The Monument

by Gary Paulsen

  Sticking Mick in there would just about kill him, especially if he tried to eat one of the eggs.

  “Maybe we should go find him,” Fred said. “And tell him where to go.”

  I shrugged. “He was over by old man Jennings’s place last I saw him.”

  “What was he doing over there?”

  “Drawing.”

  “Drawing pictures?”

  I nodded. “Looks like he’s going to draw the whole town unless he runs out of paper.”

  “Just drawing pictures as he goes?”

  “Yup.” The dust was coming into the office bad now from the dumping trucks, and I used my fingers to clean out the corner of my eyes. “His hands just fly.”

  “Is that a fact?” Fred stopped with his handkerchief halfway to blowing his nose. “Are the drawings good?”

  I thought a minute. “I don’t know. I think they are, but I don’t know anything about what makes a good drawing. I know this—they make you think, make me see things I hadn’t seen before. He did a drawing of old man Jennings’s dog Rex, and I saw Rex like he must have been when he was young.”

  Fred blew his nose, then carefully folded his handkerchief and put it away. “You know, I’d like to see that—I really would.”

  “I could take you if you didn’t have all this to do. He’s just three blocks away.”

  He looked at me. “What do you think?”

  “Fred, there’s three trucks waiting.”

  “We’ll take ’em with us.”

  “We will?”

  “Sure. There might not be a chance to see something like this again ever.”

  He thought a minute, then took three cold Cokes out of the machine, poured half of each one out the window and filled them from the bottle in the sack and walked out the door.

  One truck was dumping grain—there was a farmer named Hansen there—and two more were waiting. He handed Hansen one of the Cokes, went to the other two farmers and gave them each a Coke and talked to each of them a little. Pretty soon I was walking down the street with Python by my side and four big men following along behind.

  We had to walk past the hardware and grocery, then along the side of Bemis’s all-service station. Five people walking like that attracted attention so we picked up one here and one there until I looked back and we had nine men and three women following, none of them talking, just following in the early morning behind Python and me.

  We found Mick another block down from where he’d been. He was doing a drawing of an old car up on blocks in back of Harrison’s house. It was an old Ford, and Mick was leaning the tablet against a tree while he worked. I stopped in back of him and watched him draw. All the people with me formed a rough circle around in back of me and if Mick saw us or even knew we were there, he made no sign. His fingers whipped the chalk around, and the car came into being on the paper. When he came to doing the small oval emblem that said Ford in written letters I heard somebody in back of me cough and say:

  “You know, when Harrison was young, he went to sparking in that car and he used to shine it and shine it so the emblem just stood out, caught the light and stood out. Just like on that drawing. How could that be?”

  And so it did. And when he was done with the old car he moved on. Only this time he didn’t fold the drawing into the tablet but tore it from the pad. He handed it to Fred who took it, looked at it, and passed it on to the rest of the people.

  There was no sound except their breathing. I thought it might be because they didn’t like the drawing but it was the other way. They saw what I saw, or thought I saw—saw that the drawings were more than just drawings. Were somehow inside of what they were drawings of, so that they showed all of what that thing had been or would be.

  Showed not just the old car, but in some strange way what made the thing that way, how it lived and maybe died.

  Mick was drawing now by Harrison’s mailbox, how it leaned out and over the curb, the way the shadow from it went. His hands started the big, looping movements to form things in when he suddenly stopped.

  His nose went in the air.

  “Could it be,” he said, “that there is something drinkable nearby?”

  Fred nodded and held out the Coke bottle he was carrying.

  “No, no, I didn’t mean anything sweet.”

  Fred said nothing, just held the Coke bottle out. Something in his eyes went to Mick and Mick nodded and took the bottle and drank back about half of it.

  “There.” He sighed. “I’ve been a touch off since I woke up this morning in that strange position and that helps. That helps.”

  He studied us as if seeing us for the first time. “Now, tell me, where did you all come from?”

  Ten

  IT CAME TO ME that night that I should be an artist.

  Well—not that fast. It wasn’t just one of those silly things you hear about where somebody watches a video and decides to be a rock star or a rodeo rider or an airline pilot. Not wacky like that, or not like we used to do in the orphanage when we would study pictures in magazines and try to imagine how it would be to live the way they lived in the pictures.

  It was not from what Mick was doing, not from how he lived—not that. Who wants to live in a rusty old station wagon drunk all the time with your rear end sticking out the window and not knowing where you are?

  It was something else. Not something that Mick did so much as what his work made me want to do.

  If I could have wrapped the rest of that first day in plastic and kept it in a box forever to take out and look at and play with, I would have been happy.

  Mick moved through the whole town. The grown-ups left after a little time to get back to what they were doing, and I started to follow them as well—Python stayed with Mick again and I had to call him to break him away—but Fred stopped me.

  “The elevator will run fine without you for a while if you want to stay.”

  “It’s all right. He’s just going to draw more pictures and what is that to watch?”

