Orbiting Jupiter

by Gary D. Schmidt

  “You don’t think so,” he said, then took off the aluminum foil, sighed, and reached for the ketchup. He smeared it all over his meat loaf. Thick.

  Took a red bite.

  “We’re moving,” he said.

  Chewed.

  “Moving?” said my mother.

  “To Marysville. Upstate.” Another red bite. Chewing. “Ballard Paper Mill has a job, and Ernie Eco says he can get me in.”

  “Ernie Eco,” said my mother quietly.

  “Don’t you start about him,” said my father.

  “So it will begin all over again.”

  “I said—”

  “The bars, being gone all night, coming back home when you’re—”

  My father stood up.

  “Which of your sons will it be this time?” my mother said.

  My father looked at me.

  I put my eyes down and worked at what was left of my meat loaf.

  It took us three days to pack. My mother didn’t talk much the whole time. The first morning, she asked only two questions.

  “How are we going to let Lucas know where we’ve gone?”

  Lucas is my oldest brother who stopped beating me up a year and a half ago when the United States Army drafted him to beat up Vietcong instead. He’s in a delta somewhere but we don’t know any more than that because he isn’t allowed to tell us and he doesn’t write home much anyway. Fine by me.

  My father looked up from his two fried eggs. “How are we going to let Lucas know where we’ve gone? The U.S. Postal Service,” he said in that kind of voice that makes you feel like you are the dope of the world. “And didn’t I tell you over easy?” He pushed the plate of eggs away, picked up his mug of coffee, and looked out the window. “I’m not going to miss this freaking place,” he said.

  Then, “Are you going to rent a truck?” my mother asked, real quiet.

  My father sipped his coffee. Sipped again.

  “Ernie Eco will be down with a truck from the mill,” he said.

  My mother didn’t ask anything else.

  My father brought home boxes from the A&P on one of those summer days when the sky is too hot to be blue and all it can work up is a hazy white. Everything is sweating, and you’re thinking that if you were up in the top—I mean, the really top—stands in Yankee Stadium, there might be a breeze, but probably there isn’t one anywhere else. My father gave me a box that still smelled like the bananas it brought up from somewhere that speaks Spanish and told me to put in whatever I had and I should throw out anything I couldn’t get in it. I did—except for Joe Pepitone’s cap because it’s lying in a gutter getting rained on, which you might remember if you cared.

  So what? So what? I’m glad we’re going.

  After the first day of packing, the house was a wreck. Open boxes everywhere, with all sorts of stuff thrown in. My mother tried to stick on labels and keep everything organized—like all the kitchen stuff in the boxes in the kitchen, and all the sheets and pillowcases and towels in the boxes by the linen closet upstairs, and all the sturdiest boxes by the downstairs door for my father’s tools and junk. But after he filled the boxes by the downstairs door, he started to load stuff in with the dishes, stuff like screwdrivers and wrenches and a vise that he dropped on a stack of plates, and he didn’t even turn around to look when he heard them shatter. But my mother did. She lifted out the pieces she had wrapped in newspaper, and for a moment she held them close to her. Then she dropped them back in the box like they were garbage, because that’s all they were now. Garbage.

  Like Joe Pepitone’s cap.

  On the third day, Ernie Eco came down with the truck, and me and my brother and Ernie Eco and my father loaded the beds and the couch and the table and chairs—the stove and the refrigerator belonged to the guy we rented the house from. After that we loaded all the boxes. My mother had dug up the garden she’d worked on and put the plants into pots and watered them for the trip, but Ernie Eco said there wasn’t any room for them and even if there were he might have to make a quick turn and they’d flip over and get the truck all dirty and so my father said to leave them and we should all get in the car since we were ready to go.

  “Not yet,” my mother said.

  We all looked at her, kind of startled.

