Dancing Carl

by Gary Paulsen

  A clean thought about Billy.

  And then everybody started skating again. Not suddenly, all at once, but one and two and three and pretty soon all moving to the music and Willy came up to me.

  Sharon was gone—she’d left with her parents—and Willy got on the other side of Shirley.

  “You ever seen anything like that?” He was smiling but it was painted on. “I mean wasn’t that something?”

  Shirley nodded. I didn’t say anything.

  “I want to talk to him,” Willy said. “I want to talk to him now.”

  And he skated for the warming house, through all the skaters and I took Shirley’s hand hard and started to follow but Shirley pulled loose. “I don’t want to talk just now. I’ll skate for a while.”

  And I was caught between but I wanted to see what it was with Carl and I nodded and left her there and went to the warming house with Willy.

  10

  He was sitting on his bunk, at the end opposite the pillow, just sitting staring at the stove, which had a red-gray glow on the side.

  Carl looked tired—no, more than that, he looked smaller. Like he’d carved part of himself off to do the dance on the ice and his eyes were glazed over and in a funny way he was alone. There were other people in the warming house, of course, but Carl was alone on his bunk staring at the stove and people made an effort not to see him, as if he might be embarrassed if they looked at him.

  Willy sat on the bench next to his bunk and I stood for a minute, then sat.

  We didn’t say anything and I thought maybe we should get up and go outside again because Carl didn’t even notice that we were there.

  His eyes went through the stove, into the red glow and through and Willy coughed. “That was really something, the way you moved out there on the ice.”

  Carl said nothing.

  “Did you learn that somewhere? How to move like that so people would think of things?”

  Carl turned from the stove then and his eyes went to Willy, then through Willy. It was as if Willy weren’t there.

  He coughed, took the bottle from his pocket and took a sip to make the cough go away. Two swallows, then three, then another short cough and the bottle went back into the pocket.

  “Was it like a school?” Willy insisted. He was ever one for sticking to a thing, chewing it until it was nothing but a frazzle. I stood up because I was pretty sure Carl wasn’t going to talk to us. But I was wrong.

  “School?” Carl asked, bringing his eyes back to Willy’s face. It wasn’t that he was drunk, or maybe he was but it didn’t affect him that much. It was more that he was still out on the ice, or somewhere else. “What about school?”

  “Did you learn to dance like that at a school?”

  “What dance?”

  “Out there, on the ice. The dance you did—that was neat. Did you learn it at a school?”

  Carl looked at him for a long time, studying his face closely. Then he smiled. “You’re young. You’re just a boy. It’s all movement—not a dance. Everything in life is a movement, a swirl, a spin. And the movements have color. Like some swirls are red and some are green and some are blue like the ice and they all mix together and everything in life is a movement of color to music.”

  And of course I thought he was crazy. But Willy nodded and smiled. It was like he understood something and I thought maybe Willy was crazy, too, and then I remembered that I saw everything in lines and maybe Carl wasn’t crazy. Or maybe we were all crazy.

  “You’re nodding but you don’t see it,” Carl said, looking into Willy’s eyes now, straight in and down. “Nothing in life is without movement and the movement has color and I see the movement and the colors all the time. Sometimes it’s nice and sometimes it hurts . . .”

  And that’s as much as he said, even though Willy tried to get him to talk more about it. He went back to staring at the stove, ignoring us and the people who came and went in the warming house and we went back outside to skate.

  I found Shirley but she was skating with Phil Barret who is a year older and good at football which I don’t play so that took care of that. It was probably just as well because if I’d have gotten serious about Shirley I wouldn’t have learned about Carl later. But at the time it stung a little.

  We moved around the rink and everybody was still skating sad and after a time I went back in and took my skates off and walked home and left Willy at the rinks.

  Once on the way home I tried to move around in swirls and think of colors and something that made it all happen but nothing came out right. I didn’t even see lines, so I stopped. It wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to be caught doing walking down a dark street in your own neighborhood.

  I was just at my door when it hit me that nobody thought Carl was strange for doing it. Here he had gone and twirled around without skates on and the whole rink had stopped to watch him and nobody had said a word or thought it was out of place. If I were seen doing it I would probably be locked up.

  But when Carl did it, it was like something that was supposed to happen. And then I remembered that his dance had made me think about Billy Krieg, something in the dance had made me think about Billy, and that kept me up half the night thinking about it.

  11

  There were these rumors about Carl, things they said at school or around town or down at Crazy Joe’s Bar.

  He was an ex-convict who killed someone and lived with it on his head and drank to hide it.

  He had stolen a lot of money and hidden it and a woman had stolen it and he drank to hide it.

  He once had a wife and she took all his money and ran off with the man who delivered propane gas and was living somewhere in Montana.

  He had a bunch of children he’d deserted and he couldn’t stand the shame of it and had to drink.

  He had once danced with a great ballet company somewhere in Europe but took to drink and it destroyed him.

  He was actually only twenty-eight years old and the drink had burned him out and left him looking old.

  His family had been burned in a house fire and he had started it by smoking in bed and the memory of it drove him into the bottle.

