Gone to the Woods

by Gary Paulsen

  And Elmer would wait until they had eaten a grease-bomb burger and drunk a pony-piss beer or two and then mention he had a fish caught that morning back in the cooler.

  Didn’t matter when it was actually caught, Elmer always told them it was caught just that morning. Big northern, walleye, musky. Whatever he had—caught that morning if somebody-anybody wanted to take it home. Elmer could get five, six, seven dollars, maybe ten dollars, per fish from the patrons. If it was a big walleye with gold-brown sides and fat cheeks, ten dollars easy. A man makes forty dollars a week working at a factory, ten dollars was a lot of money. But it was a lot of fish. A lot of bragging rights. Show a picture of the fish back home, and the brag would last a long time. Good investment for a ten spot.

  Sometimes, with a good-size fish, Elmer would give the boy two dollars. Gave him that now—two dollars for a five-pound walleye with golden sides.

  Two dollars in his pocket. Along with the money he had saved and scrounged, this brought him to over five dollars. Five dollars and sixty cents. Big money. Kept money if he didn’t get caught by the big kids and they took it.

  Traveling money.

  But still he didn’t run. He wanted to run, but didn’t. Somehow couldn’t run. He dreamt of it sleeping in the chair near the furnace, of leaving, finding work, being a cowboy.

  But he only left in his dreams.

  Which wasn’t like him. He didn’t sit and dream when he could be going, like he had some big plan to think on.

  He went, instead, to the woods, along the river, where he’d build a fire and catch some bullheads on worms and fry them in the frying pan and eat them crispy and good. Get a loaf of bread for twenty cents and sop up the hot juice with soft bread.

  And think. He always thought better in the woods along the river. Where it was safe. Once he was in the woods, folded into the forest, nobody could catch him. No one bothered him.

  The woods was a good place to think.

  On why he wasn’t running.

  THINKING ON THINGS

  It was still daylight, so moving was risky.

  He kept to the alleys until he came near the railroad yards where there were bad dwellings, where the hard kids lived near the north end of the railroad yards, past the roundhouse, in ugly gray houses. Almost black from all the years when the rail lines used coal-fired locomotives pushing out smoky soot. Looked like a picture of hell, like Manila and the stains on the wall. All the houses by the railroad yards needed a coat of paint. And more. Scrubbing first, then paint, and then move. No place to live, these Hell houses. Rough houses, rough people down by the yards. That’s how people spoke when they talked of that area, those people, at all. Said they were coarse people who lived down by the yards. Like it explained everything about them.

  He didn’t live down by the yards, but anybody who saw how he lived would call him the same. Coarse. Parents were drunks and their kid was always in the streets and alleys. “Coarse”; it was a good word. No matter how he felt, thought, he was cut from some of the same rough cloth.

  Thing was, he had to cross the railroad yards to get down to the Sixth Street bridge, which led out of town going north to where the woods started. Woods that didn’t end ever, but kept going north. He looked on a large map once at the library and there was nothing but woods all the way up into Canada, like the forest went all the way north to Hudson Bay.

  The woods led north, pulled him north to where it was safe.

  But to get there, he had to cross the yards, jump over three sets of rails and a low fence, and then make it another two blocks to the Sixth Street bridge. Another quarter mile after that, he moved off the road and then into the trees. Moved through the low brush like a knife through water. Opened in front of him, closed in back of him, nobody could see him. He was there, and then he was not there. Like he’d never been there. Clean gone. Disappeared.

  But first he had to cross the tracks.

