Brian's Return

by Gary Paulsen

  ‘‘He attacked me.’’

  ‘‘We were told several versions,’’ the policeman said to Brian’s mother. ‘‘Apparently they were fighting over a girl.’’

  ‘‘A girl?’’ She looked at Brian. ‘‘You have a girl?’’

  Brian shook his head. ‘‘No—it wasn’t that way at all. I was coming in the door and he slammed the door open and Susan was knocked down and he hit me and I . . .’’

  But they didn’t hear him. Even if they had listened they wouldn’t have heard him, not really. They would never understand him.

  So he shrugged and played dumb and let them think what they wanted. It didn’t matter because he was starting to understand it now, was starting to see what had to happen, what he needed to do.

  I know someone, a counselor,’’ the policeman said. ‘‘He’s a retired cop and works with boys. I’ll give you his name.’’ The policeman took out a notebook and wrote a name and number on a page, tore it out and gave it to Brian’s mother. ‘‘Here. Call him and he can talk to your boy . . .’’

  Animal-boy, thought Brian. Not boy, animal-boy. But he didn’t smile.

  ‘‘. . . maybe he can straighten him out.’’

  Not unless he can see into my heart, Brian thought.

  Chapter FOUR

  The sign was hung on the side of an office attached to a house.

  CALEB LANCASTER

  Family Counseling

  Please Come In

  It wasn’t really an office as much as it was a room stuck on the corner of a two-car garage. It had probably been a workshop, Brian thought. He stopped at the door. This cop retired and is making money on the side by counseling boys in his old workshop. Great. Just great. He’ll tell me to get good grades, don’t fight, don’t do drugs, obey my parents— and the police—and send me on my way. After getting a check from Mom, which is really a check from the money I’ve saved, since Mom doesn’t have any money. Great.

  He had talked to a counselor briefly the first year after he’d come back but there hadn’t really been anything wrong then. He hadn’t started to miss the woods as much as he would later—and football players hadn’t attacked him yet either, he thought, looking at the sign.

  For a moment he played with the idea of turning and leaving. This was so stupid. There was nothing wrong with him. He had come back at somebody who was attacking him. He had come back a little hard, maybe, but just the same . . .

  His hand turned the knob without his really meaning it to and the door opened.

  ‘‘Hello. You must be Brian.’’

  Brian stopped just inside the door and his eyes moved and in two seconds he had taken in everything in the room. Plain white walls, some cheap pictures of woods and mountains that didn’t seem to match the rest of the space, a framed document of some kind. The desk was gray-green metal. There was one chair facing the front of the desk—an old iron office chair. Along one wall was a gray-green metal bookcase filled with books so heavy the shelves sagged. The floor was clean gray concrete.

  It was maybe the ugliest room he had ever seen.

  Behind the desk sat what Brian could only think of as a wall of a man. He wasn’t fat, just enormous and richly black, with a smile that grew wider as he stood and held out his hand. Brian almost moved back. This man had to be nearly seven feet tall. He literally almost filled the room.

  ‘‘I’m Caleb.’’

  Brian took his hand and felt himself being moved toward the chair across from Caleb.

  ‘‘Take a seat, any seat.’’ He laughed. ‘‘As long as it’s this one.’’

  Brian sat, waited.

  ‘‘They tell me you’re the boy who lived in the woods. The one who was all over television a couple of years ago.’’

  Brian nodded.

  ‘‘Is that right?’’

  Brian nodded again and realized with a start that Caleb was blind. ‘‘Yes . . .’’

  Caleb laughed, deep and booming. ‘‘You were nodding.’’

  ‘‘Yes. I’m sorry. I didn’t know . . .’’

  ‘‘Don’t be sorry. It’s flattering that you took so long to see it.’’

  ‘‘Did it happen when you were a cop?’’

  Another laugh. ‘‘Not really. I got a headache one day, a really fierce one while I was working, and three days later I was blind.’’

  ‘‘Just like that?’’

