Dancing Carl Read online

Carl made another sign and Erickson still ignored him. The big kid skated to the other end of the rink and shook his head and just kept skating back and forth.

  Carl set the little kid aside and opened the rink gate and walked out on the ice. He didn’t look mad, but more sad, and he walked to the center of the rink and stood. No more signs, he just stood and looked at Erickson and we could all see the power come out of him and go across the ice and Willy swore under his breath and saw inside of what was happening but I saw the lines again.

  Carl standing straight and clean and tall and his eyes locked onto Erickson, a straight line across the ice.

  And Erickson skating back and forth, fighting the eyes the way a northern pike fights the hook, tearing back and forth and skating around the rink, wilder and faster and faster with all of us standing and watching until finally he could stand it no more, until none of us could stand it any longer and he skate-ran to the gate and off the ice and into the warming house.

  We still stood, staring.

  Carl moved his eyes around the rink, from one face to the next, then he made a signal to the small kid and the kid came on the ice and Carl ruffled his cap so it came down over his eyes.

  Then he did another strange thing. He picked up the kid, held him out in front of him at arm’s length and went around in a circle slowly, almost as if he were offering the kid to us, then around again a little faster and swooping the kid up and down.

  And without skates, on the ice, never losing his balance, and finally around one more time to set the kid down, gently—and then he turned and walked off the ice and into the warming house.

  That’s when I thought of the dancing part. The lines all went around and swooped down and out and the kid’s skates flashed out in a silver circle, around the rink, and the line curved down so the kid came down to the ice and I thought of a troop of dancers who had come to the school one time.

  They were modern dancers and they said how the dances were supposed to mean something but they weren’t as good as Carl. Or maybe they were as good but they didn’t mean it as much. Or maybe Carl wasn’t dancing but just being and they didn’t know how to do that.

  Whatever it was, when Carl went down and out and around with the kid I thought of dancing and in my head I called him Dancing Carl and later when I told Willy that was what I’d named him Willy agreed. Except that he wanted to find the reason that Carl danced because he always looked inside things and I just wanted to see him do it again. I didn’t care so much why he did it, just that he did it.

  But none of that helped Erickson. He was cut, cut away and gone and we saw him leave the warming house later and he didn’t skate all the rest of the winter. And Carl never said a word.

  He just used his eyes and something else we didn’t understand, something that came from inside him, something that was from a sadness we couldn’t understand but so strong that when it came out nothing could stop it. His eyes stopped Erickson, drove him off the rink; his eyes and the strong thing that came out of him.

  7

  Willy always says that there are really two worlds, not one. He says that there is a grownup world and there is a world for us and he likes ours a lot better. I don’t know for sure about all of that but when it came to Carl there were at first two ways to see him, our way and the grownup way. And even though they both came together and there was just the one Carl, just the one Dancing Carl, it’s not fair to show just one side.

  We saw him at the rinks as having the power to make things happen, saw him making the lines go out and out of him, saw him as part of the ice, part of the warming house, controlling it all.

  The grownups I think at first saw him as the town drunk and they were just helping out by giving him the job at the rinks and a place to sleep and maybe that was true. At first.

  But it changed. It changed for the grownups as much as it did for all of us and Willy and I first saw the change coming down in the back of Severson’s Bakery before daylight one morning.

  Severson had run the bakery ever since he took over from his father, who had run the bakery when he took it over from his father. There’d always been a Severson’s Bakery and sometimes we would go to school early just so we could stop at Severson’s and go in the back.

  They started baking the day’s bread and rolls and pastry about three in the morning and by eight on a winter morning the smells that came out of the bakery made your mouth wet and your stomach rumble.

  We would go in the back, out of the dark cold of the morning with our hair frozen and our fingers stiff and just stand inside the door and let the smells work into us. Hot smells of fresh bread and rolls, just coming out of the big rotating ovens and when the bakers—there were three of them—when the bakers saw us standing there they would snake a couple of rolls off the racks, fresh and so hot you couldn’t hold them, and throw them to us.

  It’s hard to think of anything better. Just coming out of the cold into the smell of the bread and eating hot rolls while the steam and heat works around you—Willy says it’s a memory that will stay with us the rest of our lives but I think we should keep going back to make sure. Go back a lot.

  One morning after Carl had been at the rinks for a couple of weeks, after the business with Dalen, we stopped at the bakery and they gave us a roll and then the cooks started talking while we were eating them.

  They were talking about Carl, talking while they worked, sliding the big pans into the ovens, and Bud, who is the master baker, smiled.

  “You hear about that crazy Wenstrom down at the rinks?”

  The other two cooks didn’t say anything. He always had young cooks there and they would study with him for a while and then move on and they never talked much because Bud did most of the talking.

  “I guess he’s been doing some pretty weird stuff. Dancing or moving or something. And he’s taken over the rinks like it was his town or something . . .”

  Still the two other cooks didn’t speak but Willy and I were listening carefully now. We knew the other side of Carl.

