The Monument (3 page)

It was like he was bolted to my leg, would only move when I moved. I grabbed the hair on the top of his shoulder, which about came to my waist, and leaned on him a bit to take the weight off my stiff leg. We started away from the pen and headed home, and never once after that did Python leave my side except when I went into a building.

He wouldn’t come inside but stopped just outside the door and lay down when we got home that night. I told Emma and Fred what I had done and that I wanted to keep Python no matter what. I said that I would sleep outside in a special house with Python if I had to so he could live with us and Fred smiled.

“You don’t have to worry, Rocky. I’ll build him a house and he’ll stay outside just fine. Emma doesn’t mind, do you, Emma?”

And of course she didn’t, just as they didn’t mind anything I did that was half crazy, except that this time it wasn’t. Half crazy.

Python turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me next to Emma and Fred. The next morning Fred went to work and called the sheriff from work. When he came home that night he told me:

“Python is your dog now. I have cleared him with the law. You must take him for his shots and have Doc Emerson check him over, and I will make a doghouse for him Sunday.”

And that’s how Python came into my life and he has never left it since. When I go in the house, winter or summer, it doesn’t matter, he stops at the door, has never once tried to get in. No matter how long or short I am in the house, when I come out he is by the door and stands up. I grab the hair on his shoulder and he walks with me. When I go to school or the movies or the library it’s the same. He stops at the door and waits and
everybody knows him and that he is my friend. Nobody, nobody touches him, or me when he’s with me.

Except once.

There was a boy that lived here named Kyle Offens. Kyle was one of those people who tease other people who aren’t right, and he took to teasing me because he thought my leg was fanny. I didn’t pay any attention because of what Kyle was like—he had a brain about the size of my little fingernail and only knew three words or maybe four—but one afternoon when I was walking past him on the way home from school, he started teasing me and took a poke at my arm. It wasn’t much of a poke, and I didn’t even notice it—just a touch.

But in about half a second he was on his back. Python had him down and was standing on his chest and had all his teeth showing. He was growling deep in his chest so that it sounded like a car engine inside a garbage can, and Kyle was telling me he was sorry for anything he’d ever done to me and just about everybody else in his life.

After that nobody touched me or Python again, and after a year and then another year it was never just me. It was me and Python. When I went outside he was there, next to me, my hand on his back leaning a little. When I stopped, he would stop and when I looked at something or somebody, he would look at the same thing.

In a while I didn’t think about it, came to accept that he would always be there. When people talked about me, it wasn’t just there goes Rocky or here comes Rocky, it was there goes Rocky and Python.

We were like one person.

Rocky and Python.

M
ICK

BEFORE MICK there has to be something about the town because it was really the town that brought Mick. Mick called that ironic, because it was like the town caused its own destruction. Not that it was actually destroyed.

Well. Maybe it was, but not so you could see it.

I don’t know much about towns. All I know is
the orphanage and Bolton, Kansas. But I watch television and read sometimes, and so I’ve seen other towns that way. I guess Bolton is pretty much like all of them—like Mick called it, a small version of all other places.

It has some good people and some bad people and lots in between. I probably wouldn’t know anything at all except that Fred hired me to work at the elevator. Because Bolton is a farming community the elevator is the center of everything, so I got to hear about what was happening.

I think he just did it to be nice, so I’d have some spending money. He hired me to help with the books and clean up the office. During school days I worked each night after school for one hour and four hours on Saturday and Sunday we were off. But in the summer I worked each day for four hours, so I was there all the time in the dusty office next to where they brought the trucks to dump the grain through a grate to be pumped up into the elevator towers in the big auger pumps.

At first it was exciting. The farmers came in all covered with dirt and grain dust and they’d
tip the trucks up to let the grain pour into the elevators. It was funny, but they would always stand in back and watch the wheat coming out, golden colored in a stream. No matter who they were, they would reach out and let the grain run through the palm of their hands.

Every time.

When I asked Fred about it he smiled and said: “It’s their gold, don’t you see? That’s their gold and they want to touch it as it runs out.”

After a while seeing the grain run, especially in the fall when the big harvest push comes on, it gets a little boring. Then I’d putz around the office and look at the stuff on the shelves. Gloves and special medicines for the cattle and blocks of salt that tasted all grainy and coarse and an old machine that took nickels to give you about a tablespoon of peanuts. It was on a hot summer day that Fred taught me about peanuts and Coke. He came in and took a bottle of Coke out of the cooler in the corner and dropped a nickel in the peanut machine and put the peanuts down in the Coke bottle.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Summer lunch—want some?”

“I never heard of such a thing.”

“Maybe they didn’t sell peanuts in the orphanage.”

“Not Coke either.”

“Try it.” He handed me a Coke and dropped some peanuts in it and it wasn’t bad. The salt made the Coke taste better in some way.

