wire is up and tightened and the gravel pads are raked and reraked and the nights are cold but the sun cooks the days, the waiting starts.

  Everybody in town waits. And maybe it isn’t just for the rinks, but for the coming of winter, because even those people who don’t skate seem to be waiting. They look out windows, they look up at the sky when they’re out walking—they wait. And if it is for the winter an
d not for skating it doesn’t matter because it’s the same thing. They might as well be waiting on the rinks because in a way the rinks mean winter.

  Everybody waits. The warming house is cleaned out and the two bathrooms relimed and painted inside to remove the wall writing and we wait. The problem is that it’s too soon to flood the rinks because the water will thaw in the day when the sun hits it. Without hard freeze it just keeps sinking into the gravel and the waiting is very hard to do because everybody is ready to start skating.

  Start winter, start skating, start getting down to the business of winter—that’s how Willy says it.

  “Summer is fun, summer is fishing,” he said in the summer before Carl. We were down by the power dam trying to snag sheepsheads to sell to the mink farmer south of town for a quarter each. Sometimes you could get twenty or thirty of them and even if snagging wasn’t quite the right way to fish everybody wanted to get rid of the sheepsheads so they didn’t care.

  “Summer is soft,” Willy said. “It’s just mush. Everything is easygoing and slow.” He stopped long enough to jerk up with the wrist action that set the snag hook in a sheepshead but missed. “Now you want to get down to business, that’s winter. Winter is when you get things done.”

  Which might be why some of the people waited, to get away from the soft of summer and into the hard of winter.

  After school the kids and some of the grownups go down to the rinks and stand and wait, looking at the gravel, waiting for it to get hard and stay hard. Not all the same people just standing, but people come by. If you stayed there for a couple of hours on a November evening you would likely see just about everybody in town as they came by to check the rinks, maybe to stand a bit, then move on and it was during this time that we first saw Carl.

  Or that’s when we first remembered seeing Carl although he might have been around for some time before then.

  It was in late November, after Thanksgiving, in the end of daylight just before dark. By that time of the year it gets dark around five, and even with the lights strung in the elms next to the speakers most people don’t stay much after dark unless they’re skating. But this time there was a fair crowd of ten or twelve kids and grownups, standing near the boards, trying to look like they were being natural and Willy nudged me with his elbow and pointed with his chin and there was Carl.