  Bud had been sliding a pan into the big oven and he stopped and thought, then pushed it in. “I was skating there the other night, two nights ago, and Carl was there and he didn’t seem weird or anything. He just seemed, well, like Carl—like he’s been since the war. Since he came back. Of course I was only there for a couple of hours but there are some who say they’ve seen it and it’s kind of pretty. Like maybe he’s got the shine on him or something. But I don’t know, I don’t know—maybe we should skate a little more and see what it’s like . . .”

  And that was the end of it because he started to talk about a girl he’d met in the army once, down south someplace, and just when the story started to get good Willy pulled at my arm and we had to go to make school. Willy said he’d heard the story before but I didn’t believe him because when I asked him how it ended he wouldn’t tell me. Kept saying I was too young and that it wasn’t a true story anyway because he’d heard his cousin who is in the navy tell it about a girl in California. I said it didn’t matter if a story was true or not as long as it was a good story and we argued the rest of the way to school about that one.

  But later I heard other grownups talking and they felt about like Bud, felt like maybe Carl was strange but that there was more, too. More that they had to watch.

  8

  There was music at the rinks.

  From the hockey side you almost couldn’t hear it because the speakers were hung up in the wire and in the trees and all aimed at the left rink for the grownups who liked to skate to the music. Besides, there was usually so much noise on the hockey side you couldn’t hear it anyway.

  But there was music there, from a record player that was kept under Carl’s bunk. It was one of those old military record players, probably from the war, and it played scratchy and wobbly but they had a selection of waltzes and polkas and Carl would put records on when he opened the rinks after school and play a whole stack that night. The music didn’t make any sense at first, he
would just play them the way they came, but it was always in the background.

  Loud and scratching in the cold and after the dark came down and the lights came on the music matched the rink lights somehow. It would come dim, but then louder and seemed to be flat and moving at the same time—just like the small bulbs made the rinks all flat light, the music spilled out of the speakers and over the cold ice.

  We almost never skated to the music except one time when Shirley came down to the rinks and I got brave and asked her to skate. That took something, that did. She had her hair in a pony tail and a stocking cap on so it framed her face and her eyes kind of lifted at the corners and I thought I would die, my knees hurt so bad.

  But Willy dared me and it was the kind of dare you couldn’t really put away so I stuck my stick in the snow at the end of the rink and went out of the hockey rink and over onto the other side where she was skating. I caught her halfway around the rink and kind of moved in beside her smooth and easy and swallowed hard and said, “Would you like to skate with me?”

  I think. Actually I don’t remember what I said but I know she nodded, I saw her nod and I took her hand and we skated around the rink four times.

  Of course Willy made a thing of it and teased me when I skated past him but he was just jealous and I knew it and kept skating. After four rounds to the music she said she had to go and I nodded and let go her hand. I was pretty near crushing it anyway. And I thought it was just an excuse but it wasn’t. She really went into the warming house and took her skates off and went home and that made me feel some good. Except that I couldn’t remember a thing that I said or that she said and I sat for hours that night until I fell asleep and still couldn’t remember.

  * * *

  We sat and talked a lot. Willy was great for talking and even though I didn’t start that way some of Willy had a way of rubbing off on you like I guess some of me rubbed off on Willy.

  Like during study period we would try to get in the back and talk, or whisper. Or maybe pass notes if Melon was running the study period because he’d crack you for talking and when he cracked you it would sometimes turn blue.

  After that time with Erickson and how he got cut from the rink we talked about Carl. In fact for the rest of that winter we talked about Carl. Even now, when it’s all done, we still talk about Carl and I think maybe the whole town still talks about Carl.

  “How could that be?” Willy whispered at me in study period.

  “What?” I had a watchful eye on Melon but he was staring at the wall next to the window. Or maybe out the window. Or thinking of Miss Johnson.

  “How could it be, what Carl did?” Willy made a frown. “Down at the rink. With Erickson.”

  I didn’t know. “Maybe we’re not supposed to know where that power comes from. Maybe that’s just for certain grownups.”

  “Drunks?”

  “He’s not a drunk.”

  “He is too.”

  “No he’s not.” And this time it came out almost too loud. Melon looked up and covered the room with his eyes and I waited with my breath held but it passed and he went back to staring at the wall. “I don’t know what he is but he’s not a drunk. Pisspot Jimmy is a drunk, not Carl.”

  Pisspot Jimmy lived down in back of the Mint Cafe in some boxes and he was always wet with himself and that’s how he got his name. But he could never remember anything or even walk or talk and was just considered dead or gone. He could never do what Carl did, could never be what we’d seen Carl be.

  “Maybe Carl is a drunk,” I whispered, “because he drinks all the time. But there’s more, too.”

  Wham! I took a shot down on my head, a straight-down knuckle shot that crossed my eyes. Old Melon had gone around and caught me from the rear and just about put my lights out.

  “Quit talking,” he said quietly. “Now.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Next time I’ll pop you hard.”

