Okay for Now

  It was a beautiful sound that...

  Well, I'm lying.

  I missed the stupid post by a mile.

  But it doesn't matter, because something else happened when we finished throwing horseshoes that was even better.

  Reader, I kissed her. A quiet walk back we had, she and I.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Snowy Heron Plate CCXLII

  BUT THE THING about being a Yellow Shank is this: once you move into the middle of the picture, you're that much closer to the dark woods.

  By the middle of November, it was pretty obvious that November in stupid Marysville, New York, is about the crummiest month there is for running. You never know; things could always get worse. But in November the valley traps thick clouds and holds them low, so the air is always wet and cold, and every day, right around the time I went outside to run with James Russell and Otis Bottom, every day, and I'm not lying, it rained. And it rained the kind of gray rain that's only a few degrees short of being snow and goes down your back and pretty soon—like, right away—your sweatshirt and T-shirt and all the rest are wet through and they're so cold that you don't want them touching your skin but what can you do?

  The one thing the cold made me do was pick up the pace, so even James Russell was panting by the time we got back, and Otis Bottom kept looking at me like he was wondering why we had to go so all-fired fast. But I couldn't exactly go to Mr. Ferris's class in a sopping wet T-shirt, and I had to change it before everyone else came back to the locker room because of you know why. James Russell and Otis Bottom figured it out, I guess. They never said anything when I took my dry clothes over to the bathroom stalls.

  But the week before Thanksgiving, things got darker in PE. The So-Called Gym Teacher announced that we were going to start a new unit—Volleyball—and Everyone, and he meant Everyone, was going to Cheerfully Participate because this was a Team Sport that required Every Single One of Us to be a Part of the Team.

  Terrific.

  So we strung up nets while he sat in his office and we used masking tape to mark off the boundaries and we knocked the balls around some and then served overhand as if we knew what we were doing, and the So-Called Gym Teacher came out of his office and said we were supposed to practice passing back and forth, which he'd never told us, and he went back into his office and we passed back and forth until we all got sick of it and then we started dodge ball with the volleyballs until the So-Called Gym Teacher came out of his office again and hollered and that was pretty much the end of the period.

  One more blah day of PE at Washington Irving Junior High School.

  Except that in English the next day, a runner from the Principal's Office came in and handed Miss Cowper a note. She read it, and looked at me. "Douglas, Principal Peattie would like you to stop by after school."

  Every eye in the classroom turned toward me. They probably figured that my twisted criminal mind had made me do something awful again.

  "How come?" I said.

  "If you mean to say 'Why has Principal Peattie requested to see me?' my answer is 'I do not know.' But I'm sure he will tell you."

  "I'm sure he will," said about twenty-two voices around me.

  "That'll do," said Miss Cowper, and with one last look at me—a little worried, maybe?—she turned back to the chalkboard.

  Lil leaned over. "What did you do?"

  I shrugged. "Do I have to do anything?"

  "Pretty much you don't have to go see the principal unless you've done something."

  "All right. I'll tell you. Principal Peattie has a mad wife and he's hidden her in the school attic, except that every so often she escapes."

  "The school," said Lil, "doesn't have an attic."

  "In the basement. I went down by accident and there she was. And she came at me, Mrs. Peattie, like she was going to bite me to death or something. But I got away, and now Principal Peattie wants to keep me quiet. He'll probably lock me up too. And then, Lil, you alone will know the terrible secret."

  I should tell you that I was revealing this terrible secret to Lil while Miss Cowper was trying to teach us the Wonders of the Adverb and that when she asked if Lil and I had anything we'd like to share with the whole class, we stopped, quickly understanding that Miss Cowper was watching us angrily and would beat us mercilessly if we did not cease immediately. And I'm giving you that last sentence just to show that you can too talk and learn at the same time.

  Principal Peattie made me wait for half an hour—again. I guess it was his technique. Then he opened the door and told me to come in, and to sit, and then he sat down behind his desk and underneath the Brown Pelican and looked at me like I was personally responsible for causing all the problems of Washington Irving Junior High. He shook his head a couple of times before he began.

  I'm not lying—this Brown Pelican, he was beautiful. He could have been as funny-looking as the Large-Billed Puffins, because he was mostly bill. Put him next to the Arctic Tern, and you could hardly imagine him flying. The feet, the curve of the neck, the colors—he could have been a hoot. But he wasn't.

  When you looked at him, it didn't matter how he was put together. He was noble. If you were a bird, you could imagine bowing down to him.

  "Principal Peattie has been speaking with Coach Reed," Principal Peattie said.

  You had to wonder what the Brown Pelican's voice would be like if he could speak. Something deep, but still able to laugh. Warm. Easy.

  "Coach Reed says—Douglas, would you mind terribly giving Principal Peattie your full attention?"

  You could imagine the Brown Pelican standing over the Black-Backed Gull at the moment when the gull most needed him and saying that maybe the sky won't be lost after all.

  "Listen, kiddo, you look Principal Peattie in the i" eye!

  I did. It wasn't easy.

  "I said, Principal Peattie has been speaking with Coach Reed."

  You remember that feeling of cold, freezing rain down your back I was telling you about?

  Principal Peattie held up a piece of paper. "Coach Reed has had the secretary type up this report for your Permanent School Record."

  Just so you know, I should tell you this: I did not say, I didn't know the So-Called Gym Teacher could write a report. I did not say that. Even though I was tempted. Sometimes I really do get it.

  "He tells Principal Peattie that you have been cutting his class for weeks."

  "I've been running," I said. "He sees me go out every day at the beginning of the period."

  "Has your class been doing a Running Unit?"

  "I have."

  "The rest of your class hasn't, and guess what? You're not the teacher." He looked down at the piece of paper. It was a blue piece of paper, which I guess made it all-fired important. "It says here that you've missed the entire Wrestling Unit."

  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 Sever
al 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.