Okay for Now

by Gary D. Schmidt

  I know. Sounds like the same old Lucas. But if you had been there, you would have seen that he said it smiling.

  I was, by the way, soaked up to my knees in two steps. And if it hadn't stopped snowing and the sun hadn't come out and the sky hadn't started to blue over the tops of the mountains, I might have said, "Forget it," and headed back home. But I didn't. I drank my hot chocolate at Spicer's Deli and then set out, and Mrs. Mason was waiting with her hot milk and I got through it. Mr. Loeffler had a cupboard door that was loose, a light bulb that needed changing over the basement stairs, and a cracked windowpane in the bookcase that he needed me to take the glass out of very, very, very carefully and which he couldn't do because of his shaky hands.

  Mrs. Daugherty was keeping my bowl of cream of wheat hot, and she had a special treat with it, she said. It was bananas.

  In the whole story of the world, bananas have never once been a special treat.

  Then I headed off to Mrs. Windermere's, where I knew the coffee was percolating.

  No matter how wet and cold you are, black coffee percolating will get you through it.

  But I was pretty wet and cold by the time I got there. Wet and cold all the way through. And even with Mr. Loeffler's gray wool cap—which I only wore because Lil Spicer said I looked good in it, which you might remember—my ears were still about to fall off.

  I guess you can imagine what Lucas would have said if he heard that, but now, he would have said it while he was smiling.

  The coffee really was percolating at Mrs. Windermere's, and the kitchen was that kind of warm that goes right into you, like a blanket. I could hear Mrs. Windermere typing—probably Jane Eyre was falling in love with Mr. Rochester right there in her typewriter—and so I put away the groceries and took two cups down from the cupboard and poured the coffee and brought the cups into her study. I opened the door and set one down next to her—you could see the vibrations of her typewriter in her coffee—and I sat down and sipped at mine and was almost half done before she looked up at me.

  "Jane Eyre is falling in love with Mr. Rochester," she said.

  See?

  "But I'm not quite sure how to show it on stage."

  "Maybe," I said, "he should be over at a desk, drawing something."

  "Drawing something?"

  "And she comes up behind him and sees what he's drawing, and she thinks he's pretty cool."

  "What happens next?"

  "I don't know." I shrugged. "He doesn't have any idea what to say to her."

  "Maybe he should let her draw something with him," Mrs. Windermere said.

  "Maybe," I said.

  Mrs. Windermere nodded then turned quickly to her typewriter and began smacking at the keys. Her hands flew high. Petrels in the winds.

  I sipped at my coffee until I was finished with it. I got up and walked around the table in her study. It was still piled high with books. It will probably always be piled high with books. But the difference was, I could read them now. Not that I'd want to read these particular books, but I could have if I wanted to, and that makes all the difference. I'm not lying.

  But I don't know who would want to read these. Librettos of the Great Operas. Snore. Life of Verdi. Snore snore. Aku-Aku, which sounds like someone sneezing. History of the Old South Church, Boston. Snore snore snore. Even percolated black coffee wouldn't keep you awake, if you were reading these.

  I picked up Aku-Aku and looked at the book beneath it.

  Aaron Copland's Autobiography: Manuscript Edition.

  I read it again.

  Aaron Copland's Autobiography: Manuscript Edition.

  I picked it up. Mrs. Windermere was still typing.

  I opened the book. Inside the front cover a sheet of music was pasted, handwritten. I couldn't read any of it. Maybe I should try that next.

  Mrs. Windermere stopped typing. "What book is that?" she said.

  "Aaron Copland's," I said. "The guy who writes music."

  "You mean the guy who tries to write music," she said.

  I looked at her.

  "Skinny Delivery Boy, you are talking to a very old woman who doesn't think much good music has been written since Ludwig van Beethoven finished his Ninth Symphony." She turned back to her typing. Her hands rose high.

  "So why have the book?" I said.