  “Yes sir.” I closed my eyes and tried to figure if the colors I saw were normal or from his knuckle. They faded slowly. Knuckle colors.

  “You talk too loud,” Willy whispered as soon as Melon was gone. “Hold it down.”

  “Let’s not talk at all.”

  “I want to know more about Carl.”

  “So wait until we get to the rinks.”

  Which was what we did and was why we got more involved in what Carl’s dances meant than other people in town. Or more involved in Carl.

  But there was one more thing that happened before Willy got inside Carl and I saw more than lines with Carl’s dancing.

  Finding out about Carl is one of those backdoor things. We kept doing things that didn’t seem to have anything to do with Carl only to find that they all mattered later. Like finding out about Melon and Miss Johnson and it didn’t seem to have anything to do with Carl except that it showed us what we thought might be love only to find that what Carl danced later to Helen Swanson was different and maybe real love.

  And we started to get inside of Carl because David Hanson made a crack about my P-40 Warhawk.

  9

  It wasn’t that David was mean. He isn’t. He’s the next-door neighbor on one side of my house and there isn’t one on the other side because we live on the edge of town.

  And you’d think that living right next to each other we’d be good friends but that just didn’t happen. He’s a year older than me and his folks are kind of churchy and mine aren’t and we just do different things.

  But David came over one day after school and saw my Warhawk model after I’d painted it.

  “You could have masked it,” he said. “And not had those fuzzy edges around the paint.”

  And it was a little fuzzy around the tiger mouth, but not bad, but it bothered me. I thought it meant something that I had a messy model and his were always neat and that bothered me and I set out to make a model that was neat and real looking and hard to do and then when he came over he wouldn’t be able to say anything.

  I got a stick model B-17—a big, four-engined bomber from the Second World War—and I worked four nights almost all through the night until it was finished and there were no wrinkles and the paint lines were clean and sharp and I hung it from the ceiling in my room. Naturally David didn’t come over to see it, because that’s the way those things seem to work.

  But it turned out to have a lot to do with Carl, maybe some of it good and maybe some of it not so good.

  It got us inside what Carl was and like I said it was a backdoor kind of thing.

  * * *

  What happened to bring things all into one place and make Carl more than he’d been before was that a kid named Billy Krieg took sick and went down and down with it and they got him into the hospital but everybody said he was going to die.

  So they had a big skating party to raise money for some special operation that Billy was supposed to have and it all would have been pretty nice.

  They got some new records and put a new needle in the phonograph and opened both rinks for the party so there wasn’t any hockey that night. It was a Tuesday night so they started the skating party early and everybody had to pay a dollar to get in and a quarter a dance, only it wasn’t dancing of course but just skating to the music with your favorite girl. I only had to pay fifty cents, being twelve, and I had three quarters besides and you can guess who I spent them on and we skated together after my quarters were gone too and it didn’t matter if Willy teased me some.

  But Willy found a girl too—David’s sister Sharon Hanson—and we skated on the hockey side and it was like being a soldier taking your girl on the battlefield after the war is over, skating on the hockey side of the rinks with a girl holding your arm and talking about the night and the music and the school and everything like that.

  It would have been nice except that during the night while we were all skating around and being happy Billy Krieg died in the hospital and I saw the sheriff come and whisper something to some of the grownups at the end of the rink.

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sp; In a few minutes it went around the rinks, like a fire; we all knew that Billy had died and we all felt sad but the music kept going and some of us kept skating because we were moving when we heard it and on skates you just keep on moving.

  It was like something had stopped but had to keep going, too, and the music that was supposed to have meant something happy suddenly meant something sad but it still worked.

  I saw people skating and crying while the music played and they went around and around and I guess maybe I was crying too. Because I had known Billy too and he was all right, but more than that it was the sadness of the night and what had happened—more than who it happened to.

  I cried and skated around and Shirley on my arm cried and everybody just kept going around and then Carl came on the ice.

  He didn’t have skates on but he walked out in the middle of the ice and as I skated by I could see tears in his eyes but that might have been from the cold or the bottle in his pocket because there were often tears in his eyes, and he danced.

  This time it wasn’t just a movement or a turn. He danced with his arms out to the side, around and around with his hands making those swooping motions and he moved back and forth with the top of his body as his arms swept and it came from the music and it didn’t come from the music, too.

  He grew out of the ice. Everybody stopped skating and watched him and he grew out of the ice in curving lines and I stood with Shirley and we watched Carl go around and back and forth with his feet, his shoes, sliding on the frayed ice, torn from the blades to make a film of scraping.

  He danced and grew and moved around the rink not once but twice, twice around in great swoops of beauty out of the ice and then he was gone back into the warming house and still nobody moved and I thought of Billy Krieg.

  In just that way I stood still and something from the dance or of the dance or the way Carl had grown from the ice in swoops and curves made me think of Billy Krieg and it wasn’t sad. I thought of how I had known him before he was sick.