by Gary Paulsen
Harris shared my enthusiasm for the comics. This interest would diminish slightly when he came to see the “dourty peectures,” but by the end of the first week he hadn’t seen them yet and had seen the comics, including the Tarzan of the Apes. His reading wasn’t up to my level but it was good enough and the pictures gave him enough information to fill in the gaps.
“That guy was something,” he said, closing the comic book. We were sitting in the open granary door. I was watching closely for Ernie, whom I hadn’t seen for over fifteen minutes—usually a very bad situation. I now personally had been attacked by Ernie several times, the worst inside the outhouse. It faced the river, away from the house, and so the door could be open and it was fun to sit there and watch things down by the river while I was going to the bathroom. Ernie had sneaked around the side of the outhouse and jumped me right in the middle of—well, just say that it was very lucky I was sitting on a toilet when it happened—and during the ensuing fight (really, just me trying to get out of the outhouse alive) it looked like the toilet had been hit by artillery.
So I watched closely for him and never went out in the yard without a board, which I was holding now.
“He never seems to touch the ground...”
“What?”
“Tarzan,” Harris repeated. “He don’t never touch the ground. He just swings in them trees on them vines unless he’s riding one of them big gooners...”
“Triceratops.”
“...Whatever. He still ain’t touching the ground, is he?”
I thought about it. “No, I guess not.”
“Might ought to be a good way to live, just swinging around. Hmmmm.”
And herein lay the one shining ability of Harris—he believed everything was real. When he went for the pigs they weren’t pigs, they really were commie japs, whatever that was in his mind.
When he read a Tarzan comic it wasn’t just a made-up story. It was real. He thought in real terms, in a real world, in real time. The only instance I saw this vary was when I found out why Louie wanted the mice.
The day after we’d mowed and gathered mice I’d asked Harris why Louie needed mice.
“For coats,” he’d said. “Little coats.”
“Coats?”
“It’s better to show you. Come on.”
He had led me to the granary. The downstairs of the building was arranged in wooden bins full of oats and barley and some wheat. Upstairs there was a rough wooden floor and a crude ladder on the side wall leading up through a hole. Harris moved up the ladder like a monkey and I followed, still trying to imagine what he could be leading me to.
Upstairs there was a big cleared area and in the middle of this a large wooden table—ten by ten feet, easily—was set on thick wooden legs.
“See?” Harris said. “Here’s why Louie needs the mice...”
The table was covered with small carved figures. At first I couldn’t understand. There were men and horses and little cabins and small trees and teams of horses pulling sleighs full of logs.
“It’s a winter logging camp,” Harris said. “Louie is always carving on it.”
“Wow...” It was incredible. There were dozens, hundreds of little men working at different aspects of logging, cutting down little trees with axes and small two-man saws, building little cabins, riding little sleighs, sitting in little outhouses. And every horse had gray fur and many of the men were wearing gray fur coats. “He skins the mice to make coats and horsehair,” I said, “for this?”
“Yup. Pretty slick, ain’t it?” He had shaken his head. “It’s all just little carvings. I think he does it because he’s got brain worms. Got ’em when he worked up in the Oak Leaf swamp digging drainage ditches when he was young. That’s why he does ’em—of course, they ain’t real. It’s all in his head.”
It was the only thing Harris didn’t think of as real and I was fascinated by Louie’s dream world. I had gone up there several times since and looked at the table and still hadn’t seen everything and, indeed, was thinking of climbing up there again now to look at it once more but I noticed that Harris was studying the barnyard with new interest.
I hadn’t been there long but I knew when he had that look—it seemed the corner of his right eye went up slightly and it gave him an almost evil gremlin appearance—it meant he had a new idea. Sometimes they were good ideas, oftentimes they were bad ideas, but they were never, never boring ideas and always worth interest.
“What are you looking at?”
“I’m wondering,” he said, “what Tarzan would have done had he lived on a farm.”
“I don’t think he...”
“Do you’s’pose he would have had to touch the ground?”
“I don’t see how he would have...”
“Or do you’s’pose he would have been able to swing all through the barnyard without touching the dirt?”
He stood and left me and went around to the back of the granary and chicken coop and in moments returned lugging what seemed to be half a mile of thick hemp rope.
“I’ve been looking,” he said, dumping the rope at my feet. “And it seems to me that a man could make it from the granary to the loft of the barn without touching the ground, then from the loft back over to that hayrack. We just tie the rope to that elm limb there and over there to the oak limb. Look, see there? If we get to the hayrack, there’s even a place where we can swing out over the river, if we have enough rope for it.”
I was looking at the rope. It seemed ancient, so old there was mold and mildew growing on it. “I don’t know...”
“Come on, there’s nothing to know about it. I’ll just shinny up that elm and you throw me the rope and we’ll do her.”
He was gone in an instant and halfway up the tree before I could say that I thought the rope would fall apart.
“Up here—throw me the rope.” He had crotch-ridden out on the tree limb and was beckoning down to me. He seemed a mile up and I had to throw the rope several times before he caught it. In a minute he had it tied to the limb with what appeared to be eight or nine knots and had dropped the end to the ground and climbed back down.
