Authors: Gary D. Schmidt
And no, I didn't say a thing about my surprise at him being able to understand the mathematical
concept of zero. Remember, I got it.
And I didn't even complain about having to be in the Wrestling Unit at all, which I had reason to,
since you may have noticed that James Russell and Otis Bottom weren't there with me even though
they had missed most of the Wrestling Unit too. But so what? So what? If the So-Called Gym Teacher
wants to be the jerk of the world, so what? If he wants to boom around in his sergeant voice, so what?
But maybe you can understand a little when I tell you that when the So-Called Gym Teacher
hollered at me during Volleyball that I should go after those balls and not act like a Mama's Baby, you
can understand why I got the volleyball and was about to throw it as hard as I could into his sneering
face, but I held back—and I'm not lying, it wasn't easy—and I told him to shut up, just shut up, and he
sneered some more and said I would never throw the volleyball because I knew what would happen
to me, and my mother would be all upset, wouldn't she?
I almost threw it.
I almost did.
But I didn't.
I smiled—the way Lil Spicer likes. Then I took off my shirt and threw it onto the bleachers. I went
back and served the stupid ball over the stupid net. Overhand.
Stats for that game:
I don't remember. My platoon lost. It's volleyball. Who cares? It wasn't exactly the agony of
defeat. It was something a whole lot better.
But I'm not lying, all that week, the So-Called Gym Teacher did not let up. On Tuesday, he made three
guys in the Wrestling Unit run the bleachers all period because they weren't trying hard enough. Guess
who was one of the three guys. Then later, during Volleyball, he made two guys clean off the scuff
marks from the gym floors with old tennis balls. Guess who was one of the two guys.
On Wednesday, during the Wrestling Unit, he made two guys run the bleachers all period because
they weren't trying hard enough. Guess who was one of the two. And in Volleyball, I had to finish all
the scuff marks I'd missed on my side of the floor.
On Thursday, he had four guys finally wash the sweaty wrestling mats down. Guess who was one
of the four. In Volleyball, he told four guys that they were going to stand in the middle of the court and
try to retrieve balls that were spiked down to them. We were supposed to dive. You know what that
feels like, diving onto a gym floor for forty-three minutes?
Then he told us that the next day would be the stunning climax of the Wrestling and Volleyball
Units.
Terrific.
So on Friday, the last day before Christmas vacation, the So-Called Gym Teacher said he had
picked random wrestling partners by choosing our names from slips of paper he'd cut up and put into
a hat. He held up his clipboard. He said he'd call out the names two by two, starting with the first pair
to wrestle.
Guess who was in the first pair.
My partner turned out to be Alfred Hartnett. I'll let you guess again: Do you think Alfred Hartnett
weighed about the same as me, or about sixteen times more?
The So-Called Gym Teacher smiled when he called my name and then Alfred Hartnett's. He put the
clipboard down on the bleacher and leaned back. "Let's get it going," he said.
I'm not lying, even if I had been trying, it wouldn't have made any difference. Alfred Hartnett laid
an arm across me, and I went down. It was, for the record, his left arm, not his strong side. He was a
good guy.
The So-Called Gym Teacher thought it was hilarious.
After the period, he went back to his office and left two guys—me and Alfred Hartnett, hilarious—
to roll up the mats for Christmas vacation. They weren't so bad because, as you might remember,
they'd gotten cleaned off earlier that week. When we finished, we walked back toward the locker
room, and I saw that the So-Called Gym Teacher had left his clipboard and the slips of paper on the
bleacher.
I looked at the clipboard.
Wouldn't you have wanted to know?
Not a single name on it.
The So-Called Gym Teacher had set it all up. There wasn't anything random at all, the jerk.
I flipped over the page.
Blank.
"Hey, Alfred," I said.
I flipped over another page.
It wasn't blank.
It was a drawing. A drawing of James Russell going for a lay-up. Behind him, you could make out
every kid in our platoon.
I'm not lying, the So-Called Gym Teacher knew something about Composition on Several Planes at
once.
I flipped over another page.
Otis Bottom, hanging about halfway up the climbing rope, looking like there was no way in
creation he was going to get up any higher.
Another page.
Me. Running.
Another page.
Our whole platoon, smacking volleyballs around.
Another page.
Our whole platoon really playing volleyball this time. Me serving. No shirt. And no tattoo.
I looked at that awhile.
Then I skipped some pages and turned to the back of the pad.
And stopped.
A drawing of a low road between high grasses.
Bodies. Lots of bodies. All jumbled and thrown on top of one another.
Another page.
A Vietnamese man, old and worn. Dead. His eyes open, and his body lying crooked on the ground.
Behind him, a young girl, naked, reaching for his hand. But she never made it.
Another page.
A boy, younger than me. A straw hat broken underneath him. His face—what was left of it—with a
terrified eye. Burning huts behind him. Bodies all along the road to the huts. The words
My Lai
at the
bottom. And,
I was there.
"Swieteck, what do you think you're doing?"
It was the So-Called Gym Teacher.
He came across the gym like a thunderhead bearing down across the valley and grabbed the
clipboard out of my hands. "What are you doing, looking at my personal things?"
"Coach," I said.
"You get out of here!" Screaming, shrieking sergeant voice. "Get out of here! Never touch my things
again. Did you hear me? You get out!"
I went into the locker room to change.
Later that day, Miss Cowper—and I didn't ask for this, it just seemed to happen—Miss Cowper
wrote me an excuse from PE so that I could help her refresh her County Literacy Unit. I never did find
out what the stunning climax of the Volleyball Unit was.