  But he knew, Fred knew that I really wanted to see it, see all of it, and he shook his head. “Things like this come along, you’ve got to see them. ’Specially if you’re young. You stay and I’ll keep up as best I can. Then you can tell me all about it at supper tonight. You be my eyes.”

  So I stayed with Mick almost the rest of the day until Mrs. Langdon found him.

  Until then he just kept moving, working, drawing so that he filled the tablet, and when it was full he turned it over and started to draw on the backs of the papers he’d already drawn on. It didn’t matter to him.

  Once he saw something small, some little thing I couldn’t see. He lowered to his hands and knees and crawled into a shrub by the Walters’s place dragging the tablet behind him.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Come see—come see. Oh, it’s the most lovely thing, the most lovely, lonely thing of all. Come see.”

  I didn’t want to crawl into any old bush. The Walterses had about seven dozen kids from diaper-fillers to older than me, and the older ones had a way of teasing that made me not want to embarrass myself.

  But Python followed him in. I couldn’t let Python follow where I wouldn’t go so I scrabbled down—it was hard because of my leg—and I looked in. Light came down through the bush and showed on a small place, just a little circle inside the bush, and there was a tiny cross made of popsicle sticks where one of the Walters kids had buried a gerbil or a dead bird.

  It didn’t matter what was buried there. Not to Mick. He pulled the pad in with him, and I watched him make the light and the little circle and the two crossed popsicle sticks. While he worked I saw his face and he was crying.

  Tears moving down through the grime of sleeping in the car and the dust under the bush, crying while he worked until he was done. I could see it then, see the sadness of the little grave and the way the light hit the popsicle sticks. When we were walking down the sidewalk with the cracks where the elm tree roots were pushing up, I asked him abo
ut it.

  “How could you see that? Where the Popsicle-stick grave was? It didn’t show, I couldn’t see it until I got in there—how could you see that walking by on the sidewalk?”

  He stopped and scratched his hair around the bald spot with his fingernails. Bits of dust and dirt came out. “It had to be there, didn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that—it had to be there, didn’t it? A child simply had to go in there and bury a wee bird or animal. It was the place it had to be and I knew it was there. Just as I know this woman coming is after me—not you.”

  I turned and there came Mrs. Langdon, walking so fast the band that went around her head to hold her glasses almost flew out in back of her hair.

  “Mr. Strum,” she yelled, half a block away. “Oh, Mr. Strum, I didn’t know you’d arrived.”

  “Who is she?” He scratched his stomach, which was covered with different-colored stripes of chalk where the board had left marks while he worked.

  “Mrs. Langdon,” I said.

  “Ahh, the one who wrote me.” He nodded. “It’s not good,” he said aside to me, his voice lowered, “when they call you Mr. that way. Only people who want something call you that—bill collectors. Or rich bankers who want you to make their nose look better than it is. It was either Oscar Wilde or Whistler or Sargent who said an oil portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth. Or was it the nose? Silly, isn’t it?” But he turned toward her and smiled.

  “Hello.”

  “Mr. Strum,” Mrs. Langdon said—it was the first time I’d heard his last name. “Mr. Strum, when did you arrive?”

  Mick looked at me, a question in his eyes.

  “Last night,” I said. “I think he got here last night. He was here this morning. Sleeping in his car.” I did not add how he was sleeping.

  “But you were supposed to contact me when you arrived. We had a nice room for you at Carlson’s bed and breakfast.”

  “It was necessary,” Mick said, rising on his feet, “to capture the ambience of the town, the soul of the town. I could hardly have done that in the comfort of a soft bed.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  But I could tell that he wasn’t serious. His voice had changed and out of the corner of his eye I thought I saw him wink at me. Still, he smiled at Mrs. Langdon and nodded.

  “I will accompany you now,” he said, “as soon as I pay my assistant.”

  He looked back through the tablet and tore loose the drawing of Jennings’s dog Rex and handed it to me. “For you.”

  “But I didn’t do anything.”

  “More than you know, more than you’ll ever know.”

  In the orphanage when you got something you didn’t argue about it. There weren’t that many things to come your way but I was trying to change some of those things from the way I did them back then. Like grabbing at food or thinking of myself all the time. But I held back the once and that was enough.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re very welcome. I will need your assistance again on the morrow. Perhaps you could meet me, along with your trusted companion”—he pointed to Python—“in the morning at the aforementioned bed and breakfast—say at eight o’clock?”

  I had to work of course. I couldn’t leave Fred alone at the grain elevator. But I thought that if I went for the rest of the afternoon and evening and straightened the books out maybe I could take some time in the morning—“on the morrow”—to meet Mick and help him.

  “I’ll try.”

  “Very good.” He turned to Mrs. Langdon. “And now, my dear, proceed.”

  I watched them until they were near title corner. Mrs. Langdon was tall, and he was short-came just over her shoulder, and she bent to talk to him, her finger wagging and her head shaking—and it looked like somebody walking with a messy pet. Chalk dust seemed to poof off him with each step, and he was stained from the work, the drinking, the sleeping in the car. Just before he was out of hearing I remembered something.

