Dancing Carl by Gary Paulsen

Author:Gary Paulsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

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.

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