  He had been driven out of a town somewhere in Kansas for doing something they wouldn’t even talk about but for which they would hang him if he ever came back.

  He had fought in the Second World War and done something wrong and couldn’t live with the memory.

  All of these things were said about him and maybe some of them were true and maybe they weren’t true but nobody could say for sure because the people who said those things never once asked him about what he had or had not done. They just talked.

  Nobody except Willy and when Willy asked him it broke Carl, broke him like a motor inside had stopped. Or maybe it was my fault. I should maybe have known better than to bring the B-17 to the rinks.

  But whoever did it or didn’t do it, Carl was broken and I think would have died or stayed down and broken if it hadn’t been for Helen and Carl falling in love. That brought him up, brought the whole town up, but I think for a little time there he was awfully close to dying.

  12

  It started on a Thursday afternoon when we went down to the rinks even though they were closed. There were some powerful winds blowing and snow and cold and most people didn’t go out but Willy came over and had his skates with him and said something about going skating and I thought why not.

  Which was my first mistake. The second one was that I took the B-17 with me. That’s not as crazy as it sounds. Somebody in school had mentioned the fact that Carl might have been a pilot on a B-17 during the war and I was kind of proud of the model and I thought he might like to see it even if David Hanson hadn’t come to look at it.

  School was closed due to the weather, something that didn’t happen that often in McKinley, and I thought the way it was blowing we’d probably spend most of our time in the warming house anyway. The wind chill must have been seventy or eighty below and for anybody who hasn’t w
alked five blocks in heavy wind and cold carrying a stick model of a B-17 and a pair of hockey skates and a hockey stick I can tell you not to bother. I probably won’t be doing it again soon.

  Willy of course thought I was nuts but I’d spent a lot of time on that model and if Carl had actually flown in a B-17 I didn’t want to miss a chance to talk to him about it.

  Somehow we got to the rinks, either with the B-17 flying and carrying me along or with me holding it down, and there wasn’t anybody skating.

  Not even any kids. So we went in the warming house half figuring it would be closed but Carl was sitting on his bunk.

  He smiled when we came in, then his face tightened in a quick frown when he saw the plane but I didn’t think anything of it.

  We knocked snow off and I put the skates and stick in a corner. There was nobody else in the warming house either.

  “What’s that?” he said, pointing at the stick model.

  “It’s a model I made. It’s a B-17.”

  “I know that. I know what it is. I mean why do you have it here at the rink?”

  “I told him he was crazy . . .” Willy started, laughing.

  “Get it out of here.”

  His voice was quiet, almost like a still pond. Not mad sounding or sad, maybe a little afraid, but so quiet and still that I couldn’t quite hear it.

  “What?”

  “Please take it outside. The model. Please take it out now.”

  “But it’s just a model. If I take it out the wind will tear it apart.” Like I said, I had a lot of work in it. I’d probably ruin it later, the way you do with models. Maybe put lighter fluid on the tail and send her off a roof. But that was later, now it was still a fresh model and I hated to just throw it out in the snow and let the wind tear it apart. “I’ll put it over in the corner.”

  “Did you have something to do with B-17’s during the war?” Willy asked and it was something he shouldn’t have asked, not then, not ever.

  Carl turned from the plane to Willy and there was a hunted look in his eyes. No, more than that, more a torn thing, a broken thing—as if something inside had ripped and torn loose and left him broken and he looked at the model and his face wrinkled down and I knew it wasn’t a model anymore, knew he wasn’t in the warming house.

  “Colors,” he said, whispering. “Colors red and down and going around and around in tighter and tighter circles. Hot. Colors hot and alive and going down.”

  Willy stepped back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say anything . . .”

  But it was done. His whisper changed to a hiss, hot and alive, and he stood in the warming house and got into the open place by the door. I dumped the model in a corner, dumped it without looking, and moved away.

  Carl stood with his arms out, still making that hissing sound, and I wondered if I could get out of the warming house and go for help, get the police, but he was by the door and I was afraid to go past him. Not afraid that he’d do something to me, afraid that I’d hurt him somehow.

  So I stood, we stood, and Carl moved his arms even tighter out and the hiss changed to a kind of growl and I realized that he was a plane, a large plane, and I could see it wheeling through the sky, engines rumbling and I knew then that it was a B-17.

  Through two, then three loops around the open area in the warming house Carl moved, turning and banking slowly and I swear you could see the plane.

  Then something happened. Something hit or hurt the plane, one arm, one wing folded up and over and the plane went down, circling in a great spiral as it went down.

  I mean Carl. Carl went down. But it was a plane, too. There in the warming house there was something that Carl did that made him seem a great bomber with a broken wing going down, around and down and I could see it. See the smoke and the explosion as the shell took the wing, the way I’d seen it in newsreels, and then the plane coming down, all the lines coming down, down to the ground in a crash that was like a plane and like a bird, too.

  Down and down and crashing into the ground and Carl lay on the floor by the stove and I couldn’t see him breathing and I leaned down. Willy came from the back of the room.

  But he wasn’t dead. Not yet. He couldn’t move and he smelled and I leaned down to take his arm and Willy took the other one.

