Gary Paulsen

by Paintings From the Cave: Three Novellas

  We’ve slept in the office at the garage where Erik works part-time. Once, when Erik was dating a girl whose mom owned a dance school, we slept in the studio. That was the best deal yet—we crashed on the couches in the waiting room and soft music played all night long. But then the girlfriend, I can’t even remember her name, started dating someone new, a guy whose little brother didn’t want to sleep in her mom’s lobby, probably, and we had to move on.

  A few times we had nowhere else to go so we slept in Erik’s car, the one we took when we left, just grabbed the keys off the floor near the pile of clothes and empty bottles like they belonged to us and didn’t slow down, never looked back. Sleeping in the car was the worst. Toyotas might get good gas mileage and run really well, but they don’t have much room.

  Trying to sleep in the car was even worse than sleeping in the booths at the Burger Barn, which we did for a couple of weeks last winter. We were warm and dry, sure, but we reeked of old French fries and cleaning solution.

  We’ve been staying with Trudy for about a month now. That means dropping our stuff in a corner of her living room and sleeping on her floor. Tru’s the ex-girlfriend of the garage manager where Erik works and I think she’s just letting us stay with her to make Carl mad. I know we won’t be here long.

  Erik’s Rule #2: We keep clean, we keep quiet, we keep moving.

  Erik is trying to scrape together enough money for an apartment, but you’ve got to have three months’ worth of rent—first, last and deposit—to get a place. We never manage to save enough.

  It’s not that he doesn’t work hard, because he flips burgers during the lunch shift after he’s spent the morning doing oil changes at Dwight’s garage and before his job as the after-school custodian at a Catholic grade school. Everyone pays him cash, under the table, they call it, which means no checks or paperwork.

  Erik keeps track of our money in a little notebook—he writes down what he makes and what we spend and what he saves in the zippered pouch on a cord around his neck under his shirt. I hate that little notebook because Erik always looks worried when he studies it.

  We shop at the Goodwill for clothes and only go to the Laundromat every couple of weeks. But the Toyota needs gas so Erik can to get to work and he makes us take vitamins every day because he says the last thing we need is to get sick. The fake ID he bought from a guy who hangs out at the garage cost a ton, but he needs it in case he ever gets stopped on a traffic violation. And then there’s all the money Erik needed to pay this shady guy Digger he met at the garage. Digger painted the car we stole and did something with the paperwork that made it look like it was legally ours so no one would know it was hot.

  Erik gives me a buck or two every day for breakfast or lunch; I know he hates that it’s either/or, but he doesn’t eat both meals either. He says he’s never really hungry until after he puts in a good day’s work, but I can hear his stomach growling.

  Erik and I might not have a place to live, but we have an address, because you’ve got to have an address to go to school. I don’t know why, though, because all of the forms and permission slips and report cards come by email, which we check at the public library on the account that Grandpa set up years ago. We use Grandpa’s old folks’ home’s address as ours and that keeps me legit at school. No one checks.

  Erik may have dropped out of school to go to work, but he’s real strict about me going. “Bust your butt in classes and get good grades,” he says, “and then you can get a scholarship to college.”

  I bring home all As and Bs so he’ll have less to worry about. “When you get through high school and go off to college, I’ll be able to get my GED,” he always says when he studies my report cards. “Then the Dixon boys will be first class all the way.”

  I don’t want to disappoint him, because that idea seems to mean so much to him, but I don’t see that.

  Ever.

  The worst part about being broke and not having a regular place to live is that I’ve always wanted a dog. But dogs—even more than people because you can’t explain the situation to a dog and expect him to understand—need a warm place to sleep and good food every day. If I could do that for a dog, it would mean I’d have a home and three squares too. So I think wanting a dog is a better dream than hoping for a college education. For a guy like me.

  Erik has always been great about finding cheap fun. Cheap is good, but free is better, so we’ve always liked to visit the dog run in the park.