  Mrs. Windermere's hands were still high. "My husband liked to collect quirky books. That one has a page of Copland's music written in his own hand. But neither he nor I ever read the thing, me because I never wanted to, him because ... because he didn't have enough time." Her hands came down.

  "Mrs. Windermere," I said.

  "Don't make an old lady cry. What kind of ice cream did I order?"

  "Cherry vanilla," I said.

  She stood up. "Let's go try some."

  "Mrs. Windermere," I said, "if you don't want the book much, I think I could use it."

  She looked at me. "Do you like Copland?"

  "I do, but it's not for me."

  She peered sort of slanted at me. "You have something up your sleeve," she said.

  I told her.

  Mrs. Windermere smiled. Almost like my mother, which kind of surprised me. "The god of Creativity has folded his wings by your desk too," she said. She took the book, held it lightly to her lips, and kissed it. It wasn't weird. It was beautiful. Then she handed it back to me. "Nothing should ever sit and gather dust," she said, and we went into the kitchen and tried the cherry vanilla ice cream.

  On the way home, I carried Aaron Copland's Autobiography: Manuscript Edition underneath Joe Pepitone's jacket so that nothing would happen to it. When I got to the library, I showed it to Lil and told her. But I didn't show it to Mr. Powell.

  "Mr. Swieteck," said Mr. Powell, "I think I can accept having the petrels smile a little bit. But that is an out-and-out grin."

  "I suppose so," I said.

  He looked at me. "Rather like what you are doing right now," he said.

  "I guess," I said.

  Mr. Powell looked at Lil. "And you too, young lady," he said.

  Lil started to laugh. She looked over at me and laughed harder. Me too.

  Then Lil came up behind me to see what I was drawing. She put her hand on my arm and squeezed.

  You know what that feels like?

  "I think you two know something I don't know," said Mr. Powell.

  Lil squeezed again.

  ***

  On Monday, I went with James Russell to his house.

  Mr. Russell was playing Aaron Copland's music on his stereo. I call that Fabulous.

  Mrs. Russell made us both sit down with a glass of milk. "And I have a special treat for you," she said. I'm not lying. She really said that. I held my breath because of the last special treat at the Daughertys', but it didn't help, because when Mrs. Russell came back, she came back with a loaf of banana bread. Banana bread! And James said, "How about we have some jam with that?" and Mrs. Russell said, "Jam? Then you wouldn't be able to taste the bananas," and James said, "Ma, I hate bananas," and she said, "But I'm sure that Doug enjoys them," and I said, "I think I'm still full from lunch, so the milk's fine," and then Mrs. Russell picked up the plate with the banana bread on it, and you might not believe this, but she started to laugh and laugh and laugh, until Mr. Russell came out to the kitchen to see what was so funny and she showed him the banana bread and he said, "I hate bananas," and we all started to laugh until Mrs. Russell said, "I hate bananas too," and you can imagine us all laughing until we were crying and finally Mrs. Russell took the banana bread outside to break it up for the birds—"Let's hope they like bananas"—and then I showed Mr. Russell Aaron Copland's Autobiography: Manuscript Edition, and he stopped laughing.

  Remember how I told you how big his hands are? How they could carry boulders?

  He held Aaron Copland's Autobiography: Manuscript Edition like it was a half-cracked egg. "I've heard of this book," he whispered, "but I never thought..." He was talking like you would talk just before Mass. He opened the
front page, looked at the sheet of music pasted in.

  "It's in Aaron Copland's own handwriting," I said.

  Mr. Russell stared at it, then he looked at me, smiling, and we went into the front room and he put the book on his music stand and he played the music from the page with his silver flute, sweetly and beautifully.

  Fabulous.

  When he finished, he looked at me and said, "Where did you find this?"

  I told him. He shook his head. "I can hardly believe it," he said.

  "Mr. Russell," I said, "I have an idea."

  Here are the stats for the rest of that week:

  Number of times I wanted to tell someone: A hundred and fifty thousand.

  Number of people I told: Four. Lil Spicer, my mother, my brothers.

