by Gary Paulsen
Five
IT REALLY happened that fast. When I knew his name and said it, he looked at me through the fence and stuck his muzzle down, scarred like it was a road map, and licked my fingers where they were on the wire. There wasn’t anything I could do except break him out of there.
I waited until dark and came back and unlatched the gate and let him loose. I thought he would run but he didn’t.
He came to me and stood next to me in the darkness and leaned so his shoulder was against my leg, his fur warm and the muscle tight under the skin. I petted him and thought he would leave then but he still didn’t but stood, waiting. When I took a step, he took one, and when I stopped, he stopped.
It was like he was bolted to my leg, would only move when I moved. I grabbed the hair on the top of his shoulder, which about came to my waist, and leaned on him a bit to take the weight off my stiff leg. We started away from the pen and headed home, and never once after that did Python leave my side except when I went into a building.
He wouldn’t come inside but stopped just outside the door and lay down when we got home that night. I told Emma and Fred what I had done and that I wanted to keep Python no matter what. I said that I would sleep outside in a special house with Python if I had to so he could live with us and Fred smiled.
“You don’t have to worry, Rocky. I’ll build him a house and he’ll stay outside just fine. Emma doesn’t mind, do you, Emma?”
And of course she didn’t, just as they didn’t mind anything I did that was half crazy, except that this time it wasn’t. Half crazy.
Python turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me next to Emma and Fred. The next morning Fred went to work and called the sheriff from work. When he came home that night he told me:
“Python is your dog now. I have cleared him with the law. You must take him for his shots and have Doc Emerson check him over, and I will make a doghouse for him Sunday.”
And that’s how Python came into my life and he has never left it since. When I go in the house, winter or summer, it doesn’t matter, he stops at the door, has never once tried to get in. No matter how long or short I am in the house, when I come out he is by the door and stands up. I grab the hair on his shoulder and he walks with me. When I go to school or the movies or the library it’s the same. He stops at the door and waits and everybody knows him and that he is my friend. Nobody, nobody touches him, or me when he’s with me.
Except once.
There was a boy that lived here named Kyle Offens. Kyle was one of those people who tease other people who aren’t right, and he took to teasing me because he thought my leg was fanny. I didn’t pay any attention because of what Kyle was like—he had a brain about the size of my little fingernail and only knew three words or maybe four—but one afternoon when I was walking past him on the way home from school, he started teasing me and took a poke at my arm. It wasn’t much of a poke, and I didn’t even notice it—just a touch.
But in about half a second he was on his back. Python had him down and was standing on his chest and had all his teeth showing. He was growling deep in his chest so that it sounded like a car engine inside a garbage can, and Kyle was telling me he was sorry for anything he’d ever done to me and just about everybody else in his life.
After that nobody touched me or Python again, and after a year and then another year it was never just me. It was me and Python. When I went outside he was there, next to me, my hand on his back leaning a little. When I stopped, he would stop and when I looked at something or somebody, he would look at the same thing.
In a while I didn’t think about it, came to accept that he would always be there. When people talked about me, it wasn’t just there goes Rocky or here comes Rocky, it was there goes Rocky and Python.
We were like one person.
Rocky and Python.
MICK
Six
BEFORE MICK there has to be something about the town because it was really the town that brought Mick. Mick called that ironic, because it was like the town caused its own destruction. Not that it was actually destroyed.
Well. Maybe it was, but not so you could see it.
I don’t know much about towns. All I know is the orphanage and Bolton, Kansas. But I watch television and read sometimes, and so I’ve seen other towns that way. I guess Bolton is pretty much like all of them—like Mick called it, a small version of all other places.
It has some good people and some bad people and lots in between. I probably wouldn’t know anything at all except that Fred hired me to work at the elevator. Because Bolton is a farming community the elevator is the center of everything, so I got to hear about what was happening.
I think he just did it to be nice, so I’d have some spending money. He hired me to help with the books and clean up the office. During school days I worked each night after school for one hour and four hours on Saturday and Sunday we were off. But in the summer I worked each day for four hours, so I was there all the time in the dusty office next to where they brought the trucks to dump the grain through a grate to be pumped up into the elevator towers in the big auger pumps.
At first it was exciting. The farmers came in all covered with dirt and grain dust and they’d tip the trucks up to let the grain pour into the elevators. It was funny, but they would always stand in back and watch the wheat coming out, golden colored in a stream. No matter who they were, they would reach out and let the grain run through the palm of their hands.
Every time.
When I asked Fred about it he smiled and said: “It’s their gold, don’t you see? That’s their gold and they want to touch it as it runs out.”
After a while seeing the grain run, especially in the fall when the big harvest push comes on, it gets a little boring. Then I’d putz around the office and look at the stuff on the shelves. Gloves and special medicines for the cattle and blocks of salt that tasted all grainy and coarse and an old machine that took nickels to give you about a tablespoon of peanuts. It was on a hot summer day that Fred taught me about peanuts and Coke. He came in and took a bottle of Coke out of the cooler in the corner and dropped a nickel in the peanut machine and put the peanuts down in the Coke bottle.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Summer lunch—want some?”
