Fishbone's Song by Gary Paulsen

worked at it andthought on it and did it all just right . . .
    Maybe you could live that way. Live rough.
    Because . . .
    Because Fishbone said.
    Because when he said things that way, said them up instead of down, so your thinking went up instead of down, just that way, you thought you could maybe do anything.
    Because Fishbone said.
    Fifth Song: Dust Flower from a Soldier
    Nothing around me but whirling dust,
    nothing ahead of me but silver must.
    Must come home to you.
    Think of you each morning-night,
    think of you wrong or right.
    Must come home to you.
    Think of you each live long day,
    think of you when I stand and pray.
    Got no home but you.

6
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Treefriends
    F ishbone says . . .
    Was everything to me, what it meant. Just that. Fishbone says. Even when it didn’t seem like he might be saying very much, was still something there. Could be like the seed in the center of a wild plum. They get ripe and sweet and you eat them, same with his talk, his songs, his shuffle-pats on the wooden porch. Good to listen to, whether or not it’s sweet. Might be about a lady with a snake tattooed on her; or a fast car; or deep cold in Korea; or just a bird sitting on a limb, the way the light hits his feathers, his eye. Might be thecolor on the side of a fish, darting, there and gone. Stories there and gone.
    Maybe just stories. But inside each of them was a seed, a pit, meant more than the story. More than just the sweet on the outside. You might not see it right away, might be thinking about the tattoo or the fast car and miss the reason, miss the part of the story-song that really counted.
    Center.
    It wasn’t the tattoo, it was the beauty of it, what it meant. It wasn’t the fast car, it was the story of Jimmy Applecore. How short his life turned out. How the money counted, and then didn’t count at all. How there was a Jimmy and a Charlene and then there wasn’t. Just gone. Didn’t matter about the car or the money or the white lightning. The center was Jimmy just like the center was the woman, not the tattooed snake around her neck.
    Had to see that. See the center of his story-songs.
    That’s how it started, how I started.
    Started to think that way.
    It wasn’t the dream about the room getting bigger and bigger. Same dream over and over. It was the edge of the dream. Fishbone tried to help me see that and in the end he did. I’d see past what I was looking at, or over it, or through it, inside it.
    Saw in a book the blue-haired woman sent me about Native American people in the Southwest. Hard to read, full of ideas that were just that, ideas. What this man thought or that man thought, but just that. What they thought. No real answers in the writing of the book. But there were some pictures as well, drawings that the natives had done on flat rocks, kind of scratched-in line drawings. One was a deer, easy to tell, sideways drawing of a buck deer. But on the inside of the lines of the drawing were more drawings, almost like doctor drawings of the guts of the deer. Plus it showed an arrow in the center of the chest, front shoulder, where the heart was. Arrow through the heart.Then all the rest of the guts. How they went from the throat down into the stomach and then around and around and out the rear and at first it seemed like just that. Drawing of a deer. Somebody had taken one—with a pointed stick or arrow—and when they opened it up, they saw the guts and drew them.
    Saw inside the deer.
    That’s what I thought at first. Just drawing the inside. But then I thought—talked to Fishbone about it—what if it was more. A deer would have been almost impossible to kill then. Too fast to run down, too quick to spear. Have to sneak up to get close before shooting it with an arrow. Anybody who got one had to be really good or really lucky, and for anybody living on roots and small rodents and maybe even snakes and lizards, like Fishbone said, a deer