  She went back to the pots, all lined up on the front porch, and she took three in her arms and carried them to the McCall house next door. Then she came back, took up another three, and carried them across the street to the Petronis. When she came back again, I started up to the porch to help but my father smacked me on the shoulder. “If she wants to do it, let her do it herself,” he said. Ernie Eco laughed, the jerk.

  So my mother carried all the pots, three by three, and put them by houses up and down the street. People started coming out on their stoops and they’d take the pots from her and put them down and they’d hug my mother and then she’d turn away.

  So that’s what I was doing—watching my mother give away her plants—when Holling Hoodhood came up the street carrying a brown paper bag. I’d never seen him on this side of town before.

  He waved. “Hey, Doug,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Mr. Swieteck.”

  My father nodded. He watched my mother. He wanted to get going.

  A minute passed. My mother was back up on the porch, gathering another armload.

  “I heard you were moving,” said Holling.

  “You heard right,” I said.

  He nodded. “No eighth grade at Camillo Junior High.”

  “I guess not.”

  He nodded again.

  Another minute passing.

  “So,” he said, “I brought you something to remember us by.” He held up the bag and I took it. It wasn’t heavy.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Another minute.

  “Where are you moving?”

  “Marysville.”

  “Oh,” said Holling. He nodded like he’d heard of it, which he hadn’t since no one has ever heard of it unless he lives there, which hardly anyone does. “Marysville.”

  “In the Catskills,” I said.

  He nodded. “It’ll be cooler up in the mountains.”

  I nodded. “Maybe.”

  He rubbed his hands together.

  “You take care of yourself, Doug,” he said.

  “Say hi to everyone for me,” I said.

  “I will.”

  He held out his hand. I took it. We shook.

  “So long, Doug.”

  “So long.”

  And he turned, walked across the street, said hi to my mother. She handed him one of her plants. He took it, and then he was gone. Like that.

  “Go get in the car,” said my father.

  I went over to the car, but before I got in, I opened up Holling’s brown paper bag and took out what was inside. A jacket. A New York Yankees jacket. I looked at the signature on the inside of the collar. You know whose jacket this was, right?

  I put it on. I didn’t care how white the sky was, or how much the whole world was sweating. It felt like the breezes on the top stands of Yankee Stadium.

  “What a stupid thing to give you in the summer,” said my father.

  I zipped up the jacket.

  “Get in the freaking car!”

  Didn’t I tell you that Holling Hoodhood is a good guy?

  When we got to Marysville, around noon, we found the house that Ernie Eco had set up for us past the Ballard Paper Mill, past the railroad yard, and past the back of a bunch of stores and an old bar that looked like no one who went in there went in happy. The house was smaller than the one we’d had, so I had to room with my brother still—and there wasn’t a bedroom for Lucas if he came home. My brother said he’d sleep on a couch in the living room at night so he didn’t have to room with a puke, but my father said he didn’t want him hanging around like he owned the place or something. So he moved his stuff up with me.

  Terrific.

  The first thing I had to do
was find a place to hide the jacket, which my brother didn’t know was Joe Pepitone’s. If he had known, he’d have ripped it off me before we’d crossed the Throgs Neck Bridge. But he would find out. He always found out. So I kept it on, even though Holling Hoodhood was wrong and it was just as hot in Marysville as on Long Island and I was melting inside so bad that I was afraid I’d sweat Joe Pepitone’s signature off.

  My father said he was going with Ernie Eco to the Ballard Paper Mill to sign some forms so he could begin work on Monday, and my mother said she didn’t think the Ballard Paper Mill would be open today, on a Saturday, and my father said what did she know about anything and left with Ernie Eco. So my brother and I carried all the furniture in, and I carried all the boxes in, except my mother told me to leave the kitchen boxes on the truck until she got the kitchen clean enough so a human being could eat in there without getting sick—which she hadn’t finished doing by the time my father got home.

