Dancing Carl

by Gary Paulsen

  But I was wrong again.

  The next day after school we hurried to the rinks in the coming dark, hurried to see what would happen and we played hockey for a time and about six Helen came.

  Again Carl helped her with her skates and some of us watched and Helen nodded to him and he nodded to her and then she went out to skate.

  This time Carl played the same hard music, and he danced the same crazy-hard dance, jerking around in the cold on the ice and I thought at first he was locked into doing that, had gone crazy. But right at the end he did a graceful little swoop, a circle, a gentle move.

  And back into the warming house and that was the end of it for the night.

  And the next night the same, a wild dance but with a little more smooth on the end and we knew then that Carl was working up to something, trying to reach Helen a new way.

  “He could talk,” I said to Willy, walking home after the third night when we knew what he was doing. “He has never said anything to her. He could talk to her.”

  But Willy shook his head. “No. No he couldn’t. He could try but it wouldn’t work like what he’s doing. He can’t talk to her. Not yet.”

  And I was going to say something smart about how Willy knew that but I didn’t and I’m glad I didn’t.

  The fourth night it was about half-and-half. Half hard and wild and half beautiful and soft except that there were many new things that he did that fed one into another until it was all like one dance. He came through the rink gate and started around and down and up and by now when he started everybody quit skating, quit doing anything but watching.

  Cleaner movements now, cleaner lines he made and I felt my breath catch because this was all new, all swoops and wide circles as he followed his arms around and then off the rink.

  And still nothing out of Helen. Except that just as he finished, her hand left the soft fur muff and came up towards her mouth, not all the way, just a short distance.

  Then she skated away. Or almost.

  Just at the other end she did a small circle with her skates, a small almost-flip-around. She stayed straight up and down and controlled, but it was a light thing to do and I turned back to Carl and his face lit just as he went into the warming house.

  Ahh, I thought. Ahh, that was something to him, something good. And the small hairs on the back of my neck went up.

  That was something good for Carl.

  * * *

  The end of it, the end of that fine thing and what Willy called the start of a new fine thing came the next night.

  It was coming into late February and when the end of February comes in McKinley the weather can either be almost like spring or it can blow up a storm to freeze your water for you.

  That night it was soft and almost warm, maybe twenty above, and no wind and light until six. It smelled of spring. I went home from school to deliver my papers and eat and get back to the rinks. Once a week I had this paper route and it didn’t make me rich but it helped some and this time I hurried more than usual. We all wanted to be there to see what would happen. I went by Willy’s and we got to the rinks about seven.

  Nobody was skating. The hockey rink was full of kids but they were all standing, and on the quiet side everybody was off the ice and standing around the boards. Waiting.

  We went into the warming house and saw Carl sitting on his bunk. Waiting.

  But a new Carl.

  Still with a flight jacket, still a little drunk, but he had clean pants and a clean shirt. And he’d shaved and I could see the red in his cheeks fresh and scrubbed and his hair was cut and combed and he sat straight and tall on the bunk.

  He nodded to us, but then looked back to the door and continued to wait.

  I took Willy’s arm and we went outside without putting our skates on, went out to wait with the others by the rink.

  When I stopped by the boards I looked out on the ice and there was something in the middle, something lying on the ice.

  “What’s that?” I asked Willy, who couldn’t see it any better than I could. “What’s that on the ice?”

  He didn’t answer and I was about ready to go out and see when a grownup—I think it was old man Ekre from the drugstore—leaned over and whispered. “It’s a flower.”

  “A flower?”

  “Yes. It’s a rose. A long-stemmed rose. He put it out there a few minutes ago.”

  And I didn’t have to ask who put it on the ice.

  At exactly seven Helen came walking down the side of the road, carrying her skates by the blade guards with one hand and the other one in the muff.

  She didn’t pay much attention to us except to pause and look at us standing there as she went into the warming house. In five or ten minutes she came back out—it seemed like hours—and she came to the rink with pleasant nods for the people standing by the boards.

  Still, she went past and out to the ice and she knew what she was doing, knew then what it was all about because she skated once around the rink and didn’t look down at the rose even though she skated right by it and it stuck out like a whole bush.

  The music came on then, came on with a waltz and we all turned to the warming house to see Carl come out the door.

  He walked to the rink in a straight line, laid out and down and stopped at the gate for only a second before stepping onto the ice.

  Then he moved away from the gate on the blue of the ice in the warm evening, moved away in small circles and loops that went around with the music, made him part of the music and just when I thought he was done and saw everybody start to relax, just then he changed.

  It was maybe that he went a little crazy or maybe he just found a place in me, in us, that was a little crazy, that he reached in and touched somehow, but he changed.

  It was like he was younger. His dance got stronger and more powerful, with twirls that seemed to sparkle with light and fire, and around like that, around while Helen stood at the other end of the rink.

  But it was different now. She wasn’t standing to study, she was standing to wait, standing to see what he would do, could do for her as he moved around the ice.

  Faster, faster all the time his feet just slicking along, his arms bending, his waist bending, faster and then to the rose.

