The Cookcamp

by Gary Paulsen

  The engine roar grew louder and louder still, and Gustaf’s hands moved again and the bulldozer, the cat, suddenly lurched forward.

  The boy closed his eyes, then opened them once more. They were climbing up the face of the gravel pile. Gustaf’s strong hands worked the two steering levers and guided the bulldozer up and up the gravel pile until it came to the top.

  The boy almost fainted. They were high, so high he could see all around. He saw the cook trailer where his grandmother was working and the trees that went on and on forever, and out in front of the pile, below and to the right, were all the dump trucks in a line.

  At the bottom of the gravel pile was a large grate made of heavy steel. Trucks would pull beneath the grate and gravel would pour down until the truck was filled.

  There was a truck beneath the grate now, waiting, and before the boy was ready, before the boy could think what was happening, Gustaf made the engine roar louder, worked a lever so the huge blade lowered, and the cat roared over the top of the pile and down, down toward the grate, toward the hole.

  The move was so sudden that it made the boy scream and grab at Gustaf’s arm. But the sound of the engine covered his scream.

  It seemed they couldn’t keep from tipping over to the front, so steep was the side of the gravel pile.

  The cat roared down on the grate and hole with the blade pushing a huge pile of gravel. When the gravel hit the grate it dropped through and disappeared in a great cloud of dust and whumped down into a dump truck.

  The truck moved away and another truck took its place. But before the boy could really see what was happening, Gustaf’s hands worked the levers and the cat stopped dead and suddenly slammed backward up the pile again.

  To the top.

  To teeter on the top and hold for a moment, seeming to fall and then …

  Down again to pour another load off the blade into the hole, and another truck filled and jerked away.

  And back to the top.

  “It’s like a ride,” the boy yelled up at Gustaf. “At the fair.” He had once been to a fair, and his mother had taken him for a ride on a small roller coaster where she held him. “It’s like the roller coaster.”

  This time he yelled his loudest and Gustaf heard him. He smiled and spit over the treads. “Yah, yah. It’s fun, ha?”

  But there was no time to answer, because Gustaf had worked the levers and the cat was barreling down again.

  Except that this time Gustaf grabbed the boy’s hands and put them on the levers beneath his own, held them inside his hands and then let the boy steer the cat as it backed up the pile, and again held the boy’s hands on other levers to shift and throttle the cat down with another load.

  All morning.

  He sat in Gustaf’s lap all morning loading the trucks with gravel to make the road.

  When it was midday the boy was covered with dust and dirt and half-deaf from the roar of the engine and had never been so happy in his life.

  “We must eat now,” Gustaf said, turning the cat engine off. “Then there is more work, yah?”

  HE BOY followed Gustaf as he walked to the cook trailer. All the other men had stopped the trucks and were walking to the cook trailer as well, and the boy walked with them trying to walk as they walked, with his shoulders back and taking long steps, and he spit and cleared his lip like the men.

  He had so much to tell his grandmother about the gravel pile and the cat and how it tipped up and down and frightened him, and when he came into the cook trailer he ran to her.

  She was at the stove and smiled at him. “You’re dirty.”

  “Oh, Grandma, I rode the cat and Gustaf put my hands on the levers and I got to drive and steer and raise and lower the blade and we rode to the top of the gravel pile and down …”

  All the words ran together and his grandmother held up her hand.

  “Later. Tell me all of it later. Now you have to eat.”

  The men trooped in and took their caps off, slammed them against their legs to knock the dust off, and the boy did the same with his hands, wishing he had a greasy cap to slam against his leg. He moved to the stove to eat sitting on the bunk — except that he didn’t eat at the stove as he had before, didn’t have to wait until the men were done, didn’t have to help with the tables this time.

  “When we are men we must eat with the men,” Gustaf said, and motioned to an extra plate next to his on the table. Other men nodded and smiled, and the boy went to the bench and sat at the plate and looked at his grandmother, who also smiled and nodded.

  He tried to make himself bigger, but he could not, and still he felt proud that he could sit with the men, although he noticed that one of them, a man named Olaf, helped his grandmother bring food to the tables.

  Gustaf heaped food on the boy’s plate and he tried to eat it all but could not, could not eat even a part of as much as the men ate, and when he was so full with stew his stomach was about to burst he looked up at Gustaf.

  “I can’t eat more.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have taken it,” Gustaf said, but he was smiling, and he used his fork to scrape the boy’s food onto his own plate, from which it quickly disappeared.

  The boy was so full he could not eat pie. When they were done Gustaf started to leave, to go back to the cat and the boy started to follow, but Carl, the man who had come to the depot to get him, stopped him with his hand.

  “Gustaf doesn’t get you all the time. I need help driving the dump truck this afternoon.”

  The boy looked at Gustaf who nodded. “We must share you — good men are hard to find.” And the boy knew he was joking, but it still sounded nice.

  Again he looked to his grandmother to see that it was all right, and again she smiled and nodded, and he went out with Carl.

  It was the same truck they had come in from the depot, but he was not asleep this time and there was much, much more happening for him to see.

