The Wednesday Wars

by Gary D. Schmidt

  My father looked at me.

  "Just swell," I said.

  "That's right," he said. "And having a kid in the school is a big plus in making a bid like this. It makes the board members think that we have a deep commitment already. And if Hoodhood and Associates gets this contract, we'll really be going places."

  "I've been thinking of military school," I said.

  Dad took a sip of his coffee.

  "I'm not sure Kowalski will even bother to put in a bid," he said.

  "I'm thinking of military school," I said again. "In Alabama."

  "You don't have to say ridiculous things twice, Holling. Once is more than enough."

  "Why is military school ridiculous?" asked my sister.

  "Today the Mets decided to pay Buddy Harrelson eighteen thousand dollars a year to play baseball. Can you imagine that? Eighteen thousand dollars a year ... just to play baseball. This for a player who can't hit the ball out of the infield. Holling going to military school isn't quite as ridiculous as that, but I'll give him this—it's pretty close."

  "It's not any more ridiculous than going to our high school," said my sister.

  My father closed his eyes. He took another sip of coffee. I think he was fortifying himself.

  "Girls can't wear their hair too short, boys can't wear their hair too long," my sister said. "We can't wear skirts that are too short, or slacks that are too long, or sweaters that are too tight, or jeans that are too—and I'm not making this up—too blue. We can't even wear a turtleneck because it's too something—no one knows what, but it's something. Now, that's ridiculous. That a principal even cares about this stuff while bombs are dropping on people who hardly have any clothes is even more ridiculous."

  "You don't wear those things because you're not a hippie," said my father. His eyes were still closed.

  "What's all that got to do with education? Why can a principal just make all those rules up?"

  My father opened his eyes. "Because he can," he said, and put down his cup of coffee. "Eighteen thousand dollars. They are out of their minds."

  The Alabama Military Institute faded right away.

  After supper, my sister came into my room.

  "So you don't think you need to knock?" I said.

  "Holling, going to military school is a ridiculous idea."

  "That's not what you said at supper."

  "It's not a ridiculous idea because of why Dad thinks it's a ridiculous idea. It's a ridiculous idea because it's military school, and because the next stop after military school is Saigon."

  "So?"

  She put her hands on her hips. "Sometimes I wonder if you're even worth trying to save," she said. "There's a war going on in Vietnam, Holling. Have you noticed? A war. Two hundred soldiers die every week. They come back home in black body bags stacked into planes. And after they're buried in the ground, their families get a new American flag with fancy folds. And that's it."

  She stopped.

  "And I couldn't stand it if..."

  She stopped again.

  "It's a ridiculous idea, Holling," she said, and left.

  Pete Seeger began to play loudly in her room.

  The next afternoon, after everyone had left for Temple Beth-El or Saint Adelbert's, and after Doug Swieteck and Danny had waited around until the last minute in case Mrs. Baker had arranged for Whitey Ford to show up, Mrs. Baker handed me back my Macbeth test.

  "Macbeth and Malcolm are not the same person, though their names share an initial consonant," she said.

  "I know," I said.

  "Nor are Duncan and Donalbain, who also share an initial and, for that matter, concluding, consonant, the same person."

  "I guess not," I said.

  "Malcolm and Donalbain are the king's sons, not..."

  "You know," I said, "it's not so easy to read Shakespeare—especially when he can't come up with names that you can tell apart."

  Mrs. Baker rolled her eyes. This time I was sure.

  "Shakespeare did not write for your ease of reading," she said.

  No kidding, I thought.

  "He wrote to express something about what it means to be a human being in words more beautiful than had ever yet been written."

  "So in Macbeth, when he wasn't trying to find names that sound alike, what did he want to express in words more beautiful than had ever yet been written?"

  Mrs. Baker looked at me for a long moment. Then she went and sat back down at her desk. "That we are made for more than power," she said softly. "That we are made for more than our desires. That pride combined with stubbornness can be disaster. And that compared with love, malice is a small and petty thing."

