Okay for Now (22 page)

Possibility!

Geez,
the moon.

In January, all of Coach Reed's classes were starting a new unit in PE: Physical Fitness and

Endurance. We were going to have a whole lot of tests to see how many sit-ups we could do in four

minutes, and how many pushups, and squat thrusts, and leg lifts, and chin-ups, along with timed

hundred-yard dashes and mile runs. We were supposed to compare ourselves to the President's

Council on Physical Fitness goals that all American boys should be trying to reach so we wouldn't die

of heart attacks someday.

So that period we spent practicing the correct way to do pushups and sit-ups, and after that we took

turns holding each other's ankles and counting sit-ups, or holding fists beneath each other so that you

could tell how far down your chest had to go for a good pushup, and we got timed for a trial run. It

was about as exciting as it sounds.

You know how the Snowy Heron has its beak pointed out to the world? How it doesn't care that the

hunter is coming up the path? How he looks at the hunter and says,
So what?

How he sees Possibility?

After class, when everyone was headed into the locker room, I stopped at Coach Reed's office. He

was sitting behind his desk, which was covered with Presidential Fitness Charts with lots of little

spaces that needed filling in.

"Hello," I said.

He looked up from his clipboard, then turned it over.

"What do you want?" he said.

"I saw some of your drawings. You're good," I said.

He looked at the face-down clipboard. Then he looked at me with suspicious eyes. "So?"

"You drew the war," I said.

Coach Reed not saying anything. His hand pressing down on the clipboard, pressing it into the

desk.

"My brother was there too," I said. "He's back."

A long minute passing.

"No, he's not," said Coach Reed finally. Not his sergeant voice. "No one ever comes back from

Vietnam. Not really." He picked up the clipboard and held it against his chest.

"He's not reading the letters he gets."

Coach Reed nodded.

"He needs someone who knows what it was like."

Coach Reed looked at me.

I looked at the clipboard.

"Maybe you do too," I said.

"Get out, Swieteck," he said. "I'm busy." Sergeant voice back.

"I could help," I said.

He laughed. Not a happy laugh. "Help," he said.

"I could take care of those charts. I could write down everyone's names and keep track of where

they start, what kind of progress they make, where they finish. Stats like that."

Coach Reed got up and sat on the edge of his desk. "Why so helpful?" he said.

"Do you want me to do it or not?"

"Not," he said.

I shrugged. "Okay." I turned to go.

"Wait a minute," he said. He fingered the clipboard. "I'll think about it. Go get changed. I'll let you

know when you come back."

I nodded. "Okay."

When I came back, his office door was closed. But on the door, there was a note.
Swieteck,
it said.

Start with the second-period stats.

I stayed after school to start.

"You know, Mr. Powell," I said the next Saturday. "I don't think Audubon had this right. I mean, about

the hunter."

"Do you think he's in the wrong place in the picture?"

"No. He shouldn't be in the picture at all."

"What would you have put there instead?"

"Another heron. He's just seen her, and he's going to fly over to say hi."

"It would be a different story," said Mr. Powell. "What do you think, Lil?"

She came over and looked at the picture. Then she took my hand.

You know what that feels like?

Like what the astronauts will feel when they step onto the moon for the very first time.

Like what might happen if Coach Reed rang the doorbell at The Dump some afternoon and sat

down next to Lucas.

Like knowing that Principal Peattie is wrong about what he said.

Like laying a missing bird picture back where it's supposed to be.

Like someone seeing what a chump you are and getting you a cold Coke anyway.

Like Possibility.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Forked-Tailed Petrel
Plate CCLX

DO YOU KNOW how often it snows in stupid Marysville during a winter? Once a week. Maybe twice.

And do you know on what day of the week it always snows? Saturday. Every Saturday for most of

January and on into February. Every Saturday.

You remember what I do on Saturday mornings?

And do you think deliveries stop just because it's snowing, and blowing, and blizzarding, and the

snow isn't turning to slush like it would on Long Island and it's getting deeper and deeper, and the

cold is so bad that Joe Pepitone's jacket doesn't help much at all and my fingers are starting to stick to

the handle of the wagon so I have to pull Joe Pepitone's sleeves down over my hands but I don't have

anything for my ears, which were about to snap off until Mr. Loeffler gave me this gray wool cap that

Lil says looks great on me but I think makes me look like a chump but I wear it anyway because I

really don't want my ears to snap off and besides did I tell you that Lil says it looks great on me?

Every Saturday it was the same. I'd wake up, and it would still be dark because the clouds were

thick and it was already snowing hard, and it had been snowing hard for most of the night so the

ground was covered, and the sidewalks and the streets too. While Lucas and Christopher slept, I'd put

on about everything I had beneath Joe Pepitone's jacket and then I'd put on the gray wool cap that Lil

says looks great on me, and I'd lace up my sneakers and head out into the snow, and my feet would be

cold and wet in three steps. Mr. Spicer always had a cup of hot chocolate for me to start off each of

the runs, and I'd drink it and go out with the first load. In the beginning of January I did this with the

wagons, but pretty soon Mr. Spicer figured that I'd do a whole lot better with this old toboggan he

had. So that's what I'd use. And it went a whole lot quicker. I'm not lying.

