by Gary Paulsen
“Still …”
“It will be fine, Emma, just fine.”
And of course it turned out to be, but not quite in the way Fred meant it.
Eight
A WEEK PASSED, then another one, and summer rolled into the busiest part of itself. The elevator was humming, sometimes with trucks waiting in line to bring the grain in and dump it and go back for more. Farmers worked until dark, and Fred stayed open often until midnight or later so they could bring in the last trucks of grain for the day. Then the next morning they would start at daylight and we’d have to be open not long after then to be ready for them, truck after truck rolling in to dump their golden grain, the dust so thick even inside the office you could choke on it, and no way to stop.
There was so much paperwork that I had to be there almost all the time with Fred just to keep up, totaling the grain amounts and filing them in the old wooden filing cabinets next to the peanut machine.
I didn’t think it would ever end, and I took to taking morning walks just after we opened the doors. There was a short quiet time just at dawn before the trucks started to come in from the fields, just an hour or so, and I would take Python and we would walk through the town. Bolton was so small that after a couple of times you’d think you knew it all but there was always something different happening. The birds were always singing and the sun wasn’t hot yet and I wasn’t covered with grain dust yet and Python seemed to like it. I let him pick the way to go, just moving along next to me, his shoulder against my leg, and on one of the morning walks he took me so that I met the artist Mrs. Langdon had sent for to make the war memorial.
Mick.
Although at first I didn’t know he was the artist.
At first I just thought he was a pervert.
Python and I always walked a different way. Sometimes we’d move through the small downtown area because Hopper’s bakery would be taking out the first rolls of the day. The smell of fresh bread came out of the back doors of the bakery into the alley and made our mouths water. Hopper would come to the door and give us each a roll, and Python would take his ever so gently, and we’d eat them hot and steaming.
Sometimes we’d go down in back of Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium because Lyle had a thing about cats and must have had a dozen of them, and Python liked to put them up the power poles. He didn’t catch them and maybe even didn’t want to, but it was fun for him once in a while to decorate the power poles with them, and it probably kept the cats from getting too careless.
This morning Python had taken me by the bakery and Hopper had given us each a sticky cinnamon roll. Python wasn’t much on manners so he’d taken his down kind of in one gulp. I ate mine slower, and when I was done my hands were all over sticky so I let Python lick them. We were standing at one end of the alley, and I looked up while he was licking my hands, and there was Mick.
Actually there was an old station wagon with rust so bad it looked to be falling apart. The back window was rolled halfway down and the left front fender was patched over with silver duct tape until you couldn’t see anything but tape. Jammed into the driver’s-side window was the bottom of a man.
It had clothes on, the bottom, but there it was, filling the window, and I stopped. Python made that sound low in his throat so you thought the ground was shaking.
I knew all about perverts from what the nuns had told us—or sometimes hadn’t told us—in the orphanage and also what we learned in school so I thought naturally I was seeing a pervert.
I also thought—just as naturally—how that pervert would feel if I let Python go and he took about half of that bottom off for a snack to follow up his cinnamon roll.
But something held me back. It didn’t seem right for a pervert to be sitting with his bottom propped in the side of an old station wagon window at dawn in Bolton, Kansas.
Plus it wasn’t moving.
“It’s dead maybe,” I said to Python. “It’s a dead bottom.”
Python rumbled again.
I moved closer.
I know how that sounds. Stupid. Everybody says if you see a pervert get away from him, and everybody is right. But I moved closer. Maybe it was because I was dumb or maybe because I half figured nobody in his right mind would bother me with Python standing next to me. Whatever the reason I moved closer.
Two steps, then two more.
Still the bottom didn’t move. Just stood there in the window. I thought maybe the joke was bad because somebody really was dead, the way it was so still.
When I was ten feet away it moved. Just a bit to the side, a lean, and I heard a moan, so low there was almost a chop to it, kind of, “Oh-oh-oh …”
Then there was a fumbling sound, a click as somehow he reached back through between his legs and operated the door handle. The door creaked open and I was looking at a man standing on his head in the front seat of the station wagon looking at me back between his knees.
Only he didn’t see me. He saw Python.
“Oh God, it’s death, death coming for me. I’ve gone too far this time. I’m gone. Gone.”
Then he saw me, looking still up and back through his legs, and he smiled—that is his mouth seemed to smile, upside down—and he coughed. “Tell me—are you with death?”
I didn’t say anything. It still was in my mind that he was a pervert, and I was ready to run or put Python on him, either one.
“No,” he answered himself. “Death wouldn’t come with a girl. Why, then, why are you with that … that thing?”
“It’s not a thing. It’s a dog. His name is Python, and if you’re a pervert, he’s going to make lunch out of your rear end.”
“Pervert?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ve been called lots of things and will be called many more but pervert isn’t one of them.”
“How is it, then, that you’re standing upside down in a car with your bottom sticking out the window if you’re not a pervert?”
“It was the way I happened to be,” he said, “when I fell asleep.”
