by Gary Paulsen
Then came sixteen.
He went out west again, but he was a little too early and he couldn’t find farmwork because the fields were too wet to work. He had a little money and he lived in an old abandoned building on the edge of a small town waiting for a job to open up. Sardines and crackers, twice a day. Sixty cents a day for food. Water free from an old hand pump in a nearby vacant lot.
He was near done after a few weeks of living rough and on the edge of heading back to the woods for the summer, when a county fair came to town and he went out to see if there was a chance of getting some work. He picked up a job helping put up rides for five dollars a day and the man who owned the Tilt-A-Whirl, name of Tucker, hired him on for the summer.
Five dollars a day. Thirty-five dollars a week. He couldn’t believe how much money he’d make. A hundred and forty dollars a month. Even if he spent some change on day-old hot dogs and tired sloppy-joe sandwiches from the gedunk wagon, he’d make more than if he’d been working ranches or farms for three dollars a day. He’d be rich. He didn’t mind sleeping across the truck seat at night. And Tucker showed him how to work the clutch on the Tilt-A-Whirl to suck change out of the pockets of the rubes wearing loose pocket bib overalls. Rubes were even better targets than the drunks in the Northern Lights saloon in terms of taking their money. Easier money and less chance of taking a thump like he did if the drunks saw him scraping change for himself, since the rubes were most of the time busy puking their guts up after the ride. Might be another two or three dollars a day on top of the five.
Just making good hard money.
And then there was Wanda, who was Tucker’s wife, and blond and old, but not that old, who was a dancer in a sideshow where she showed the rubes her body a little at a time. More than once, the boy—who was a rube himself—had snuck in for a peek.
But then Tucker caught one of his carnival workers with Wanda, and he was a little drunk and they had a knife fight, and the cops came and there he was, the boy, a runaway, a Runaway, and wham, he was detained. Not arrested, but picked up by the cops and sent back home again and, wham, back in school again, so not arrested, but in jail anyway.
At least until he could split ass and make it into the woods, at least until everybody stopped watching him, took their eyes off his business for more than a minute and he could run again.
Except now he was reading all the time because of what he had learned from the library and librarian, and so he knew things. Knew some things. Most important that he could be more, do more, become more someday. He didn’t want to be some bust-ass grunt laborer the rest of his life and then, right then, the government stepped in.
The state got sick of chasing after him skipping school and always running away, so they took over and sent him to some social worker/counselor/do-gooder. He was told he had to go or else get sent to a “home” where you were detained even worse than when he’d been detained but not arrested working for Tucker and sent back to school. They called the place the Murphy Home for Boys and promised that they’d lock your ass in every night.
The counselor sat him down in a room across a gray table and gave him a cup of coffee so stiff it would hold a spoon upright, leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette with yellow nicotine-stained fingers, and said: “You’re pretty much pissing your life away.”
The boy didn’t say anything. Just sat.
“Do you want to change that?”
What do you want me to do? the boy thought. Find Jesus? Go to school and find Jesus? Go to school and become a nice kid living in a nice family and find Jesus? Or did he have some other fairy tale in mind? Maybe find a lamp and rub it and get three wishes and then find Jesus? Come on. The man across the table was as thick as an oak board. The boy smiled to himself, thinking, You could saw him up and make a library table out of his butt.
He still didn’t say anything, because this man had nothing to offer. He’d sit there, wait out the wood man, leave as soon as he could, and head out. Split. Like always.
“So…” The counselor took a long drag on his cigarette and the boy wondered whether he should start smoking. Looked cool. Smoking might make him look older so he could pass … for what? Pass for somebody who looked older. Another drag on the cigarette. L.S./M.F.T., like the radio commercials said, Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. Even sounded cool.
“So, since the way it’s going, you’re going to flunk out of school, the state has this new program they’re starting for people who have trouble with regular school. They call it vocational training school. That way you can learn a trade even if conventional school doesn’t fit you. There are two versions—you can either become an automobile mechanic or a television repair man. You pick. The school will pass you into the twelfth grade, and instead of going to normal school, you will attend one of the two vocational schools five days a week. You miss three days running and you’re out and into the Murphy Home.”
And it was that moment that changed him. Changed everything.
He had made friends with a boy named Leo who had been a ham radio enthusiast, and the boy found himself enjoying everything about being a ham operator. Leo had a small 30-watt transmitter hooked to a dipole antenna outside his room, and he helped the boy make a small oscillator out of spare parts, which aided him in learning Morse code. The two of them would sit for hours when the skip signal was working, and talk in code to people all over the world. Sometimes even as far away as Russia, where it was forbidden to have a radio, let alone communicate with people in other countries … if you considered it communicating to ask and answer the same question over and over again: Where are you?
The boy had thought that if he ever found a place to settle down, he would get his amateur license and work the network. In the meantime, he visited Leo and learned as much as he could about amateur radio. And electronics. And television, which was just entering the public world then, and seemed a strange and magical thing—that you could shoot a beam of electrons through space and get a picture, a motion picture on a screen, didn’t seem possible.
