Okay for Now

by Gary D. Schmidt

  I flipped over the page.

  Blank.

  "Hey, Alfred," I said.

  I flipped over another page.

  It wasn't blank.

  It was a drawing. A drawing of James Russell going for a lay-up. Behind him, you could make out every kid in our platoon.

  I'm not lying, the So-Called Gym Teacher knew something about Composition on Several Planes at once.

  I flipped over another page.

  Otis Bottom, hanging about halfway up the climbing rope, looking like there was no way in creation he was going to get up any higher.

  Another page.

  Me. Running.

  Another page.

  Our whole platoon, smacking volleyballs around.

  Another page.

  Our whole platoon really playing volleyball this time. Me serving. No shirt. And no tattoo.

  I looked at that awhile.

  Then I skipped some pages and turned to the back of the pad.

  And stopped.

  A drawing of a low road between high grasses.

  Bodies. Lots of bodies. All jumbled and thrown on top of one another.

  Another page.

  A Vietnamese man, old and worn. Dead. His eyes open, and his body lying crooked on the ground. Behind him, a young girl, naked, reaching for his hand. But she never made it.

  Another page.

  A boy, younger than me. A straw hat broken underneath him. His face—what was left of it—with a terrified eye. Burning huts behind him. Bodies all along the road to the huts. The words My Lai at the bottom. And, I was there.

  "Swieteck, what do you think you're doing?"

  It was the So-Called Gym Teacher.

  He came across the gym like a thunderhead bearing down across the valley and grabbed the clipboard out of my hands. "What are you doing, looking at my personal things?"

  "Coach," I said.

  "You get out of here!" Screaming, shrieking sergeant voice. "Get out of here! Never touch my things again. Did you hear me? You get out!"

  I went into the locker room to change.

  Later that day, Miss Cowper—and I didn't ask for this, it just seemed to happen—Miss Cowper wrote me an excuse from PE so that I could help her refresh her County Literacy Unit. I never did find out what the stunning climax of the Volleyball Unit was.

  Lucas didn't talk much, and when he did talk, it was never around my father. It was mostly around my mother. You could hear them late at night, when everything was quiet and dark. There would be these low voices, then quiet, then the low voices again. Sometimes crying. Every night, when they were alone, my mother would change the gauze bandage around Lucas's eyes. Then her voice would call quietly up the stairs, and Christopher would go down to bring Lucas up to our bedroom.

  He wouldn't talk about what happened, how he lost his legs and maybe his eyes. Sometimes you'd come into the kitchen and he would be sitting by the kitchen table where the sunlight was coming in, and he'd have his face raised to it like he could see its warmth. Sometimes you saw him try to lift his body up and down in the chair, like he was lifting a weight—which he pretty much was. Sometimes he would get letters from people in his unit or from the doctors and nurses who had worked on him after he was wounded. I told him I would read them for him. He never wanted me to. He told me to throw them all away, which I didn't.

  His stumps hurt him, and sometimes he would reach down to where his legs used to be—he wanted to scratch them, but there was no place to scratch. He'd still try, and then he'd give up and put his hands over his face, and you could tell he was doing everything he could not to let himself think that everything was ruined forever.

  We were supposed to go down with Lucas to a doctor in New York City every two weeks for who knows how long, but when my father said he couldn't be traipsing all over the state every two weeks, we found a doctor in Kingston who would see him, and when my father put up an all-fired fuss at the first visit about how much it cost, the doctor said he had a son in Vietnam too, right now. A medic. So he'd take Lucas on for as long as his son was over there, and my father said he wasn't asking for any freaking charity, and the doctor stopped talking to him and told Lucas he'd see him in two weeks and he gave him some exercises to work on.

  Lucas didn't do them.

  Two weeks later, just before school was about to start after Christmas vacation, we went up to Kingston again and the doctor had an eye doctor waiting too. My father said he wasn't going to be gypped and he hadn't brought any money so if he thought that ... The eye doctor turned his back on him and unwrapped the gauze from Lucas's face.