  He went to the rose and went past the rose and came back to it and pointed to it. Not with his arms or hand, not with his finger, he pointed to the rose somehow with the dance, somehow with all of everything he was he pointed to the rose and then away again.

  Off to the side of the rink he danced, around, and now I could hear his breathing coming hard and fast but still he didn’t stop and back to the rose he came.

  Again, with all of what he was doing he made me see the rose, made me watch the rose, and again away, away only not as far and back, and once more away and still back and again away and finally, chest heaving, arms hanging, shoulders bent, he stood about five feet from the rose.

  Looking and down, at the rose and yet more too, the line of him not going to the rose so much as to the rose and back up to Helen, all in curves and we were frozen now, all of us, watching in the February night.

  Waiting.

  Waiting and for a second or two nothing happened. Then Willy nudged me and he didn’t have to because I saw it, saw it coming.

  “She’s going to do it,” Willy said.

  Helen came, straight up and down, skating with her hands in the muff. She came across the ice and bent without seeming to bend and one hand come out of the muff and she picked up the rose—picked it up and looked at Carl, looked him right in the face, right in the eyes and she smiled and Carl answered the smile and we all breathed again. Carl moved off the ice to the warming house and she skated beside him and they went in and we all started skating and talking at once.

  And I saw Carl many times after that, after he left the rinks. And maybe he was a little drunk but he was clean and happy when I saw him around town, and straight like maybe some of Helen rubbed off on him.

  And I heard many thi
ngs still later. I heard that Carl went crazy and should have been put in the state hospital and I heard that Helen had some part of her brain hurt many years before and I heard they moved into a house together and shared their government checks. I heard they couldn’t be married because of something in Carl’s life and I heard even later that Carl died of drink and Helen had to go to a special home to live and all of this happened in some other town they moved to and none of it, not one single thing of what I heard, makes any difference at all.

  All that mattered then and all that matters now is that Helen stooped to pick up that rose.

  Keep reading for a sneak peek of This Side of Wild!

  • CHAPTER ONE •

  A Confusion of Horses, a Border Collie named Josh, a Grizzly Bear Who Liked Holes, and a Poodle with Three Teeth

  First, a hugely diversionary trail:

  Very few paths are completely direct, and this one seemed at first to be almost insanely devious.

  The doctor diagnosed various problems, some lethal, all apparently debilitating, and left me taking various medications and endless rituals of check-ins and checkouts and tests and retests. . . .

  Which drove me almost directly away from the whole process. I moved first to Wyoming, a small town called Story, near Sheridan, where I kept staring at the beauty of the Bighorn Mountains, accessed by a trail out of Story, and at last succumbed to the idea of two horses, one for riding and one for packing.

  The reasoning was this: I simply could not stand what I had become—stale, perhaps, or stalemated by what appeared to be my faltering body. Clearly I could not hike the Bighorns, or at least I thought I could not (hiking, in any case, was something I had come to dislike—hate—courtesy of the army), and so to horses.

  My experience with riding horses was most decidedly limited. As a child on farms in northern Minnesota, I had worked with workhorse teams—mowing and raking hay, cleaning barns with crude sleds and manure forks—and in the summer we would sometimes ride these workhorses.

  They were great, massive (weighing more than a ton), gentle animals and so huge that to get on their backs we either had to climb their legs—like shinnying up a living, hair-covered tree—or get them to stand near a board fence or the side of a hayrack (a wagon with tall wheels and a flatbed used for hauling hay from the field to the barn) so we could jump up and over onto their backs.

  Once we were on their backs, with a frantic kicking of bare heels and amateur screaming of what we thought were correct-sounding obscenities—mimicked from our elders—and goading, they could sometimes be persuaded to plod slowly across the pasture while we sat and pretended to be Gene Autry or Roy Rogers—childhood cowboy heroes who never shot to kill but always neatly shot the guns from the bad guys’ hands and never kissed the damsels but rode off into the sunset at the end of the story. We would ride down villains who robbed stagecoaches or in other ways threatened damsels in distress, whom we could save and, of course, never kiss, but ride off at the end of our imagination.

  The horses were—always—gentle and well behaved, and while they looked nothing like Champion or Trigger—Gene’s and Roy’s wonderful, pampered, combed, and shampooed lightning steeds (Champ was a bay, a golden brown, as I remember it, and Trigger was a palomino, with a blond, flowing mane and tail)—we were transformed into cowboys. With our crude, wood-carved six-guns and battered straw garden hats held on with pieces of twine, imagined with defined clarity that the pasture easily became the far Western range and every bush hid a marauding stage robber or a crafty rustler bent on stealing the poor rancher (my uncle, the farmer) blind.

  Oh, it was not always so smooth. While they were wonderfully gentle and easy-minded, they had rules, and when those rules were broken, sometimes their retaliation was complete and devastating. On Saturday nights we went to the nearby town—a series of wood-framed small buildings, all without running water or electricity—wherein lived seventy or eighty people. There was a church there and a saloon, and in back of the saloon an added-on frame shack building with a tattered movie screen and a battery-operated small film projector. They showed the same Gene Autry film all the time, and in this film, Gene jumped out of the second story of a building onto the back of a waiting horse.

