Okay for Now (19 page)

I didn't say anything.

"How are you going to make that up?"

I still didn't say anything. I figured that keeping my mouth shut was my best option. I got it.

"Principal Peattie will tell you how you're going to make that up. Coach Reed staggers his units, so

he's starting another one on Wrestling for his fifth-period class. You be there for that one—and don't

even think of missing a day."

"Fifth period is my lunch period," I said.

"Fifth period
was
your lunch period," he said.

"Do I still have to do his—"

"Yes, you still have your other period with him too." Principal Peattie looked at the blue piece of

paper. "Volleyball."

"He must really love me to want to see me twice a day," I said.

"He doesn't," said Principal Peattie. And then he said something that I don't think I want to tell you.

It only gets me closer to the dark woods.

Saturday deliveries in November are, of course, cold and gray and wet. The sky is as dark and lousy

as it is in the background for the Snowy Heron, which is the Audubon picture that Mr. Powell had

turned to because he wanted me to think about Composition on Several Planes at once.

But things weren't like they had been in October.

On Saturdays now, Mrs. Mason was taking out a couple of doughnuts again from the two dozen I

was bringing, and she was putting them on a white plate, and setting that beside a mug of hot

chocolate that was waiting for me. And Mr. Loeffler, who was reading
Jane Eyre
because he said I

inspired him, liked to tell me that I should see the movie with Orson Welles sometime, and then he'd

act out a scene or two and we'd start to laugh because Mr. Loeffler is no actor, and I'm not lying.

Afterward we'd change whatever light bulbs needed changing. Then when I got to the Daughertys'

house, Phronsie and Davie and Joel and Polly and Ben would all be waiting to tackle me, and I let

them. I never came away from them without two or three new bruises somewhere. It was great.

And Mrs. Windermere. You know how cold it gets when you're walking out to Mrs. Windermere's,

and Mrs. Mason's hot chocolate is a long time ago, and it's misting and freezing and Joe Pepitone's

jacket isn't as warm as it could be, and you have to walk fast so that you don't start to shiver but you

can't walk too fast because you don't want to tip the stupid wagon over? It's that cold.

So when you walk into Mrs. Windermere's kitchen and it's all warm and cozy like my mother

would keep it if this were her kitchen and you hear Mrs. Windermere typing in the distance with the

god probably sitting beside her with his wings folded, you take your time because you don't want to

go out into the cold again. And besides, there's the Red-Throated Divers to look at and wonder what

spectacular thing the mother diver is thinking about showing her kid next. And then Mrs. Windermere

comes in and says, "Skinny Delivery Boy, do you want a cup of coffee?" I'm not lying. Coffee. And I

say, "Sure," and she says, "How do you take it?" and I say, "Black," and she says, "Fine," and I'm warm all the way back home.

And then, on November Saturday nights, I'd be over to the Daughertys', who had decided to give

me a chance after all. Maybe they were desperate.

Mrs. Daugherty wasn't kidding: five kids, and every single one of them needed to get read to before

going to sleep. And it wasn't like you could read to all of them at once, or even three of them, or two.

It was five kids, five books.

This takes a long time. I'm not lying.

But I didn't care, because I figured it all out, thanks to Miss Cowper's County Literacy Unit.

I figured out Sam-I-Am for Phronsie.

I figured out Circus McGurkus for Davie.

I figured out Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack for Joel.

I figured out Andy and the thorn in the lion's paw for Polly.

And I even figured out why Wilbur is one terrific pig for Ben.

You know what this feels like, to figure all this out?

Do you really know what it feels like?

And after the Daughertys came in at night, Mr. Daugherty would drive me back to The Dump in his

police car.

So you might think that things were going pretty well. And I guess they were. But even while eating

cinnamon doughnuts, and changing light bulbs, and walking back from Mrs. Windermere's, and

driving to The Dump in a police car, and working on the Snowy Heron, I'd be thinking about what

Principal Peattie told me, and you really don't care about Composition on Several Planes at Once

when you're thinking about what he told me.

"Look at the diagonals that Audubon sets up first," Mr. Powell said. "Go from the tip of the heron's

feet to the tip of his beak, and you have the first diagonal. But look at the second diagonal. It's a lot

subtler. He starts at the end of
this
broad leaf in the upper left, right here, and then brings it down

across the top edge of
this
broad leaf, and the bottom edge of
this
rise in the shore. And the two

diagonals form..." He waited.

"An x," I said.

"Exactly right. And the center of that
x
is..."

"The lake."

"Which is drawn linearly, long and narrow. Do you see?"

I got it.

"So," Mr. Powell said, "you have one plane of action in the forefront, marked by the diagonals. In

that one, the heron is stepping out from the higher brush and is trampling this plant. In the other plane,

the one on the horizontal, the hunter is in the background, holding his gun and advancing."

I nodded.

Principal Peattie is a jerk.

"What's interesting is that the two planes are going to come together sometime soon after the

moment we are seeing, because both the bird and the hunter are approaching the center of the

diagonals, which in a composition such as this always intersects at the middle of the page, just like

the action will intersect at the middle of the page."

"It doesn't look like the heron is going to come off too well," I said.

Mr. Powell looked at the approaching hunter. "Probably not."

"So this is one dead heron we're looking at."

Lil got up from her table where she was doing our English class exercise that was supposed to

show us More Wonders of the Adverb. She looked at the Snowy Heron. "He doesn't look dead to me,"

she said.

"Shows how much you know," I said.