Passed out, more likely, I thought but I didn’t say anything. Hell, I thought, any old pervert worth his salt wouldn’t tell you if he was a pervert anyway. He’d just wait and do his pervert things, and I thought for half a second about turning Python loose anyway, just on general principle, when the man suddenly moved. His feet had been propped somehow on the ledge next to the door, and with the door open there wasn’t anything to hold them on the ledge and they slipped off.
Both feet—he was wearing tennis shoes that looked to be made of rags—dropped to the ground, the legs and bottom followed, and he bounced off the seat with his face, kicked sideways off the back of the car seat, rolled half over and was sitting on the ground by the car looking up at me right side up.
“Hello.” He squinted. “My eyes are bleeding.”
“No they’re not. You’re just drunk.”
“Not true. I was drunk. Now I’m not. And my eyes are bleeding. You wouldn’t have a bottle somewhere, would you?”
“No.” I thought of Fred’s bottle at the elevator but didn’t say anything about it. “You don’t need it anyway.”
I think I was going to say more about how he drank too much but he wasn’t listening to me.
“God, look at that. See the light?”
“What light?”
“There! The light coming by that old wall, see how it comes down gold and across your face? Oh, God, see it, see the light? It comes down across you like a blessing, like a kiss from the gods. I’ve got to get it … get it. Stay there. Just there. Stay there. Don’t move.”
And all the time he was talking he had moved around to the rear of the car and was rummaging in the back of the station wagon, pulling at what looked like a bunch of junk to me, folders and boxes and paper sacks. In a few seconds he found a tablet and a small box that he brought to the hood of the car.
“Don’t move, don’t move.”
I had no intention of moving. It was coming to me now, what he was,
the thought, and I was wondering what it would do to Bolton.
He looked kind of like a garden gnome, one of the statues that Clyde Frenser had in his yard and garden. Round and short with red faces, all smiling, all happy, but with some little thing in their eyes, some wicked little thing that made them look like they were always on the edge of doing something wrong. His eyes had the same look, the tip up at the corners, and he had a small beard and was bald on top and looked all mussed and devilish. Even his clothes looked like they came off a garden gnome. He had a bright red shirt over a pale green pair of stretch slacks that looked like they’d been on him for about a year. There were stains down the front of his shirt that I didn’t care to look at or think about much. He opened the box to show a bunch of pieces of colored chalk.
He flipped the top of the tablet back to get to a clean piece of paper and grabbed a chunk of dark-colored chalk from the box and drew.
“Don’t move—not a muscle.”
He sketched fast, his head bent over the tablet, his hand flying in great motions, round and round, and when I leaned forward to see he yelled at me.
“Don’t move!”
Python rumbled at the way his voice jumped but he didn’t even notice that, didn’t notice death. He just kept sketching.
“The light—see the light?” His voice was a whisper while he worked, a hushed sound, almost like praying, and in a few minutes he was done.
“There—I’ve caught it. Just notes, see, just notes, but I can paint it later if I can find somewhere in this place with light, with a room to work in. That’s it, don’t you see? Just a dry room and light. God, light is everything.”
And here a strange thing happened. While he was talking, his voice soft about light and how he needed a dry room, while he was going on Python walked over to him and put his jaw against the man’s leg, just pushed his muzzle over, and the gnome reached down and petted him. Without losing a finger. Python had never let another soul touch him and here he walks right up to this complete stranger who could have been a pervert and lets him touch him on the head.
“You’re the artist,” I said. “The one they sent for to do the monument.”
“Mick,” he said. “Mick … well, any last name you want. Just Mick. It doesn’t matter. Names don’t matter, do they? Only the light matters, the light and the way colors move in the light. That’s all. And shapes. Line—it’s all in the line.”
And all this time he’s petting Python, rubbing his head, “But aren’t you the one for the monument?”
“Well, that goes, doesn’t it? What in blue-bonnet hell would I be doing in this place if I weren’t sent for? I know nothing of farming or wheat or flatness. Only line, and color and form and shading. See—look now, turn and look, girl, at the light coming across the face of that building. Look at how it catches the bricks so you can see the soul of the men who laid them, see the guts of the men who made the building. See? There it is.”
And he turned to a new page in the tablet and started to draw again. This time he wasn’t doing me so I could move, and I stood in back of him and watched him draw. It didn’t make any sense—the lines seemed to fly all over the place, all in browns and reds and yellows, sometimes one over the other and all mixed. I didn’t see how it could make anything but junk, just junk, and suddenly it did.
Suddenly it was all there. All the dust and light from the sun and the bricks in the old Emerson building that used to be a hardware store but now was empty—all of it was there. And the light.
“I can see it!” I said. “I can really see it—how did you do that?”
“It’s not me, is it—it’s the light. It’s the way the thing is, the way of it, and I just make it be the way it is. Like over there, over by that old fence, see how it comes out there and the shadows fall in the dirt by the road?”
And he was off again, the pad out in front of him this time, his fingers holding different pieces of chalk as he moved. Python followed and I followed and watched him work. Once when I looked down, Python was looking at the chalk as well, watching it fly around the paper.
