Paintings From the Cave by Gary Paulsen

PAINTINGS FROM THE CAVE: THREE NOVELLAS
     by Gary Paulsen

 

This short story collection contains three novellas: Man of the Iron Heads, Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Girl, and Erik's Rules.  These stories allow the reader to embrace three troubled children, Jake, Jo, and Jamie, who are growing up in environments that no one, much less a child, should have to endure.  Jake lives in a city polluted with gangs, drugs, and violence.  He lives by one rule: You stop moving, you're done!  Next to the building he hides in to avoid the drug lord and his minions is a newly constructed apartment building protected by security and guarded entrances.  As he scrambles and sneaks through the wrecked interior of his building in an effort to avoid the druggies and crackheads who inhabit the front rooms, he spots a man across the alley who seems to be creating an iron head out of putty.  Intrigued and mesmerized, Jake risks exposure to find a window to better see the man work.  As he watches, fascinated, the man looks up and their eyes meet.  Jake has spent his entire life hiding from evil and protecting his friend, Layla, who is pregnant from being raped in the stairwell of her building.  His entire world changes, however, when he meets the eyes of this stranger across the alley. 

Jo lives in a low-class suburban area, where her drunk parents spent their days either screaming at each other or beating Jo.  She became very good at moving silently through the days of her life, attracting as little attention as possible...that was before the dogs.  Jo's first dog was a terrier that a neighboring family had left behind tied to the fence as they pulled away.  Mike became the first of her canine family, followed shortly thereafter by Carter, a skinny brown mutt that had a permanent smile.  It wasn't long before Betty joined them...laying in a box outside the grocery store sporting a sign that read, "Free Puppies".  Jo spend her days going to school, where she was the brunt of a considerable amount of bullying due to her ragged clothes and unkept appearances.  She learned to shoulder this distain along with the neglect her "biologicals" afforded her.  This all changed when she found the dogs...and when the dogs found a small girl with dark, sad eyes named Rose.

Jamie was an artist.  He didn't feel like one or believe he had any talent, but it was his art that kept him from going insane.  Jamie and his brother, Eric had a major challenge in their life...they are runaways, running from a live of abuse and neglect from their mother and her alcholic boyfriend.  Eric is fifteen and Jamie's ten and they have hidden in cars, slept in alleys, in the park, stayed over at the houses of a few sympatheic strangers, and even slept on the benches of the burger joint that Eric worked at after school.  Eric has rules: Rule #1...Don't talk about, or think about, what happened before.  Jamie tries to follow this rule, but the nightmares still come in the dark of the night and he wakes screaming and trembling with fear as Eric holds him close, comforting him, waiting for the shaking to stop.  Eric is trying to keep them together, in school, clothed and fed, and most importantly, out of sight.  Eric's Rule #5...Stay off the grid, out of sight, out of the loop, don't do anything to call attention to yourself because the least little thing could trip you up. 
This was a rule that Jamie was very good at following, he was small, quiet, unobtrusive.  It was his art that caused him to break this rule, his art that led him to the dogs, and it was the dogs that gave him and Eric a chance for a short stay in heaven. 

A short glimpse of these three novellas may be seen at:
http://play.google.com/books/reader?id=viMwInQ1qiQC&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en

Gary Paulsen is heralded as being "one of the best-loved writers alive".  After reading these novellas, I can completed understand why this may be so.  His youth was troubled and he ran away from home at the age of fourteen.  As with many of his story characters, he was also "saved" by art and dogs.  A short bio-glog can be seen at glogster.com. 

 http://cdoerksen.edu.glogster.com/gary-paulsen/