And this man, with the nicotine-stained fingers and yellow teeth, was offering him a chance to learn about television. And electronics. How they worked. How they made things happen that seemed magical.
“I want,” the boy said, “to become a television repair man.”
“With the aforementioned restrictions?”
Nobody, the boy thought, uses words like “aforementioned restrictions” with a straight face. But the man wasn’t smiling.
The boy nodded. “Sure.”
“Three days and you’re out.”
Another nod. “Sure.”
And it was done. Just the way the man said. When he was about to flunk out of the eleventh grade, the state stepped in and he was passed to twelfth grade with the “proviso” (their word, not his) that he was to pay attention and really try to learn a vocation as a television repair man and not be a “burden to society.” Again, their words. He didn’t want to have anything to do with society, even as a burden. So he kept nodding and smiling and learning everything he could about Ohm’s law and how vacuum tubes (this was well before transistors and silicon controlled rectifiers) functioned and exactly how television worked. And even then, when he knew and understood it, the whole thing still and always seemed magical to him. Take a picture of a person, break the picture down, shoot it through space on a radio beam to another place, and rebuild the person.
Pure magic.
And he loved it. Ate it with a spoon, ravenous to know more and more, to figure out how it all worked and to really know everything there was to learn about this new thing. And although he did not even sense it at the time, he would find later that the knowledge, the technical base of the knowledge, would affect him profoundly and for the rest of his life.
In the meantime, however, regular life went on. He still had to earn enough money to live, and he added trapping to his normal workload of working the bars and setting pins—mostly for leagues, now that he was older. He set smal
l snare lines and trapped some mink, now and then a raccoon, a couple of fox, and sold rabbits for a dime, and later a quarter each, to mink farmers for domestic mink food.
All this hard work added hours to each of his days, in addition to his time at school. But he never missed a day of classes, even though he set the line and checked it each morning, and set pins or cleaned the bar every night.
He never got ahead. He could never quite catch up with all he had to do each day, and every night, after the long hard days, he’d fall into his easy chair in the basement or crawl in the back seat of the car in a dead stupor.
Add to this the newfound interest in girls, which he did not fully understand since all he knew was what little he’d glimpsed of Wanda at the carnival, and that certainly didn’t help him fit in well with high school girls. He finally worked up enough courage to ask a girl out on a date, but she looked him up and down, said: “With you?” followed by a smirk and a short laugh, and that was that. He felt some relief since he couldn’t have afforded much of a date anyway.
He never seemed to have enough time. He had dropped back into the world, his old world, where he needed alleys and the library to stay safe from the bigger kids who were bullies. Between school and having to keep up a hustle morning and night, he didn’t have time to pay attention to his safety the way he should have, and there came a day when they caught him cold out in the open as he was crossing the railroad yards heading for the woods to check snares.
Big kid named Benny cornered him by one of the equipment sheds. Took a swing at the boy, which he ducked and took on his shoulder. Took another swing. Or started one.
Only this time things were different.
Very different.
The boy had grown stronger, tougher, quicker. And, in some ways, meaner.
He had an edge now.
Some of the men he’d worked with in the carnival were from the other part of living; they’d done time in prison where they had to know how to fight, and they’d brought this knowledge to the carnival. The boy not only started to comb his hair in a ducktail, cut the belt loops off his Levi’s, wear a pair of engineer boots, but he knew how to think like, act like, the men from the carnival now.
The carnival men would drink a few beers, take a sip or two of whiskey, and so, of course, fighting was the next thing, the natural thing, in the evenings after the carnival shut down. But one of them, a skinny, runty man with hardly any teeth and crude prison tattoos, Billy, seemed to skate right through the middle of the booze and anger without ever fighting. Men might drink a couple of beers, sip some whiskey, and look Billy’s way. But he’d make a sound, an animal snarl, and nobody touched him. They might have thought about making a move on him, but one glance at his face after he made that sound, and everyone backed off, left Billy alone. Only made a move on Billy one time, never a second try to get him to take a swing.
One day the boy was holding the pegs while Billy drove steel car axles into the ground with a twelve-pound sledgehammer so they could help Tucker set up the sideshow tent. Billy never missed, never hit the boy’s hand with the sledge. The boy was careful and timed it right and jerked his hand away just as the hammer slammed into the axle but, still, easy enough to miss and bring that sledge down wrong.
He was studying the tattoos on Billy’s arms as the hammer came down. Blue snakes on each arm wrapped around a naked woman. Snakes seemed to move, tighten their coils with the movement of the muscles under the skin, looked powerful and very fast, and he looked into Billy’s face and said: “How come you never fight?”
Kind of a snoopy question, and for a breath, then two, Billy looked off into space. The boy wasn’t sure he would answer and thought, God, I hope I didn’t piss him off. Then Billy shrugged, stretched his arms—quick coiling and relaxing of the blue snakes around the women—and said: “I don’t have to fight.”
The boy thought he might as well go whole hog. “How come?”
This time Billy shrugged. “Something I learned in prison.”
The boy waited.
“I’m small. Was small. People, men, tried to work me. Take me. Use me. Steal from me. I made them stop.”