“How did you get here?” I asked. “I mean, if you see all these things to draw all the time, how do you get anywhere?”
He stopped and looked at me. “Ahh, yes, there it is, isn’t it? I haven’t a clue. Drunk, I suppose—drunk is the only way I can seem to get anywhere. I have a drink now and then.”
“You do.” I thought of Fred and Emma. They “had a drink now and then.” Mick must swim in it. When he moved now I could sometimes smell him, smell his clothes, and Python didn’t seem to mind. But then Python liked to roll on dead skunks on the highway when he could find them. Mick’s clothes made me want to stop breathing.
But I followed him. Even the smell didn’t stop me.
He kept moving and I kept following him.
Nine
SOMETIMES you don’t see things and time will go by and by and then you’ll look and see it. In the orphanage we always thought Sister Gene Autry was kind of ugly because she had such a square face and big jaw. But later and still later after I was adopted by Emma and Fred and woke up every morning happy, later I would sit and think of Sister Gene Autry as being kind of beautiful. And maybe she wasn’t, but that’s how I remember her now. I wrote a letter to her to tell her, sort of, without telling her how I thought she was beautiful now, but it embarrassed me and I never did mail it. But I wished I had. Although that’s not the same.
That’s what happened now, while I was following Mick. I’d been in Bolton for years, and what with walking now every morning while we worked through the hard part of harvest, I thought I knew everything about it, how it looked and acted, but I was wrong. I didn’t know anything. Not really.
Mick went through town like a chalk storm, the little colored bits in one hand and the tablet in the other.
“The town, see, it’s all there, all … right … there.”
And he would stop and draw. Once he drew the corner, just the corner, of Henderson’s old white house. It was an abandoned house on the stretch of Third and Elm. I always just thought of it as an empty house, just a box that nobody used any longer. Fred had told me once that there had been a large, happy family there but hard times had come in the thirties and they had all left, and nobody ever heard of them again, not a word.
Somehow that came into the drawing. I watched Mick work, saw the lines happen and the colors and, just from the corner of the old house, felt all the loneliness of the family being gone—all of it. It made me think of Sister Gene Autry and I swore to myself I would write her another letter and mail it this time, and Mick moved on.
On a back street he stopped by a small green house where Mr. Jennings lived. Mr. Jennings was so old that not even Fred and Emma knew how long he’d been in Bolton. Fred thought he was over a hundred and when I watched Mr. Jennings come out for mail once, to the box on the street, I agreed. It seemed to take him about a week to walk out and walk back, and he had this old, old dog named Rex who slept on the front steps. Rex would get up and walk with Mr. Jennings out to the street for the mail, step by step, and together they made you think of old—old dusty dead and old.
Mick did a drawing of Rex on the porch, and Rex didn’t move even though Python was there which sometimes made Rex raise his head, and when he was done I could see Rex as a young dog.
He was still old and not moving and the house was still small and green and Mr. Jennings was still old but I could in some way see them all young and new. I could see Rex how he must have been when he was young with tall shoulders and pretty fur and bright eyes. The drawing made me want to know Mr. Jennings young, know what he was like when he was a young man. I decided just because of the drawing to ask around and find out all I could about him.
“How do you do that?” I asked, but he ignored me, kept going and drawing until I realized that I was late for work and Fred would have to handle the paperwork for the loads without me. He could do it, but it made things slower, and the farmers would h
ave to wait in line longer. That made them mad because they wanted to get back to their fields.
“I have to go,” I said, but he was doing a tree limb near the school, just a limb that hung out over the elementary playground fence, and he didn’t hear me, or didn’t care, and I turned to go.
Python didn’t come.
“Are you staying with him?” I asked. It was the first time he’d ever done that, stayed when I got ready to leave. He turned at last and came to me, leaned in so I could take his shoulder. We walked four blocks back to the grain elevator while Mick stayed to draw the town.
There was a long line of trucks and Fred looked all frazzled.
“I was about to send somebody to find you.”
I slid in behind the desk. “The man came—the artist.”
“Oh—he did? When?”
“Must have been last night sometime. I found him asleep in his station wagon.”
“In his car? Didn’t he know- they had a room saved for him at Carlson’s bed and breakfast?”
“I guess not.” Or maybe he did, I thought. Widow Carlson had heard about a new tiling for small towns—bed-and-breakfast inns—on some television show she’d seen and decided she should turn her house into one.
“Just to pick up a few dollars,” she said to Fred and Emma in the grocery store one day when we were shopping. “To help tide a woman over, you know, the rough spots.”
Fred told me later the Widow Carlson had about as much money as a small European country, having owned seven square miles of prime wheat land that her husband left to her. Maybe she just needed something to do.
The problem was Bolton is off the path to just about anywhere in the world, and nobody ever came except grain and cattle buyers. They spent the nights in Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium until near morning, buying and selling grain and cattle, and then driving on without actually sleeping the night anywhere. So when nobody came Widow Carlson just more or less saved the breakfast portion for the next time—which was two hard-boiled eggs—and, like Fred once said, the eggs must have hair on them by this time.
