by Gary Paulsen
“I could play with the thimble boy,” he said, half whispering. “We could play hide-and-seek and I could be It.”
He hid the thimble boy so that he could not see him with the eye closest to the ground unless he moved sideways and looked down between a row of sticks he’d put in the dirt. “He’s hiding in back of the wall….”
“Who is?”
His grandmother had come to the door of the cook trailer to dump a pan of water, which she threw with great skill to the side to miss where the boy was playing.
“The thimble boy,” he said, and explained how he was playing hide-and-seek.
“Do you have friends back in Chicago to play with?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No. No friends. Sometimes Mother had Clara come and watch me while she went to work, but Clara didn’t play with me. She was old and drank red wine from a big glass jar and listened to the radio. But she didn’t play with me.”
He started to tell her of Casey because once or twice Casey had tried to be nice to him and had tried to play with him and brought him toys — but he didn’t. Instead, he squinted up at her — the sun was over her shoulder and he had trouble seeing her — and said, “I had a new truck and a tractor and a jeep to play with. They were all made of iron and had wheels that turned. I forgot them in Chicago. But I didn’t have any friends to play with. Mother wouldn’t let me play outside, because she said there are bad men who would hurt me.”
He quit talking then. She was smiling down on him and it was the same smile she had when she first saw him at the depot, the kind of smile that made him feel soft inside and want to run to her and be hugged and held.
“Why don’t you come into the trailer? I made some apple pies, and you can have a piece with some milk if you don’t tell the men I gave you the first piece.”
“Why can’t I tell the men?”
Her eyes wrinkled at the corners and seemed to have a light in them, and she laughed a low laugh in her throat. “Because they always try to get the first piece for themselves. They say I’m going to marry whoever gets the first piece.”
“Well, I’ll marry you,” he said, following her into the cook trailer. “So that takes care of that.”
“Yes, that takes care of that.” She picked him up and hugged him. “Now have some pie.”
She took a pie down from the shelf over the sink where there were six pies cooling and put it on the table. He sat next to it and looked at it. It was a rich brown with some red mixed in with it and a little sugar sprinkled on it, and it smelled of apples and cinnamon, which he liked but could not say.
“It’s got simmanon,” he said. “It smells good.”
She cut it with a knife cooled in water, and put a piece on a plate with a fork next to it, and sat down across from him.
“Aren’t you going to eat pie?” he asked. She had no pie in front of her.
She shook her head. “Cooks never eat what they cook.”
But she was smiling again and he knew she was kidding him. He saw her eat during the day and it was what she had cooked. “You’re so thin. Your arms are so thin. You should eat. That’s what Mother tells me. She says I should eat or my arms will stay thin and I will never grow big like Uncle Casey.”
He did not mean to speak of Uncle Casey, did not like to think of Uncle Casey even a little bit, but before he could stop, the name was out. He took a bite of the pie and chewed, looking down, but if his grandmother had heard the name she didn’t say anything about it.
Instead she turned and went to the sink and poured some condensed milk from a can into a glass and added water and stirred it with a big spoon and brought it to him to drink with the pie. He thanked her and took a drink, and it tasted like tin from the can, tin and something else he couldn’t name, but it was still good, and when the taste mixed with the taste of the apple pie in his mouth even the tin in the milk went away.
The boy ate quietly for a time, tasting each bite and drinking the warm milk and thinking of all the things that were in the pie — the sugar and cinnamon and dough and juice and apples — and he could not understand how it could all come together and make a pie that would taste so good.
“There’s so many things in it,” he said to his grandmother around a bite on the fork.
“In what?”
“In the pie. So many different things and they aren’t all good, but when they are in the pie they are good.”
“What isn’t good?”
“Apples aren’t good, because they hurt your teeth when you bite them. And simmanon is too strong. And sugar makes you sick if you eat too much of it. I ate some once from a spoon from a sack when Mother was at work and Clara wasn’t watching and I threw up.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“When you put them all together in a pie they taste good and make me want to eat more and more and even drink the milk with the tin in it. How can that be?”
His grandmother leaned back in the bench across the table and smiled. “You think so strange about things….”
But she didn’t answer the question about the pie. Instead she stood and cut him another small piece and he ate that as well until his stomach felt tight and round with it.
“Maybe it is time for a little rest,” she said then, putting the plate near the bucket of water and the washbasin. She sat on the bunk and wiggled her finger for him to come over, and he went to her and sat on the bed.
She used her hand to wipe his forehead once and then once again and the motion made him drowsy so that he let her put him back on the pillow and lie next to him and sing.
She sang a soft song in Norwegian that he couldn’t understand. The small sounds seemed to be inside his head and in the pillow and in his hair.
And he could not stay awake.
He wanted an answer to the question about the pie and the things that made a pie, because it seemed important to know how to take many things that aren’t so good and make one good thing with them.
But the small sounds of the song took him and he could not think any longer.