  Number of times I walked by the library, hoping that Mr. Powell might be in: Twelve.

  Number of minutes off the record for finishing the Saturday deliveries for Spicer's Deli: Seventeen. (Mr. Loeffler didn't have any chores to do, so that helped.)

  Number of minutes it took me to get to The Dump from Spicer's Deli and then back to the library: Twelve. Probably a record.

  Number of seconds it took between coming to the library and Mrs. Merriam telling me not to run up the stairs: Less than one.

  Amount of time it took Mr. Powell to understand what I had: I think he's still working on it.

  We laid the Large-Billed Puffins back in their place in Audubon's Birds of America. It became a little more whole than it had been before.

  Do you know how that feels?

  Do you think the Forked-Tailed Petrels were dancing now?

  Not much more than Mr. Powell, who first danced around the room with me and then with Lil, and then we all went downstairs to tell Mrs. Merriam, and he took her hands and tried to dance with her but she wouldn't have any of it, even though I think she was smiling just a little the whole time she was shushing him away.

  ***

  That night at supper, Lucas said he wanted to go to the library before it closed to see the puffins.

  "Don't expect me to carry you up those stairs," said Ernie Eco, who was eating with us—again.

  "We don't," said Christopher.

  Ernie Eco looked up at him from his plate.

  Christopher stared back.

  Ernie Eco looked down.

  "Once we get inside, there's an elevator," I said.

  Ernie Eco worked on his string beans.

  After supper, Christopher and I went with Lucas to the library. The days were finally starting to get longer, but it was still dark, and the first stars had been out for a while. Lucas looked up toward them as we went, squinting, blinking, trying to see.

  We carried the wheelchair up the six steps between the two of us, and it wasn't light. Then we lifted it over the door frame and onto the marble floor of the library, where the wheels ran quiet and smooth. Mrs. Merriam looked up to see who had come in so late, and when she saw Lucas, she walked out from behind the desk and took off her looped glasses—this didn't happen very often—and she said to Lucas, "Welcome home." I'm not lying. She said, "Welcome home." Like she was bringing him into her own kitchen or something.

  Lucas turned his face toward her and blinked. "Thanks," he said.

  "When did you get back?" she said. He told her. "Where were you stationed?" Told her. "Were you near Saigon at all?" Nodded. "When?" Lucas tried to remember.

  Then she asked him, "While you were there, did you ever hear of a Lieutenant Merriam? Lieutenant Leonard Merriam?"

  Lucas thought, then shook his head. "I never did."

  She leaned down toward him and put her hand on his chair. "He was stationed near Saigon. You might have heard of him."

  Lucas shook his head again. "I'm sorry."

  Mrs. Merriam stood up again. She twisted her hands together. "I didn't think you would have," she said. "I never really did."

  "There's thousands of guys there," Lucas said.

  "I know. But your mother must be glad you're home."

  "Thanks," said Lucas.

  I told Mrs. Merriam that we were going up to see the book, and she went to the bottom of the stairs to turn the lights on, and she watched as we went to the elevator. Lucas didn't exactly like the steel gate that we had to draw across. And he really didn't like the way the elevator rattled around on its way up. And he really, really didn't like the sound of the pulleys straining themselves. And of course, at the top, the elevator stopped a couple of inches below the floor, and we had to pull Lucas's chair over the lip.

  So he was sweating—and even shaky—when we got into the room with the petrels and the puffins and everyone else. But he wheeled himself over to the display case and looked in. Mr. Powell had left the book open to the Large-Billed Puffins, and Lucas stared down at them for a long time, trying to make them out.

  "There's two of them," he said. "Right?"

  He looked down again. And after a while he said, "Lieutenant Leonard Merriam is MIA."

  "How do you know he's missing?" said Christopher.

  "I know," he said. Lucas looked at the puffins. He leaned so close that his face was almost touching the glass. "Not everyone gets to see who they want to see again. I guess I'm lucky."

