Free The Monument by Gary Paulsen

of space, and near as I could see, not one of them was looking at Mick.
    All around the walls, in two rows, one above the other, were drawings. Many of them were in the colored chalk—some I had seen him do, like the one of the small grave and drawings at the elevator, but most of them I had not seen before. Some were in pencil, some in charcoal, some just a few lines to show an idea, a few lines that showed everything, and many of them in more detail.
    They were all of Bolton and for a second I just stared without seeing—there were so many. Dozens of them. And he had done them all in just two days and one night. One after the other, and they were all taped to the walls in the courthouse, and it didn’t seem possible that he couldhave done it. Not in such a short time. But then I remembered that I had seen him do some of them in three, four minutes, his arm swooping with the chalk.
    Then I started to look at the drawings, really look.
    They were more than just drawings—they were pictures of Bolton, pictures of the inside of Bolton, pictures of everything.
    “Look,” somebody near me said, “look at Mrs. Langdon.”
    They meant the drawing. I saw it to the left of the bench on the wall. It was a chalk drawing in a partially lighted room, almost dim, and she was standing near a window looking back over her shoulder at the person looking at the picture.
    She was nude.
    Her hair was down and she was nude and it was one of those things you had to believe because of the things around it. There was the drawing of Jennings’s dog, and there was Mrs. Langdon, and the drawing of the old car up on blocks, and there was Mrs. Langdon, and there were the sparrows at the elevator, and there wasMrs. Langdon, and even if it weren’t true, even if Mick hadn’t seen Mrs. Langdon nude, it didn’t matter.
    The drawing made it true.
    And more—more drawings of all the inside of the town. Drawings of the men in Lyle’s Weak Beer Emporium that made them look coarse and ugly and thick-necked and drunk and red. Drawings of Mrs. Carlson holding a dollar in her hand and it was her, just exactly her, and she looked greedy and like she could hold on to the dollar forever and ever.
    And me.
    There was a drawing of me.
    I was walking down the street with Python, holding on to his shoulder and the leg was there, the leg I didn’t like to think about was there, and I could see it now, see it as others saw it, and I felt tears coming to my eyes. Not because I was sad or upset, but because I felt like I did when I saw the painting by Degas with the ballet dancers in it and I wanted to know them and they were gone.
    And there was me and I wanted to know me,to talk to me and ask me all about the leg and the dog, and I couldn’t because it was me. I think in all the time of my life, in the long nights in the orphanage when we used to sneak into the bathroom and talk at night and bring cans of fruit cocktail and pretend to have picnics in there, in all the times of dreaming for somebody to come along and adopt me, in all the time of my life, I never saw me. Just me.
    And there I was.
    I started to choke up and saw that some others were crying and some—like Mrs. Langdon—were mad. She was standing in the middle of the crowded room staring, first at the drawing of her and then at Mick, who was not looking at her, and then back at the drawing and then to Mick. If she’d had a gun, I think he would have been dead.
    Mrs. Carlson was the same. Off in a corner she was looking at the drawing of her holding a dollar. I thought it looked just as natural as life but she was so mad she was shaking. While I was looking at her she worked through thecrowd to the wall and tore the drawing down and crumpled it and threw it on the floor.
    It was as if everybody had been waiting just for that. People seemed to lean, then sway back, and then others came to the wall and did the same—tore the drawings down and crumpled them and stamped them on the floor. In moments