  And it was still daylight. He’d have to be careful, be still and watch before he made his move. He sat by the back of an old equipment shed along the tracks and studied everything ahead of him. Forty yards across the tracks would put him by the old coal tower where they used to load coal into the coal tenders in back of the locomotives. Now it was a roost for a hundred or so pigeons. He used to climb inside at night with a small flashlight and take a couple of pigeons now and then when he couldn’t get anything hunting in the woods. He’d grab them off the cross members in the tower and break their necks. Click. Then he’d clean them and cook them, boiled in a battered aluminum saucepan he’d found in the trash over the hot plate in the basement. Not a lot of meat, but good. Like dark meat on a chicken or a smaller grouse breast. Good taste. Somebody said once they served them in fancy restaurants in the cities. Didn’t call them pigeons because nobody would eat them. Called them squabs. Call them that—squabs—and people paid top dollar for them. Didn’t know any better, didn’t know they were eating pigeon. He stripped the meat off the bones when they were boiled, and ate the meat with a little salt rolled in a tube of white bread. Made his mouth water now, thinking on it, watching the pigeons flying around the tower before they went in to roost. But he’d already decided to go to the woods, build a fire, and catch a bullhead or two or three to cook on a stick over the fire. Keep thinking on why he hadn’t run yet, sitting in smoke to keep the mosquitoes down, eating the red fish meat off the bullheads. If he didn’t make meat that way, he’d come back after dark and take a couple of pigeons back to his basement hidey-hole. Boil them and have a late snack. Bread and pigeon. Call it squab and he’d be a high-tone man. Nothing coarse about a man who eats squab.

  Forty yards to the coal tower. If he made it that far, he could hide in the shadows until he made sure it was clear to move again. He stayed low and moved in back of a row of more equipment sheds until he was at the bridge. Then thirty or so yards to the bridge. Across the bridge and off the road into the forest and done and gone.

  He was ready to move. All clear and he jumped out over the tracks and was almost at the coal tower when he heard a yell behind him to the right. He took a quick look while picking up speed. He ran with his arms reaching ahead for more land with each stride.

  A kid named Mikey thundered behind him. Fifteen or sixteen years old and built like a freakish gorilla with long arms and sloping forehead covered with little red freckles and short reddish hair. He was a tough nut who wore heavy high-top work shoes with thick soles. He liked to kick a kid when he was down—had, in fact, caught the boy two, three months ago behind the bakery, leaving bruises and sore ribs that still hadn’t entirely healed. The woman at the bakery, nice woman, left two or three hot fresh rolls out for him on some mornings. He ate them still warm from the big oven.

  Mikey had two of his brothers with him. Both a little younger, but still big. Kyle and Pudge. Funny names, but mean kids, looking like slightly smaller Mikeys. He took a bad beating that time. Went down and rolled in a ball, but they kicked at him while he was down. Kicked his ribs and his stomach so hard he puked up the rolls.

  Mikey was alone this time, wearing big clodhopper boots at the end of those heavy legs, and there was no way Mikey could catch him.

  He found a little more speed as he cut between the equipment sheds in his cheap high-top tennis shoes—PF Flyers—advertised in Boys’ Life magazine. They weren’t cool, but they were light on his feet and he made two steps for every one of Mikey’s, and it wasn’t long before the big clunker realized he was wasting time and slowed and then stopped. Gave up.

  He dropped back to a fast trot as he cleared the equipment sheds and approached the bridge. Not even breathing hard. Crossed the bridge, worked his way along the road, and then slid off the side into the woods like he was going home. Which he was, he thought, smiling. Going home.

  One time the three brothers, with another booger-eating jackass named Harvey, had hidden waiting for him and almost caught him at the bridge. They’d jumped out of an old rusty car body in the ditch where they were hiding
and followed him into the trees, into his home. He smiled now, thinking on it. He disappeared on them. Just folded into the trees and willows and disappeared clean. They spread out to search for him, but he lay down and slithered into and under tall swamp grass the way deer sometimes hid from hunters, and they passed not fifteen yards from him and didn’t even know he was there. He thought of standing up and yelling at them and getting them to follow him deeper into the woods. Still deeper until … He wasn’t sure. Until they were lost, maybe. Lost and not knowing what to do and he could get one of them alone and …

  And nothing.

  Just stay away from them. Let them be. That was the best. He cut into the thickest part of the trees and worked back out to the edge of the river where it curved around a big, lazy bend, an eddy, a place where the water swirled into a constant dead hole. He called it his magic spot because he knew the bullheads stayed there feeding on the bottom, which they felt with their whiskers.

