Gary Paulsen

by Paintings From the Cave: Three Novellas

  “You ever been bitten by a rat?”

  He got real quiet. I kept talking.

  “Sharp teeth, rats. Alley rats run, but basement rats don’t always run. Sometimes they stand still and you can kill them with a stick or a brick. They got teeth like razors.”

  I thought the man wasn’t gonna say anything. Finally he said no. “A dog bit me once, but it wasn’t bad, he bit me on the ankle and then ran away.”

  Then I showed him marks on my ankle where the rats bit me and he looked like he was going to cry. From seeing rat marks. He should have seen the dead wino frozen to a grate, bits of his face left there when they dragged him off. So rat bites don’t mean anything.

  I asked him the second question.

  “They made us read that book you wrote and everybody in your book was happy, living in good houses, talking about their problems until the problems went away. Course, they didn’t have no one screaming on the street corner all night long, they didn’t have drunks asleep in their hallways in puddles of pee first thing in the morning, those people in your book. But anyway, in this book you wrote—there was a mother who cooked and cleaned and a father who went to work every day and came home every day and a big brother who didn’t smack anyone around—is that true?”

  He looked at the clock, shoved his hands in his pockets, looked down at the floor—not at me, not at anyone else in the room, either—cleared his throat and said, “Yes. There are families like that.”

  “From around here?”

  He nodded. “Many of them.”

  Then we knew he was lying.

  I quit going to school regular when I found out they were lying to us.

  Besides, there’s more to learning than what’s in school.

  Just getting through a day takes a whole world of knowing.

  It’s not so bad early in the day.

  Blade, he’s a night man. What he sells doesn’t move in the morning.

  First thing in the morning—food.

  I check the fridges. Layla’s ma buys week-old bread and lunch meat. When she thinks of it, my aunt buys big cans of beans.

  I eat lunch meat and bread and beans till I just about puke.

  I’m still hungry after the beans are gone, though. Cans are big, but not that big, and nothing lasts forever.

  I used to shop for food at Skinny Tony’s corner store half a block away. I used to shop without money, but Skinny Tony got too smart. He brought in an old hockey stick. He catches you taking something, you get the hockey stick so hard it makes your ears ring.

  I don’t shop at Skinny Tony’s without money anymore.

  Guys used to come with guns and rob him, too. But Skinny Tony got his own Glock Nine. A crackhead came in with a little .22 peashooter pistol and Skinny Tony blasted him to pieces.

  So no one tries to rob Skinny Tony anymore.

  The best way to get money is to wait until the monthly checks come and everybody’s messed up. Then I sweep their pockets or purses for change. After I hit up Layla’s ma and my aunt, I’ll go through some other apartments where the locks don’t work right. I mostly get small bills. Now and then a ten. Once a twenty. Sometimes just change. Doesn’t matter; I take what I can find.

  I used to work the street, go two, three blocks away, where no one knew me, and hold my hand out.

  I don’t do that anymore.

  Because out there I’m an easy target. Blade or his boys, they come by and I’m done. Got to keep moving. You stop moving, you’re done.

  If you don’t take money from pockets and purses in the building and you won’t stand on the streets, another way to get money for food in my building is to work for Blade. I’ve seen it happen to enough people. I know how it works.

  He has them stand on a corner, and when the cops come, the people call Blade on a cell. At first he pays them with money, maybe some new shoes. They think things are good. Then he says it’s time to sell some weed. Okay, no big deal, weed is chump change around here. Then the weed turns into something else. They’re still doing fine until the day comes when they stop selling, start using. And that day always comes.

  Then they’re done. Finished.

  Because Blade’s inside their heads then. He owns them and they have to sell more and more to keep up, and pretty soon he’s selling them.

  Boy, girl, it doesn’t matter. There are people who buy both. There are always new kids to catch, kids who don’t keep moving, don’t know the safe places to be, think they can sell and not be sold.

  Now, even without money I still got to eat.

  Today I make a mistake and try to lift something at Skinny Tony’s. I catch the hockey stick. When I run out of the store I’m not watching, and I stop and hold my head.

  You stop, you’re done.

  Blade gets me.

  Course it isn’t Blade, but one of his people. Blade doesn’t have to leave the building. His people bring him food, women, all the things he sells. And money. Blade has guys who beat the crap out of whoever gets on his bad side so he doesn’t have to go do it himself. Today that’s me.

  Petey catches me. They call him that because he drinks Sneaky Pete—cheap wine.

  Petey grabs my wrist with his sharp hands that’re like big claws. Strong for such a skinny man.

  “J. How you be?”

  I pull left and right but he’s got me. For now. Cold.

  “I’m chillin’,” I say. “Stayin’ out of trouble.”

  “How’s that girl? What’s her name? Layla?”

  “I don’t know,” I lie. “I never see her. Guess she’s okay.”

  “She’s fine, just fine. Blade wants to see her after she has her brat. She’ll be gettin’ a monthly check then. Blade wants to see her. ’Bout that check, ’bout some other things.”

  “What’s that to me?”

  “I know you talk to her. You tell her that after she has the kid, Blade wants to see her.”

