Dancing Carl Read online

  We nodded. We didn’t have our skates and couldn’t skate until we’d gone home for them but before we could leave Carl came out of the warming house and walked to the rinks.

  He stood, looking out across the ice for a full minute, maybe more, stiff and straight, then he pulled the bottle out of his pocket and looked over the top of us.

  “Not yet. Tomorrow.”

  “But Stan said ...” I started and Willy put his hand on my arm and shook his head.

  “We’ll skate tomorrow,” Carl repeated. “It would be wrong now. It’s too soft.”

  Stan turned back to his hoses, not mad, just ready to have Carl take over. It was like an old dog and a young dog where the old dog just shoulders up and the young one moves away without any fight.

  We stood there for a while. There was something in Carl’s voice that made it clear that nobody would be skating until the next day, even if we wanted to, so we stood and looked at the new-blue of the ice on the rinks and while we were watching it that way Carl moved onto the left rink.

  He didn’t have skates on or anything, just street shoes with the laces sort of loose and the heels round and you would have thought he would have fallen on the ice but he didn’t.

  He walked around the rink carefully, just walked, taking short pulls from the bottle in his pocket, and when he’d gone all the way around, looking forward and down, he moved to the middle of the rink and raised his head and Willy whispered, “He’s going to do it again. That strange thing.”

  But this time he didn’t. He just stood with his head raised and said nothing and then he lowered his chin and turned and saw us staring at him and he smiled and walked past us into the warming house.

  “Let’s go in,” Willy said. “I’m cold.”

  It wasn’t cold, not as cold as it would get, but it was getting dark and there was light in the warming house so I nodded. It was as good an excuse as any to see more of Carl so I followed Willy in.

  Inside the warming house it was all scars. Like the rink. Scars from skates and sticks and pocketknives. Carved initials and words in the wooden walls and the wooden benches that ran around the sides. Except for the ceiling no inch was bare, nothing was smooth but all rounded and worn and scarred. Dark round-soft wood.

  In the middle of the room was a potbellied stove, black and worn, full of smoking birch with the flue open to make a small roar. The side glowed red, dull and hot. Overhead was one bulb, bare, with the hot wire showing inside.

  Back to the rear was an army cot, steel, with a brown blanket that had a big US in the middle and a small pillow without a pillowcase, just stripes on a gray background.

  And in the middle of the bunk sat Carl. There was nobody else in the warming house and he looked up when we came in, looked up and smiled with short yellow teeth. “Come in.”

  Willy nodded and went to the bench at the side near the stove and I followed still but couldn’t think of a reason for doing it. I wasn’t cold. I never got cold, except my heels in the hockey skates when it was deep cold in the middle of the hardest part of winter and we were playing and couldn’t stop to go in and warm up.

  But we sat down near the stove and Willy held his hands out as if he were warming them and I just sat and stared at the deep dull red on the side of the stove and wished I hadn’t come in. I was working on a stick model at home, a model of a P-40 Warhawk and it was almost done, just the tissue left to glue on and I thought I should have been home doing that . . .

  “You skaters?” Carl asked, cutting into my thinking, after we’d been sitting a long time.

  Willy nodded. “All the time.”

  “Rinks will be open tomorrow.”

  “We heard you outside.”

  “Ahh.” But he was just talking the way grownups usually talk to kids. Over and through while his mind worked on other things. It never failed when you were dealing with them—grownups talked like you weren’t there. Except when they were chewing you out. Then they saw you.

  Carl took another long pull from the bottle in his pocket and put it back and looked down for a moment and then up. He brushed something off his arm, looked at it, brushed it again and kept brushing it and I felt sad because I’d seen that before on Jimmy. Pisspot Jimmy had gone into deep problems with drinking, problems so he couldn’t really walk or anything and they had to take him into that place for treatment and he was always brushing things off his legs. One time when I was just a kid and didn’t know any better I asked him what he was brushing away and he told me it was bugs.

  “I’m all over bugs,” he’d said. “The little monsters won’t leave me alone.” And of course there weren’t any bugs at all, just in his head, and here Carl was brushing his arm the same way and any fool could see that he drank a lot so I just felt sad, the way you do when somebody has the bottle that way. But I was wrong.

  “Either one of you got any saddle soap at home? This leather on the jacket is getting dried out, starting to crack bad. I should soap it down.” He’d been rubbing the leather to smooth the cracks.

  Willy stood up. “I’ve got some. I’ll go get it.”

  “No. No. Just bring it tomorrow when you come to skate. That’ll be fine.” Another smile. “The jacket is my home. I should take care of it.”

  Which was a strange thing to say about his jacket, even if it was kind of true. Besides, the leather looked like it had never been cleaned and the bits of wool sticking through had surely never been rubbed with saddle soap or they’d be matted down more. It was dirty and grimy and the wool was gray to almost black but I didn’t understand then that the jacket, and talking about the jacket, was the way Carl had when he drank.

  We didn’t know the jacket yet the way we would know it and understand it later when he talked about the plane.

