Gone to the Woods

by Gary Paulsen

  He thought of Manila and the war. No sense at all to ruin a city that had been as pretty as Manila. No sense to kill all those people and gut the city and leave ugly stains on the wall where they had made people stand before they turned the flames on them. He couldn’t see kids doing any of that, just enemy soldier grown-ups. For nothing. Not a single good reason in the world.

  And the librarian was a grown-up.

  Why would he stay for a grown-up? She was nice to him. But other grown-ups had been nice to him, and then, when he relaxed his guard, they turned not so nice.

  So it didn’t make sense that he would stay for the librarian.

  Even though she … she was different.

  He’d been cutting through an alley on a cold day the previous winter—twenty below—when it was just dark. Late afternoon, early evening, really, far too soon for the drunks to be loose in the bars where he would pretend to sell newspapers for fifteen cents each, and when they weren’t looking close, he’d sweep some of their change off the bar by accident. Change fell on the floor and he’d pick it up for them and keep some of it. Maybe a quarter. Couple of dimes. On a good night he might make one, maybe two bucks.

  It was too early to run the bars for change.

  And it was cold.

  Blue cold. That’s how he thought of it. Walk with one ear pressed down in the collar of your jacket until the other ear got numb. Then switch ears. Left, right. Numb, flip ears, numb.

  Blue cold.

  He’d come to the end of the alley, and between two buildings, he’d seen the front of the library. Probably looked at it a hundred times without actually seeing it at all. This time it looked different with the steam-fog hanging in front of it so the light looked blurry. Special, like movie light.

  The library looked warm.

  And it was blue cold outside.

  And he had some time before he could work the bars so why not the library?

  It surprised him that he’d never been inside before. Maybe it had always seemed too much like school. Or a grown-up trap, where he’d get cornered and they had him because there was only one door.

  But it was cold.

  And the light from the front of the library cut through the ice fog and looked warm.

  So warm.

  He moved to the door, opened it, and went inside.

  Not what he expected at all. Bright and quiet and smelled of wood and books and a gentle flower smell—perfume or lotion.

  Smelled of being kind.

  And it was warm.

  God, it was warm. He could feel the warmth driving the cold in his jacket into his body. He unzipped the jacket and let the warm in, which pushed the cold out.

  He looked around and he realized with a small jolt that the tables nearby were filled with old ladies. Eight or ten of them. Really old. Some of them had to be eighty. That’s where the smell was coming from—the ladies. They sat around the tables with blue hair and glasses and old dresses, knitting balls of yarn into sweaters or scarves and mittens, and the lotion smell came from them. Gentle and kind, grandmother smells. He loved his grandmother, who was the best grown-up of all. She smelled of lotion. When he was very small, he had lived with her for a time, one summer during the war. She made him apple pies and rubbed his knees when they hurt at night and held him when he cried because he was missing his mother, who was working at a war plant in Chicago. Then he was sent to join his mother, and his grandmother went north to work on the cook camp for the road-building crew.

  He didn’t cry anymore; he’d quit crying in Manila because nothing that happened in his life was as bad as what happened to the women and kids in Manila when they stood next to that wall. Not even when his mother was crazy-out-of-her-brain drunk and tried to stab him with a butcher knife under the kitchen table. She didn’t know what she was doing and he never even got clipped. He moved too fast and kept the chair and table legs in front of him. Her knife clinked on the shiny chair legs when it hit the metal. He didn’t like it at all, but it still wasn’t nearly as bad as Manila when he quit crying. Plus, he’d had those chair legs and he couldn’t see a kitchen table with shiny chair legs now without feeling thankful. They didn’t have chair legs in Manila, just bad grown-ups and fire.

  He moved to the side of the door, but stayed close in case he had to cut out. He was there to get warm, to soak up the heat before he had to hit the streets to work the bars.

  He didn’t want to get noticed, just warm. He moved to the side of the door and leaned back against the wall. Tried to fit in, while he got some of that heat in him.

  Moving to the left and staying against the wall put him closer to the old ladies sitting at the table and he realized after a few moments that they were talking to each other in soft whispers.

  He could not hear their low-voiced words at first.

  Just the sound, an almost-music like a lullaby his grandmother sang to him when he stayed with her and his hurting knees and elbow bones kept him awake. Her gentle voice-song, crooning. And, just like when he’d been little and his grandmother sang to him, he leaned against the wall and let the sound come over him, which added to the warmth of the library and covered him like a blanket.

  He closed his eyes and thought of home, mostly of Edy and Sig. Even though home was something he didn’t have, never had. He was only ever in a place. Then another. But a place wasn’t a home. And he wished he had more than just places, wished he had a home. Where people waited for him. Like the old ladies sitting at the tables.

  The warmth and the light thawed him until at last he could hear their words. Not just as music but as real words. They were talking about their husbands who had passed away—never dead but passed away—and children that had moved away. Husbands had passed and children had grown and everyone else had moved on and they were alone.

  So now they came to the library and sat and told their stories to each other in soft voices with the gold light around them because it was cold, deep-northern-killing cold and they couldn’t afford to keep their houses warm all through the day and evening.