  Farther south, way south, they were called catfish and they were huge, fifty, sixty pounds. But up here they were called bullheads and they stayed small. Even big ones rarely made two pounds, and smaller bullheads at half a pound, or just over one pound, were the most common. Still tasted good. He had to be careful holding them, getting them off the hook. They had sharp spines on their front fins and back that went into your hand like needles. They left a poison slime in the hole that hurt like blazes and got swollen and could make your hand and sometimes your whole arm stiff and hard to use.

  But good meat. Reddish-dark meat that was rich, good food. No trout in his river—too muddy—but people said the bullhead meat was as good as brook trout caught fresh in the mountains. Someday he’d fish those mountains. Catch a trout and see for himself if it was as good as bullheads. Maybe sooner than later if he ever decided to run.

  His brain started on its own, thinking on running away, on why he didn’t seem to be running. He shook his head. That was for later. Now he had to get a line in the water, gather dry wood, make a fire. He jerked his mind back to catching something to eat, maybe a bullhead or two. They were easy to catch. He’d think more after he ate.

  He kept a strand of fishline with a leader and hook and lead sinker attached to a willow pole hidden by the eddy back in the brush. Looked just like another willow if somebody saw it, but nobody came there anyway. Not to his woods. Sometimes he actually felt like he owned them, like it was his house, his room. He found the pole now. He flipped over a rotten log and pulled out a couple of earthworms before they could slick-slither fast back into the moist dirt. He gang-slopped both of them in a gob of loops on the hook and then swung the line out over the water so the hook dropped on the bottom where the bullheads fed. They worked their head feelers around in the mud for food, and if they felt the worms, they tried to take them and they were his. Easy to catch.

  It was coming on dusk now. He made a small smoke fire—which called to mind images of Sig on the riverbank—to discourage the mosquitoes, then gathered wood for a proper fire before it got dark night.

  Night.

  He liked the night in the woods, but he knew some people who didn’t.

  Thought there were monsters. Hear a mouse rustling in the grass and think of something big. Mean. Bears or panthers. He’d seen bears, lots of them, but never a panther. One of the uncles he’d stayed with once told him they were there, could walk without sound the way an owl could fly in silence. He asked the uncle why people were afraid of sounds if the panther walked without it, and the uncle told him to quit being a smart-ass kid or he’d probably be eaten by a panther some dark night.

  But he liked the night. Because he was part of it. Or night was part of him. The darkness folded around him like the woods and it was like being a bigger safety. Double safe. Maybe even more than that. He’d learned to like the dark in Manila, where the enemy had destroyed all the power-generating machines when they killed everybody and gutted the city. Even after the American army dragged the abandoned enemy sub to the city docks, ran wires from it, and used it as a temporary generator for some emergency lights, the city was mostly dark, and it was a different city in the dark. Not quite so safe, things happened outside the limits of being safe, dark things that no man should see or even know about and he was only a little kid but he saw and knew and he would never forget. Never get it out of his brain-pictures. But all that had taught him how to move in the dark, in the ruins and alleys, and the dark became a tool he could use to not be there. Had white-blond hair, but he covered it with a dark green army field cap a soldier gave him, a cap so big it came down and rested on his ears, bent them down a little. Soldier said he looked like Dumbo, who was an elephant with big ears. A mean soldier joke. But his cap hid the hair.

  And then he could vanish in the dark. Clean and gone. Like now.

  He brought in more wood and built the fire up. Felt the fishline going into the water, pulled it a bit, and knew he had a fish on. Easy to catch. He pulled the line in and he’d caught nearly a two-pounder. Bullheads had no scales. Just skin. One of the larger ones like this had golden skin on its belly. He took the fish off the hook slowly, avoiding the sharp spines by the front fins. Using dry grass he wiped off the slime, then gutted the fish with the small pocketknife he always carried. Because you never knew. Never knew. He threw the guts back in the river for other fish and crayfish to eat, and cut a small forked willow that he whittled and sharpened to make a meat spit. He slid the bullhead on the two sharpened prongs and held it over the fire, but not too close. Didn’t want to completely torch the meat. But not too far either. Close enough to cook it and crackle the skin, which was as good as the meat, even better if it was rolled in cracker crumbs and fried in grease. But still good this way. Hunger made food better.