  ‘‘Just like that. The doctors had some fancy names for what happened but I like to keep things simple. I had a headache. I went blind. That’s it. But we’re not supposed to talk about me. We’re supposed to talk about why you beat the hell out of that football player.’’

  Brian leaned back.

  ‘‘If you want to.’’

  Brian took a breath.

  ‘‘Or we could talk about something else.’’

  ‘‘I didn’t beat the hell out of him.’’

  ‘‘They took him to the hospital . . .’’

  ‘‘He attacked me.’’

  ‘‘Over a girl,’’ Caleb said.

  ‘‘No. Or maybe. I don’t know. He just slammed out the door and hit me.’’

  ‘‘And you hit him back.’’

  Brian nodded, then remembered. ‘‘Yes.’’

  ‘‘Tell me about the woods.’’

  ‘‘Pardon?’’

  ‘‘The woods. Tell me about them. I’m a city boy and don’t know anything about woods. What are they like?’’

  ‘‘I . . .’’ Brian shrugged. ‘‘They’re all right.’’

  ‘‘All right? That’s all? After all you did that’s all you can say? I heard you had to eat bugs and almost died. What was it like—really like?’’

  Brian paused, remembering. A blade of grass that moved, the way a rabbit turned its head just before an arrow hit it, a flash of color when a fish rolled in the water.

  ‘‘I don’t think you would understand. Nobody who hasn’t been there can really know . . .’’

  Caleb nodded and was silent. Then he spoke softly. ‘‘Tell me one thing then.’’

  ‘‘What do you mean?’’

  ‘‘Tell me one thing, one part of it that I can see in my mind and understand. You can do that, can’t you?’’

  Brian shrugged. ‘‘I guess so. Which part do you want to know about?’’

  ‘‘You pick it.’’

  Brian thought for nearly a full minute. Moose attacks, wild wind, good kills, near misses, food—lord, food when he was starving—and the fierce joy that came when a hunt worked. All of it was there, every little and big thing that had happened to him in a summer and a winter, and in the end, he decided to tell Caleb about a sunset.

  There had been many sunsets and they were all beautiful; every one had had different light, different sounds, and he remembered them all the way somebody who watches a wonderful movie can remember every bit of the movie.

  The one he described for Caleb was in the winter. It had been a still, unbelievably cold day when trees exploded and the sky was so brilliantly clear that when he looked into the blue it didn’t seem to have a limit, didn’t seem to end. It was late afternoon and he had eaten hot food inside his shelter and gone outside to get wood in for the night. The sun was below the tree line but there was still light and the sky was rapidly turning a deep cobalt blue and Brian could see a single bright star—or was it a planet? Venus, perhaps, near where the sun had disappeared.

  Suddenly—and it was so quick he almost missed it—a spear of golden light shot from the sun and seemed to pierce the star. Like an arrow of gold light, one brilliant shaft there and gone, and while he watched, transfixed, another shaft came and then another. Three times. Three light-arrows from the sun shot through the star.

  It made him believe, made him know, that there was something bigger than he was, something bigger than everybody, bigger than all. He thought it must mean something, had to mean something, but he could not think what. Three arrows of light. Three-Arrow. Maybe a name, maybe a direction. Later, after he came back a
nd was trying to understand all that had happened, he read that early Inuits in the North saw the northern lights and believed them to be the souls of dead children dancing. Brian knew it was really the ionosphere ionizing but he still wanted it to be the souls of dead children playing, wanted it to mean more, and it was the same with this sunset.

  It was so beautiful it took his breath and he stood, his arms full of wood, staring at the sky until the sun, the star and the light were gone, wanting it all to mean more.

  He tried to tell Caleb everything about the sunset every color, every shade, the small sounds of the ice crack-singing on the lake, the hiss of the cold sky, the rustle of powder snow settling.

  Told it all and when he was done he looked across the desk and saw that Caleb was crying.

  Chapter FIVE

  ‘‘Did I say something wrong?’’

  Caleb wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand. ‘‘No. I was just . . . moved . . . by how it must have looked. It sounds so incredibly beautiful . . .’’

  ‘‘It is. It’s . . . It’s everything. Just everything.’’