  Mrs. Merriam was waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs. She turned the lights out when we got down. She held the door open for us. And then—I watched through the window—she went back to her desk, sat, put on her glasses, and looked at something a long way out from the library.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Brown Pelican Plate CCLI

  YOU REMEMBER how I said that when things start to go pretty good, something usually happens to turn everything bad?

  I was starting to think maybe I was wrong.

  Maybe things don't always turn bad.

  What a chump I am.

  One Saturday in the middle of March, I figured out that my baseball—and you know which one I mean, my baseball that I had been keeping in the bottom drawer of the dresser underneath my socks and sweatshirt since I'd started wearing Joe Pepitone's jacket—my baseball was gone.

  Then on Monday morning, I found out that Joe Pepitone's jacket was gone too.

  When I asked my mother if she knew where my jacket was, she put her hands on the back of a kitchen chair and held on hard.

  "Could you have left it at school?" she said.

  "I wore it for the Saturday deliveries."

  "At the library?"

  I shook my head.

  "On the stairs?"

  "No."

  She held on tighter to the chair.

  I didn't ask any more questions.

  Remember how I said something usually happens to turn everything bad? Remember how I said that?

  My jacket from Joe Pepitone.

  Then one day in late March, one of those days when the sun is sort of teasing you with the idea that maybe spring isn't so far away after all, the Tools 'n' More Hardware Store was robbed again.

  Guess who the police came to question?

  Christopher said he hadn't been anywhere near the Tools 'n' More Hardware Store.

  Lucas and I both said he hadn't been anywhere near the Tools 'n' More Hardware Store.

  One of the policemen said, "Can we see your bike, son?"

  "Sure," said Christopher.

  We all went outside, my mother and me and Lucas and Christopher and the policemen. Christopher wheeled his Sting-Ray up.

  "You're missing a pedal," said the policeman.

  "I lost it a few days ago," said Christopher.

  "Where did you lose it?"

  "If I knew that," said Christopher, "then it wouldn't be lost anymore."

  "Chris," said Lucas, low and steady.

  "You wouldn't have lost it anywhere near the hardware store?"

  "No, I wouldn't have lost it anywhere near the hardware store because I haven't been anywhere near the hardware store since I don't even know when."

  The policeman took a bicycle pedal out of his pocket. He slid
it onto the rod on Christopher's bike. It slid on easily. "I found this over at Tools 'n' More," said the policeman, looking up at my mother. "Around the back." Then he turned to Christopher. "Looks like a match to me."

  It did. We could all see it was the right pedal.

  Christopher went with the policemen.

  I went to the Ballard Paper Mill to find my father.

  I didn't want to run into Mr. Ballard. Not right now. So I went out onto the floor, looking for my father, but no one seemed to know where he was. He wasn't at his station, where he was supposed to be, and he wasn't packing, and he wasn't loading trucks. Finally, one of the loaders said I should try outside past the loading dock. Maybe he was there. And he was. Taking a break, I guess. Smoking a cigarette with Ernie Eco.

  I told him about Christopher.

  And the funny thing was, my father looked straight at Ernie Eco. It was the first thing he did. Look straight at him.

  Ernie Eco shrugged.

  My father threw his cigarette away and we went in and across the floor. "Swieteck," someone called, but my father never even let on that he heard. We went across the floor and out the front door and into his pickup and on into Marysville.

  It took two hours to get Christopher out on bail. And in that time, he was fingerprinted, and his picture taken for police records, and a policeman tried to get him to confess, but he kept saying he didn't have anything to confess and he didn't know anything about the hardware store and no, he didn't have any idea who did. And when he wouldn't confess they put him into a cell for the rest of the two hours and when he came out he smelled like throw-up.

  A sergeant said there would be a hearing—they'd let us know when. And in the meantime—he looked hard at Christopher—in the meantime, if Christopher happened to remember what went on that night and where all the stuff was, maybe things would go a whole lot easier for him.

  Christopher didn't say anything. We went out into the pickup. My father got in the front, and I got in the front, and Christopher got in the back.