  Then he turned to my father. "Anything else?" he said.

  It was the first time my father had seen Lucas without the bandage. It was the first time I had too.

  Burns all across his face. Whatever skin was left was shiny and stretched. His eyebrows and eyelashes were gone, it looked like for good. And everything was seeping. Everything looked wet and raw.

  He'd lost the sky.

  Christmas, as you can guess, wasn't exactly Ho Ho Ho around our house. On Christmas Eve, my father went out somewhere with Ernie Eco, and Lucas didn't want to go to midnight Mass, and so Christopher stayed with him, and my mother and I went. We didn't have a tree, and if it hadn't been for the ham that Mr. Ballard sent home to all his employees, I think we would have been celebrating with thawed hamburgers. Presents? Forget it.

  So I went to St. Ignatius, and it was cold and damp like it usually was, outside and inside, except inside there were more candles lit than you'd think could fit inside a single church. Up front there were two balsam trees, and their scent mixed with the waxy smell of the candles. And there was a cradle beside the altar, a blue cloth draped over it. And there was a choir of perfect boys in perfect white robes with perfect combed hair singing their perfect notes like everything was perfect. And I thought of Lucas back home in his wheelchair, and so I couldn't understand it when my mother turned to me during "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" and said loud enough to hear over the organ and the perfect choir, "What a wonderful Christmas this is."

  I shivered.

  Even with all those candles, it was still cold.

  That wasn't the only time I shivered. I shivered late at night after Christopher carried Lucas up to bed and we had gotten him in and covered. Then we would lie awake and listen to his dreams.

  And I would see the young boy with the broken straw hat. The burning huts. The girl's hand. My Lai. I was there.

  Then Lucas would try to turn over, and there would be a low moan, and Christopher would get up, and I knew that Lucas was awake in the dark that he carried around with him all the time.

  "What can I do?" Christopher would say.

  "You weren't there. You can't do anything."

  None of us knew how to make it light.

  At the beginning of the first physical science class of the new year, Mr. Ferris set Clarence on the front lab table and started him rocking. "Do you know, Otis Bottom," he asked, "what historic event in the sciences will occur during this new year of 1969?"

  Otis Bottom looked like he didn't really want to be back from Christmas break yet. He could have guessed all day and not gotten close.

  "Doug Swieteck?" Mr. Ferris asked.

  "The moon shot," whispered Lil.

  "The moon shot," I said.

  "Thank you, Lil Spicer. Yes, the moon shot. Apollo Eight has circumnavigated the moon and descended to sixty-nine-point-eight miles over the lunar surface. Think of that. From the very beginning of human consciousness, we have looked at the moon and wondered what it would be like to walk on it. In 1969, what man has wondered about for thousands and thousands of years, you may be able to see on your television screens. It is our first step out into the solar system. It is our first step out into the galaxy."

  Clarence was really rocking. I'm not lying.

  "So what are they going to find there?" Otis Bottom was trying to recover.

  "Ah, Otis Bottom. That is the question. What ar
e they going to find there? Who knows? Maybe everything will be exactly as they expect. Maybe everything will be a surprise. But one day soon, man will walk across the soil of the lunar landscape, and that will be a sign of our progress. In a time when it doesn't seem as if we're making much progress anywhere else, this, ladies and gentlemen, is a sign of tremendous possibility. And that, Otis Bottom, is perhaps the best answer to your question. They will find possibility there."

  I thought of Lucas in his darkness. Wouldn't he like to see it?

  I went through the rest of that day in a kind of daze. I mean, the moon!

  Possibility!

  Geez, the moon.

  In January, all of Coach Reed's classes were starting a new unit in PE: Physical Fitness and Endurance. We were going to have a whole lot of tests to see how many sit-ups we could do in four minutes, and how many pushups, and squat thrusts, and leg lifts, and chin-ups, along with timed hundred-yard dashes and mile runs. We were supposed to compare ourselves to the President's Council on Physical Fitness goals that all American boys should be trying to reach so we wouldn't die of heart attacks someday.