  It turned out to be one of the wrong days. Again. Of course. My father couldn’t figure out why my mother hadn’t gotten the kitchen ready. He couldn’t figure out why we hadn’t gotten the kitchen boxes off the truck. He couldn’t figure out why my mother hadn’t gotten groceries yet. All she had to do was walk over to Spicer’s Deli! He couldn’t figure out why there wasn’t food on the table for lunch. She had time enough to get the crucifix up in the hall, but she didn’t have time enough to make a couple of sandwiches? It was already two o’clock! And he really couldn’t figure out why Mr. Big Bucks Ballard was only going to give him a salary that was barely half of what Ernie Eco had promised.

  I told him we didn’t have lunch yet because how were we supposed to know where Spicer’s Deli was and he had taken the car anyway and Mom had to clean up the kitchen because he sure wouldn’t have wanted to eat in this dump before she did that.

  My father turned to look at me, and then his hand flashed out.

  He has quick hands, like I told you.

  “Why don’t you just stay here in your new jacket and get those boxes off the truck and into the nice, clean kitchen while we go out to find a diner?” he said. He told my mother to go get in the car, and my brother too—who smirked and swung like he was going to hit my other eye—and then they were gone, and I was left alone in The Dump.

  I went down to the basement and looked around. There was only a single light bulb hanging, and it shone maybe fifteen watts. Maybe ten. A huge octopus of a furnace reached across most of the ceiling, and cobwebs hung on its tentacles, drifting up when I walked beneath them. Under the stairs it was open and dry and dark—a few old paint cans piled on top of each other, a couple of broken window frames, something dead that once had fur. I looked around and found a nail—you can always find a nail in an old basement—and hammered it in behind one of the stairs. That’s where I hung Joe Pepitone’s jacket.

  Then I got those boxes off the truck.

  And after that, I went out to explore the great metropolis of Marysville, New York.

  Terrific.

  Here are the stats for stupid Marysville:

  Eight beat-up stores and a bar out front of where we were living.

  Four blocks of houses as tiny and beat up as ours.

  Twelve blocks of houses that had grass out front, a lot with bikes lying on their lawns like their kids were too stupid to know that anyone could walk off with them.

  Big trees along all the streets.

  Eighteen houses with flags outside.

  Twenty-four sprinklers going.

  Fourteen people out on the stoops, sitting around because there wasn’t any boring thing else to do in boring Marysville. Two who waved at me. One with a transistor radio on—except it was the stupid Mets and not the Yankees.

  Two dogs asleep on their porches. One barked. One looked like it was too hot to think of chasing me, even though he knew I didn’t belong.

  A girl rode by on a bike with a basket on the handlebars. She looked at me like the dogs did, and then went on. Probably she knew I didn’t belong too.

  I hate this town.

  I hate that we had to come here.

  I decided to take a left, then go back to The Dump along another block so people didn’t think I was lost or something. And so I turned the corner and looked down the street. There was the girl again, putting her bike in a rack and getting ready to head up into this brick building that was trying to look a whole lot more important than it should because no matter how important it looked it was still in stupid Marysville.

  I crossed the street like I’d done it a million times before. It was shadowy under the maples in front of the building.

  The girl saw me coming. She reached into the basket and pulled out a chain with pink plastic all around it. She looped it around the bike and the rack and clicked it all together and spun the combination lock before I had crossed the curb. Then she looked up.

  I pointed to the chain. “Is that because of me?” I said.

  “Should it be?” she said.

  I looked over the bike. “Not for this piece of junk,” I said. “And if it wasn’t a piece of junk and I did want it, a pink chain wouldn’t stop me.”

  She turned and picked up the books from the basket. “Is there something you do want?”

  “Not in this town.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She held her books close to her—like my mother with her plants. And then I knew something.

  This is what I knew: I was sounding like Lucas when he was being the biggest jerk he could be, which was usually just before he beat me up.

  I was sounding like Lucas.

  “You must have just moved here,” she said.

  I decided I wouldn’t be Lucas.

  “A few hours ago,” I said. I put my hands in my pockets and sort of leaned back into the air. Cool and casual.

