The Monument by Gary Paulsen Read Free Book Online

said. “You just let it grow and grow and have a good time with it. That’s the most important thing.” She leaned down and kissed me on the forehead and touched my cheek with her hand that smelled of lilac water. Fred turned off the light so I could sleep but I lay awake for a long time and stared at the drawing in the light that came in the window from the streetlight. It changed and changed until I thought it was moving, and then I went to sleep.

Eleven

    HE WAS NOT the same person in the morning.
    I woke up with the sun and had breakfast with Fred and Emma and went with Fred to the elevator to help start up.
    At seven twenty Python and I left the elevator and walked to Carlson’s place where his station wagon was parked. At exactly eight o’clock hecame out the door with a pad of paper and a small wooden box that I found was a pencil case. He was scrubbed clean, had on fresh baggy canvas pants and a clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the middle of his upper arms. The hair around his bald spot was slicked back with water. His eyes looked clear.
    “Good morning,” he said, then down to Python, “and to you too. How are you both this morning?”
    “We’re fine. I want to be an artist.” It just popped out and I wished I hadn’t said it because it sounded silly, but he said a strange thing.
    “And how could it be any other way?” It was almost exactly the same thing Fred had said the night before.
    “Can you … teach me?”
    He shook his head. “No. Not to be an artist. You already are that—I knew you had the hot worm in you when I first saw you walking up to the station wagon.”
    “I didn’t think you could see much with your—from that end.”
    “Well, then, there’s seeing,” he smiled, “andthere’s
seeing
, isn’t there? The point is I knew it, and there is nothing I—nor you, for that matter—can do about it. The fact exists. You are an artist.”
    “But I don’t know anything.”
    “Ahh, there I can help you.” He paused and let gas, just as natural as anything, and rubbed his stomach. I don’t think he thought it was crude or even thought of it at all—maybe nothing was crude to him. “She had strange eggs for breakfast—reminds me of some I had in India once. They were pickled but these had the strangest flavor.”
    I didn’t say anything. If they hadn’t killed him by now they probably wouldn’t.
    “I can teach you something of technique, of line, of color—of art.” He stopped at the station wagon and opened the back, put the pad and pencils in the back in a pile of what looked exactly like junk. He closed the rear door and motioned to the door on the passenger side.
    “Get in. Your lesson starts now.”
    “Where are we going?”
    “Tomorrow night there is to be a public meetingto make some kind of decision about the monument. I need to know more about your town, my dear, more of what it’s like so that I can decide what kind of a monument to do.”
    “But isn’t that up to them? To the people in the town?” I held the door open and Python climbed into the front seat and sat in the middle. I climbed in and sat in the middle of a junk pile of old cans, bread wrappers, and empty potato chip bags, and some stuff I didn’t want to guess about. Python seemed to love it. “Don’t the people in Bolton get to decide what kind of monument they get?”
    He looked at me, watched my face. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
    I nodded. “It seems like if they’re paying for it …”
    “There it is—right there.” He slammed his hand against the wheel and I felt Python jump next to me. “There’s the crux of it, isn’t it? All of art comes down to that, right down to that.” He laughed but it wasn’t a funny laugh, more a sad one. “You have to kind of squirm around thatpoint—like a bug on a hot stove looking for a cool place. That’s art, that is. Right there.”
    He was silent for a time, which was just as well. The station wagon, once it