  The fuel oil was too expensive so they turned the heaters down so it wasn’t burning so much of their small monthly checks and they could still afford to buy and make two meat meals a week. But the cold brought them aches and pains so they came to the library where it was warm and they sat and talked and knitted scarves and mittens to give to their children who had moved away. They turned their house heaters down and lived on their memories in the library.

  Although he couldn’t cry anymore, his eyes burned listening to the old women who were soft and gentle with only memories to live on. They didn’t complain, they never said anything bad, not even about the oil companies.

  That first time he stayed next to the door and listened to the old ladies in their music-talk about their memories, it took him out of himself. Normally he had to think all the time about his own things—what he had to do to get by. Live. How he could live. Where the next food was coming from, the little money he could find or make, where to move, how to stay safe.

  Their stories seemed to come alive in him when they talked about how they first came to this country, this northern country. The first thing they remembered was their marriage, and how it had been early on. First saucepan. First plates. First dishes. First cabins with screens on the small windows to keep out bugs. How their husbands had been then. Strong enough to split logs with an axe in one hand. Strong enough to walk behind a horse-drawn plow breaking new soil all day and still laugh at night, singing wedding songs. Bring joy to the house. Bring love.

  At first it was like he wasn’t there. Part of the wall. Nobody really saw him or thought of him, and the invisibility made him feel wonderfully safe, like he was more than just a kid with a runny nose and bad clothes and a cloth shoulder bag for carrying old newspapers to fake-sell to the drunks. He was part of the wall listening to the old ladies’ stories, letting their memories wash over and through him and make him better. If they still saw soft beauty and happiness i
n their lives, he sure couldn’t complain because he took a beating now and then and was forced to move through alleys.

  He looked up once when the ladies were talking and he saw the librarian looking at him. Not long and not directly. A sliding glance, her eyes over him and gone. He could tell this was not the first time the librarian had noticed him. He could tell from her look that she’d been watching him listen to the old ladies.

  This time, though, he saw her watch him, and when she saw that he had seen her, she gave him a smile. A small one, same as her glance. Sliding look, brief smile and gone. He relaxed against the wall again.

  She too was old, but not as old as the ladies at the tables. Maybe forty. That old. But not pushing eighty like he thought the women at the tables might be. Forty with glasses and a little bit of gray in her hair. Small wrinkles at the corners of her eyes that were laugh wrinkles. If not laugh, then at least smile wrinkles. Clear gray eyes glancing over him and gone.

  Had they stayed on him, had her eyes caught and held him, he would have left the library and probably never come back. When grown-ups with authority saw you, studied you—even if they smiled and acted nice—it never seemed to work into a good thing. She might have told him to get out, told him he was the wrong kind of person to be there. She could have called the cops and had him taken out of the library because of his bad clothes, his street look, if her eyes held him and locked him down. You never knew. Just never knew with adults.

  But she didn’t.

  Her eyes flicked and were gone and so he felt safe enough to stay. Stayed until nine o’clock, stayed and got warm. Stayed and listened to the old ladies’ stories until the library closed and he could go to work at the bars for change and get a grease-bomb hamburger from Elmer—free for a change—and make a dollar seventy-five working the drunk-change gimmick and move back to the basement at the dump—The Dump—and catch some good sleep near the furnace with a belly full of hamburger and money in his pocket.

  Good day. Library day.

  THE LIBRARIAN

  It all blended in. Life. The library. One overlapped the other until it was more a mix than a simple thing. He had run twice before and was caught and brought back by police and religious do-gooders. So when he was gone working the farms he was one thing, one kind of person. And when they caught him and brought him back to what they termed his home—God, he thought, that they could call it a home—he was another kind of person. Alleys, dark streets, working the dam for fish and the bars for change, the basement and his hot plate and cooking pot, setting pins at the bowling alley now and then, and finally, the woods.

  When the summer turned to fall, he spent most of his time in the woods. Too late to run away again with no fall or winter work on the farms. He had his lemonwood bow and blunt arrows and he hunted and stayed out most of the time. Ate what he could kill. Became pretty good with the bow. Used snares for rabbits and the bow and blunt arrows for grouse. Fishing line for bullheads to vary the meals. Ate sitting or standing by a fire alone, only not alone because he had the woods, like a friend. He knew every sound, every motion, every curve of line and color. The woods were a close friend.

  Now and then, he came into town to get bread. Salt. Cooking lard.

  And go to the library.

  It happened that way. Somehow, without thinking, the library became part of what he was, what he did. A safe place. Like the woods.

  Strangely—considering that it was an official place run by grown-ups—he found himself liking the library. He loved the woods, they were like breathing to him. But he caught himself liking the library. When he couldn’t be in the woods—cold fall rains, deer season when the woods filled with maniac-drunk deer hunters who would shoot at any sound or motion—when he couldn’t be there, he would head for the library.

