Fishbone's Song by Gary Paulsen

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

5

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Greenroom

Fishbone has a lot of rules where he makes things right in your head, but some of them you don’t understand at first.

If you kill it, you eat it.

Don’t think about bad things if you don’t want bad things to happen.

If you think something is red, it’s red.

If you think about something small a lot of the time, it will get bigger, but if you think about something big, a lot of the time it will still get bigger. Like fish. Or debt.

A house is something to keep things out, not to keep things in. Like weather. And biting flies. And some snakes.

Always stay hungry. It makes you see things better. Especially if you’re hunting. Or trying to think up a new idea. Orville and Wilbur Wright were always hungry when they were working on how to fly. Stayed in a shed, Fishbone said, with slab walls, and had eggs to cook and eat, eggs in a board shelf with a hole for each egg, and every egg was numbered. Number said when it was laid, told how fresh it was. That was hunger, Fishbone said—fat, full people don’t number eggs. Just eat them. Anybody who numbers his eggs is hungry. All the time. When I asked how he knew about Orville and Wilbur and their eggs, he looked at me like I was going to be the big part of a wise guy and then shrugged and smiled and said he saw it in a magazine picture of the inside of their shack. Was still true, even if Fishbone wasn’t there to count the eggs himself.

A room is as big as you want it to be in your head.

And there it was. A change had started in me just before that about the room. Not the same change as later but a change. The thing is, what with one thing and another, it seemed like everything was changing for me. On me. About me. Don’t know how old I was because I never quite knew when I was born. Might have been twelve, plus a little. Fat side of twelve. But I’d taken to having dreams I didn’t understand about families I’d never had, about girls I’d never known, about parts of girls I’d never seen. About parts.

About.

Dumb dreams.

But I couldn’t seem to stop them and one evening on the porch I told Fishbone about them. About the dreams and he said, what else?

What else what, I asked.

What else would you dream about? Comes a time, comes a time when you’ve never had a car and your voice is changing. What else are you going to dream about? Came to me, came to me later than you because I never knew peace until I was older. Still young when I went to Korea and got shot some and then cars and running white lightning up that damn road and never knowing time for real dreaming until later, older, when I was in New Orleans swamping out the

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