  “I’ll bring the soap tomorrow,” Willy promised. “For sure.”

  Since he was standing and I wanted to go pretty badly I stood up and went to the door and moved out into the cold where it was dark and Willy followed me for a change.

  We walked with our breath out in front and I was thinking of Carl and I thought Willy was doing the same but after a bit he laughed.

  “That Melonowski, he’s something.”

  “Well, you can see why. Miss Johnson is really pretty.”

  “Sure. But right there in school like that. Huh. That takes something.”

  After that I went home and worked on the model Warhawk and did it fine except that I got some wrinkles in the tissue around the wing root and when I tried to wet them a little and take them out the paper got too wet and ruined it and I had to patch it with glue and more paper and of course that looked just awful.

  My models always come out messy.

  5

  No matter how much you do in the summer, no matter how hard you work or run, your ankles always get weak. The muscles you use for skating don’t get used in the summer and it’s like everybody has to start all over in the fall, or the first part of winter when the ice forms and gets tight.

  The next day was a Friday. School was school. But everybody brought skates and after school we hit the rinks and it was cold and dusky and we went into the warming house to put our skates on.

  It was packed. It usually is the first few times after the ice is formed. But this time for some reason there were a lot of little kids, three and four, and like always they were having a rough time.

  After skating gets going the warming house isn’t so crowded. People skate and come in for a little, then back out, and cycle through that way. But when it first opens they just pack in and the little kids get pushed sideways until they’re all in one corner, standing holding their skates, pouting and some of them starting to cry and always before they just had to fight it out or wait until the bigger kids were done and out skating.

  But now there was Carl.

  He was in the back of the shack and he stood up and he moved into the middle and he took a little girl by the hand and shouldered people out of the way and moved to the benches by th
e door. There were other kids sitting there, high-school kids suiting up for hockey and he looked at them.

  That’s all he did. Just looked at them, standing up with his flight jacket unzipped and the little girl holding onto his hand and Willy and I were sitting where we could see his eyes.

  “They look hot,” he said to me, leaning close to my ear. “His eyes look hot.”

  And they did. They almost glowed when he looked down at the kids who were sitting on the bench.

  For a second or two they didn’t do anything, and I think maybe they didn’t want to do anything either. But the eyes cut through them, and they moved sideways and some of them got up and they left a place for the little girl and still Carl stood, looking down.

  They moved more, made a wider place, and then the people in the center of the room parted and Carl raised his hand and the children who had been pushed down and down came through and they started to use the bench by the door and from that time on whenever the little kids came in they used that part of the bench and nobody else would use that place. Not even the grownups who came to skate to the music.

  But it was Carl with the little girl that made me stare. With Willy it was the way he used his eyes to clear a spot for the little kids. But Willy sees things and I see lines, outsides of things, and Carl and the girl, the little girl, was all curving lines.

  She was all in white with little white skates with colored pom-poms on the laces and she was three or maybe four and he leaned down and took her under the armpits and sat her on the bench.

  Then his hands, hard and red and old and bent, took up the skates and untied the laces and helped her take off her boots and put the skates on, pulling them up soft and then hovering over the laces and tightening them for her, one at a time, all the time the curve of him looking down at the skates. He looked like a great bird, his brown coat hanging open, the arms like wings coming down to pull the laces tight, then snug, and then helping her up and another child sat down and Carl’s hands went down to the skates and worked magic, pulling them on and tightening them.

  That’s what I saw.

  Willy saw inside of what was happening, saw something Carl was doing with the people inside and I saw the lines of what was happening; saw him bending over and down to help the little kids and I almost forgot to skate and maybe would have just sat and watched Carl but Willy nudged me.

  “We’ve got to get out on the rink. Get our ankles started back.” He clumped up and went for the door walking on his skate toes and I followed, staying up on the toes because they were sharp, new sharp, and there was some gravel on the road between the warming house and the rinks. Nothing dulls the skate blades like gravel.

  We went right onto the hockey rink and just started skating around to the right. I left my stick at the gate because I didn’t think I’d need it because they didn’t have the nets out yet anyway.

  My ankles felt like rubber but I could feel them stiffening and pretty soon I was skating fast and I came up in back of Willy and threw a small body check at him, just playful, and he went down and got up and came back at me with one and I knew winter was going to be all right.

  It was Friday and the ice was hard and the skates grabbed right with the new edges and starting Saturday we would get into hockey.

  I forgot summer and fall the way you forget winter when it’s summer or fall, just let it fall away and went to skating backwards and doing slow rolls dodging in and out of the other kids until it was stone dark and the lights came on and then we skated until our ankles screamed and went home to sleep hard and down thinking only of the ice and the cold.

  6

  It was during hockey that we first truly came to see how powerful Carl really was, saw how it came out and out of him, made people do what he needed them to do. We’d seen a bit of it that first night when he cleared the bench for the young kids—but during hockey we saw what it could really do.

  Hockey at the McKinley rink had to be the closest you could come to war without killing somebody—a friendly war.