  Just slip inside the door and stand to the left. Not talk to anybody. Try to thaw out, maybe even get warm, from the bitter chill outside now that winter was either here or at least on the way. Smell the books and polished wood and later, when the old ladies came, the scent of their lotion—which gave him memory-pictures of his grandmother—and after a time, after many visits just standing and listening, he moved carefully to the magazine rack and looked at magazines.

  He did not take them from the rack to a table, didn’t even touch them, but stood by them, pretending not to be there, looking out the corner of his eye to see what the librarian was doing at the main desk. She always seemed to be too busy to notice him. He would have gone, if she had really looked at him. Just another grown-up trap then. But she didn’t look at him and so he started to look at the magazines.

  Sports Afield, Outdoor Life, Boys’ Life. Art. Pictures. He was a slow reader and skipped the words unless they were under a picture; stumbled over the words might be a better way to put it. But he saw, learned from what he saw, and found to his surprise that many of the articles about outdoors, about hunting and fishing, were inaccurate. Like the writer really didn’t understand what he was trying to say and put down the wrong words. Some artist would do a picture thinking it was right, trying to illustrate what the writer was trying to say, only it was all wrong.

  One picture showed a man meeting a bear in the woods, and the bear standing and showing his teeth savage and mean. Didn’t happen that way. Bears didn’t stand like that. They moved. Slope-shoulder moved in a rolling push and if they didn’t like what they saw they either ran away or made a “wooft” sound to tell you to get out of the way.

  He knew because that had happened to him once. The bear didn’t hurt him. Just rolled toward him and made that “wooft” and he just about crapped his pants. He let the bear move on—like he could do anything else. So he knew that the magazine’s showing them the other way, standing and waving their paws around, was wrong.

  He thought at first that he should tell somebody. Maybe tell the librarian. Just a notion and then it was gone. He didn’t want to open that door and let her see inside. Not a good fight to try and change things. Better to move on the way the bear did. Shuffle down and roll on by. Make a “wooft” in your own head.

  So, when he wasn’t in the woods and had to be in town, he spent time at the library looking at magazines. It wasn’t a habit, not really, but something he did without knowing that he was coming to like it. Not realizing that the library had moved into his brain in a strange way, the same as the woods.

  He’d start to have a thing in his head, his thinking, a thing he maybe didn’t understand or know about—cars or guns or whole countries or stars—and he’d come to the library, to the magazine rack, and try to find the answer to his questions. Try to snag the knowing the way he snagged fish below the dam or snared rabbits in the woods. Snag a kind of knowing out of a magazine.

  That’s how he’d learned that all stars were suns. Might have planets around them. Might even be a boy like him on one of the planets. That’s where he’d learned the woods he loved went all the way north to where there were no more trees and snow, where there was ice almost the year around and people who hunted seals. Or caribou and ate meat raw and what they didn’t eat they fed to dogs to pull sleds. That’s when he learned to think outside himself about what might come, like how he might someday want to try a sled being pulled by dogs.

  The library was how and where and when he came to learn things.

  Snag a way to learn out of the library.

  Eventually he moved from standing in front of the magazine rack reading to sitting at one of the tables, which only happened because he was hurt, really.

  One of the bigger kids who set leagues at the bowling alley was sick and he was offered the chance to work league night. Normal league nights he’d earn seven cents a line, plus tips. Usually, though, there were no tips. Tournament nights, however, meant two alleys, eleven cents a line plus a much better chance of tips, so he took the work for the money even though working two lines at eleven cents a line still meant it took a long time to make two dollars at the bowling alley.

  Every alley ended in
a wooden pit in back of the machine, which had a holding-hole for each pin. After the ball came and knocked the pins down, a pinsetter had to pick up the ball, slam it into the groove track that sent it back to the front to the bowlers, grab the pins and slide them into the holding-holes, heave down on a bar-lever over the machine that put all the pins down and set them right for the next ball that came.

  Except if all the pins weren’t knocked over—the bowler didn’t roll a strike—the boy had to return the ball, grab the pins that did get knocked over, and then get out of the way before the next throw came down the lane. Sometimes, when the bowlers got drunk, they would try to catch the pinsetters in the pit with the ball. Big game, big joke for the big men—hit a kid with the bowling ball. Once a kid nicknamed Cat Eyes because he swore he could see in the dark got hit and never got over the limp. Maybe he could see in the dark, but he sure couldn’t see the ball coming at him in the light.

  But the pits were on the edge of warm, and if you stayed busy, you’d work up a sweat and not feel the cold air coming in the high back window. And you weren’t on the freezing streets.

  In back of the pits was a narrow wooden bench where the pinsetter could jump, pull his legs up, and hope to be out of the way when the ball crashed into the pins and sent them flying. Two alleys side by side, jump over a small retaining wall between the alleys, pick up the ball, slam the pins into the pin holes, jump back over the wall to the first alley, throw the ball back, set the pins, climb up on the bench out of the way, and then do it all again.

  Hard work.

  Crippling work.

  Dangerous work.

  Beer was flowing, and as soon as the bowlers were drunk, they began to throw harder, throw wilder, making bets on whether they could catch the pinsetter in the pit before he could jump out of the way.