  But I was too late.

  “That’s a shame,” she said. “But maybe you’ll get run over and I won’t have to chain my bike anymore. Now I’m going up into the library.” She started to talk really slow. “A library is a place where they keep books. You probably have never been in one.” She pointed to the street. “Go over there and walk down the broken white line with your eyes closed, and we’ll see what happens.”

  “I’ve been in plenty of libraries before,” I said.

  She smiled—and it wasn’t the kind of smile that said I love you—and she skipped up the six marble steps toward the marble entrance. You know how much I was hoping she would trip on the top step and scatter her books everywhere and she’d look at me like I had to come help her and I wouldn’t but maybe I would?

  But she didn’t trip. She went in.

  And so what if I’ve never been in a library before? So what? I could have gone into any library I wanted to, if I wanted to. But I never did, because I didn’t want to. You think she’s been to Yankee Stadium like I have? You think Joe Pepitone’s jacket is hanging up in her basement?

  I climbed the six steps—and she didn’t see me trip on the top one, so it didn’t matter. I pushed open the glass door and went in.

  It was dark inside. And cool. And quiet. And maybe stupid Marysville was a dump, but this place wasn’t. The marble outside led to marble inside, and when you walked, your footsteps echoed, even if you had sneakers on. People were sitting around long tables with green-shaded lamps, reading newspapers and magazines. Past the tables was a desk where a woman with her glasses on a chain looped around her neck was working as if she didn’t know how dumb glasses look when you’ve got them on a chain looped around your neck. And past her started the shelves, where I figured the stuck-up girl with the bike was, picking out a new stack of books to put into her basket and take back to her pretty little Marysville house.

  Suddenly I wasn’t sure I wanted her to see me.

  So when I saw another staircase—marble again—circling up to the next floor, I took it. Its steps were smooth and worn, as if lots of people like the girl with the bike had been climbing up here for lots of years. Even the brass baniste
r shone bright from all the hands that had run along it.

  So what if everyone in stupid Marysville comes into the stupid library every stupid day? So what?

  I got to the top and into this big open room with not much. There was a painting on the wall, a guy with a rifle across his chest looking as if he was having a vision or something. And in the middle of the room, there was this square table with a glass case on top. And that was it. All that space, and that was it. If my father had this space, he’d fill it with tools and boards and a drill press and a lathe and cans and stuff before you could spit twice. There’d be sawdust on the floor, cobwebs on the ceiling, and the smell of iron and machine oil everywhere.

  I went over to the table to see how come it was the only lousy thing in the whole lousy room.

  And right away, I knew why.

  Underneath the glass was this book. A huge book. A huge, huge book. Its pages were longer than a good-size baseball bat. I’m not lying. And on the whole page, there was only one picture. Of a bird.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

  He was all alone, and he looked like he was falling out of the sky and into this cold green sea. His wings were back, his tail feathers were back, and his neck was pulled around as if he was trying to turn but couldn’t. His eye was round and bright and afraid, and his beak was open a little bit, probably because he was trying to suck in some air before he crashed into the water. The sky around him was dark, like the air was too heavy to fly in.

  This bird was falling and there wasn’t a single thing in the world that cared at all.

  It was the most terrifying picture I had ever seen.

  The most beautiful.

  I leaned down onto the glass, close to the bird. I think I started to breathe a little bit more quickly, since the glass fogged up and I had to wipe the wet away. But I couldn’t help it. Dang, he was so alone. He was so scared.

  The wings were wide and white, and they swooped back into sharp rays. And between these, the tail feathers were even sharper, and they narrowed and narrowed, like scissors. All the layers of his feathers trembled, and I could almost see the air rushing past them. I held my hand as if I had a pencil in it and drew on the glass case, over the tail feathers. They were so sharp. If my hand had shaken even a tiny bit, it would have ruined the whole picture. I drew over the ridges of the wings, and the neck, and the long beak. And then, at the end, I drew the round and terrified eye.