  “Don’t eat the eggs,” I called. “They’re older than you.”

  But he didn’t hear me.

  The rest of that day I worked at the elevator and brought all the books up to the minute and had them all ready so Fred could just enter things the next morning. We went home late and I took a hot bath and sat in my bed in my pajamas and looked at the drawing Mick had given me and decided to be an artist.

  It was there—in the drawing. But in more, too, in the way it had been today watching him work, watching him see things, see inside them. I put the drawing on a piece of cardboard and leaned it against the mirror on my little birch dressing table. I watched it until I was nearly asleep, remembering how he had done the lines, the colors, how he worked the chalk with his fingers to make Rex be something on the paper.

  Before I slept there was a soft knock on the door, and Fred and Emma were there to say good night as they did each night before I went to sleep. It reminded me somehow of the orphanage because Sister Gene Autry always came in to say good night to us the same way.

  Emma tucked me in and Fred ruffled my hair and I lay back on the pillow.

  “I’m going to be an artist,” I said.

  “It couldn’t go any other way,” Fred said, nodding. “Ain’t he something?”

  “It’s not just him,” I said. “It’s the drawing, all of it.”

  “I know,” Emma said. “You just let it grow and grow and have a good time with it. That’s the most important thing.” She leaned down and kissed me on the forehead and touched my cheek with her hand that smelled of lilac water. Fred turned off the light so I could sleep but I lay awake for a long time and stared at the drawing in the light that came in the window from the streetlight. It changed and changed until I thought it was moving, and then I went to sleep.

  Eleven

  HE WAS NOT the same person in the morning.

  I woke up with the sun and had breakfast with Fred and Emma and went with Fred to the elevator to help start up.

  At seven twenty Python and I left the elevator and walked to Carlson’s place where his station wagon was parked. At exactly eight o’clock he came out the door with a pad of paper and a small wooden box that I found was a pencil case. He was scrubbed clean, had on fresh baggy canvas pants and a clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the middle of his upper arms. The hair around his bald spot was slicked back with water. His eyes looked clear.

  “Good morning,” he said, then down to Python, “and to you too. How are you both this morning?”

  “We’re fine. I want to be an artist.” It just popped out and I wished I hadn’t said it because it sounded silly, but he said a strange thing.

  “And how could it be any other way?” It was almost exactly the same thing Fred had said the night before.

  “Can you … teach me?”

  He shook his head. “No. Not to be an artist. You already are that—I knew you had the hot worm in you when I first saw you walking up to the station wagon.”

  “I didn’t think you could see much with your—from that end.”

  “Well, then, there’s seeing,” he smiled, “and there’s seeing, isn’t there? The point is I knew it, and there is nothing I—nor you, for that matter—can do about it. The fact exists. You are an artist.”

  “But I don’t know anything.”

  “Ahh, there I can help you.” He paused and let gas, just as natural as anything, and rubbed his stomach. I don’t think he thought it was crude or even thought of it at all—maybe nothing was crude to him. “She had strange eggs for breakfast—reminds me of some I had in India once. They were pickled but these had the strangest flavor.”

  I didn’t say anything. If they hadn’t killed him by now they probably wouldn’t.

  “I can teach you something of technique, of line, of color—of art.” He stopped at the station wagon and opened the back, put the pad and pencils in the back in a pile of what looked exactly like junk. He closed the rear door and motioned
to the door on the passenger side.

  “Get in. Your lesson starts now.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Tomorrow night there is to be a public meeting to make some kind of decision about the monument. I need to know more about your town, my dear, more of what it’s like so that I can decide what kind of a monument to do.”

  “But isn’t that up to them? To the people in the town?” I held the door open and Python climbed into the front seat and sat in the middle. I climbed in and sat in the middle of a junk pile of old cans, bread wrappers, and empty potato chip bags, and some stuff I didn’t want to guess about. Python seemed to love it. “Don’t the people in Bolton get to decide what kind of monument they get?”

  He looked at me, watched my face. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  I nodded. “It seems like if they’re paying for it …”

  “There it is—right there.” He slammed his hand against the wheel and I felt Python jump next to me. “There’s the crux of it, isn’t it? All of art comes down to that, right down to that.” He laughed but it wasn’t a funny laugh, more a sad one. “You have to kind of squirm around that point—like a bug on a hot stove looking for a cool place. That’s art, that is. Right there.”

  He was silent for a time, which was just as well. The station wagon, once it got moving, sounded like it was going to explode. Things clunked and rattled and the muffler must have been gone because it was impossible to hear anything but a loud yell.

  Which Mick did now. He leaned across Python, close to my ear, and yelled:

  “Art is like medicine—people take it because they have to take it, because they think they have to take it or because you make them think they have to take it. True art, that is.” He took a deep breath, yelled again, “If we left it up to them we’d be waist deep in bleeding pictures of Elvis or Christ on black velvet in no time.”