  We were both quiet.

  "Malice is not always small and petty," I said. "Have you seen what Doug Swieteck's brother put up in the halls?"

  "I have," said Mrs. Baker. "A wonderful picture of you playing a wonderful part."

  "In yellow tights," I said.

  "Well," she said, "you may chance have some odd quirks and remnants of wit broken on you."

  "That doesn't sound like it's from Macbeth."

  "It's not. But I promise you, people will soon forget about Ariel."

  I sighed. "It's a whole lot easier saying that than seeing yourself in that picture."

  "I suppose that would be true," she said.

  "It's not like it's your picture in the halls, or that you have all that much to worry about," I said.

  I know. Dumb.

  Mrs. Baker's face went suddenly white. She opened her lower desk drawer, put her copy of Shakespeare into it, and closed it. Loudly. "Go sit down and fix the errors on your Macbeth exam," she said.

  I did.

  We said nothing else to each other that whole afternoon. Not even when I left.

  I walked home under gray clouds whose undersides had been shredded. They hung in tatters, and a cold mist leaked out of them. The cold got colder, and the mist got mistier all through the afternoon, so that by suppertime a drizzle was making everything wet and everyone miserable—especially my sister, who believed that she had hair that belonged in southern California, where it would be springy and bouncy all the time, instead of in gray, cold, misty Long Island, where it just hung.

  So dumb.

  Lying in bed that night, I listened as the drizzle turned to a rain, and then the rain started to spatter thickly on the window, and then all sounds of it faded away, and my room began to grow cold. I got up and looked out, but the glass was covered with a sheet of thin ice, and the only thing I could see was the crazed pattern of the streetlight outside.

  In the morning, ice covered the town. If the sun had been shining, it would have been a spectacle, like something Prospero might conjure up. But as it was, the tattered gray clouds hung even lower, and the mist was leaking out of them again, and the town looked more like the kind of foul heath where Macbeth's Three Weird Sisters lived.

  As I walked to school that morning, the mist laid down a fine, light coating of water on last night's ice, and by the time I got to the library, I could stand on the sidewalk, give a little push, and slide. By the time I got to Goldman's Best Bakery, I didn't even need to push: The last block and a half was all downhill, so I pointed my feet, leaned down a bit, bent my knees, and let myself go. Since there wasn't a single car anywhere, I didn't even stop at the corners. By the time I reached Camillo Junior High, I had enough speed to take out Doug Swieteck's brother—if he'd been anywhere in sight.

  And then, suddenly, there he was—just like the Three Weird Sisters appearing because Macbeth had thought of them—Doug Swieteck's brother, on the other side of Camillo Junior High, waiting for a school bus to turn the corner so that he could grab on to its bumper and have it pull him along on the icy roads.

  It was what eighth graders whose career goal was the state penitentiary did.

  The school buses were driving around town even though no cars were because Mr. Guareschi was principal of Camillo Junior High, and Mr. Guareschi wouldn't have let the scho
ol close right before the New York State Standardized Achievement Tests even if the Soviet Union had started raining atomic bombs on the entire east coast of the United States. I heard that from Mr. Petrelli himself, and it's probably true.

  So the buses were driving on ice, and they all pulled in late, and you only had to look at the drivers' faces to see they were all mad at Mr. Guareschi, and Mrs. Baker was mad because we straggled in throughout the morning because the buses were late. I figured that the only one who was happy in the whole school was Mr. Ludema, Doug Swieteck's brother's teacher, because Doug Swieteck's brother stayed out until the last bus came in.

  "It's the dictator-of-a-small-country thing," Danny said when he finally got to class—he was on the last bus. "Mr. Guareschi thinks he can control the weather! He tells us to come to school in the ice, and we come. He tells bus drivers to drive in the ice, and they drive! He controls all the school buses of the world!" He held his hands up high in the air. "He controls us all!"

  Danny Hupfer can get carried away.