But you can't believe how cold the wind can blow in stupid Marysville.

Mrs. Mason always had a cup of warm milk waiting for me, because I'd told her like a chump that

Mr. Spicer always started me off with hot chocolate and she wanted to be sure to give me something

different, she said. So it was hot milk. I got used to it.

Mr. Loeffler always had a cup of hot tea waiting for me. I got used to that too.

Mrs. Daugherty always had a bowl of cream of wheat waiting for me. I did not get used to that.

Phronsie whispered that it was good if you put a whole lot of brown sugar on it. It wasn't.

Mrs. Windermere always had a cup of hot coffee waiting for me. Black, which, she said, was the

only way to drink it if you wanted to be awake to serve the god of Creativity, which she needed to do

a whole lot since she was working on a stage adaptation of—guess.

Yup.
Jane Eyre.
I'm not lying.

When I told her that the only people who read
Jane Eyre
were people who had to because their

English teachers made them read it and no one in their right mind was going to pay good money to sit

in front of a stage and have all this acted out, she sipped her coffee and said, "Skinny Delivery Boy,

I'm not even finished with it and people are already lining up to buy tickets."

Can you imagine anyone buying tickets to
Jane Eyre?

Can you imagine Joe Pepitone buying tickets to
Jane Eyre?

Me neither.

***

I spent that winter with my head down against the wind, pulling the stupid toboggan, my hands up Joe

Pepitone's sleeves, and always having to go to the bathroom because of the cold and the warm hot

chocolate, milk, tea, coffee.

But afterward, when I got back from Mrs. Windermere's, Lil would be waiting at the deli, and Mr.

Spicer would heat up some chicken noodle soup for us—his own recipe, with lots of chicken and

onion—and I'd take off my sopping sneakers and lay them beside the radiator, and take off my sopping

socks and lay them on the radiator, and I'd stretch my sopping feet as close as I could get them to the

radiator, and I'd eat the chicken noodle soup until I was warm again. And then we'd go to the library,

where Mr. Powell was waiting for us and where we had started to work on gesture.

Which, by the way, the Snowy Heron would have been good for, but it was gone now too, because

of the snow.

I'm not lying.

Stupid Marysville had so much snow that winter that the town ran out of money to pay for the

plowing and the salting and the sanding. So the Town Council went over to the library, like it was a

bank or something, and took a razorblade with them, and the next time Mr. Powell came in, the Snowy

Heron was cut out, just like that, and sold off somewhere to pay for more plowing and salting and

sanding.

If you're trying to get Audubon's pages back, and stupid Marysville is selling them off faster than

you can find them, it gets sort of discouraging.

So here are the stats for volume three of John James Audubon's
Birds of America
owned by the

Marysville Free Public Library of stupid Marysville, New York:

Total number of plates: One hundred.

The Arctic Tern: Missing. Sold to an anonymous collector from overseas.

The Red-Throated Diver: In Mrs. Windermere's house.

The Large-Billed Puffin: Missing. Mr. Powell won't tell me where.

The Brown Pelican: In Principal Peattie's office.

The Yellow Shank: Returned by Mr. Ballard, who is a good guy.

The Snowy Heron: Missing. Mr. Powell won't tell me where.

Total removed from
Birds of America:
Six.

Total returned to
Birds of America:
One.

Total to be returned to
Birds of America:
Five.

Terrific.

"When you're considering gesture," said Mr. Powell, "you're not imagining the birds as if they're

posing for you. You're imagining them moving across the page instead of staying put. Your pencil is

going to show them not only at the moment of the picture, but the moment before and the moment that

is going to come after."

I looked at Mr. Powell.

He started to laugh. "Try this: You're not going to draw a picture of the bird. You're going to draw a

picture of the bird's flight line."

"How do I do that?"

"Don't think of the bird as a flat image. Think of it the whole way around, even the parts that you

don't see. Then think of how all the different pieces of the bird are working with or against each other.

Think how the body of the bird wants to fall..."

"And the wings want to keep it up."

"Exactly. All movement relies on that kind of tension. You show the movement by suggesting the

tension."

"And how do I do that?"

That was when we looked at the Forked-Tailed Petrels.

Things at Washington Irving Junior High School were going mostly okay.

My
Geography: The Story of the World
was as clean as you could expect after half a year. Mr.

Barber still checked it out, leaning down over me when I was working on the Chapter Review Map

about India. I could smell his coffee, and even though it didn't smell as good as Mrs. Windermere's—

which she percolated before I came—it still smelled pretty good. In world history, Mr. McElroy had

found eight filmstrips about the history of the Philippines. The record pinged away at us just about

every class.

Terrific.

In English, Miss Cowper was throwing us into the Introduction to Poetry Unit like it was as all-

fired important as the moon shot. You know, there are good reasons to learn how to read. Poetry isn't

one of them. I mean, so what if two roads go two ways in a wood? So what? Who cares if it made all

that big a difference? What difference? And why should
I
have to guess what the difference is? Isn't

that what
he's
supposed to say?

Why can't poets just say what they want to say and then shut up?

In math, Mrs. Verne selected a group of students who had shown Excellence and Promise to work