I tested the rope gingerly at first, then hanging on it with my full weight, and finally bouncing. It held but had spring to it, a little stretch.
“Here, hold it like this and when I get on the granary roof flip it up to me.”
“How are you going to get on the granary roof?” I asked but he was gone again, a dust cloud coming up in back of him as he ran into the granary and disappeared.
He reappeared almost instantly at the small window in the peak of the granary roof. It opened inward and he pushed it over and wriggled until he was half in and half out, then he turned, reached up, and grabbed the peak of the roof and pulled himself up.
“Give me the rope.”
I whipped the rope sideways several times and finally managed to get it close enough for him to grab it.
“Way it works is I’m going to swing from here over to the loft door on the barn and just whip inside and drop in the hay.”
On the front of the barn there was a large opening for putting hay inside to store for the winter. The door opening was seven or so feet wide and the big door was tied open to ventilate the loft. Inside there was an old pile of hay left from winter.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” I called up.
“You bet. And as soon as I do her you can try it.”
I had pretty much made up my mind that there was nothing on earth that would get me to “try her”—Harris looked like he was a mile away, sitting up there straddling the peak of the granary—though I was completely willing to help Harris.
He stood, wobbling on the peak, his bare feet holding at the hip and ridge, and held the rope. I eyed the swing it would take to make the barn loft, and while there was still some doubt I nodded up at him to give him confidence. And in truth I thought he might make it.
Yet there were several mistakes that had already been made that would alter Ha
rris’s destiny. Wind, humidity, rotation of the earth, stretch of old rope, and springiness of an elm tree limb—all had been ignored in the computations. But worse, far worse—I had laid my board/weapon down and we had both forgotten Ernie completely.
“What did he always say?” Harris yelled down to me.
“Who?”
“Tarzan, you dope. Isn’t he always saying something when he does this?”
“He has a yell.”
“How does it go?”
I did a Tarzan yell, or a version of it. “Like that.”
“When he swings?”
“That’s what it says in the comic books.”
“Well, then. Here goes.”
He started a Tarzan yell and without any hesitation whatsoever jumped off the granary roof into space hanging on to a rotten piece of hemp rope.
We would argue later over many aspects of the Tarzan Leap, as it came to be known. How far it went, how far off the aim really was, how much Harris meant, and how much (I thought all of it) was accident. One of the main points of contention involved the yell.
Harris claimed it was a valid and authentic Tarzan yell, made as he swung down from the roof. I maintained that it became a scream of terror the moment his feet left the granary and that, coupled with Ernie’s enthusiasm, was the reason for my own sudden involvement.
In retrospect there was no one point that it fell apart but many smaller disasters that fed the big one.
Ernie had been hiding under the combine. I was standing a few feet off the line of swing with my back to the combine, not twelve feet from the lurking Ernie.
As Harris began his swing, Ernie saw his chance—saw that I had put my board down and was concentrating on Harris.
Just as Harris stepped off the roof Ernie hit me in the back of the head and drove me forward nearly into Harris’s path. Rope stretch and poor aim did the rest. Harris veered enough to hit me head on, Ernie still riding me and spurring me. I grabbed at Harris—I would have grabbed at anything to get away from Ernie—and hung on as the momentum of Harris’s swing carried me, and the clinging Ernie, along for the ride to the barn loft.
Or what should have been the barn loft. Here again miscalculation intervened. Harris’s original swing was off, slightly, to the left. My weight and drag brought it more to the left—as did Ernie’s raking and clawing—so that all of us were well off the expected flight path for the loft; were, indeed, aimed perfectly for the pigpens.
The rope almost held us. That we agreed on. And it would have held Harris alone just fine. But the weight was more than doubled with me hanging on to him.
We swung in an arc—Harris, Ernie, and me—back off the ground, directly over the pigpens and the bynow panicking sows.
Where the rope broke.
We hit in a plume of mud and pig dung—I had the foresight from past experience to close my eyes and mouth this time—propelled by the swing and gravity, with a force that knocked the wind out of me and for an instant even seemed to stun Ernie.
Our surprise arrival did not stun the pigs. They ran over us like stampeding cattle, then back over us, then over us again, and seemed to be thinking of making it a regular part of their exercise when I heard:
“Come here, you gooner!”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Harris—never one to waste an opportunity—hit one of the sows on the side of the snout and swing up into the saddle and I thought, as I went down in a new wave of tromping pig feet, that he looked almost exactly like Tarzan riding a triceratops—if Tarzan had worn bib overalls and been covered with pig slop, of course.
7
In which I am exposed to the city,
and the lure of the silver screen,
and orange pop
Summer days fed into summer nights full of fireflies and the smell of lilacs around the house and back into days where the farmyard became a whole way of life. Any concept of an outside world was lost in the endless games and new ideas Harris conceived.
But when I’d been there two weeks—long enough so that the other parts of my life were all but forgotten and I was content to stay there and play forever—a day came when there was a change in the routine.
