Except before I got to it, I heard Lil's voice.
"Did you know that half of your head is covered in bird droppings?" she said.
"It's not bird droppings," I said.
"It's not?"
"Dropping. It's one dropping. Not droppings. It's not like I stood here and let this army of birds poop on me."
"So you stood there and let only one bird poop on you. Good for you."
"I didn't let it poop on me."
"Oh," she said.
Do you know how she said Oh? It wasn't like she was figuring something out and had just gotten it. It was like she was saying that I was the jerk of the world, which I had been hearing a lot lately.
"It sure is a mess," she said. "When you have hair as black as yours, it really shows well."
"Thanks," I said.
"Do you need some help cleaning it up?" she said.
By the way, and not that I think you're not too smart or anything, but I just want to make sure: You do know that she wasn't really offering to help, right?
"No," I said. "I don't need any help."
"If you ask me," she said, pushing her bike past, "you are someone who needs a lot of help." She turned and looked back at me. "Maybe you should try going under a sprinkler," she said, and smiled helpfully.
I smiled back and watched her ride away.
Then I reached up and felt the bird poop in my hair. It was crusty all right, but it was still sticky enough to smear. I rubbed as much as I could out of my hair and onto my fingers and then onto the grass. I didn't get much out before it all hardened.
So I did go under a sprinkler on the way home. It wasn't a bad idea.
The third time, I didn't look like a chump—at first. I was spading up a place for a garden in front of The Dump, and I'm not lying, this was hard work, since no one had spaded up this ground since forever. It took all morning, but I had almost finished when Lil Spicer came riding up on her bike. In her basket, she's got these plants.
It was the eeriest thing. It was like we'd had the same dream or something.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi," I said.
"My mother sent these over," she said.
"How did you know I was digging up a garden?"
Lil got off her bike and put down the kickstand. "My mother is weird like that when it comes to plants. She knows." She reached into her basket and held them up. "Daisies," she said.
They were long, and bright white blossoms fell out of the damp newspaper.
We planted them together. And watered them. And then tightened the soil around them. It means something, you know, when people plant things together. By the time we were done, these daisies were strutting their white hearts out in front of The Dump—which didn't look quite so much like a dump anymore.
"My hands are all dirty," Lil said.
I almost reached out to hold them. I think she would have let me.
How come when you're feeling good like this, something always happens to wreck it all? How come?
So we're standing there, Lil and me, Lil holding her hands out, and my brother, my jerk brother, comes riding up on his Sting-Ray. He gets off and looks at the daisies. Then he looks at us. "Nice," he says.
"Thanks," says Lil, because she doesn't know yet that he's a jerk and she doesn't know like you know that he's not really saying they're nice.
"Looks like they need some water," he says.
My stomach starts to twist up.
"They're fine," I say.
"We've already watered them," says Lil.
"Not enough," says my jerk brother, and he walks over and stands next to them.
He leans down over the first flower and lets fall a glob of spit—about as big as the bird poop. It falls right into the flower, and its head bobs down with the weight.
Then my jerk brother leans over to the next flower. He lets fall another glob of spit.
Lil gets on her bike and rides away.
My brother spits on every one of the flowers. Big globs that he hacks up from deep in his lungs somewhere.
"Looks a lot better now, don't you think, Douggo?"
I stood there like a chump.
You see how things never go right when you're feeling good?
"You see how things never go right when you're feeling good?" said my father that night. "You work like a freaking dog and get ahead in production because you've been doing a good—no, a great—job, and so you take a few more minutes for lunch to relax a little. Who cares? You're still making your quota. So who freaking cares? But it turns out that Mr. Big Bucks Ballard cares, and he lays into you for coming back late—like it's going to cost him a whole dollar and a half. 'We don't get things done around here by coming back late,' he says to me when I come in. 'Try not to make it a habit.' I'll make it a freaking habit if I feel like making it a habit, I almost said to him."
And stuff like that, through the meat loaf and green beans and canned peaches.
"Who does he think he is?" said my father.
I almost said that maybe Mr. Big Bucks Ballard thinks he's my father's boss, but I'm not an idiot. My father's hands were twitching like they wanted to flash out, and I didn't want them to flash out my way. So I shut up and ate, which is what he would have told me to do if I had said anything anyway. My mother mostly looked out the window.
"Things never go right when you're feeling good," my father said again.
After my father and my brother left, I helped my mother bring the dishes into the kitchen. "Thanks for the meat loaf, Mom," I said.
"Thanks for the daisies," she said.
"I'll dry," I said.
That smile.
The next Saturday's deliveries went better, mostly because I remembered the routes.
Evelyn Mason on Gardiner was waiting for me at the back door, which she held open as I carried her bags of groceries in and put them on the kitchen counter. "You're so skinny," she said.
"I think that's everything," I said.
"I want you to sit right down there and pour yourself a glass of milk," she said. Then she opened up the box of cinnamon doughnuts I had delivered.
You don't know how much I love cinnamon doughnuts.