  But even if Mr. Guareschi could control the school buses like the dictator of a small country, he couldn't control the Long Island Power Company, which that morning was spending its time not giving electricity to most of its customers—including Camillo Junior High. You couldn't have raised a spark of electricity anywhere. Any light that came into the classrooms was from the windows, and on a day of gray tattered clouds, that wasn't much.

  So we sat in the half-dark, in our coats, in the cold. We could hear Sycorax and Caliban scurrying in the walls, climbing down from the ceiling to find someplace warm to burrow in. Like a human body. I figured they probably could sense us, and soon the walls would start to shred, and we'd see claws and nails, and there would be clacking yellow teeth, and before Birnam Wood could come to Dunsinane, we'd all run screaming out of the room into the misty cold.

  That's how we spent our day preparing for the New York State Standardized Achievement Tests. In Mrs. Baker's class, we drilled on sentence diagramming. In Mr. Samowitz's class, we drilled on mathematical sets. (We didn't tell his homeroom class, who were coming into our room for sentence diagramming, about Sycorax and Caliban. We figured we'd hear if anything happened.) In Mr. Petrelli's class, we recited European borders and exports. And as we drilled, our hands got colder and colder, so that by noon it was hard to feel our pencils with our fingers.

  But at lunch, Mrs. Bigio came into the classroom carrying a tray of thick paper cups, steaming with the hot scent of chocolate—probably because she felt guilty about the Something Surprise from before the holidays. "Don't ask how I got them hot," she said to Mrs. Baker. "But if Mr. Guareschi is looking for his desk, he might have a hard time finding it."

  Can you believe it? Hot chocolate!

  Mrs. Baker laughed—a real laugh, not a teacher laugh—and sat down behind her desk with the cup Mrs. Bigio gave her. She held both her hands around it to warm them.

  Mrs. Bigio walked down the aisles, and we each took a cup from her tray. Doug Swieteck tried to take two, but when Mrs. Bigio put her heavy and sensible shoe on his sneaker, he put the extra cup back.

  Mai Thi did not reach for the chocolate when Mrs. Bigio came beside her. She did not raise her head.

  And Mrs. Bigio did not pause. She finished the rest of the aisles, and left with one cup still steaming on her tray.

  "Let's begin the next sentences," said Mrs. Baker.

  We groaned.

  "Now," said Mrs. Baker, "while the sugar is coursing through your veins."

  She walked up and down the aisles to watch us work. I don't know if anyone else saw her put her cup of hot chocolate on Mai Thi's desk.

  Not that she had suddenly become filled with the milk of human kindness. (That's from The Tragedy of Macbeth, by the way.) Mrs. Baker did not even let us outside after lunch. We kept drilling.

  In midafternoon, the clouds pulled up their tatters and started to thicken. Then they began to billow out toward the ground, as though they were carrying some heavy load and were about to split. They billowed further and further, until a few minutes before we finished school they finally did split, and huge wet snowflakes fell from them onto the icy roads—just as the bus drivers were pulling into the parking lot, probably watching for signs of Doug Swieteck's brother.

  Before we left, Mrs. Baker read a memo that Mr. Guareschi had sent around to all the classrooms. "Since the New York State Standardized Achievement Tests are to be administered tomorrow throughout the entire state, plan on attending school. No student will be excused without permission from the principal. Weather will not be a factor. The school will be open for the administration of the tests."

  Mrs. Baker put the memo on the desk. She looked outside at the snow that was already gathering on top of the ice. "I will see you all tomorrow," she said.

  It was like Mr. Petrelli had said: Even if atomic bombs had started raining down.

  When I left, I realized that for the whole day Mrs. Baker had not said a word to me.

  So dumb.

  Through the late afternoon and evening, the wind sculpted the snow first into low mounds and then into strange, sharp shapes. And when the wind was finished with the snow, it threw itself against our house, wailed under the eaves, and looked for any chink it could push through. At times the Long Island Power Company would muster up some electricity and send it out, and suddenly all the lights in the house would flick on, along with my sister's radio turned up to full volume, and the light over the stoop would show how deep the snow had become. But then the electricity would flit away again, and we were left in the candlelight and cold.