  So that period we spent practicing the correct way to do pushups and sit-ups, and after that we took turns holding each other's ankles and counting sit-ups, or holding fists beneath each other so that you could tell how far down your chest had to go for a good pushup, and we got timed for a trial run. It was about as exciting as it sounds.

  You know how the Snowy Heron has its beak pointed out to the world? How it doesn't care that the hunter is coming up the path? How he looks at the hunter and says, So what?

  How he sees Possibility?

  After class, when everyone was headed into the locker room, I stopped at Coach Reed's office. He was sitting behind his desk, which was covered with Presidential Fitness Charts with lots of little spaces that needed filling in.

  "Hello," I said.

  He looked up from his clipboard, then turned it over.

  "What do you want?" he said.

  "I saw some of your drawings. You're good," I said.

  He looked at the face-down clipboard. Then he looked at me with suspicious eyes. "So?"

  "You drew the war," I said.

  Coach Reed not saying anything. His hand pressing down on the clipboard, pressing it into the desk.

  "My brother was there too," I said. "He's back."

  A long minute passing.

  "No, he's not," said Coach Reed finally. Not his sergeant voice. "No one ever comes back from Vietnam. Not really." He picked up the clipboard and held it against his chest.

  "He's not reading the letters he gets."

  Coach Reed nodded.

  "He needs someone who knows what it was like."

  Coach Reed looked at me.

  I looked at the clipboard.

  "Maybe you do too," I said.

  "Get out, Swieteck," he said. "I'm busy." Sergeant voice back.

  "I could help," I said.

  He laughed. Not a happy laugh. "Help," he said.

  "I could take care of those charts. I could write down everyone's names and keep track of where they start, what kind of progress they make, where they finish. Stats like that."

  Coach Reed got up and sat on the edge of his desk. "Why so helpful?" he said.

  "Do you want me to do it or not?"

  "Not," he said.

  I shrugged. "Okay." I turned to go.

  "Wait a minute," he said. He fingered the clipboard. "I'll think about it. Go get changed. I'll let you know when you come back."

  I nodded. "Okay."

  When I came back, his office door was closed. But on the door, there was a note. Swieteck, it said. Start with the second-period stats.

  I stayed after school to start.

  "You know, Mr. Powell," I said the next Saturday. "I don't think Audubon had this right. I mean, about the hunter."

  "Do you think he's in the wrong place in the picture?"

  "No. He shouldn't be in the picture at all."

  "What would you have put there instead?"

  "Another heron. He's just seen her, and he's going to fly over to say hi."

  "It would be a different story," said Mr. Powell. "What do you think, Lil?"

  She came over and looked at the picture. Then she took my hand.

  You know what that feels like?

  Like what the astronauts will feel when they step onto the moon for the very first time.

  Like what might happen if Coach Reed rang the doorbell at The Dump some afternoon and sat down next to Lucas.

  Like knowing that Principal Peattie is wrong about what he said.

  Like laying a missing bird picture back where it's supposed to be.

  Like someone seeing what a chump you are and getting you a cold Coke anyway.

  Like Possibility.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Forked-Tailed Petrel Plate CCLX

  DO YOU KNOW how often it snows in stupid Marysville during a winter? Once a week. Maybe twice. And do you know on what day of the week it always snows? Saturday. Every Saturday for most of January and on into February. Every Saturday.

  You remember what I do on Saturday mornings?

  And do you think deliveries stop just because it's snowing, and blowing, and blizzarding, and the snow isn't turning to slush like it would on Long Island and it's getting deeper and deeper, and the cold is so bad that Joe Pepitone's jacket doesn't help much at all and my fingers are starting to stick to the handle of the wagon so I have to pull Joe Pepitone's sleeves down over my hands but I don't have anything for my ears, which were about to snap off until Mr. Loeffler gave me this gray wool cap that Lil says looks great on me but I think makes me look like a chump but I wear it anyway because I really don't want my ears to snap off and besides did I tell you that Lil says it looks great on me?