“See? It’s just a quick bite when you feel the heat getting you down.”

Except that when the farmers came in to figure up their grain Fred had a different quick bite. He kept a bottle in a sack under the counter and he would pass it to the farmer, sack and all. They would each take a shot off the bottle and snort and make faces and wheeze and spit out the door in the dust before settling down to business. The only farmer Fred didn’t do the bottle in the sack with was a man named Carl Avery, who would talk about Jesus when he came. Not in a bad way, but just as he might talk about a friend—like Jesus was somebody he just met and liked—and Fred didn’t hand him the bottle.

But all the rest. And when business was done
and they had figured up the amount of money due and all the government extras that would come in later, the farmers would stand and talk to Fred.

About many things.

I would sit back in the corner at the dusty desk drinking Coke with peanuts in it and listen to them talk. After a little while they forgot I was there, or maybe figured I was like the desk—almost furniture—sitting there listening to them, and I heard it all.

They loved to gossip.

They’d chew tobacco and spit in a can by the peanut machine—it’s the only thing I never cleaned for Fred, that can full of spit, and it
always
seemed to be full and I
always
seemed to have to look at it—and talk about crops and who got the best wheat or the best rain or the best wife or who was fooling around with who or who owed the most money to the bank or who lost the most money in the poker game at Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium.

Fred never spoke much. He’d just smile and nod no matter what they said. I never heard him
repeat a story, not once, though he had many chances.

A farmer would come in and sell wheat and tell him about some other farmer who was cheating on his income tax. Then not ten minutes after the first one was gone, the second farmer himself would come in to sell wheat, and here stood Fred, smiling and nodding, and not telling him a word about what he’d heard about how he cheated on his taxes. He’d stand there and let the man talk, never saying a word while nine times out of ten the second farmer would be telling Fred all about the first former and how
he
cheated on his income tax.

I used to think things were bad in the orphanage, what with one of us talking about another one, but we didn’t hold anything on those farmers. I suspect it meant about as much—nothing—and I wouldn’t bring it up except that it was where all the talk started that was to bring Mick.

I remember the very first time the talk started.

It was on a spring Saturday and we were selling seed. I had to write down each time a farmer
bought seed because none of them had much money, and we would charge it until they could pay in the fall.

I had just entered the amount for a farmer named Packer in the charge column. Old Bee-bee—who worked for Fred lifting and carrying and generally anything that didn’t require thinking—was taking the hundred-pound sacks of seed out to Packer’s truck when Packer filled his jaw with tobacco and scratched his neck where I don’t think he’d washed since maybe 1970 or ’71 and said to Fred:

“Talk is we need a monument.”

Like we’d heard all about it. Of course I hadn’t, not in the elevator anyway, and I could tell from the way Fred was waiting that he’d never heard about it either, but he didn’t say anything. Just waited for Packer to go on.

Packer spit in the can and went to the door, his hand on the knob. It didn’t mean he was leaving. I’ve seen some of them stand with their hand on that doorknob for half an hour or more getting ready to leave, talking all the time.

He stood with his hand on the knob and said: “It’s all over town that we need a monument.”

Fred still didn’t say anything, and I remembered now that Packer was the one other man Fred wouldn’t give a drink to. I drew some squares on the blotter with the yellow wooden pencil with the name of the elevator on the side and waited, wondering what he meant by
monument
.

“It’s because of that one in Washington. Word is Stanger went there on some kind of farm-subsidy trip and saw a monument and decided we had to have one, and so he come back and now everybody says we need one.”

“What monument was that?” Fred asked finally. “What did he see in Washington? There’s dozens of them.”

“The one to the boys killed in Vietnam,” Packer said. “That black wall. He saw that one and said we had to have one too.”

Fred looked out the dust-covered window as a tractor went by on the way to Hokum’s garage, but I don’t think he was seeing the tractor. “Yes,
well, Stanger had a boy that stayed in Vietnam, didn’t he?”

“ ‘Stayed,’ hell, he was killed over there.”

“That’s what I mean.” Fred turned from the window and his eyes stopped on my face for a part of a second. They looked soft but not drunk-soft. Just soft. “That’s just what I mean. Stanger lost a boy there, and I can’t say I blame him for wanting a monument. It’s little enough.”

“Damn waste of good money,” Packer said. “Good money after bad. The whole war was bad and now they want to spend more tax dollars on a monument to it. And it won’t bring back Stanger’s boy, nor nobody else, either, to have a black wall on the courthouse lawn.”

“They’re saying that?” Fred asked. “That they want a black wall?”

“Well. No. Just that we should have a monument. There’s a meeting over to the courthouse Tuesday night.”

“Well,” Fred said, winking at me. “I guess if we’re civic minded we ought to be there, oughtn’t we?”