  If you think the four of us huddled together under blankets like the pioneers and told stories and sang old western songs in front of a roaring fire, you're wrong. And not just because houses on Long Island don't have fireplaces—at least, none that give off heat.

  It was more like this:

  Every half-hour when the shows switched, my mother walked over to the television and tried the on-off button several times. Then she turned the channel and tried the on-off button again. "You'd think that at least this would work," she said. Then she turned the channel and tried again. When nothing happened, she went out to the kitchen and opened the windows so we couldn't tell that she was smoking. We tried to ignore the cold billows that swept through the house and made us clutch the blankets around us even tighter.

  My father raged by the phone. He couldn't believe that employees of Hoodhood and Associates were already calling, wondering if the firm was going to be closed the next day. "Don't they know we have a contract to compete for? And they're going to let a little snow get in the way? They must not want to work for me much longer," he said. "It's not like I'm the Mets and I can pay Ed Kranepool twenty-four thousand dollars next season. Twenty-four thousand dollars! For Ed Kranepool! Next thing you know, they'll be paying Tom Seaver twenty-four thousand dollars too. Are they out of their minds?"

  My sister was tormented, absolutely tormented, absolutely, positively tormented by three things. First, she could never hope to put on her makeup without lights, and she'd die before she went out anywhere without her makeup. Second (and these are supposed to be getting worse as we go along), the Beatles television special, which was at eight o'clock, was starting right now—Right Now!—and was being seen by every single person in the country except for her, and somehow Ringo would find out about that and never, ever forgive her. And third, because the New York State Standardized Achievement Tests would take an hour longer at the high school, she would be walking home at the same time as her brother—the one who wore yellow tights—who, if he knew what was good for him, would walk home on the far side of the road, far enough away from her that no one would ever suspect any sort of family connection.

  So it wasn't pioneer songs by firelight.

  It snowed all night, and in the morning we looked like Alaska. Northern Alaska.

  But it didn't matter. A whole new Ice Age could have started, and it wouldn't have mattered.
Because Mr. Guareschi was as good as his word. My sister's transistor radio announced that all the schools would be open, this despite more snow overnight than we had seen the last three winters combined. Students were advised to leave early, as travel might be slowed by the snow—like this was the most astonishing observation of the century.

  So I did leave early, and I hiked through knee-deep drifts to school, the wind still wailing and throwing itself against me, three sharpened Number 2 pencils for the New York State Standardized Achievement Tests in my pocket. Since the power was still off at the school, I wore thermal underwear—top and bottom—plus an extra T-shirt, a sweatshirt, and two pairs of heavy socks. I was sweating by the time I reached Camillo Junior High, but I figured that I would be warm and cozy through the tests, even if I couldn't move my toes in my boots.

  None of the roads had been plowed yet, but enough buses had come down Lee Avenue that it was packed hard and slick. And Doug Swieteck's brother was riding the bumpers again, heading for the state penitentiary, all happy, as if he hadn't spent the last week with newspaper pictures and a jar of yellow oil paint, ruining my life.

  When I saw him riding by, holding on with just one hand, something in me snapped. I'm not sure what it was. I guess Presbyterians would call it sin, but I don't think it was sin. It was more like the human need for revenge—sort of what Malcolm and Donalbain were thinking. (Please note that I do know the names of the king's two sons.) By the time I saw Doug Swieteck's brother come by again, my plan was fully formed. A snowball had appeared before me, a fatal vision. I dug down into the snow and pulled up some of the slush underneath. I packed the snowball tight. I rounded it so that it would fly straight. Then I spit on it a few times to give it a frozen overcoating.

  The next bus started to come down Lee Avenue.

  In my mind I could see it all: I pull back my arm, plant my left foot, Doug Swieteck's brother comes sliding into sight, I release the fastball, his face turns toward me at the last moment, and the snow-ice-slush-spitball splatters against his nose. Perfect.