  “He stinks,” I said. “What’s that smell?”

  “He went in his pants.”

  “God.”

  “Let’s get him on the bunk.”

  We horsed and pulled until finally he was on the bunk. Or at least the top half was up on the bunk. Then we jacked around until we got his legs up.

  “I think we should get a doctor or something,” I said, looking down at him. “He doesn’t look so good.”

  His face was gray, gray to white, and there was some of the gummy stuff in the corners of his mouth that I saw on Uncle Raymond when he died of a stroke. But Willy took my hand and pulled me away from the bunk. “I don’t know what good it would do, and besides, I don’t think we should leave him.”

  “But what can we do?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s good to leave him right now. He might need us.”

  To be with him when he dies, I thought. That’s all that came through. And I knew it was wrong, but I thought maybe Willy was right—we should be with him. I moved away from the door and Carl suddenly sat up.

  He turned and put his feet on the floor and his face down in his hands and then took the bottle out of his pocket and drank long and hard. I thought he was all right, was over it, but he wasn’t. He’d just moved into the next part.

  He stared past us, or maybe that isn’t quite right either. He didn’t stare so much as just not look at anything—when I looked at his eyes I thought that he wasn’t there, was somewhere else.

  “We were ten and now there is only one,” he said, his voice flat, toneless.

  When he said nothing further Willy leaned forward. “It’s all right, Carl. It’s all right.”

  “No. It isn’t. We were ten and now we are only one and she is gone.” He was crying now and I felt awful because he was hurt, hurt deep and I thought maybe somehow we had done it. “She is gone, curling down in fire and heat and gone to hell with all of them and I’m the only one alive.”

  He stopped and kind of weaved and I thought he was either going to pass out or fall back on the bunk but he kept on.

  “We were going to Bremen and there were ten of us and she was the Lucky Doll, the Lucky Lady who never let us down but we took one in the wing root and she crumpled, crumpled and started down and the fire started up, started as we whipped around in the tight spin the tight spin the tight spin . . .”

  He stopped for breath then, took it deep and hard, then talked again, his words tight and fast, slamming one against the next so hard they almost ran over each other.

  “. . .oh God the tight spin and the fire came then all red and roaring and hot and then the explosion and I was blown clear. Only me. I was clear and falling next to the Lucky Doll, falling with her falling around and around down towards the ground with the burning Lady, dancing with the burning Lady to the ground while the fire took her and I was the only one, the only one left . . .”

  Another breath and again we thought he was done and Willy said: “It’s all right. It’s all right,” the way he had done when Barbara Tilson’s puppy was hit by the grain truck except then it wasn’t all right because the puppy was dying and it wasn’t all right now because I was sure Carl was dying.

  “No!” He screamed it. “NO. NO. It wasn’t all right because I danced with her, danced with the Lucky Doll down and down and when I looked to her I saw Jimmy in the belly turret, saw Jimmy in the belly turret and he was looking right at me and his legs, his legs were on fire and he was in the Lucky Doll and I was out and free and he was burning and he looked right at me, dancing down and down and then he tried to choke himself with his microphone cord, choke himself and I wanted to help him, down and down I danced with the Lucky Doll, danced with the lady wi
th the hole in her stocking and her knees keep a knocking dance to the light of the moon ...”

  He sang the last in a kind of Oriental singsong voice, sang it high and low, and then fell over on the bunk and I thought he was gone.

  Willy leaned over. “He’s still breathing. Help me with his legs.”

  We got his legs up on the bunk again and this time he didn’t come to but stayed asleep, or passed out and we sat back on the benches.

  “We’ve done a terrible thing,” I said, looking down at Carl. “Without meaning to we’ve done some kind of a terrible thing.”

  Willy looked at him, lying in the smell, and he shook his head. “No. Not us. Somebody did, somebody back then did a terrible thing to him but it wasn’t us. We just reminded him of it.”

  We sat in the shack for hours after that, talking about Carl and how it must have been to dance with a falling B-17 or see your friend burn and finally, when it got late and he was still out cold, afraid to stay and afraid to go, we left and walked home.

  We banked the stove before we left, loaded it with birch and turned the damper down, so Carl wouldn’t freeze to death and then we left him there, with the stove cooking and the light on.

  I was sure that when we came back he would either be dead or gone and I knew I wasn’t going to sleep. Halfway home I threw the model in a garbage can, threw the work away, and maybe I cried some and I thought how awful it was that you could mean well and do so much damage to somebody. I really thought then that Carl was broken, a broken thing and we had done the breaking and Willy agreed and we didn’t see any hope for Carl, for what we had done.

  But that was before Helen came.

  13

  Sometimes things mix. Sometimes you seem to start with something that’s by itself and you think it will stay that way but then it mixes and it’s all different. Like when you mix two colors of paint in art class and you get something completely new and different.

  Part of the rinks that winter with Carl is like that. It started with hockey, with skating, just like it always did, and then it started to mix with the feelings of Billy Krieg dying and that mixed with the way we broke Carl without meaning to break him and finally Helen . . .