  Every Saturday it was the same. I'd wake up, and it would still be dark because the clouds were thick and it was already snowing hard, and it had been snowing hard for most of the night so the ground was covered, and the sidewalks and the streets too. While Lucas and Christopher slept, I'd put on about everything I had beneath Joe Pepitone's jacket and then I'd put on the gray wool cap that Lil says looks great on me, and I'd lace up my sneakers and head out into the snow, and my feet would be cold and wet in three steps. Mr. Spicer always had a cup of hot chocolate for me to start off each of the runs, and I'd drink it and go out with the first load. In the beginning of January I did this with the wagons, but pretty soon Mr. Spicer figured that I'd do a whole lot better with this old toboggan he had. So that's what I'd use. And it went a whole lot quicker. I'm not lying.

  But you can't believe how cold the wind can blow in stupid Marysville.

  Mrs. Mason always had a cup of warm milk waiting for me, because I'd told her like a chump that Mr. Spicer always started me off with hot chocolate and she wanted to be sure to give me something different, she said. So it was hot milk. I got used to it.

  Mr. Loeffler always had a cup of hot tea waiting for me. I got used to that too.

  Mrs. Daugherty always had a bowl of cream of wheat waiting for me. I did not get used to that. Phronsie whispered that it was good if you put a whole lot of brown sugar on it. It wasn't.

  Mrs. Windermere always had a cup of hot coffee waiting for me. Black, which, she said, was the only way to drink it if you wanted to be awake to serve the god of Creativity, which she needed to do a whole lot since she was working on a stage adaptation of—guess.

  Yup. Jane Eyre. I'm not lying.

  When I told her that the only people who read Jane Eyre were people who had to because their English teachers made them read it and no one in their right mind was going to pay good money to sit in front of a stage and have all this acted out, she sipped her coffee and said, "Skinny Delivery Boy, I'm not even finished with it and people are already lining up to buy tickets."

  Can you imagine anyone buying tickets to Jane Eyre?

  Can you imagine Joe Pepitone buying tickets to Jane Eyre?r />
  Me neither.

  ***

  I spent that winter with my head down against the wind, pulling the stupid toboggan, my hands up Joe Pepitone's sleeves, and always having to go to the bathroom because of the cold and the warm hot chocolate, milk, tea, coffee.

  But afterward, when I got back from Mrs. Windermere's, Lil would be waiting at the deli, and Mr. Spicer would heat up some chicken noodle soup for us—his own recipe, with lots of chicken and onion—and I'd take off my sopping sneakers and lay them beside the radiator, and take off my sopping socks and lay them on the radiator, and I'd stretch my sopping feet as close as I could get them to the radiator, and I'd eat the chicken noodle soup until I was warm again. And then we'd go to the library, where Mr. Powell was waiting for us and where we had started to work on gesture.

  Which, by the way, the Snowy Heron would have been good for, but it was gone now too, because of the snow.

  I'm not lying.

  Stupid Marysville had so much snow that winter that the town ran out of money to pay for the plowing and the salting and the sanding. So the Town Council went over to the library, like it was a bank or something, and took a razorblade with them, and the next time Mr. Powell came in, the Snowy Heron was cut out, just like that, and sold off somewhere to pay for more plowing and salting and sanding.

  If you're trying to get Audubon's pages back, and stupid Marysville is selling them off faster than you can find them, it gets sort of discouraging.

  So here are the stats for volume three of John James Audubon's Birds of America owned by the Marysville Free Public Library of stupid Marysville, New York:

  Total number of plates: One hundred.

  The Arctic Tern: Missing. Sold to an anonymous collector from overseas.

  The Red-Throated Diver: In Mrs. Windermere's house.

  The Large-Billed Puffin: Missing. Mr. Powell won't tell me where.

  The Brown Pelican: In Principal Peattie's office.

  The Yellow Shank: Returned by Mr. Ballard, who is a good guy.