  Carl’s truck was third in line. The boy watched the other trucks drive under the grate and watched Gustaf on the cat push the loads of gravel down the pile into the trucks where they landed with great noises and clouds of dust.

  Finally it was Carl’s turn, and he growl-whined the truck forward under the grate. The boy tried to lean over Carl and see Gustaf use the cat, but it was too far back and up to see through the grate.

  Suddenly the truck lurched sideways as the load of gravel dropped down into it, and no sooner had the dust begun to settle on them, bouncing off the hood, than Carl worked the levers and the throttle and the truck whined forward.

  And out of the gravel pile place and down a long dirt road with new gravel on it, fresh and damp looking to the boy, like cereal; out and down the road where they met other trucks coming back empty until they reached the end of the road….

  Where there were two more cats and a grader. The bulldozers would plow the trees over with their big blades, and when the trees were gone the gravel trucks ahead of Carl’s truck would dump their loads and the grader would even it out.

  Finally it was Carl’s turn. The last truck dumped with a great raising and sliding sound and turned and headed back to the gravel pile, and Carl moved his truck forward. When it was in the right position he reached out the window and pulled a lever with a rope on it and the bed of the truck whooshed and raised slowly.

  The boy could feel the gravel slide out of the truck onto the ground, feel the truck bounce as the weight left it and Carl pulled the lever and turned the truck around while the empty box was coming back down, and then he started the long journey back to the gravel pile — except that he turned to the boy and said:

  “Do you want to drive?”

  He made room in his lap for the boy, who moved to sit there and hold the wheel and steer it under Carl’s hands as he had steered the cat under Gustaf’s hands, and they met trucks and saw a deer, and he steered and didn’t have to make engine sounds with his mouth because the truck made them fine without him.

  All the way back he steere
d and into line for the next load, and he thought of all the things he had seen and done, all the many things he had seen and done this day that he could tell his grandmother about tonight when they had apple pie and the milk with the taste of tin in it.

  HEY had eaten supper and all the men had gone to the sleeping trailer, and the boy sat with his grandmother at a table.

  It was dark and he was very tired, but she had given him a piece of cherry pie she’d made with canned filling and a glass of the warm milk that tasted of tin, and he was trying to remember all the things of the day to tell her.

  “It was so much fun,” he said. “I drove the cat first and then the truck and steered and worked the shift lever. Carl let me sit in his lap and spit out the window and wear his cap with the button on it and press the horn, except that it didn’t work.”

  “Eat your pie,” she said, pushing his hair away from his forehead with the back with her hand. It was a soft touch, like a kiss with her fingers, and he paused and ate a piece of pie but could not stop telling her of the day, and before he knew it, before he could stop himself, he had said things about Uncle Casey.

  “We had fun, too,” he said. “Uncle Casey took me to the zoo once and to a movie where cowboys rode and jumped on a stagecoach and shot the guns out of other cowboys’ hands and I thought I would never have as much fun as I did with Uncle Casey. But then he and Mother made the sounds on the couch and I didn’t have fun with Uncle Casey anymore, but it doesn’t matter now. Now I’m having more fun with Gustaf and Carl and you than I ever had with Uncle Casey….”

  His grandmother’s face had changed. The smile was still there but it had become tight, and the edges of her eyes looked hard so that the boy trailed off and could not say more. It was anger, but more, too — she was more than mad. He thought something must hurt her, and he knew it was what he had said but did not know why it would have hurt her to say he had fun with Uncle Casey.

  She stood from the table and turned away from him and picked up the flyswatter that hung by the stove. It was the kind of swatter that was made from a screen and had a picture of a circus clown on it and a red wire handle, and she went to the window over the sink and hit a fly.

  Small hits, the boy saw. She used little flicks of her wrist, and even when he did not see the fly a fly would fall.

  She didn’t say anything for a long time, just went around the trailer flicking at the flies, dropping them on the floor, and when she was done — the boy watched her the whole time — she took the broom and dustpan and swept each fly body up to dump in the wood stove.

  She is thinking of something else, the boy thought, watching her kill flies; as when his mother would speak to him but be looking at something else, not thinking about what she was saying.

  His grandmother was killing the flies but not seeing them, not thinking of them, not caring about them except to kill them, and when she was done she turned to the boy once more and sat at the table and pushed the hair away from his forehead.

  “Tell me,” she said, “about Uncle Casey. Do you like him?”

  So the boy finished his cherry pie and warm milk and tried to think first if he liked Uncle Casey or not and decided he did not.

  “But he is fun,” the boy said. “Sometimes he takes me to movies and we go to the Cozy Corner and he drinks beer with Mother and gives me nickels for the jukebox and fried chicken…. And he took me to the zoo and we laughed at the monkeys.”

  “But you don’t like him?”

  “No. I don’t like him. Sometimes he looks at Mother and doesn’t see me, and when they are together … well, I just don’t like him.”

  And again her face grew tight, but this time she did not get up or move away. “It’s late now. Why don’t you go to bed?”