“I never heard of such a thing.”
“Maybe they didn’t sell peanuts in the orphanage.”
“Not Coke either.”
“Try it.” He handed me a Coke and dropped some peanuts in it and it wasn’t bad. The salt made the Coke taste better in some way.
“See? It’s just a quick bite when you feel the heat getting you down.”
Except that when the farmers came in to figure up their grain Fred had a different quick bite. He kept a bottle in a sack under the counter and he would pass it to the farmer, sack and all. They would each take a shot off the bottle and snort and make faces and wheeze and spit out the door in the dust before settling down to business. The only farmer Fred didn’t do the bottle in the sack with was a man named Carl Avery, who would talk about Jesus when he came. Not in a bad way, but just as he might talk about a friend—like Jesus was somebody he just met and liked—and Fred didn’t hand him the bottle.
But all the rest. And when business was done and they had figured up the amount of money due and all the government extras that would come in later, the farmers would stand and talk to Fred.
About many things.
I would sit back in the corner at the dusty desk drinking Coke with peanuts in it and listen to them talk. After a little while they forgot I was there, or maybe figured I was like the desk—almost furniture—sitting there listening to them, and I heard it all.
They loved to gossip.
They’d chew tobacco and spit in a can by the peanut machine—it’s the only thing I never cleaned for Fred, that can full of spit, and it always seemed to be full and I always seemed to have to look at it—and talk about crops and who got the best wheat or the bes
t rain or the best wife or who was fooling around with who or who owed the most money to the bank or who lost the most money in the poker game at Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium.
Fred never spoke much. He’d just smile and nod no matter what they said. I never heard him repeat a story, not once, though he had many chances.
A farmer would come in and sell wheat and tell him about some other farmer who was cheating on his income tax. Then not ten minutes after the first one was gone, the second farmer himself would come in to sell wheat, and here stood Fred, smiling and nodding, and not telling him a word about what he’d heard about how he cheated on his taxes. He’d stand there and let the man talk, never saying a word while nine times out of ten the second farmer would be telling Fred all about the first former and how he cheated on his income tax.
I used to think things were bad in the orphanage, what with one of us talking about another one, but we didn’t hold anything on those farmers. I suspect it meant about as much—nothing—and I wouldn’t bring it up except that it was where all the talk started that was to bring Mick.
I remember the very first time the talk started.
It was on a spring Saturday and we were selling seed. I had to write down each time a farmer bought seed because none of them had much money, and we would charge it until they could pay in the fall.
I had just entered the amount for a farmer named Packer in the charge column. Old Bee-bee—who worked for Fred lifting and carrying and generally anything that didn’t require thinking—was taking the hundred-pound sacks of seed out to Packer’s truck when Packer filled his jaw with tobacco and scratched his neck where I don’t think he’d washed since maybe 1970 or ’71 and said to Fred:
“Talk is we need a monument.”
Like we’d heard all about it. Of course I hadn’t, not in the elevator anyway, and I could tell from the way Fred was waiting that he’d never heard about it either, but he didn’t say anything. Just waited for Packer to go on.
Packer spit in the can and went to the door, his hand on the knob. It didn’t mean he was leaving. I’ve seen some of them stand with their hand on that doorknob for half an hour or more getting ready to leave, talking all the time.
He stood with his hand on the knob and said: “It’s all over town that we need a monument.”
Fred still didn’t say anything, and I remembered now that Packer was the one other man Fred wouldn’t give a drink to. I drew some squares on the blotter with the yellow wooden pencil with the name of the elevator on the side and waited, wondering what he meant by monument.
“It’s because of that one in Washington. Word is Stanger went there on some kind of farm-subsidy trip and saw a monument and decided we had to have one, and so he come back and now everybody says we need one.”
“What monument was that?” Fred asked finally. “What did he see in Washington? There’s dozens of them.”
“The one to the boys killed in Vietnam,” Packer said. “That black wall. He saw that one and said we had to have one too.”
Fred looked out the dust-covered window as a tractor went by on the way to Hokum’s garage, but I don’t think he was seeing the tractor. “Yes, well, Stanger had a boy that stayed in Vietnam, didn’t he?”
“ ‘Stayed,’ hell, he was killed over there.”
“That’s what I mean.” Fred turned from the window and his eyes stopped on my face for a part of a second. They looked soft but not drunk-soft. Just soft. “That’s just what I mean. Stanger lost a boy there, and I can’t say I blame him for wanting a monument. It’s little enough.”
“Damn waste of good money,” Packer said. “Good money after bad. The whole war was bad and now they want to spend more tax dollars on a monument to it. And it won’t bring back Stanger’s boy, nor nobody else, either, to have a black wall on the courthouse lawn.”
“They’re saying that?” Fred asked. “That they want a black wall?”
“Well. No. Just that we should have a monument. There’s a meeting over to the courthouse Tuesday night.”