I had two with a glass of milk. Evelyn Mason looked as happy as I probably looked. "I'll order some chocolate doughnuts for next week," she promised. I didn't tell her not to.
On the next run, I got turned around and had to ask a mailman where the Loeffler house was. I showed him my map. "You need to be on Washington Street," he said. "It's parallel to this one, but two blocks that way." When I got there, Mr. Loeffler was sitting on his front porch with a light bulb in his hand. He stood up when he saw me turn the corner. "Exactly who I've been waiting to see," he said.
"I'm not late," I said.
"No, no. I just need someone to change the bulb over the back door. I'm a little shaky on ladders, you know."
I changed the light bulb while he held the ladder.
I climbed down and looked at him. He looked a little shaky on the ground too.
"Anything else?" I said.
We went all over his house and changed six light bulbs. He must have spent a lot of time in the dark.
"That's just great," he said. He was pleased as all get-out, you could tell. He handed me a dollar bill. "For services rendered," he said.
On the last run in town, I went to the Daughertys' first—they were the people whose ice cream had melted last Saturday.
Mrs. Daugherty met me at the back door. Five kids watched through the screen while she inspected the ice cream straight off.
"Did the ice cream melt again?" the littlest one asked her mother.
"No, Phronsie. Not this time."
"That's good," Phronsie said to me. "Because if it was melted, then Ben and Joel and Davie said they were going to have to kill you."
I looked at the three boys.
They smiled at me.
"Not really," they said.
"Don't be too sure," Mrs. Daugherty said to
me.
And when all that was done, I had to head out to Mrs. Windermere's.
It was a load pretty much like last week's—a little more, at $23.65. "Don't forget the money," said Mr. Spicer, and I promised I wouldn't.
"Don't ever turn your back," said Lil.
"Lillian," said Mr. Spicer.
"I warned you," she said.
It was a day more than hot enough to make you work up a sweat. But the blue of the air went forever, and when the houses gave out and the road passed into the open field and there was just the sound of cicadas, Marysville didn't seem so bad.
Except it would have been a whole lot better with a really cold Coke.
Or if Joe Pepitone and I were walking side by side trading stories, and then we stopped for a while and threw in the field with the cicadas. That would have been even better. That would have been a whole lot better.
So I was looking out into the field, thinking about throwing with Joe Pepitone, and then this thing happened. Maybe the god of Creativity flew by and brushed me with his wing. I don't know. But suddenly, out in the field, it wasn't Joe Pepitone I was throwing with. It was Lucas—which, just so you know, would never have happened. But I could see us, Lucas back from Vietnam and me, throwing out in the field on a blue summer day. Like that. Throwing back and forth, and the sound of cicadas and bees and high-up birds and the leather smell of our gloves and the ball smacking into them. Lucas laughing in the sun.
It was almost like seeing a ghost.
I got to Mrs. Windermere's and I could hear her typing and dinging, so I went around to the back door and found the Cleverly Hidden Key and brought in her groceries and put them away, starting with the ice cream. Then I swung open the kitchen door and headed into the house to get the $23.65. I followed the sound of her typing and dinging until I could see her through the glass door, typing madly in another opera dress. Pencils still stabbed through her hair. Hands flying like birds in a panic.
But before I knocked, I went into the blue room.
I don't know how long I stood there, staring at the picture. I didn't even hear the typing and dinging stop or Mrs. Windermere coming into the room.
"Aren't they beautiful?" she said.
I nodded.
"What kind of ice cream did I order this week?"
"Peppermint. What kind of birds are they?"
"Audubon called them Red-Throated Divers. They're a sort of loon. It's a lovely family group, I think. Peppermint?"
"Some family," I said. "No one's paying attention to the mother. Who could blame her if she took off ? Look at them."
A minute or so went by, and then Mrs. Windermere said, in a voice as soft as summer blue air, "Skinny Delivery Boy, you have it all wrong. Look how she's standing close to her little one. She's looking around to watch for the next spectacular thing that's going to come into his life."
And I'm not lying, she was right.
After dropping off the wagon and pocketing ten dollars for my pay plus Mr. Loeffler's dollar plus a $1.35 tip from Mrs. Windermere and drinking a really cold Coke with Lil and not telling her a thing about Mrs. Windermere no matter how hard she tried to make me and not burping until I got out on the street, I went to the library. Mrs. Merriam glanced up when I came in. "Oh, it's you," she said, in that Disgusting-Thing-on-the-Bottom-of-My-Shoe kind of voice.
I went upstairs. The lights were on and Mr. Powell was standing by the glass case. He looked up at me as I came over. The three blank sheets of paper were still there, and there was another pencil. A light blue.
I moved the sheets over and looked down at the Arctic Tern. Those sharp wings. The neck. The beak. Everything dropping toward the cold, cold sea.
The terrified eye.
I let my hand follow the lines over the glass. I stopped over the eye. My fingers moved.
"I don't think I know your name yet," said Mr. Powell.
"Doug Swieteck."
Mr. Powell held up the black pencil. "Mr. Swieteck, would you like to try to draw it?" he asked.
"I don't know how," I said.