  The fish cooked fast. Ten minutes, five on each side, and it was done. He sat back by the fire and ate the skin first, peeled it with his fingers, before picking the meat off. It was hot, but it cooled fast and didn’t take him long to eat it all. Put the bony carcass and head back in the water at the side of the river. Slow current here and an easy spot for the crayfish to get at and eat the remains.

  He added more wood on the fire to get a good-size blaze. He needed good smoke to keep the bugs down.

  He lay back on the grass. Good food, but still not full; there should have been more grease and some white bread. Still, the meal was good and it cut the edge of his hunger. He wasn’t packed full, but he’d caught and cooked and eaten good food.

  He looked at the stars, spread across the sky like they’d been painted there, and he thought about how each of them was supposed to be a sun and maybe even had planets around it. He’d read that the number of stars was so big they couldn’t be counted, more stars than all the grains of sand on all the beaches in the world. He’d also read that if you weighed all the ants on earth in one place, they would weigh more than all the people in one place.

  Crazy.

  But there was a farmer’s pile of stars. And ants wherever you looked. So you never knew. You just never knew.

  And then it came to him. Out of nowhere, while his brain was full of thoughts flopping around like fish. Stars, ants, bullheads, grease, bread. Outrunning Mikey, big, slow-footed Mikey. How nice it would have been to have not just white bread, but two or three of those hot fresh rolls from the bakery to eat with the bullhead meat while he counted stars and thought of ants and wondered how many ants it would take to weigh the same as him. How many ants would it take to weigh the same as a big, slow-footed monster like Mikey.

  And it was right there.

  Right in the middle of his swirling thoughts.

  It was the library.

  The reason he didn’t run away now when he came on thirteen and it was a perfect time for running was the library.

  No. Not exactly. Not only the library.

  It was the library and the librarian.

  But still more than that. It wasn’t the library, as much as the librarian.

  THE LIBRARY

  Bi
g old bugger of a building. Solid brick with carved stone over the entry doors that read: CARNEGIE. Old, with high windows that let in shafted sunlight so everything looked like it was made of gold. Square windowpanes that seemed to channel the shafts of gold light filled with dust motes. And all around were stacks and stacks of books against the walls, with freestanding shelves in the middle of the rooms filled with more books. On the left as he came in was a high flat rack with magazines and newspapers against the wall and, in front of that, large oak tables with straight-back oak chairs. Light shone down on the dark oak of the tables so they seemed alive. Deep oak color in the light-like-living wood.

  And quiet. No hard sounds. Just smooth quiet.

  Place smelled like wood and what? Smelled like … books. Official-looking wood-book-smelling quiet place that made you relax the minute you came in the door.

  That’s what made it feel safe. An official government place where nobody would mess with you. A safe place where none of the loud-hard kids would come.

  A kind place.

  That was it. An official kind place. Big building with gold light on oak tables where you could be safe.

  But North Dakota was safe as well. As safe as the library. Even more because, once he ran west, he was far from all the bad things that tracked him now. Away from the hard ones, away from his parent-vipers, where he could move in daylight and not have to run in alleys.

  Still he stayed.

  Even though he knew it was safer working farms in North Dakota—especially now that he could drive the big grain dump trucks and the big diesel tractor for plowing that made his shoulders bigger.

  And yet he stayed.

  And he knew, even as he worked his brain around it, that the real reason he had not run away this time wasn’t just the library.

  It was the library and the librarian.

  She was a grown-up. And he had no luck with grown-ups. Couldn’t really count on what they said, what they did. They always seemed to say one thing, promise one thing, and wham, go ahead and do something else. You could never make a plan on what they said or did, couldn’t even make sense of it.