  I wait for his grip to loosen, but it stays tight.

  “Blade wants to talk to you, too.”

  “I got nothing he wants.”

  “You got you. That’s what Blade wants to see you about.”

  “What’s he want me for?” I know the answer but I’m stalling, hoping Petey’s grip will loosen. He’s a little drunk, a little high, but he’s moving down, not up, and he’ll be nodding out soon.

  “Blade is always looking for new … opportunities.…”

  It’s a big word for him, and he has to think, slow down. His hand loosens and I’m gone.

  He swears after me but I’m clean down the alley. Nobody can catch me now because I’m fast and quiet. I run like flying birds. Alley wind. God’s alley wind. I run all the way to the corner before I look back to see him trying to run after me and stumbling.

  I go right, down Second Street, but not too far away from what I know. The only thing worse than being on Blade’s street is when you find yourself on someone else’s. Someone you don’t know, someone who doesn’t know you, someone with a whole new set of rules, someone who’s just like Blade but might even be worse, might leave his building, might take care of things himself, not send some skinny dumb drunk you can get away from quick.

  One block, clean, then into the alley on the next block. I stop and look back but Petey isn’t even out of the first alley, so I double back, slowing down, running from Dumpster to Dumpster, keeping the garbage between me and anybody looking for me.

  Pretty soon I’m back behind my own building, looking over to the busted basement window of the empty building where I’ve got my place.

  Nobody’s around so I truck across the lot and slide down through the window into the basement. Finally, I’m in my place, watching the other world.

  People are eating dinner. I’d forgotten how hungry I was, but now I remember and I can almost touch the smell of food. My stomach growls as I watch. Seems everyone in that building eats at the same time. Must be something rich folks do, eat at the same time every day. Together.

  Iron-head m
an is gone, his four windows are dark, so I lean back and wait. I can’t go out for a while. Petey’s maybe waiting to catch me again—if he can even remember. If he does, though, he’ll be mad and might make it worse than the first time. So I have to stay put. I chill, which is true ’cause it’s cold.

  In a few minutes the iron-head man comes back. He throws his coat over a chair in the kitchen, pulls a pan from the fridge and puts it in the oven. Then he goes into the room with the heads and starts working.

  He’s pinching at the mud with his thumbs and then looking in the corner where I can’t see. He looks across the room while he lets his fingers trace the head he’s working on.

  I decide to move up a floor so I’ll be even with him because I’ve gotta see back in that corner. When I watch that man touch the mud, I forget where I am. When I see those heads, I’m not cold and hungry, standing in a filthy dump anymore. This is the one place where I can see something beautiful and where I feel warm on the inside.

  When I get upstairs, I look out from this new window and there he is. But I still can’t see enough. So I go one room over, chase a rat out, and then I can finally see in that corner.

  He’s got a picture of a man leaning against a chair. It’s a big one, like a poster. But he’s just making the head of the man.

  All of a sudden the kitchen’s full of smoke and he runs to take the pan out of the oven. He drops it in the sink, opens the window and swears some good blue words. I can hear what he says because there’s no glass in my window and we can’t be more than ten feet apart.

  He looks up from the sink and sees me standing there, watching him. We’re staring right at each other, so close that I can see that his eyes are sparkly, but not shiny like he’s lost to something Blade sells. He’s got black skin, and he’s … bright, somehow, like there’s a streetlight shining out from his insides right through his skin, right over to me.

  He’s bald and his head gleams like he polished it. I’m surprised that he’s so young. I’m not good at guessing ages—it doesn’t matter much how old you are where I live, but he doesn’t seem old enough to have a place on his own. Not one that nice, anyway.

  “Hello,” he says. “I saw you the other day. I’m Bill.”

  I nod, but I don’t say anything. He waits a minute and then says, “What’s your name?”

  “Jake. But everybody calls me J. Just the letter.”

  “Well, J-just-the-letter, I’d invite you to dinner, but as you can see I pretty much burned the life out of it.”

  Yeah, I think. Offering me food. Right. Across a fence. Put it on a stick, hold it out in the air. Like feeding something at a zoo. I saw a man on the TV once, feeding crocodiles meat on the end of a stick so that he didn’t have to get close.

  “I’m not hungry. Much.”

  He looks at me for a long time. Not in a bad way, but like he’s figuring me out. “How about I order a pizza?”

  I stare at him, saying nothing.

  “Don’t you like pizza?”

  “You want to eat pizza with me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Across a fence.”

  “Fence?” He looks out and down like he just noticed we’re talking across an alley. “Well, no. You’ll have to come over here. I’ll let you in the building.”

  Pizza sounds good, but I know that some people are bad to the bone when they see a kid. Blade sells to people like that. I’ve seen it happen.

  This guy doesn’t seem like one of them. But I know that bad people don’t always look different on the outside. People can look good, be bad—it’s all in their heads.

  “Why’re you doin’ this?” I ask.

  “Inviting you to split a pizza with me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You have a good face.”

  I shake my head. Look away.

  “What?”