"Then let's begin," said Mr. Powell, and I'm not lying, when I took the black pencil in my fingers, it felt ... spectacular.
CHAPTER THREE
The Large-Billed Puffin Plate CCXCIII
OKAY. So I was going to the library every Saturday. So what? So what? It's not like I was reading books or anything.
I went every Saturday because I had a lot to get in. There were only three weeks left in August and then a few days in September before stupid Washington Irving Junior High School of stupid Marysville, New York, was scheduled to open its stupid doors and suck us away from summer. Only three weeks. And there was a lot to learn.
"We'll start with contour lines," Mr. Powell said that first Saturday. "Put your hand up on the paper—no, higher up—the paper is the same size as the page in Audubon's book, so you want to try for the same proportions. Look at the tern. Good. Now draw the outline of the bird. You don't need to look at your paper. Bring your line down from that first tip. Not quite so slowly. Bring it all the way down to the beak."
I brought the line all the way down to the beak.
"Now, start on the right side and let's do the same thing: bring the line all the way down to the beak. Don't look at the paper. That's it."
"How am I going to make the lines meet if I don't look at the paper?"
"You're not."
I finished the right side of the bird, then looked at the paper.
"That doesn't look like much of a bird," I said.
"Not yet it doesn't."
"It looks more like I'm showing what isn't the bird."
Mr. Powell put his hand over mine and stopped it. I looked up at him, and he had this smile. It wasn't like my mother's smile, but it was okay.
"That's right, Mr. Swieteck," he said. "That's exactly what you're doing. Most young artists take a long time to understand that. Let's try it again. Turn the sheet over. This time, let's go a little faster with the lines. And as you start—that's it, right there—as you start, think about how the line is sending out information about the bird. How is the air moving over the feathers? How are the feathers stirring? How fast is the bird traveling?"
"Fast," I said.
"Keep that in mind as you bring the line down."
I brought the line down.
"Stop," Mr. Powell whispered. "You're about to come to the front edge of the wing, right?"
I nodded.
"Think about how the air is hitting that edge."
Okay, you're probably not going to believe this, but when I did think about it, I really could feel the air right on my shoulders. I'm not lying.
"Press down harder on your pencil to show how it feels." I did.
"Harder. You won't break the point."
Harder.
"The right side, same thing."
I did it again.
Mr. Powell nodded. "Now, Mr. Swieteck, let's bring in the neck and the head and beak. We'll let this white space here between the wing lines be the body. So imagine the neck extending out of that space. Put your pencil where you're going to begin. Very good. Now, bring your line down. A little faster. Audubon worked with curves on this bird, so that's what you're going to want to work with. Let it come around—yes, just so. Now bring your pencil to where you're going to start on the right side. No, look at the picture. You see how Audubon started this wing down a little lower? Why do you think he did that?"
"Because if the wings were at the same height, he'd look like he was hanging stuffed in a museum somewhere."
Mr. Powell smiled again. "You're talking about something called composition. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Draw the right line. A little faster."
We filled all three sheets of paper, front and back. And I think we could have filled a whole bunch more if Mrs. Merriam hadn't come up and reminded Mr. Powell that there were other patrons of the Marysville Free Public Library, not to mention all the cataloging for those new books from Houghton M
ifflin, and she couldn't do that by herself and check books in and out also, could she?
"Of course not," said Mr. Powell, even though she probably could if she just put her looped glasses on and got to it.
"End of your first lesson," said Mr. Powell. He looked over the drawings. "Take this one home," he said. "Here's something a little advanced for you, but I'm curious. See if you can figure out how to draw in the feathers. Think of it as a problem to be solved." He rolled the paper up into a scroll and handed it to me. "Take the pencils. I'll clean the rest up later. Right now, I've got to go catalog."
When I came down into the cool of the library that afternoon, it was only three thirty and no one else was in the whole place as far as I could see, so I don't know what Mrs. Everything-Has-to-Be-Cataloged-This-Second Merriam was all fussed up about. Along the line of my thumb there was a dark streak from the pencil. I decided I wouldn't wash my hands for a while to see if I could make it last.
By the way, in case you weren't paying attention or something, did you catch what Mr. Powell called me? "Young artist." I bet you missed that.
That night, I worked on the feathers before my brother came up to bed, which wasn't easy, because I didn't have a desk so I had to use the floor. And I didn't have much time, because my brother could come up any second—like, during some Marlboro commercial—and he'd find me on the floor and he'd say, "What do you think you're doing?" and it wouldn't matter what I said because he'd tear the paper into shreds and they'd be outside in some gutter like Joe Pepitone's hat. So I had to work fast.
I started on the left wing, and I figured out that I could get these thin lines by angling the pencil tip. I tried to remember the rows on the tern, how the feathers on the wings got larger as they moved down, how they slanted a little bit into the body, how they kind of jumbled together above the long tail feathers. How the feathers were different—rounder—before they suddenly speared into the tail. How the wing feathers were long and sharp, but the feathers on the body were like whispers.
You think it's easy trying to remember all that?
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