  “Aren’t you coming to bed?”

  “No. I have some things to do to get ready for tomorrow.”

  She helped him to bed and tucked him in and kissed him on the forehead, and he could smell the lavender water she used in the morning on her neck, and he fell almost asleep.

  She sang softly for him with her hand on his forehead and his eyes closed. It was a song about a young girl, and she did not sing it in Norwegian but in English so he could understand. The song was sad and in a story and he wanted to hear it, but sleep came before she reached the end of the song and he did not hear more.

  * * *

  HE DID NOT know how long he slept, but he awakened before morning. A strange sound cut through his sleep, and he opened his eyes.

  His grandmother was sitting at the table nearest the stove. She had an oil lamp on the table and a small tablet and a stub of a pencil in her hand. She was wearing small glasses that sat on the end of her nose, and she was writing on the tablet, the pencil making tiny scratching sounds.

  And while she wrote she talked, spoke down to the paper.

  “Damn war,” she said. “Damn the war and damn the men and damn the cities that take the girls.”

  And here her voice changed and became lilting and high and made the boy think of his mother.

  “Remember who you are,” his grandmother said, the little pencil squiggling. “And how it was before the war when the men were different. You mustn’t be this way….”

  And she was crying down onto the tablet, tears dropping on the paper.

  The boy started to say something, tell her he was awake, but he held back. Something about her tears stopped him from making a sound, and instead he got out of bed quietly and went to her and hugged her.

  “It’s all right, Grandma….”

  She held him. “I know. Everything will be all right. You’ll see.”

  Which made no sense to him, because he had just had a day when he drove the cat and steered the truck and everything was already as all right as it could be, but he said nothing.

  She put him back to bed and combed her hair down and came to bed herself, and he fell asleep almost at once and did not awaken until the men came in for breakfast.

  OR DAYS things got better and better and better….

  Carl let him drive the truck again and spit out the window, and then all the other men seemed to want him, and he rode in their trucks as well until he knew them all.

  Sven, Ole, Nels, Harvey, Emil, Altag, Pete — he knew all their names and the way they laughed and joked and spit and wore their caps.

  He rode with them all and drove the gravel pile cat again and drove everything but the cat that cleared the forest ahead of the grader so there could be a road; he rode with everybody except the road cat, and each night when they were done eating and the men had gone to the sleeping trailer he would sit and eat pie and drink milk and tell his grandmother all about each day before he went to bed.

  And each night she would stay up when he was in bed and write a letter, which she put in her apron pocket.

  There was one for each day, one letter in a small envelope for each day and each night she cried and swore and killed flies even when there were no flies and came to bed when she was done.

  * * *

  ON FRIDAY Carl came to her instead of going to work with his truck. The boy was sitting at a table finishing his oatmeal, and he looked up at Carl, thinking the truck driver wanted to take him with him to work again.

  But this day was different.

  “It is time to go to town,” Carl said. “I’ll warm the truck and you and the boy get ready.”

  Once a week they had to go to a town that lay thirty miles away by rutted narrow road, and the boy had not known it.

  They had to go to buy supplies for the camp.

  “Where are we going?” he asked as they walked to Carl’s truck. “Why aren’t we going to work?”

  “We’re going to Salvang,” his grandmother said. “We need food.”

  “For the men?”

  “And you.”

  “Is there a store in Salvang?”

  “Yes.”

  They climbed into the truck and Carl started driving down the dirt road, shifting through the whi
ning gears.

  It was a beautiful morning with a clear blue sky. The trees along the road were so green in the morning sun they hurt the boy’s eyes.

  For a short time Carl drove down the same road the boy had come on from the depot and he thought he remembered the way.

  But then they turned off onto a side road that was worse than the one they’d been on, and soon it was so rough the truck bounced from side to side.

  They came to a stream, and the road disappeared into the water, and Carl drove the truck right through the stream.

  They saw a moose. It was huge and brown, standing in the middle of the road, and it did not move until Carl beeped the truck’s horn — and then it only walked slowly away, all but ignoring the truck and the horn.

  When it seemed to the boy that they would never get out of the woods, the trees suddenly fell away from the road and opened into cleared fields and farms.

  In the distance he saw a metal water tower with a word written on the side. He couldn’t read the word, but his grandmother leaned over and said, “It’s Salvang,” into his ear so he could hear it.

  It was a small town. After Chicago and the apartment buildings, Salvang was almost not a town at all.

  “One, two, three, four, five,” the boy said. “Five houses I count.”

  And that was all of Salvang. Five houses and one store where Carl stopped the truck. But when the boy followed his grandmother and Carl inside he saw it was like no other store he’d ever seen.

  The store seemed to sell everything in the whole world.

  Inside it was dark and cool and there was a high ceiling made of molded metal all pressed in a design with flowers in it. The boy stared at the ceiling while his grandmother talked to the man who owned the store — stared until he became dizzy and had to hold his grandmother’s dress to keep from falling over.

  He looked down at the walls, but there were so many things to see he still had to close his eyes to stop the dizziness.