  “I’m not one of those boys like on the street.…”

  “You think I’m somebody who would … bother a child?” His face looks like that writer guy from school when I asked if he knew about rat bites. Kinda like he’s frozen or something.

  “I’m not a child. I’m el … twelve. No one asks someone to come over for pizza without a reason.”

  He exhales, rubs the back of his neck. “Well, J, I do have a reason for inviting you over for pizza: I’d like to make a few studies of you, your face and your head.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m a sculptor. I’m making three-dimensional images of figures—right now it’s just heads—in clay. And I’d like you to sit on a stool here in my studio so I could sketch the lines and planes and curves of your head in clay to sculpt later.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because I’ll pay you. Pizza and ten dollars.”

  “Ten dollars to sit and eat pizza?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s it? You won’t touch me?”

  “God, no. I promise.”

  Then I think I have him. “You want me to take my clothes off?” I saw that on TV once, an artist made pictures of naked people. I don’t have no truck with that.

  “No. Not at all. I just want to look at your head. I’m doing a study of heads right now and I realize, looking at you, that all I’ve done are adult figures. I’d like to try to capture a young person’s form.”

  I don’t know what he’s talking about. But he’s got food and he’s got money. And I can give them both to Layla afterwards. She likes pizza and she needs the money. I can do this for Layla. Besides, I want to see the heads.

  “All right. Where do I go?”

  He smiles again. “Go to the next block.” He points out the window to the front of his building. “I’ll meet you there.”

  So I go to the basement, out the window, down the alley to the street that runs alongside the building, looking for Petey all the way. But I never go this way, so it’s not likely Petey does, either.

  I walk along the fence on the side street, to the front of the iron-head man’s building. He’s there and he opens the door and holds out his hand.

  “What’s that for?” I ask.

  “To shake.”

  “I told you: no touching.”

  He nods and moves back so I can step through the door.

  I slip past him. And I go into Bill’s world.

  Once when I was still in school, they took us on a trip downtown to the library and a museum where a bunch of dead people’s things were laid out for us to look at.

  Those places were like Bill’s world.

  Quiet. Clean. Warm.

  His hallway doesn’t smell of pee and worse, and the walls are clean, no gangbanger raps spray-painted everywhere.

  He waits for me to go ahead of him, but I tip my head at him so that he’ll walk in front of me and I can keep an eye on him. I got to keep moving and I got to watch things. A person could get in trouble if he doesn’t do that.

  The elevator works. The place doesn’t stink and the elevator works. I shake my head. We go up to his floor and down the hall to his loft.

  He’s got no real rooms like the apartments I know, it’s one big space. The kitchen is at one end and I see his bed, just a piece of foam and a blanket, in a corner. A couch that’s missing a cushion is under the windows and he’s got piles of books everywhere—so many that it looks like that library they took us to. I wonder how long it took this man to read all these books. No TV, but soft sounds coming from a radio. It’s not really music ’cause there isn’t any real punch to it. The wood floors are clean and shiny. Not like the torn carpets in my building, so old they aren’t even a color anymore.

  His place smells funny. Like burned food from the oven, then paint, and something from the statues.

  Statues.

  From the windows I could only see three or four of them. Inside, I see that statues are all over, some small, some a little bigger. Not all of them are heads. One statue is a bird with open wings and there are a few small statues of girls dancing, little arms out like they’re s
pinning around so you think they’re moving.

  I look at the pictures on all the walls and a wooden frame with a big white pad of paper in one corner of the big room.

  Off to the side is a bathroom. I take a quick peek: clean. Just to make sure, I flush the toilet.

  He’s watching me, so I say, “We don’t even have water half the time.”

  He looks out the window, across the fence. “That’s not right.”

  No shit, I think. That’s not right. There’s nothing right about the other side of the fence. Everything’s different over there. Even the air.

  “You live here all the time?” I ask. “Is this your home, or just where you come to make heads?”

  “A little of both, I guess. It’s just my place to go.”

  “Yeah, I got one of those too. A man needs his place to go.”

  He looks at me, frowning, and continues, “I won a small grant. It’s not much, but it’s enough so that I don’t have to worry about money and I was able to leave school for a while.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  He raises an eyebrow so I say, “I left school too. Only”—I laugh through my nose—“I don’t think it’s for just a while.”

  “But …” He starts to say something, stares at me for a second, then looks at a number on the wall, picks up the phone and punches the buttons. “What kind of pizza do you want?”

  “A big one. With everything ’cept them little stinking fish.”

  “Anchovies?”

  “Yeah. They smell worse than the Dumpster in the summertime.”

  I’m talking too much. It’s better to just listen. You can’t learn anything talking ’cause you’re just saying stuff you already know. You’ve got to be quiet to learn. And keep moving.

  He orders pizza, then points at the stool in the corner, next to the big picture of the man. “Would you go sit on that stool, please?”

  “With my coat on?”

  “It’s up to you. But aren’t you too warm with it on?”

  Cooking like a hot dog in a bun, that’s how warm I am. But I want to keep it on in case I have to run. This guy talks all right, but you never know. He could buy the pizza, then pull a knife.