by Gary Paulsen
He wound down. Stopped. Thought, Oh my God, what am I doing? Talking like this to a grown-up. Rattling on like a broken record. And am I doing this? She couldn’t know these things, wouldn’t possibly understand what I’m trying to tell her. She probably thinks I’m crazy. I went too far. She’ll tell me to leave now.
Instead she nodded. Hesitated for what seemed the longest time to him. Then asked, “Was all that in the book?”
She was listening. Actually listening to him. He shook his head. “Not exactly. But the book made me think of things I’d seen when I was a kid in Manila. It was like … an opening. Like the book opened my brain to let it see other word-pictures somehow.”
He heard her make a small sound—a soft but sudden breath. And he saw her lower lip quiver a tiny bit and she bit it with her front teeth to stop the quivering. Her eyes misted and he thought, God, she’s going to cry. But she didn’t. Not quite. Instead she nodded again, and in a soft voice, almost a whisper, she said:
“Isn’t that wonderful?”
STORIES
And it went this way:
The first book took a day or so short of two weeks to read. Clumsy, toggling back and forth in the pages to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. Brought it back and found out she hadn’t lied—didn’t charge a thing for it. In fact, she gave him another book.
This one a Western story about a boy training a wild horse that somebody had hurt. The horse became his friend. He liked the book even though he knew nothing of horses, but he still had a bit of a plan to head west and become a cowboy. The horse was black and white, which is called a paint horse. Named Poncho and ate carrots out of the kid’s hand.
Things he hadn’t known about horses and now he knew them.
From reading.
He raced through this second book.
One hundred and fifty-two pages.
Knocked that sucker off in a week and one day.
Only had to do skip-back reading a couple of times to check on what he read to not miss anything.
He didn’t miss much and he figured that he was getting better at reading. Also realized that he could know more, maybe be more, from reading.
Amazing.
He wanted more, as if he was … what? Thirsty. Like his brain was thirsty and wanted more things to know the way he wanted water if he was dry. And not just that he wanted more, but had to have it, like water. That’s what came from books, the knowing of new things and then wanting more.
Next book he read in four days, and the fourth book in three days, and then he was reading two books a week, sometimes three. He couldn’t get enough of the knowledge-water for his thirsty brain, and there came a time in midwinter when he brought back a history book the librarian had given him—history, for crying out loud—but he had read it all through and learned about Custer getting wiped out at a place called the Little Bighorn River by Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux Native Americans.
The writer had been a bit too real because it brought back brain-pictures of some of the things he had seen in Manila. The kind of things that he had kept in little compartments in his brain so they weren’t always there pushing at him.
When he returned the book, she could tell he was a little troubled and she asked what he was thinking. He hadn’t meant to, but he found himself telling her about how the book had made some brain-pictures come out of compartments that he didn’t always want out in the open. He told her how he’d lived in Manila for three years when he was a kid and had seen things that he hadn’t talked about.
“What kind of things?”
“Dust,” he said. “Heat and dust and noise. Terrible noise. I heard gunfire almost every night in Manila when machine guns would start firing. So fast it was like a giant piece of cloth being ripped. Must have been the same at the Little Bighorn.”
And for a moment he thought she was going to ask another question, push him to talk when he didn’t like talking.
But instead she reached under the countertop and brought out a pocket notebook, which she set in front of him. Then she reached down again and came up with a brand-new yellow number-two wooden pencil. She put it in the sharpener and cranked the handle and then set the sharpened pencil on the notebook and looked at him.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“It’s for you.”
“For school?” He started to suspect a gimmick again—all this was to get him back in school. They kept catching him and making him come back, but he’d wait until they weren’t looking and scratch gravel. Be gone. He wasn’t going to fall for that just because of a nice smile. No thanks.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It works two ways. You can read and get mind-pictures, which is interesting. And important. But there’s the other thing, the other way. You can see things, do things, learn things on your own, and see if you can write them down to make mind-pictures for other people to see. To understand. To know. To know you…”
“Who?” Who would ever want to see his private word-pictures? Or understand him or know him—an ugly kid, with bad hair, old clothes, no money. Just nobody. A wrong kid in the wrong place with the wrong people at the wrong time doing all the wrong things. Who would even care about him and what he had to write?
“Who?” he repeated. “Write it down for who?”
“Well…” She hesitated. Looked up at the windows a second. Up into the gold light. Then back down to him. “Well, me, for instance. You could show it to me.”
Stopped him cold.
And he thought: She’s a grown-up.
But she was a grown-up who was nice to him, had a warm smile that she meant, showed him how to feed his brain and understand word-pictures and hadn’t asked for a dime from him. Or laughed at him. Or treated him like what he was—street stuff. Or held him off to one side to “examine” him like so many did.
He turned and left the library without saying a word. Just turned and left, out into the frigid air and down the alleys to the basement into the old chair by the furnace, and was sitting down before he realized two things.