HE BOY dreamed of going to a zoo with his mother. There were lions and snakes and tigers and elephants all in dusty cages, and his mother held his hand to lead him through. They looked at each one and his mother smiled and held his hand.
When they came to the monkey cage one of the monkeys made a face at him, and he made a face back and looked up at his mother to show her the face.
Except that it wasn’t his mother anymore but had turned into Uncle Casey and he was holding the boy’s hand and smiling.
Smiling down on the boy.
And it wasn’t a bad smile. It was a happy smile, and the boy smiled back, but Uncle Casey was holding his hand hard, really hard, so hard the boy almost cried out, so hard and harder and harder until the boy could not stand it.
His eyes snapped open and for a second time he did not know where he was — felt himself still in the zoo being held too hard by Uncle Casey.
Then he heard his grandmother singing and saw the end of the wood stove and knew he was all right.
He sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“Are we awake?” His grandmother peered around the end of the stove.
“I had a dream,” he said. “I was at the zoo with Mother and we saw tigers and snakes and monkeys and Mother was holding my hand and she turned into …”
He stopped. He didn’t want to talk about Uncle Casey and once again his grandmother acted as if nothing were wrong.
“The men will be in soon and they will be hungry. After they eat maybe you can ask them the question about how bad things can make good things. Now help me set the tables before they get here.”
The boy took the plates and silverware and laid them out on the tables, but he did not think he would dare to ask the men any questions. Then he put all the cups upside down and arranged them in neat lines so they lined up with each other and all the other cups and plates on the other tables.
And then the men came.
It was as before.
The boy wasn’t ready and in some way they frightened him. They were so huge as they came in that he couldn’t help moving in back of his grandmother’s dress until they were all seated.
Then they had to eat, and he helped take food to them. Bowl after bowl of potatoes and gravy and strips of meat in the gravy and they ate and ate until the boy could do nothing but stand around in back of the stove and watch them until there was no food left.
When they were done eating meat and potatoes they drank coffee, and the boy helped bring them pie and each of them ate a giant piece of pie and drank another cup of coffee. His grandmother handed him a box of sugar lumps for each table. She poured them still more coffee, hot and steaming, and the men sat for a time holding sugar lumps in their coffee.
It looked so strange to him, their huge fingers holding the tiny sugar lumps in each cup like little toys. When a lump had soaked up coffee until it was brown and almost ready to crumble, each man would carefully put it on his tongue and take a sip of coffee noisily, wash the lump around, then swallow it.
And take another lump and do it again.
The boy watched them until all had finished their coffee and he thought they were done. He wanted them to be done because he had about a thousand questions to ask his grandmother.
Like, Why were they so big?
And, How could they eat so much?
And, Why were their faces two colors?
And, Why did they dip the sugar cubes in coffee and suck them to nothing in their mouths and always take their caps off and jam them in their pockets when they came in and always spit in the can by the door and clean out their lower lips with their fingers, and talk so loud it made his ears hurt, but they didn’t leave.
They didn’t leave at all as they had in the morning.
Instead when they finished eating they pushed their plates away for the boy and his grandmother to clear off.
They laughed and told jokes about the day while the boy took the plates away and they made an effort to ruffle his blond hair when he went by, and asked to see his muscles.
HEN the tables were cleared they leaned back in their chairs and filled their lower lips with tobacco from the little round cans in their bib overalls.
Then they took out small decks of cards — or at least they looked small in their large hands. They broke into two groups and they began to deal and play cards.
The boy and his grandmother sat by the stove and watched them. She had saved a plate for him, and he ate potatoes and meat without looking, taking food and chewing it and swallowing without thinking as he watched the men.
He did not know about cards, did not know how to play with them, except once alone in the apartment when Clara was drunk and his mother was gone to work Clara had shown him how to build a house with cards.
He had tried hard, but the card house kept falling. At first Clara had laughed at him, but then she grew angry and threw all the cards in the garbage, and that was all he knew about cards.
The men weren’t building houses anyway.
They would deal all the cards around; then they would throw them down one at a time.
One man would start by throwing a card down, then each of the other men in the group threw a card down with a great slap of the card and a loud laugh or curse.
“There! I’ve got you, by God!” they would yell, and slap a card down so hard the tables jumped off the floor.
“What is this game?” the boy asked his grandmother when he dared. He spoke in a whisper, afraid to disturb the men.
“It’s called whist,” she said.
“Why does it make them mad?” he whispered directly into her ear so they would not hear.
“Mad? They aren’t mad.”
“But they’re so loud and throw the cards down so hard….”
But she did not hear him. She had signaled one of the men with her fingers. “Gustaf — the boy knows nothing of whist. Show him, will you?”
And Gustaf, who had a face of two colors and a scar on one cheek that made his eye droop and was almost bald, smiled at the boy.
“Come and sit on my lap, boy, and help me whip these buggers.”
But the boy was shy and would not have done it — was shy and afraid — except that his grandmother grabbed him by the hand and half guided, half dragged him to the man named Gustaf.