  We watch all the dogs and pick out which one we’d want to be ours. Erik likes the little ones that are feisty and don’t know they’re small enough to be eaten whole by the bigger dogs. I like the big ones that look like, if you could hear their thoughts, they’d be thinking, Dunh dunhdunh, in a really happy, punchy little hum.

  Even when Erik’s at work, I still like to go to the dog park. When I’m alone, I take my sketchbook.

  I’ve been drawing, or trying to draw, ever since I saw a book at the library about paintings in caves in France. They were the first art ever, about hunting and hurting and dying. And the way I could see the people’s lives in the paintings made me want to do the same thing.

  Erik has never once hit me, but he said he would beat me raw if he ever caught me stealing.

  Erik’s Rule #3: It’s nothing but trouble to want what you don’t already have.

  I think he meant: Don’t take money or food or clothes. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t consider it stealing when I take sketchbooks and the soft smudgy pencils from Mrs. Fitzgerald’s art room at school.

  Because he knows I have to draw or I’ll lose it. When I’m hungry, cold, dirty or sick to death of wondering where we’re going to sleep tonight, I can pull out one of my sketchbooks. A little while later, I’m okay again.

  I only ever get the tiniest thing right—like the way Ms. Meyer’s hair falls over her forehead when she corrects papers at her desk during English or the stretched-out shadow the windowpanes cast on the floor during math. That’s enough, though. Sometimes.

  My best work always seems to be when I draw dogs. I got the crooked back leg of a poodle just perfect one day and I nailed the snout and jaw of a Rottweiler even though he was running around the whole time I tried to draw him.

  So I’m sitting near the dog run after school, drawing, when a guy in a crummy white SUV pulls up. He jumps out and opens the back door and five or six dogs tumble out and race to the dog run’s gate. He slams the door shut and follows them.

  I’ve seen him before. I recognize all the regulars. He’s the only one who ever brings more than one or two dogs, though, and the weirdest thing is that he brings a different group all the time. I don’t pay much attention to the people, though, not when there are so many dog ears and dog tails and so much dog fur to try to get just right.

  I’m studying the dogs, then glancing down to try to catch the shapes and the colors and even the sounds of them with my pencil. I must be staring at the guy, or at least the dogs close to him, because he waves and heads over.

  I’ve got my art gear spread out on the bench so I can’t pack up and leave before he gets to me—I’m not what you call friendly to begin with and Erik has made it clear that most strangers are not safe for people like us.

  But this guy’s got a nice smile. Real. Not like some adults who smile with their mouth but not their eyes and not like the guys Erik has warned me about—bad, mean, sick people with no business talking to kids, who smile with just a little too much teeth showing.

  This guy just looks like he’s in some bubble of … clean. Crazy, I know, and nothing I’ve ever seen before. But it’s there. I can see it in the way he jumps sideways to miss the Chihuahua who scampered in front of him and the way he laughs when the big mutt gooses him in the butt in that sniffy way dogs have.

  “Hey,” he says when he’s finally standing in front of me. “I’m Greg; I’ve seen you drawing before. Can I take a look?”

  Even though I’ve never shown anyone but Erik my sketches, I nod to the sketc
hbook closest to Greg. He picks it up and sits on the bench, but not too close, which makes me feel safe. He leans back and crosses his ankles as he turns each page.

  “That’s Neenie”—he points to a sketch of a terrier—“and this”—he flips to one of a pug—“is Gretchen.”

  I scan the dog park, looking for them. He catches my look. “They’re not here today. Neenie got adopted day before yesterday and Gretchen was in a funk and stayed back to pout and think about what she did.” He laughs at his own joke. I frown, not getting it. “Gretchen bit Slade today when I had them in the outdoor pen and so she lost her field-trip privileges until she can be better behaved.”

  I’m more confused than ever and he can tell. “I’m Greg,” he repeats, and puts out a hand for me to shake, and I do, slowly. “And I volunteer at the animal shelter over on Diehl. I bring a handful of the dogs over here to run after my shift. It’s not really allowed”—he shrugs—“but what the powers that be don’t know won’t hurt them, and those guys deserve a better place to play than on concrete behind chain-link fences.”