Okay, that was sounding like Lucas—and dumb. I know. But nobody else in the room had Principal

Peattie tell him that ... nobody else in the room knew what it was like to have someone blast away at

him, like this heron was going to find out.

Lil went back to the adverbs. Mr. Powell was quiet; then he got out a sheet of paper. "Try drawing

the contour of the heron without a line—suggest the feathers," he said. "At least until you get to the

base of the neck."

I tried, but I couldn't get it. And after Lil closed her book and got up and left without saying a thing,

I didn't even want to try to get it.

"Mr. Swieteck," said Mr. Powell, "take the paper home and try it."

I shook my head. I left the pencils and the paper there. And I left the Snowy Heron too, forever in

the moment before he was going to be blasted, which he had no idea was coming.

He didn't know how lucky he was.

On the day before Thanksgiving, we got a postcard from Lucas—still not in his handwriting—that

said he was coming home, finally. He'd be back by the middle of December. "Remember, I don't look

exactly the same," someone wrote for him. My mother cried, and she said that we had a lot to be

thankful for this Thanksgiving, and I guess that was true, especially since Mr. Ballard sent home a

twenty-two-pound turkey—which, I'm not lying, is a big turkey—for every one of his employees. On

Thanksgiving Day, my mother put it into the oven right after she got up, and it cooked all morning and

half the afternoon so that the whole house was filled with the scent of it.

My mother went around smiling—until Ernie Eco came.

On the Monday after Thanksgiving, I went to fifth-period PE class instead of lunch.

I sat down at the end of one of the squad lines. The So-Called Gym Teacher made us count off by

twos—no, I didn't say anything about how this was probably as high as he could count—and then he

divided us into two platoons and told each platoon to line up by height (which took a lot longer than

you might think) and then he told us to sit on opposite sides of the mat spread across the floor to see

who our opponent would be. It was supposed to generate aggression, he said.

Terrific.

And you know, you have to wonder if the world is fair when it was one of those late-fall days in

stupid Marysville when a tropical front or something had come up from who knows where—South

America?—and everything was warm and the yellow sun was shining and what a sweet day it would

be to run, or to eat lunch outside. Instead, I was messing around on a gray mat that smelled of the

sweat of a thousand wrestling matches. It was, I had to admit, hard to give the Wrestling Unit my full

attention.

Here are the stats from my first match of the period:

One takedown ... of me.

One pin ... of me.

One loss ... for me.

Match time: Eight seconds.

I guess you can tell I wasn't paying much attention.

The So-Called Gym Teacher came up behind me before my second match while my opponent was

staring at me across the mat generating aggression. "I'm not going to pass you for the unit if you don't

try," he said.

Here are the stats for the second match of the period:

One takedown ... of me.

One pin ... of me.

A second loss ... for me.

Match time: Thirty-six seconds, which is four and a half times longer than the first match.

The So-Called Gym Teacher eyed me from the other side of the mat. I eyed him back. Then he

leaned down and said something to my next opponent, who turned to look at me. The So-Called Gym

Teacher said something to him again, and then he walked away. It was sort of creepy. Like you were

the Snowy Heron and you could feel that something was wrong but you weren't sure, because you

hadn't seen the hunter with the gun coming across the horizontal yet.

But I'm not lying, the stats for the third match were different.

When the So-Called Gym Teacher blew his stupid whistle, this other guy and I got into the circle,

and I crouched down as if I cared at all, and as we started to circle each other he said, "Reed wants

me to call you a Mama's Baby."

I almost lunged at his throat.

"But I'm not," he said quickly. "I'm not." We circled some more. "He's a jerk," the guy said.

"Let's get something going," hollered the So-Called Gym Teacher.

We circled some more. And when my back was to the So-Called Gym Teacher, I said, "Keep

circling."

So we did. And someone on the edge of the mat started to laugh, and then someone else, and then

we started to circle faster, and pretty soon the whole place was laughing except for the So-Called

Gym Teacher, and this kid and I were laughing so hard we could hardly keep circling but we kept

going until we were dizzy and finally the So-Called Gym Teacher hollered at us to sit down and we

did except we both kept swaying, we were so dizzy.

The So-Called Gym Teacher was about as angry as you can see a teacher get, and when he called

the next two guys up for their match, he could hardly keep the roar out of his sergeant voice.

But you know what the two guys did?

That's right.

They circled. And circled. And circled.

I think you can imagine what the So-Called Gym Teacher did. If it had been legal, I think he would

have called in firing squads. But since it wasn't legal, he told us that he was going to give every boy

in class a big fat zero for the day, and we could see how we all liked that, yes sirree, buster.

We all went in to get changed. We were still laughing.

No one in the locker room looked when I took my shirt off.

Maybe the Snowy Heron is going to come off pretty badly when the planes come together. Maybe.

But he's still proud and beautiful. His head is high, and he's got this sharp beak that's facing out to the

world.

He's okay for now.

On the first Saturday of December—the month that Lucas was coming home—I waited for Lil outside

the library after the deliveries. It was cold, and I'm not lying. The sky was iron, and Mrs.

Windermere's coffee had worn off way before I got back into town, even before I passed the open

meadow. A few snowflakes blew past in a hurry, which is how most people went by too, all huddled

together and their heads down and their arms close in. So you can see it was kind of noble for me to

wait outside for her. But I hadn't really talked to her since Thanksgiving, and I guess I wanted to make

sure that she wasn't still thinking of my stupid "Shows how much you know" like I was still thinking

of Principal Peattie's stupid ... what he said.