The boy nodded. “I’ve seen that. They’ll start to come at you, and then change their minds. Why is that? Why do they back off?”
“It’s in my eyes. The secret.” He looked out again, away from the boy, maybe back in time.
“What secret?” The boy thought of the mean bigger kids and how they made him run to safety. Forced him to hide and move in the alleys in the dark. If there was a way …
“It’s not too big a sweat to figure it out”—Billy half smiled, showed a hole where a tooth was gone—“you’ve got to be ready to hurt someone. No matter what they do to you, while they’re pounding on you, you’ve got to be ready, got to be absolutely willing, to hurt some part of them. Bite a nose off, tear an ear loose, kick their gonads into next Saturday. Really bring a hurt down on them and the next time they want to mess with you, they’ll remember what it was, how it felt, and they’ll back off. Pretty soon, it shows in your eyes. Shows that you will do it no matter what comes and even the ones you never fought before will drift, will back away before it starts. It’s like they can smell it. Smell that you’re dangerous.”
He learned that. The boy had worked the farms hard from morning until dark, slept hard, ate hard, and in the end, turned hard. Like leather that’s been cured tough so that his skin felt dense, muscles coiled under thick skin, and on top of the hardening, he absorbed all that Billy told him coming from perhaps the hardest place in the world, prison.
The boy that Benny cornered in the railroad equipment buildings wasn’t quite a boy, and while he hadn’t become what he would someday become, he wasn’t frightened any longer.
He was, had become, whipcord tough. Tied tight inside like a pressured spring about to explode, and though Benny couldn’t see it, the boy had become a dangerous thing, somebody you didn’t want to corner in an equipment shed.
Without thinking—he had, indeed, no plan—the boy caught Benny by the belt and the collar of his shirt, flipped him in the air and down on his back and brought his knee down on Benny’s chest.
Hard.
Heard air come out of both ends.
Benny’s eyes shut tight, then opened like saucers while he tried in vain to get some breath. Any breath. Surprised both of them and made the boy smile down on Benny’s face.
Not even mad. Just something that had to be handled. Like a good, bad dog. Thought he might bite, but changed his mind.
“No more, right?” The boy said it quietly, but when Benny didn’t nod at once, he brought the knee down hard again. Pushed the words a little harder with the knee. “No more.”
This time Benny nodded, still trying to find breath, and the boy stood back and turned from him and walked away, leaving Benny on his back gasping. Didn’t even look back.
Looked forward. Tried to understand what happened. What changed. No. What needed to change, now that he was different, was not the same boy. Was somehow not a boy at all anymore. Was becoming something else, changing into something else.
Not a man yet. Though he had hope. Sixteen, near seventeen, but still thinking boy thoughts. And yet he knew the other thing was coming, that he had to be ready for it. Ready to stop thinking of small things and focus on the larger picture. Get prepared. Learn to grow the hell up.
And that’s when the idea solidified:
The army.
RA27378338
He decided that the sergeant who met the train at the depot in Colorado Springs wasn’t quite human. Nor was he alone. With him were two corporals and one private first class, and all four of them, Sergeant Grim, Corporals Fitz and Jackson, and Private First Class Yello, were also not quite human.
All of them, it seemed, were cut from the same cloth. The fabric of which made them appear—the boy had trouble coming to an identification—“impervious.” That was the word. They seemed to be structured from some material that
made them immune to anything even remotely human, from feeling pain, joy, affection, pathos.
Tough beyond recognition, like stone, they ordered the new men who were still dressed in civilian clothing from the train with brutally loud and surgically cut, short and profane commands.
“No talking!”
“Get off the train, maggots!”
“Stand in a row, maggots!”
“Say ‘here, sir’ when you hear your name, maggots!”
It was late September and 2:00 a.m. on a cold morning when the train from Fargo, North Dakota, arrived in Colorado Springs. There were forty men on the train, perhaps half of them two-year draftees who most emphatically did not want to be there, and the other half, like the boy, enlistees who had signed up for three years. They had been asleep in their seats when the train arrived, and many of them had not had time to use the bathroom before being ordered off. They were ordered, nonetheless, to stand in ranks while the roll call was finished, and when it was found that one man was missing, the two corporals went back on the train, found him still asleep, grabbed him, and dragged him, kicking and swearing, out of the train and threw him into position with the other men.
They were then ordered to do a right face—about a third of them turned left and had to be corrected, which involved swearing and dealing out pain—and then they were walk-marched to and jammed in olive-drab buses for the short trip to Fort Carson, Colorado.
He had been in the army six days.
Until then it had been simple enough. They graduated him from high school, considering the vocational school segment as a wide kind of credit, handed him a diploma—his parents weren’t there and nobody cared about him or applauded him—and, aside from becoming adept at electronics and able to troubleshoot and repair television sets, school had meant nothing to him.
He had just turned seventeen and could legally enlist in the army if he had his parents’ permission. He went from graduation to the recruiting sergeant the next morning after forging his father’s signature on a permission form, swore himself in, was then told to report to the train depot in Fargo to take the train to Colorado two days later.