  He’s still carefully turning the pages of the sketchbook and nodding. “You’ve really captured their spirits. I don’t know art, but I do know dogs, and this is really good.”

  “Thanks.” I don’t know what to say.

  “What’s your name?” he asks.

  “Jamie.”

  “That’s a good name for an artist—one name, like Christo, is memorable.”

  “I’m not an artist.” Normally I don’t like talking with someone I don’t know, but the way he turns the pages and looks at the pictures and then back at the dogs makes me feel good.

  “Sure you are. I’ll prove it: What’s the going price for your pieces?” My eyes open wide as he digs out his wallet. “I’m not kidding. I’ll buy some. We put pictures of the dogs online along with descriptions to try to find them homes. But the photos, even if I do take most of them myself, are crap and don’t do justice to the dogs. Not the way your drawings do. You could help them find homes.”

  Home.

  He’s asking me to help find homes for the dogs. Me.

  “You could draw them in their pens, if you wanted. It must be kind of cold sitting on the bench.”

  I’m still thinking. Money. For my drawings. Homes. For the dogs, at least.

  “Well, look,” he says, pulling a few bills from his wallet. “Just think about it. Since you haven’t named a price, I’m going to make you an offer: I’ll give you five bucks each for the pictures of Gretchen”—rrrrrip, he carefully tugs her picture out of my sketchbook—“Simon, Papi and AJ.” He gently tears out the other three pages and hands me a ten and two fives.

  He looks so happy that I don’t know what to say. Plus, I have twenty bucks in my hand.

  “I’ve got to get the dogs back pretty soon. Come by the shelter someday—I’m usually there from three until six.”

  And then I hear a voice—mine—say, “Yeah, I think I will.”

  Greg drives off with the dogs and I sit looking at the twenty bucks.

  I could buy four pizzas. I could even go to a grocery store and get … I don’t actually know what I could get, Erik and I don’t go to grocery stores so I’m not sure I’d know how to shop or what I’d do with the stuff when I got it.

  Erik’s Rule #4: Never own more than you can carry or stash in less than a minute and never stash anything you can’t afford to lose.

  Then I think about Erik’s little notebook and his pouch of money and how worried he looks when he pulls either of them out. So I tuck the cash in my jeans pocket. Maybe Erik’s not the only one in this family with an income now.

  I don’t want to tell Erik about the money until I make more and can help him with the apartment fund, but I can’t keep this to myself.

  So I go see Grandpa. His old folks’ home is just a few blocks away from the dog park and I’ve got some time before I need to meet Erik back at Trudy’s for the night.

  Grandpa has always been the one fun and wonderful thing in our lives.

  When we were little, he came over to get us one Sunday like usual and, well, he didn’t like what he saw. He didn’t say a word, just turned very white, and he picked up an empty paper bag from the liquor store that was on the floor and walked over and around the bodies sleeping it off, snoring, on the floor, and he gathered up anything that looked like it belonged to two kids. There wasn’t much.

  He took us away with him that day and we lived with him until two years ago and it was great. We ate frozen dinners together and watched sports on TV and he helped us with our homework and it was quiet and safe and clean. We had birthdays. Christmas. New clothes now and then. No one screamed and no one hit and nobody looked at you funny and tried to touch you in places and ways they shouldn’t.

  He used to take us on the weekends to see the guard dogs at the junkyards down on Washington Avenue. Maybe that’s where Erik learned how to make cheap fun. I don’t know why we thought that was such a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon, to walk up and down that stretch of Washington where there were three or four junkyards and what we thought were huge and ferocious attack dogs, but I remember thinking we had the coolest grandpa in the world.

  But then Grandpa got sick. Erik and I got home from school one day and overheard the neighbors talking about how Grandpa’d had a stroke and had been taken away in an ambulance. I didn’t know what that meant, but Erik did.