Lucas didn't talk much, and when he did talk, it was never around my father. It was mostly around my
mother. You could hear them late at night, when everything was quiet and dark. There would be these
low voices, then quiet, then the low voices again. Sometimes crying. Every night, when they were
alone, my mother would change the gauze bandage around Lucas's eyes. Then her voice would call
quietly up the stairs, and Christopher would go down to bring Lucas up to our bedroom.
He wouldn't talk about what happened, how he lost his legs and maybe his eyes. Sometimes you'd
come into the kitchen and he would be sitting by the kitchen table where the sunlight was coming in,
and he'd have his face raised to it like he could see its warmth. Sometimes you saw him try to lift his
body up and down in the chair, like he was lifting a weight—which he pretty much was. Sometimes
he would get letters from people in his unit or from the doctors and nurses who had worked on him
after he was wounded. I told him I would read them for him. He never wanted me to. He told me to
throw them all away, which I didn't.
His stumps hurt him, and sometimes he would reach down to where his legs used to be—he wanted
to scratch them, but there was no place to scratch. He'd still try, and then he'd give up and put his
hands over his face, and you could tell he was doing everything he could not to let himself think that
everything was ruined forever.
We were supposed to go down with Lucas to a doctor in New York City every two weeks for who
knows how long, but when my father said he couldn't be traipsing all over the state every two weeks,
we found a doctor in Kingston who would see him, and when my father put up an all-fired fuss at the
first visit about how much it cost, the doctor said he had a son in Vietnam too, right now. A medic. So
he'd take Lucas on for as long as his son was over there, and my father said he wasn't asking for any
freaking charity, and the doctor stopped talking to him and told Lucas he'd see him in two weeks and
he gave him some exercises to work on.
Lucas didn't do them.
Two weeks later, just before school was about to start after Christmas vacation, we went up to
Kingston again and the doctor had an eye doctor waiting too. My father said he wasn't going to be
gypped and he hadn't brought any money so if he thought that ... The eye doctor turned his back on him
and unwrapped the gauze from Lucas's face.
Then he turned to my father. "Anything else?" he said.
It was the first time my father had seen Lucas without the bandage. It was the first time I had too.
Burns all across his face. Whatever skin was left was shiny and stretched. His eyebrows and
eyelashes were gone, it looked like for good. And everything was seeping. Everything looked wet and
raw.
He'd lost the sky.
Christmas, as you can guess, wasn't exactly
Ho Ho Ho
around our house. On Christmas Eve, my father
went out somewhere with Ernie Eco, and Lucas didn't want to go to midnight Mass, and so
Christopher stayed with him, and my mother and I went. We didn't have a tree, and if it hadn't been for
the ham that Mr. Ballard sent home to all his employees, I think we would have been celebrating with
thawed hamburgers. Presents? Forget it.
So I went to St. Ignatius, and it was cold and damp like it usually was, outside and inside, except
inside there were more candles lit than you'd think could fit inside a single church. Up front there
were two balsam trees, and their scent mixed with the waxy smell of the candles. And there was a
cradle beside the altar, a blue cloth draped over it. And there was a choir of perfect boys in perfect
white robes with perfect combed hair singing their perfect notes like everything was perfect. And I
thought of Lucas back home in his wheelchair, and so I couldn't understand it when my mother turned
to me during "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" and said loud enough to hear over the organ and the
perfect choir, "What a wonderful Christmas this is."
I shivered.
Even with all those candles, it was still cold.
That wasn't the only time I shivered. I shivered late at night after Christopher carried Lucas up to bed
and we had gotten him in and covered. Then we would lie awake and listen to his dreams.
And I would see the young boy with the broken straw hat. The burning huts. The girl's hand.
My
Lai. I was there.
Then Lucas would try to turn over, and there would be a low moan, and Christopher would get up,
and I knew that Lucas was awake in the dark that he carried around with him all the time.
"What can I do?" Christopher would say.
"You weren't there. You can't do anything."
None of us knew how to make it light.
At the beginning of the first physical science class of the new year, Mr. Ferris set Clarence on the
front lab table and started him rocking. "Do you know, Otis Bottom," he asked, "what historic event in
the sciences will occur during this new year of 1969?"
Otis Bottom looked like he didn't really want to be back from Christmas break yet. He could have
guessed all day and not gotten close.
"Doug Swieteck?" Mr. Ferris asked.
"The moon shot," whispered Lil.
"The moon shot," I said.
"Thank you, Lil Spicer. Yes, the moon shot.
Apollo Eight
has circumnavigated the moon and
descended to sixty-nine-point-eight miles over the lunar surface. Think of that. From the very
beginning of human consciousness, we have looked at the moon and wondered what it would be like
to walk on it. In 1969, what man has wondered about for thousands and thousands of years, you may
be able to see on your television screens. It is our first step out into the solar system. It is our first
step out into the galaxy."
Clarence was really rocking. I'm not lying.
"So what are they going to find there?" Otis Bottom was trying to recover.
"Ah, Otis Bottom. That is the question. What are they going to find there? Who knows? Maybe
everything will be exactly as they expect. Maybe everything will be a surprise. But one day soon, man
will walk across the soil of the lunar landscape, and that will be a sign of our progress. In a time
when it doesn't seem as if we're making much progress anywhere else, this, ladies and gentlemen, is a
sign of tremendous possibility. And that, Otis Bottom, is perhaps the best answer to your question.
They will find possibility there."
I thought of Lucas in his darkness. Wouldn't he like to see it?
I went through the rest of that day in a kind of daze. I mean,
the moon!