He had left the library without a book for the first time since he started reading whole books.
And he had taken the notebook and pencil.
The pencil was bright yellow. Like gold. No teeth marks in it. No scuffs. Full-on eraser at one end. She had sharpened it for him, but the point tip had broken off in his pocket. He sharpened it carefully with his small knife, laid it on the arm of the chair. It looked so clean and new, and he thought, It’s a present.
She gave me a present.
Then he looked at the notebook. A spiral wire at the end holding it together with a hard blue cardboard cover and a brand name in black ink: SCRIPTO. He lifted the cover and saw the clean white pages with thin blue lines. He counted the lines: fifteen of them. Then the pages: thirty.
He sank back in his chair then, looking at the blank first page.
Which called to him.
Like the page forced him to pick up the pencil and make a mark on the paper. Make a word. His word.
The paper was waiting. It felt to him like the page was sitting there, like a dare. Come on, smart-ass, write a word. Let’s see if you can do it.
He wrote two words: The Deer.
His handwriting sprawled all over the place in dumb big letters. He erased it and rewrote the words in smaller, tighter letters. He controlled the pencil better and got the words down, and he then knew that he would tell the story for her.
He would tell the story of the deer for the librarian.
She was a young doe.
And he had seen her drinking water from the river near where he was camped by the eddy. It was late summer and hot, and the flies were at her and he sat still and watched her stamp her feet, angry at the flies biting her. So graceful and beautiful, but stamping her front feet in a kind of swearing.
And he knew the feeling. Deerflies bit humans as well as deer, other animals. Bit deep and took a little chunk of meat out with the bite and it hurt like blazes an
d then itched afterward and if you scratched it you bled.
The flies made him mad, too, and he swore when they bit him as well.
They were at her face, working at the corners of her eyes, and she jammed her head down in the water and shook it to get rid of them. But when she raised her head, they were there again in force. Exasperated, she shook her whole front end and dived completely into the water, splashing and slamming her head back and forth, kicking the water in a glorious spray that caught the afternoon sun and made a quick rainbow.
A doe standing in a sudden small rainbow.
He’d held his breath, hoping to make it last, but the moment disappeared as quickly as it formed.
Back on dry ground, she looked at him as if to say, just there, for a moment, the flies didn’t bother me. And, in that glance, he knew her. Before she turned and leaped away, still trailing the flies, he knew her not as a deer but as another person. A friend.
A friend to be met in the woods. And he closed his eyes, trying to remember everything about her. How she looked, how she moved, the marks on her so he would know if he saw her again, when he saw her again.
And he did.
Only she was dead. After deer season, he was back in the woods, moving through the trees in fresh snow, and he came upon her lying on her side. One of the idiotic drunk deer hunters had shot her poorly, hit in the gut, and she had run and the hunter had let her go without even trying to find her and end it clean, and she had crawled into some willows and died.
Where he found her and knew it was her because he had memorized everything about her, every mark, every lay of her coat, and now she was ended. His friend. Snow in her eyes, red blood spreading and frozen from the wound in a spray, a hideous red rainbow in the snow. And he thought, Oh God, why did she have to die this way? There was not a word for how he felt looking at her. Not sad. But more. Hurt deep inside as if he had been shot himself.
He had seen many dead things.
Sometimes, when he used to sell papers in the hospital before he worked the drunks in the bar, he would come upon people who had just died. He knew by the copper smell, the copper-alcohol smell and the flat white light. He’d seen dead people in Manila after the machine guns were through. Broken and fallen people, like posed, busted puppets when the string snapped, wild chickens pecking at the bodies.
But they were not … what? Not graceful as the doe had been. Who had been forced to crawl into the willows to hide and die alone after some drunk deer hunter gut-shot her and left her.
To say he was sad wasn’t even close.
Small tears. He cried alone there kneeling in the snow with her body and tried to remember everything little about her when she was alive so he could remember her that way. Alive. In the river shaking the flies off. The look she gave him.
And later, a year later, sitting in the basement with his notebook and yellow pencil gifts, he wrote the story of the deer for the librarian with a warm smile, and he tried to not leave anything out, but wrote of how the doe had been alive and when he found her dead and the bodies in Manila …
He wrote all the word-pictures as well as he could, and still later he wrote of setting pins and working on farms and even later he wrote about how he lied about his age and joined the army and he wrote of marriages and unmarriages and becoming a sergeant and wrote of that, too.
He wrote all of that.
He wrote everything he could remember.
He wrote for the librarian with the warm smile. Even after she was gone and he was living in new places, living new ways, even then he carried the notebook with a blue cover and a yellow pencil and wrote all he saw and did and could remember.
Always for the librarian with the warm smile.
Who first showed him how to read the whole book.