  ‘‘And you miss it.’’

  There it was, out in the open. The thought had been in Brian’s mind ever since the police had brought him home, and before that without his knowing it. Small at first, then bigger and bigger. And Caleb had seen it.

  ‘‘Yes. More than anything. I miss . . . being there. I feel I should go back . . .’’

  ‘‘Is it running away or running to?’’

  Brian frowned, thinking. ‘‘It’s neither. It’s what I am now—for better or worse. It’s more that I just can’t be with people anymore.’’

  ‘‘You hate people?’’

  ‘‘No—not like that. I don’t hate them. I have friends and love some people. My mother and father. And I’ve tried to do things with people and go to school and be . . . normal. But I can’t—it just doesn’t work. I have been, I have seen too much. They talk about things that don’t interest me and when I talk about what I think about, what I see, they just glaze over.’’

  ‘‘Like the sunset . . .’’

  Brian nodded, then remembered again that Caleb couldn’t see. But he’d ‘‘seen’’ more of Brian than anybody else. ‘‘That and other things, many other things . . .’’

  ‘‘Can you tell me some of the other things?’’

  ‘‘Like the sunset?’’

  Caleb nodded. ‘‘If you wish. Whatever you want to tell me.’’

  Again Brian paused, thinking.

  ‘‘If it’s too private . . .’’

  ‘‘No. It’s not that. It’s more that what I’ve seen is different from how people think things really are. Television makes them see things that aren’t real, that don’t exist. If I tell you how it really is you won’t believe it.’’

  ‘‘Try me.’’

  Brian sighed. ‘‘All right. Mice have houses and make towns under the snow in the winter.’’

  ‘‘Make towns?’’

  ‘‘See? You don’t believe it, do you?’’

  Caleb shook his head. ‘‘I meant that I wanted to know more. Please tell me about it.’’

  And so Brian did. He had been moving around a clearing one day on snowshoes, hunting. It was cold but not the crippling cold that came sometimes and he had an arrow on the bowstring of his war bow just in case, when he looked out in the clearing and saw a fox make a high, bounding jump and bury its head in the snow, its tail sticking up like a bottle brush.

  The fox came up with snow all over its face, looked around—Brian froze and the fox didn’t see him— then looked down at the snow again. It cocked its head, listening, then made another leap, fully four feet in the air, and dove headfirst into the snow again.

  This time it came up with a mouse wriggling in its front teeth. The fox bit down once, killed it, swallowed it and then listened again, bounced in the air again and came up with another.

  The fox did it eight more times and got three more mice before trotting out of the clearing and away. Brian watched the whole thing, wondered briefly about eating mice and thought better of it. Not that he was squeamish but he had a deer by this time and plenty of meat and besides, it would take probably thirty or forty mice to make a meal and cleaning them—gutting each mouse and skinning it—would take a lot of work and time.

  Still, he was curious. He hadn’t thought much about mice but now that he did he supposed they would be hibernating. But the ones that came up in the fox’s mouth were wriggling. Clearly they hadn’t been sleeping.

  Brian moved into the clearing and stared at the snow, listening as the fox had done, but he couldn’t hear anything. He took off his snowshoes and used one of them as a shovel, carefully scooping away the snow until he was down to grass, and it was here he found the truth.

  The grass had been tall when winter came. When the snow fell on it the grass bent over on itself and made a thick, thatch-like roof the snow couldn’t penetrate. It was beneath this roof that the mice lived.

  Brian cleared more of the snow and found small, round tunnels leading from one snug grass room to another, little homes under the snow. In itself the grass would not have been that warm but the snow— two feet of powder over the top—made a wonderful insulator and the rooms were dry and cozy looking. When Brian lay on his stomach and looked down one of the tunnels he saw that light penetrated the snow, and as he watched, a field mouse came around a corner and saw Brian. It froze and turned and ran back. During the ten minutes he watched five more mice came down the tunnel and ran back when they saw it was open.