Gustaf scooped the boy up in his huge arm and propped him on his lap with his arms around him, holding him in.
“Deal, boys,” Gustaf said, his voice so deep that his chest rumbled against the boy’s back.
The boy smelled the pungent odor of snoose and trees and oily diesel smoke in Gustaf. And somehow he could not separate the smells from the sounds he had heard of the trucks; the roar of the engines was in the big man’s smell, and the boy thought how safe it was to be in his lap. Like being in his grandmother’s lap or his mother’s lap.
Gustaf picked up his cards as they were dealt. The boy looked at the pictures on the cards and the little symbols and numbers, and it was before he knew numbers, but he thought they were pretty anyway and he smiled up at Gustaf.
“Good, aren’t they?” Gustaf said, and winked.
Then he played, and each time he leaned forward to slap a card down on top of another man’s card it rocked the boy forward gently — forward like a cradle would rock him, safe in Gustaf’s arms.
Soon all the men’s talk flowed together and made one long sound, and the rocking forward became one with the sound and the safe place, and he was so comfortable that the cards seemed to blur.
He could not keep his eyes open, and he fell asleep caught between Gustaf’s big arms. He missed all the rest of the game, slept with his head over on Gustaf’s arm, and when it was over Gustaf lifted him to carry him to bed in back of the stove.
“He’s light as a goose-down pillow,” Gustaf said, putting him in the bunk. “Tomorrow I’ll take him on the cat with me — he needs to work. Get some weight to him.”
That the boy heard through the sleep. And though the words didn’t cause him to awaken, they did make his sleep move into dreams of wonder at what it would be like to go to work with Gustaf….
HE BOY awakened early because he was excited. It was still dark outside — he could not see anything through the windows. But early as it was his grandmother was already awake. She had a small mirror hung on a nail by the sink, and she was looking in the mirror while she braided her hair, which hung down in long ropes, the gray like frosting mixed with black cake, hung down to her waist, and she braided it while he watched, with graceful movements of her hands.
One over the other over the other over the other, he thought; her hands move like small birds flying one over the other over the other over the other.
He loved to watch her comb and braid her hair. She was his grandmother and very old, but when she combed and braided her hair he thought she looked like a girl next door in the Chicago apartment who combed her hair and braided it on the back stoop.
His grandmother saw him watching and smiled at him.
“Why are you up so early, little thimble?” she asked.
“Gustaf said he would take me on the cat.”
“Oh — you heard. I thought you were asleep when he said that.” The braid was done and she raised it over her head and coiled it in back at the top of her head.
The boy sat up, stood by the stove. “Did he mean it? Is he really going to take me with him?”
She winked. “I don’t know — what do you think?”
“Oh, Grandma, you’re teasing me.”
“I am, am I?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Come now.” She used a ladle to put steaming oatmeal in a bowl. “Eat some breakfast.” She mixed milk in a bowl and poured it on the oatmeal. “So you will be done eating when the men come.”
The boy sat in front of the bowl and ate with a large spoon. The oatmeal was very hot and it made the milk smell funny, but he sprinkled sugar on it and held his breath and
ate and it tasted good.
He had just finished eating when the door burst open and the men came in for breakfast, and he was kept busy running back and forth with bowls of oatmeal and pancakes.
But he kept his eye always on Gustaf who ate and ate. When the men were done they all stood up and thanked his grandmother and moved out of the cook trailer.
Gustaf went with them and the boy felt the edges of disappointment.
Except that at the door Gustaf stopped and turned.
“Well?” He smiled and winked at the boy’s grandmother, then looked at the boy. “Aren’t you coming?”
The boy looked up at his grandmother. She nodded and he ran to the door.
Gustaf took him around the waist, lifted him, and went out the door carrying the boy on his arm.
* * *
OUTSIDE the other men had gone down a path through some trees, and in a moment the roar of diesel engines filled the air.
Gustaf moved off in another direction, the boy on his arm. They walked down a narrow road through the trees until they came to a large clearing.
In the middle of the clearing was an enormous gravel pile. The boy had never seen anything so huge.
“I can’t see over it,” he said to Gustaf. “What is it?”
“It’s the gravel pile,” Gustaf said. “For building the road. The cat is around the other side….”
The boy was so excited he could hardly bear it. As they walked around the side of the pile that went to the sky, the boy saw a big caterpillar tractor parked at the bottom of the pile.
Gustaf walked to the side of the cat and put the boy up on top of the steel treads next to the driver’s seat.
Everything was yellow and oily and there were levers and dials all over the tractor. He stood on the treads and did not dare touch anything.
“Hang on to the seat,” Gustaf said, “while I climb up.”
The boy did as he was told.
Gustaf went around the cat. He stopped and did something to the engine, then climbed into the seat and put the boy on his lap between his arms.
The boy leaned back.
Gustaf’s hands flew across the controls, hitting levers and switches, and there was a sudden roar as the engine caught and started. Blue flame splatted up out of the exhaust pipe, and the boy jumped.