Part V
SOLDIER
1957
He was not exactly certain when it appeared to him that the military was any kind of a solution to his problems. The decision defied sensible reasoning, which at best was convoluted and at worst—which was the norm; it seemed for a long time that all his reasoning turned out to be the worst—incredibly tangled. He knew what the military was like. He had known soldiers in Manila. How they lived or, in some cases, didn’t live. And he had no illusions about the life of a soldier. A person only had to see dead soldiers rotting in a jungle one time for that to happen. And yet …
And yet, somehow, the thought of the army came to mind.
Started like this: He had been thirteen and everything changed when he found books.
And then he was fourteen and headed out west to work on farms, or become a cowboy and make his fortune. That’s how his mind worked when he was fourteen: Head out to make his fortune.
He’d earn two, three dollars a day, eat stale food off a metal pie plate nailed to a board, sleep on gunny sacks in a shed, drink water out of a hand pump. If he was lucky. At the end of summer, he’d go back to town, but really back to the woods and working the bars and living in the basement of the apartment building next to the furnace. Warm, but shared with rats.
Then he was fifteen and headed back out west, more west, farther west, West, and four dollars a day this time. One part of the summer working in a fresh-frozen Bird’s Eye vegetable factory for a dollar an hour. Pulling boxes of corn, peas, string beans off the conveyor as they came shooting out of the machines ten at a time, pull ten over to the freezer tray, ten more, ten more, push the tray down to the freezer and ten more, ten more … Huge eight dollars a day. Twenty-eight minutes for lunch from a vending machine. Puke-tasting can of chili eaten with a tiny wooden spoon. Globules of unmelted orange fat and slimy beans that took most of his daily pay and had him crapping like a goose, crap so hot it seemed to make his rear end steam, and then sleep in the brush in clouds of mosquitoes not far from the factory.
Then he was sixteen and back out west still again to work farms or ranches or become a cowboy and have a horse and ride the range except that, this time, he took a job with a carnival troop and learned about life, no, Life, from a woman named Wanda.
But before that, even before going west again and again and the woods, came the school problems. It didn’t work for him; school, the concepts of studying and making friends, the playing nicely with others and doing his work on time, simply did not function for him. Square peg–round hole kind of thing.
In time, his problems went still further, became antagonistic. He’d run and they’d come after him, with the law at times, trying harder and harder to get him to be something he felt he could never be, force him to fit in.
Fit the heck in.
Mash the square peg hard enough and it would eventually fit impossibly in that round hole. The cops would take him to school, drag him into the building, turn him over to the system that would start mashing him into the wrong hole shape.
He had seen, been, done too much. Thought: What do you talk about? Clothes? Girls? Sports? He shuddered to think of even trying to play those games. He never had the right clothes and wouldn’t have known how to wear them if he owned them. He’d roamed the dark streets of Manila hundreds and hundreds of nights where there were soldiers and night women, and he’d seen and heard them too many times to feel anything akin to romance when he was with school girls. He thought all sports were silly: You see a kid run to a fence and try to climb it to raid a soldiers’ camp just so he has something to eat and he gets cut in half right there in front of God and the world by machine-gun fire, and basketball seems inane.
Perhaps, he thought, that was when he began to think the only place for him was in the military.
But before that, when school became a burden, and then an overburden, he simply ran. Got out. Rewrote his grandmother’s philosophy: If it sucks Here, go over There.
He’d head for the woods because, if he stayed in town, they would sometimes find him, bring him back, say strong things to him. But, in the end, it didn’t work. In the end, it was just that, the end.
When he looked ahead in his
life, he didn’t see anything to do with school. Only work and trying to make it through each day alive and, of course, the woods.
The library was always there and books, still more books, and by the time he was full-on sixteen he was reading like a wolf eats. Devouring books, learning to know, but that only took him further from school.
The librarian guided him, gently, with kindness, into new kinds of books and she started to get him to read history. In particular, he read a book about Napoleon and his soldiers and their insane, abortive attempt to invade Russia, which nearly wiped out the whole army as thousands of men starved and many more froze to death in the unbelievably cold Russian winters.
Turns out that his history class in school was studying Napoleon at the same time, and the teacher—who was really the football coach pretending to be a teacher, thick neck, small brain—was lecturing about Napoleon in Egypt and called on the boy to tell what hardships they had suffered. The boy, who had been reading about the winter campaign in Russia and misunderstood the question—which was slightly mumbled—replied that the number one problem was troops freezing to death.
The teacher brutally pointed out his mistake: You didn’t freeze to death in Egypt. He made a point of teasing the boy until he had the whole class laughing at him. Stupid boy—freezing troops in Egypt—how dumb could you be? The boy was always teetering on the edge of complete social disappearance anyway, and the teasing pushed him still further apart in school, away from any kind of social acceptance.
And so the woods. The library and the librarian were his friends, where he would go to know more, be more, and the woods became his living room, his place to live. And school, all that went with school, was the gray, dead thing that threatened to take away his … his everything.