Actually the day was much of the same. Up, worry about Ernie, help with milking, and get in trouble. In this case the trouble involved playing at being what Harris called “a red Indian.”
Definitions are important. I had often played Cowboys and Indians back in the cities where I lived, and played War a great deal in the Philippines, and had ironed out forms and disciplines for both games. In War you were always the hero and you always won and you always were generous with your foe—if he lived. In Cowboys and Indians you were always the cowboy and always won—usually with as much gunplay as possible—and often saved somebody in the winning.
Harris had not had other children to play with as much as I had and so he had to make up some of his own rules.
There were, for instance, no cowboys the way Harris played. This caused some difficulty because I had a revolving cylinder, silver-plated (chrome, really) six-shooter with me. I had not used it for War because it was the wrong kind of gun but it made me, clearly, king of the cowboys. It was hidden in my box beneath the bed, along with the pictures, and I suggested bringing it out but Harris was adamant.
“No. There ain’t no cowboys. Only red Indians. And don’t nobody win but the red Indians.”
This idea was new but I was willing to try it as long as I didn’t have to lose. What with Ernie and the pigpen I had been doing rather a lot of losing lately.
“What do we do?”
“We lurk,” Harris said, “and shoot the hell out of everything.”
I warped my imagination around and figured a way a red Indian could have come up with a silver-plated six-shooter—something to do with barter and some ponies—but Harris again shook his head.
“You never in your life saw no red Indian with a silver six-shooter.”
“Well what do we shoot with—our fingers?”
It was a lesson to me—to never, never underestimate Harris.
He took me around to the back of the granary. There had once been a chicken pen back there, years and years before. It had all fallen down and rotted away but willows had grown where the chicken yard had been. Fed by the chicken manure the willows had gone crazy and made a stand of perfectly straight limbs so thick it was almost impossible to get through them. They were every size from as thick as a little finger to one inch across.
Harris pulled a butcher knife out from beneath the granary. It was Clair’s favorite meat knife and only that morning she’d wondered where it had gone and I knew then that Harris had planned to play red Indians even yesterday. I was pretty sure that Clair wouldn’t want Harris to have the knife—or anything with sharp edges or a point, as far as that went—and said as much.
“There’s too blamed much of that in the world,” he said.
“Too much of what?”
“Rules. Every time you turn around there’s something you can’t have or something you can’t do. I’ll tell you what”—he looked at me and waved the butcher knife—“you never in your life saw no red Indian putting up with rules, did you?”
Which was perhaps true. But it was entirely possible that no red Indian had ever taken Clair’s butcher knife and hid it under a granary either, I thought, yet I didn’t say anything.
He waded into the willows and started whacking away. The thicker willows became bows and the thin ones became arrows. We worked for an hour or more peeling bark and using heavy sack-cord as string for the bows and stripping the bark from the thin ones to lighten them up for arrows.
We sharpened the arrows—each of us had six—and set out to do as Harris had stipulated: lurk and shoot everything.
Here Harris and I differed dramatically. I thought he meant, literally, things. I was content to shoot at dirt hunks, mounds of hay, clumps of horse droppings—and just pretend they were settlers or cowboys or cavalry.
Harr
is took it to the next highest plane of realism and went for living objects—cows, horses, and pigs.
I hesitated. Clearly this violated some rule or we—as I pointed out to Harris with what I thought to be impeccable logic—would have seen the grownups out shooting at the animals with bows and arrows.
“They won’t see us anyway,” Harris pointed out. “We’ll be lurking.”
He convinced me. Not directly, but I had started to consider the secondary benefits of this approach. The truth was I had two formidable enemies at the farm. One was Vivian, who had driven my testicles up somewhere around my tonsils and my head down between my shoulders. I still twinged when I thought of her. The second deadly adversary was, of course, Ernie.
It was all right to play red Indians and imagine enemies, I thought, but how much better to have real enemies to shoot at.
We lurked.
Harris led off and I followed, mentally awaiting my chance to get a shot in at Ernie or Vivian, who was out in the pasture in back of the barn.
Harris shot at the sows. I shot at the sows. The arrows bounced off their sides without hurting them, though they squealed and acted in other ways just like surprised cavalry.
Harris shot at a chicken. I shot at a chicken. We both missed—chickens being a much smaller cavalry than pigs—and undaunted we headed around the back side of the barn. I was watching to the rear, hoping for a shot at Ernie, and turned to the front just in time to see Harris take a quick shot.
There had been a small patch of gray fur by the edge of the corner of the barn, not much bigger than the palm of my hand, so small that Harris would normally have missed. And he would probably have missed, but he shot instinctively and his reflexes carried the day.
This time he hit perfectly. The sharpened point plunked into the center of the fur and there was a screech like somebody drawing a million fingernails across blackboards and about fifty pounds of really angry lynx looked back around the corner directly into Harris’s eyes, his soul.
“Oh...” he had time to say. “Buzzer. No, Buzzer. I’m sorry, Buzzer. I’m really sorry. Buzzer, no! Please, Buzzer...”