  A whole city was under there, he thought as he watched—a mouse city. There must have been hundreds of mice down in the grass tunnels and rooms, protected and snug for the winter, except that it wasn’t completely safe. The fox knew they were down there and with those big ears it listened until it heard one moving through a tunnel. Then it leaped in the air and pounced headfirst, driving down through the snow and grass to catch the mouse.

  ‘‘The fox didn’t hit all the time,’’ Brian told Caleb, finishing the story. There were probably hundreds he missed living down there, so most of the mice were fine. It made me feel foolish, trying to keep my cave warm, working so hard to live. The mice had it all figured—’’

  ‘‘Does anybody else know this?’’

  ‘‘I haven’t seen it in books or anywhere. And nobody would believe me if I told them.’’

  ‘‘I believe you.’’

  ‘‘Well—almost nobody.’’

  ‘‘Tell me more.’’

  ‘‘About the mice?’’

  ‘‘About the woods. What time is it?’’

  ‘‘Three o’clock.’’

  ‘‘Oh. I have another appointment at three-thirty. Why don’t you come back tomorrow and talk to me?’’

  ‘‘As a counselor?’’

  ‘‘No—there’s nothing wrong with you.’’

  ‘‘There isn’t?’’

  ‘‘Not a thing. In the attack you were simply defending yourself—the best way you knew how. I just want to hear more about the north woods. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to—and tell your mother there’s no charge. It’s just that you make it sound so . . . real. I want to hear more.’’

  ‘‘All right.’’ Brian rose. ‘‘I’d be glad to come back tomorrow.’’ And he was surprised to find as he walked to the door that he meant it.

  Chapter SIX

  At first, things didn’t go nicely and he would look back later and wonder at the timing and the way life worked. It was spring, with two months of school left. School became difficult for Brian—everybody knew about the fight. Some thought he was a hero and some thought he was crazy, and most kept away from him. He ran into Carl Lammers now and then in the hallway and Lammers stayed well clear of him.

  Susan decided Brian was just exactly the Right Person in the Whole World for her and made an effort to be near him whenever she could, walk with him whenever she could, talk to him whenever she could. He knew sh
e was a good person, but she was very popular, a member of all the clubs who did all the activities, and she was always trying to draw Brian out, to make him talk about himself. Finally he began to avoid her, in as nice a manner as possible, but word went around that he was stuck-up, and soon Susan and everybody else left him alone.

  Though he liked the solitude, oddly it made him feel bad and made going to classes difficult. He began to hate school and went only because he had to. He studied out of habit, and strangely his grades stayed up. Months later he thought that he would have gone crazy except for Caleb and the dream.

  The dream came when he was awake. In school, at home with his mother, whenever there was a moment of quiet or boredom, his thoughts would glaze over and the dream would come.

  It was a dream of getting ready. Always that—getting ready. Ready to go back. Ready to go . . . home. To go home to the woods and find . . . he didn’t know what. To find himself, something about himself. Often the dream would be about what he would take. The kind of weapon—always a bow, never a gun—the kind of arrows, fishing equipment, clothing. Not just to go back and survive this time, but to live and to be happy where he lived. Just to be. The right kind of equipment. His canoe. A good bow, several dozen good arrows. The right pair of snowshoes. Some hooks and line. A good sleeping bag. Tarp to make a shelter. Maybe a tent. A pot to cook in. No, two pots. One big and one medium. Clothes for fall and winter. Good boots, moccasins.

  He worked the list endlessly in his mind, improving it, changing it and, finally, writing it down on the list. He carried it in a notebook wherever he went, making changes as they came to him, meticulously noting each detail of each item.

  I have become truly anal, he thought once when he changed the kind of arrowheads from the fancy new razor heads to the old-fashioned MA-3s—three-bladed army-issue arrowheads that needed sharpening but were so strong you could hit a rock without hurting them.

  But it was more than just being picky. In the end he was keeping his sanity, arranging his life. At first the List was a guide from the dream to reality but when he had perfected the List he started to gather the items on it, ordering from catalogs in the backs of hunting and fishing magazines. His mother knew he was ordering but she was involved in other things and left him mostly to himself, and as he received items he put them in his room and she didn’t question him.