“Well,” Fred said, winking at me. “I guess if we’re civic minded we ought to be there, oughtn’t we?”
Seven
THE TRUTH was most kids wouldn’t have come to the courthouse meeting about the monument, and I wouldn’t have gone either except that Fred and Emma decided it was important for me to be “community minded.”
Which meant I had to wear a dress. It’s not that I hate dresses if there’s a good reason for wearing one—say if you’re going to the president’s birthday party and you’ve got a written invitation. But usually I don’t like getting into one because it leaves my leg hanging out in the open where I can see it and other people can see it.
But Emma said I had to wear one and Fred nodded and it was little enough to do for them, so Emma tied me down and got me into a yellow dress that she said set off my hair and brown eyes. To be honest about it I didn’t feel bad walking between them to the courthouse. I wouldn’t have admitted it to the world, but I felt all pretty and fresh and maybe strutted a little, as much as you can strut with one leg stiff, and when I turned to the side I liked the way the dress whirled out.
Python followed along behind us, walking about four feet to my rear. If I had been alone he would have walked in to my left so I could grab his shoulder hair, but for Fred or Emma he moved away and just followed.
When we got to the courthouse it was already crowded. There were pickups and cars parked in the small lot in back of the building, so many they were jammed in on top of each other and the overflow filled the street.
Python rumbled at the size of the crowd, “I didn’t know there were so many people in Bolton,” I said.
“Oh, my, yes,” Emma answered. “If you take in all the county around there might be four, five thousand of them.”
“And they’re all here,” Fred said, smiling. “Or almost all of them.”
“They take this all pretty seriously.” Emma stopped to straighten her dress, and as she bent down I could smell the wine on her breath but she didn’t show it.
I put Python outside by the statues of the lions that looked more like sheep near the front door, and he sat looking out across the tops of the people coming up the steps, ignoring them.
Inside the courtroom—the largest room in town except for the gym at the school—was packed to the walls. Fred worked himself in and to the left, and we followed him until we were more or less stuck against the wall.
I couldn’t see anything until Fred picked me up and let me prop my feet on the back of one of the benches so I could see the front.
Except that there wasn’t much to see. Just old Howard Bemis, the mayor, standing up at the main bench.
“The motion has been made that we hire an artist to construct a war memorial monument in front of the courthouse. This special open public meeting has been called to discuss the motion, find its merits and demerits, and open them to public scrutiny to ensure the free operation of the public will in these matters.”
“For God’s sake, Howard, shut up and sit down and let’s get to it.” This from Wayne Conners who owned a farm north of town. “I have to be home by tomorrow to work.”
Howard seemed to rise on his feet. Since he was short and kind of round, it didn’t do much for him except seem to raise him about half an inch. “Need I remind you, Mr. Conners, that this is a town matter for town residents only?”
“And need I remind you, Mr. Bemis, that if it weren’t for my grain money and the rest of our grain money, you wouldn’t have a town?”
“All right, all right.” This came from Fred. I looked around to see him smiling. His voice was soft but everybody was listening. “That doesn’t do any good at all. Let’s just talk about the monument, all right?”
Which settled them right down and showed a side of Fred I didn’t know about. In the elevator he just let the others talk, mostly, and didn’t enter into any of it. I looked at Emma but she didn’t seem surprised.
“Very well,” Ho
ward said. “Back to the issue at hand. The floor is open to discussion. Does anybody have anything to say about the war memorial?”
Which was about like throwing raw meat into the middle of a bunch of cats. Everybody had something to say about it, and they all said it at once. You couldn’t make out any words, just a roar, and Howard held up his hands. It seemed to take about half an hour but finally everybody quietened down again.
“We’ll do it by hands,” he said. “You first, Margaret.”
Margaret Balen stood up from one of the benches in the front row and took a deep breath. She said all at once, “Just so it’s big I think it ought to be big because there are so many small monuments in the world and we want a big one so people don’t laugh at us when they drive through town.” She sat down abruptly.
“Yes. Well.” Howard nodded. “And you, Taft—what do you have to say?”
Taft was a man with no hair at all on his head except for bushy eyebrows and he coughed and said, “I think we ought to know how much money we’re talking about here.”
And so it went, talk and talk until my head was starting to nod. Fred put me down so I could sit on the back of the bench and lean against his chest and doze a little until it was over at last. I heard Howard say:
“All right, it’s settled. We do the monument as long as it falls under two thousand dollars. Mrs. Langdon will see about contacting an artist since she was the one who won last year’s art award at the county fair with her macramé piece depicting the history of Bolton County up to the present.” He banged the gavel and we all shuffled out and worked our way into the street.
Python was waiting and slipped in behind us as we came out.
“I don’t know about all this,” Emma said. “Just because she could knot some baling twine into the shape of Bolton County doesn’t mean Trudy Langdon can find an artist.”
“Magazines,” Fred said. “She’s got tons of art magazines. Carl told me one day he about blew a truss moving them. She’s got crates of them. There’s probably ads in all of them for artists looking to do monuments.”