  “A blood vessel broke in Grandpa’s head, Jamie. He’s gone to the hospital for a while to get better. We have to keep a low profile until he’s well enough to come back home, or Social Services will find out. We’ll be taken away and put in foster homes, maybe separated. We can’t have that.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “You never have to be scared when I’m around,” he told me. “You just do what I say and everything will be fine. We have to pretend that someone, like from our family, is staying with us, though. People get weird about kids on their own. Don’t let on we’re alone, okay?”

  Erik’s the one person I could always trust, so I believed him.

  We couldn’t visit Grandpa in the hospital because we were kids, but Erik made his voice low and pretended he was a grown-up and called every day to find out how Grandpa was doing. Grandpa couldn’t talk, they said. For a couple of weeks we held things together at the apartment without him, eating canned food and setting the alarm clock so we wouldn’t be late for school, while we waited for him to come back.

  Grandpa never did come home, though. When he finally got released from the hospital, he was sent straight to the old folks’ home.

  Erik hung up the phone after he found out, and turned to me.

  “Something broke in Grandpa’s head when he had the stroke,” Erik told me. “He’s too confused to take care of himself.”

  “We could take care of him,” I said. “We take care of each other.”

  Erik shook his head. “He’s never going to get well enough to live with us again.”

  “We can live here by ourselves,” I tried. “They said the social worker from the care center is going to come and pack up Grandpa’s things because he didn’t have an emergency name in his medical records.”

  “But what about us? We live here too. They can’t just kick us out.”

  “No one really knows we’ve been living with Grandpa, Jamie. It wasn’t exactly official or legal. We don’t want to call attention to ourselves because then Social Services will get involved.”

  “We don’t want that.”

  “Right. So we’ve got to clear out.”

  We went back to the place we used to live.

  We stayed for less than five minutes.

  Nothing had changed since the day Grandpa took us away. The place was still full of empty bottles and loaded strangers. We saw a guy slap the woman who used to be our mother, holding her hair in one hand and yelling in her face about money.

  But it was worth it because that’s when Erik took the car. It was a piece of c
rap, he said, but no one would miss something this beat-up and the kind of people who hung out at the place we used to live wouldn’t have insurance so nobody would come looking for it or get too upset that it was gone. He fixed it at the garage and it ran pretty good. Good enough for us.

  We used to visit Grandpa every day. Erik said not to take it personally that Grandpa couldn’t remember who we were.

  “In his heart, he still knows us, Jamie, and we should act like he’s still there. Just treat him like normal, even though he doesn’t seem like the same person.”

  We only go once a week now, though. We bring him lemon drops and read the sports section to him. He might not know who we are, but we can tell that he likes to hear the baseball stats and football plays and basketball team lineups. The newspapers are usually old, from the waiting room on the first floor, but he doesn’t notice and we don’t care. We still like being with him, even if he doesn’t know it’s us.

  I walk up the stairs to Grandpa’s room on the fourth floor—I don’t like to take the elevators because it creeps me out to be in a small place—and when I get to the door of his room, I can see that he’s asleep.

  I hate to say this, but I’m getting to like those visits best. The kind where I can just sit there in his quiet room and draw. Today I sketch Grandpa asleep in his bed. Well, actually, I just draw his hand resting on top of the blanket. I’m trying to draw his knuckles, which look so much bigger than the rest of his fingers, when I notice that he’s got big ugly purple bruises on his wrists, just under the sleeves of his bathrobe.

  I push back one sleeve and I see that he’s got bruises that go all the way around his wrist. His skin is so papery and thin and the marks aren’t just dark like when I get them, but black-purple-green-yellow and blotchy.

  “Those are from the restraints.” I turn to the voice from the door. It’s Nan, the nicest of the aides who works on his floor. There’s a lot of turnover at the place so we hardly ever know the people taking care of Grandpa. Which is good, Erik says, because if we don’t know them, they don’t know us, and that’s how we like things.