  It wasn’t hockey with rules, it wasn’t hockey with a limited number of players, it wasn’t hockey that ended or even began.

  It was just hockey.

  Nobody kept score, nobody chose up sides, nobody said who could play or who couldn’t play. In the right-hand rink hockey just went on and on, as long as the rink was open, all winter long; just the flash of skates and the shouts and swearing of kids as they slammed into the boards, the flat-whap of slap shots and the moans when somebody went down with a bad hit.

  Hockey.

  One time a kid came down from Canada and he played on a team up there, a high-school team, and he was good. He played left wing and he was really fast and he came to the rinks one day and when he got done he told me he’d never seen anything like it.

  “That’s the hardest hockey I’ve ever played,” he said, sucking the blood out of a knuckle where a puck had smashed him. We didn’t wear gloves. “Some of those small guys will kill you for the puck. Just kill you, eh?”

  Naturally we’d played a little hard because we all knew he was from Canada and wanted to make a good impression. I threw a check into him once so hard he sprayed snot all over the ice and even if he was four years older I can hit pretty hard if I’m up to steam.

  But even so, when you get a kid from Canada saying we play rough hockey you get an idea of how the game goes. Merv Billings’ mother won’t let him play with us anymore because he got a cracked rib and when he got that it was nothing, nothing compared to some of the shots we get.

  Maybe it would be right to call it wild hockey, the way it would be played if there just weren’t any rules and it was being played by jack-pine savages just out of the woods or something.

  It started when you hit the ice and it ended when you went home and you played all the time. All winter. And there were no rules except that you couldn’t intentionally use your stick to hook a guy in the gourds because one time Jimmy Nelson got hooked so bad he skated in little circles puking and it froze on the ice and we had to skate through that puke all winter.

  Other than that no rules. Little kids skated on the left rink with the grownups until they thought they were ready for hockey and then they came onto the hockey rink. If they didn’t make it they went back until they could handle it and that’s how it went. Anybody could play hockey. Girls, boys, young, old—we even had some grownups on the hockey side now and then and they learned right away that when they hit the ice and got the puck they were no better and no worse than anybody.

  Hot and wild and fast, twelve and fourteen hours a day of hockey on the weekends. If you got hurt you went to the warming house until the pain went down. If something broke they called your parents and you were out for the winter.

  But the hockey went on. Pounding, slashing, cutting back and forth—the hockey went on. Sometimes there might be ten or twelve players on each side, between twenty and thirty players on the ice at the same time. With that many after the puck you felt lucky to see the thing, let alone get a shot, and if you actually got possession of it and tried to make a goal you could find yourself in the middle of an awful fight.

  Hockey.

  Blue and fast and tight. Sometimes you forgot how cold it was and your feet would freeze until your heels felt like lumps and you had to go in and sit through hot pain until they thawed and then back out into the fight. There was crying and there was screaming and there was speed and there was movement so fast and wild that you could forget who you were, forget everything but the ice and the speed and the game that went on and on and didn’t start and didn’t end.

  But now and then things could go wrong. Not often, but sometimes, and when they did there was usually a fight to get things squared away and if there wasn’t a fight there would be cutting—somebody who was bad, really bad, would be cut out of the game and not allowed to play.

  That’s how we came to see what Carl could do—when Dalen Erickson got cut.

  It came fast. He high-sticked a l
ittle kid in the face and that wasn’t so bad if it happened by accident. The kid bled a little and it stopped and he went back into the game and that should have been the end of that. But Dalen did it again, and I saw him, and he smiled when he did it—hooked the kid hard on purpose and there was more blood this time and I skated up to Willy.

  “That Dalen, he hooked the little kid on purpose.”

  “Yeah. I saw it.”

  “Just to see the kid bleed.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So we’ve got to do something about it.”

  Willy looked at me, then back to Erickson who was skating around the rear of the net. Erickson was big. Really big. “He’s a junior in high school,” Willy said, looking at me again. “He’ll kill us. We’re just going into the eighth grade. He’ll really kill us. I don’t want to die.”

  But he knew we had to do something just as I knew it. When somebody acts mean that way you just have to do something about it. If you don’t it just comes back later. Once on my paper route I had a big kid take my money and I gave it to him because he said he’d leave me alone and naturally he was lying. He kept coming back and finally I had to fight him, which I did and used a brick to make up for size and hit him so hard he goobered like a sick cat and went down. The point was that I might as well have fought him in the first place and saved the money.

  Still. I didn’t want to die either. “Why don’t we talk to him?” I looked down at the ice. “Maybe we could just explain it . . .”

  But it never came up. The little kid ran for the warming house and went inside and pretty soon Carl came out.

  He wasn’t running, but he walked kind of quick and the little kid was with him and he pointed out Erickson on the ice and Carl made a sign with his hand for Erickson to come off the ice.

  Erickson ignored it and tried to go back to playing but by now we’d all stopped and were just standing, looking at Erickson and Carl.