  We, of course, had to try it, and I held the horse—or tried to—while my friend jumped from the hayloft opening in the barn onto the horse’s waiting back.

  He bounced once—his groin virtually destroyed—made a sound like a broken water pump, slid down the horse’s leg, and was kicked in a flat trajectory straight to the rear through the slatted-board wall of the barn. He lived, though I still don’t quite know how; his flying body literally knocked the boards from the wall.

  I personally went the way of the Native Americans and made a bow of dried willow, with arrows of river cane sharpened to needlepoints and fletched crudely with tied-on chicken feathers plucked from the much-offended egg layers in the coop, which I used to hunt “buffalo” off the back of Old Jim.

  Just exactly where it went wrong we weren’t sure, but I’m fairly certain that nobody had ever shot an arrow from Old Jim’s back before. And I’m absolutely positive that no one had shot said arrow so that the feathers brushed his ears on the way past.

  The “buffalo” was a hummock of black dirt directly in front of Jim, and while I couldn’t get him into a run, or even a trot, no matter what I tried, I’m sure he was moving at a relatively fast walk when I drew my mighty willow bow and sent the cane shaft at the pile of dirt.

  Just for the record, and no matter what my relatives might say, I did not hit the horse in the back of his head.

  Instead the arrow went directly between Jim’s ears, so low the chicken feathers brushed the top of his head as they whistled past.

  The effect was immediate and catastrophic. Old Jim somehow gave a mighty one-ton shrug so that all his enormous strength seemed to be focused on squirting me straight into the air like a pumpkin seed, and I fell, somersaulting in a shower of cane arrows and the bow, with a shattering scream on my part and hysterical laughter on the part of the boy with me.

  “You looked like a flying porcupine!” he yelled. “Stickers going everywhere . . . You was lucky you wasn’t umpaled.”

  Which was largely true and seemed to establish the modus operandi for the rest of my horse-riding life. I do know that I couldn’t get close to Old Jim if I had anything that even remotely resembled a stick for the rest of that summer.

  Horses are unique in many ways, though—and I know there will be wild disagreement here—not as smart as dogs, certainly when it comes to math.

  I knew nothing of them then and perhaps little more now. But one of those summers I experimented with rodeo.

  I was not good at it, to say the very least, and for me it was a particularly stupid thing to do because I was indeed so incredibly bad at it, and I did not do it for any length of time.

  I tried bareback bronc riding for a few weeks. I learned some things: I learned intimately how the dirt in Montana tasted and learned that next to old combat veteran infantry sergeants, rodeo riders are the toughest (and kindest and most helpful) people on earth.

  But I learned absolutely nothing about horses. I rarely made a good ride, a full ride, but even if I had, you cannot learn much in eight seconds on an animal’s back. . . .

  And so to the Bighorn Mountains.

  • • •

  It is probably true that all mountains are beautiful; there is something about them, the quality of bigness, of an ethereal joy to their size and scenic quality. And I have seen mountain ranges in Canada, the United States, particularly Alaska, have run sled dogs in them and through them and over them and have been immersed in their beauty as with the old Navajo prayer:

  Beauty behind me

  Beauty before me

  Beauty to my left

  Beauty to my right

  All around me is beauty.

  But there is something special about the Bighorns in Wyoming.

  I found a sm
all house at the base of a dirt track called the Penrose Trail, which led directly up out of the town of Story into the lower peaks and a huge hay meadow called Penrose Park.

  If memory serves, it is twenty or so miles from Story up to the meadow, then a few more miles to an old cabin on a lake and the beginning of a wilderness trail through staggering beauty; the trail is called the Solitude Trail—among other nicknames—and it wanders through some seventy miles of mountains in a large loop.

  Older people who lived in Story, who rode the mountains before there were trails, told me of the beauty in the high country, and it became at first a lure, a pull, and then almost a drive.

  I wanted to see the country, the high country, as I had seen it in Alaska with dog teams; the problem here was that it was summer, too hot for dogs, the distances were much too great, and my dislike of hiking much too sincere for me to even consider backpacking through the mountains.

  And so, to horse.

  Unfortunately, I knew little or nothing as to how one goes about acquiring a horse to ride on potentially dangerous mountain trails.

  And then another horse to pack gear on those same possibly dangerous mountain trails.

  For those who have read of my trials and tribulations when I tried to learn how to run dogs for the Iditarod, you will note a great many similarities in the learning procedure, or more accurately, how the learning processes for both endeavors strongly resembled a train wreck. It is true that I have for most of my life lived beneath the military concept that “there is absolutely no substitute for personal inspection at zero altitude” when it comes to trying to learn something. While functional, the problem with this theory is that it often places you personally and physically at the very nexus of destruction. Hence both legs broken, both arms broken more than once, wrists broken, teeth knocked out, ribs cracked and broken, both thumbs broken more than once (strangely more painful than the other breaks) and—seemingly impossible—an arrow self-driven through my left thumb.