Authors: Gary D. Schmidt
together on Advanced Algebra. Guess who was in it? Lil too.
You know how that feels?
In Mr. Ferris's physical science class we were distilling aspirins, very large aspirins, which by the
time the last bell rang Mr. Ferris said he needed. Clarence was rocking his little hooves off these
days because the moon shot was still on go-ahead, and it looked like it wouldn't be long before there
were human footprints on the lunar surface, as Mr. Ferris kept reminding us. When we asked him if
making aspirin was as important as men going to the moon, he rubbed his head and looked kind of
painfully at us and said, "Believe me, aspirin is pretty darn important."
And in case you're wondering how things have been going with Coach Reed, January and February
were mostly okay, too. I filled in all the Presidential Physical Fitness charts for him, in both periods.
He'd call out the numbers, and I'd write them down where they were supposed to be. When he had to
do the Written Comments at the end of the charts, he told me what to write, and I did it. I told him
maybe my spelling wasn't going to be all that terrific, but he said he didn't care.
A few days into this, he brought me a new gym shirt so that I didn't have to wear my undershirt
anymore. He handed it to me one morning after we finished a period's chart.
"Thanks," I said. "My brother isn't talking much these days. And he dreams a lot."
"Go shower," he said. "You'll be late for your next class."
There are two Forked-Tailed Petrels. They're in the middle of a green, stormy sea, and the waves are
about as high as they're flying. They're heading closer, and their sharp beaks are open, because they're
calling to each other kind of desperately.
"Look at the way the wind is blowing the waves," said Mr. Powell. "Anything odd about it?"
I shook my head.
"Look again," he said. "Pay attention to the composition."
He was right. Two winds were blowing the waves in two directions, completely apart.
"So how are the birds' bodies responding to those winds?"
The two winds were pushing them in different directions, but the petrels were using them to meet in
the center of the picture. That's what the picture was about: meeting, even though you might be headed
in different directions.
All movement relies on that kind of tension, you know.
Because of the snow, we missed most of Lucas's appointments in Kingston. My father said he didn't
want to chance driving off the highway in this stuff, and he wasn't about to take a day off just for a
doctor's appointment, not with Big Bucks Ballard breathing down his neck. So Lucas would have to
do the best he could.
My mother did the best she could by calling up the doctor's office and asking what to do and filling
the prescription for the ointment for Lucas's eyes and checking the stumps every day to be sure there
was no redness or smell of infection.
You can imagine what that was like.
Lucas mostly sat around the kitchen with a blanket over his lap. Not because he was cold. He didn't
talk hardly at all. None of us could know what it was like, he said. We weren't there. So what's the
point of talking?
When he did talk, he was his old jerk self again.
When I told him about the moon shot and how one day there would be human footprints on the lunar
surface, he said, "I guess they won't be mine."
And when my mother asked me to run down to Spicer's Deli for more milk, Lucas said, "I'd run
down for you, but..."
And when Christopher said he was thinking about going out for track in the spring—which is
something like a miracle since Christopher has never gone out for anything in his whole life—Lucas
said, "I bet I could run my legs off if I tried—oh, wait a minute."
Every time he said something, that was the last thing anyone said for a long time.
Which is what had probably happened the second Saturday of February, when I had been working
on the gestures of the Forked-Tailed Petrels and I was starting to get them just right so that they looked
like they were about to dance with each other and I came back home and said to my mother and
Christopher, "I think I got them dancing," and Lucas said, "I bet you couldn't do that for me," and the
Silence Came Down and I thought of the Yellow Shank and I said, "Shut up, Lucas."
I'm not lying. I said, "Shut up, Lucas."
He turned his face toward me. "What did you say?"
"Are you deaf too?" I said.
He threw the blanket off his lap. He tried to raise himself up in his wheelchair. "Listen, little
brother—"
"I can hear," I said.
"I got my legs blown off, in case you forgot."
"How could I forget? You tell us about it every day."
I think if Lucas could have gotten out of the chair, he would have pulled my face off.
My mother had her hand up to her mouth. But she didn't stop us.
The thing about the Forked-Tailed Petrels is that they only have a moment. The winds are blowing
opposite ways, and each one is riding a different wind, and there's only this one moment when they
can meet. It's all-fired important.
They can't miss it when it comes.
"Doug," said Lucas. He said this in a kind of snarl.
"You don't even try," I said.
"Try what?" More snarling. "I can't grow new legs."
"You have two arms," I said. "They used to be strong."
"You used to be able to take me," Christopher said.
"And the doctor said that you should try leaving the bandage off your eyes," said my mother.
"Maybe..."
"I'm blind."
I walked over to my brother. I reached for the bandage across his eyes, and when he felt me near
him he tried to stop me. Snarling. But I was a lot stronger than him now. I hadn't thought about it, but I
was. So I grabbed his arms, pushed them away, and pulled the bandage off.
My mother started to cry.
Most of Lucas's face was still the shiny pink of half-healed skin. His eyes glistened with the
ointment smeared over them. No eyebrows. No lashes. His eyes blinked, and blinked, and blinked.
"You want to stop me?" I said, or maybe I snarled. "Try. Hitch yourself up in that wheelchair. Try."
He didn't move. He kept blinking.
"Try," said Christopher.
Lucas blinked again. He turned his face toward my mother. "I think I see you," he said.
The next Saturday it snowed, but it didn't matter; Christopher and I carried Lucas into the pickup, and
Lucas, my mother, and my father drove to Kingston early. Lucas didn't have the bandage over his eyes.
He kept turning his face from side to side, blinking, trying to make things out.
And he was smiling.
I already told you about his smile, right?
After the deliveries, I drew the Forked-Tailed Petrels with smiles.
"Birds," said Mr. Powell, "tend not to have expressions on their faces."
"This is their one chance," I said. "In a second they're going to be blown past each other, and who
knows what will happen next?"
Mr. Powell leaned down to my drawing. "In that case, smiles are appropriate."
But none of the petrel smiles could touch Lucas's smile or my mother's smile when I got home that
afternoon, or mine, probably, when I heard that the Kingston doctor thought,
really
thought, that
Lucas's eyes might heal, and he was going to send him to a specialist down to Middletown—
"He was going to send him to some guy in New York City, but I set him straight on that," said my
father.
—and meanwhile, the doctor had some exercises he wanted Lucas to
really
work at for his arms
and upper chest and Lucas said, "I may need your help, little brother," and I said, "Sure." He reached
out his hand and I took it and we shook, and his hand felt ... strong.
***
it, it seems to me that they're probably circling, like two wrestlers. And when the waves and the
winds smack at them, they spread their wings and skitter around and then they try to come back
together again. That's what I think they're doing.
On Monday, James Russell was counting my squat thrusts for the Presidential Physical Fitness chart
when he said, "I hear you've been drawing birds at the library."
"Yup," I said, kind of breathless. It's hard to talk when you're doing as many squat thrusts as you
can in four minutes.
"Audubon's stuff," he said.
Nodded.
"You know, some of the plates are missing from that book," he said.
Nodded again. I was at sixty-three and still had about a minute to go, which, if you ask me, isn't
bad.
"I know where one of them is," he said.
Nodded again. Principal Peattie's office, I figured. I'd seen the Brown Pelican too.
"Puffins," he said.
I stopped the squat thrusts.
"My father bought it from the town."
I'm not lying: I added another forty-two squat thrusts before Coach Reed called time.
If I had James Russell's father's job, I wouldn't talk about it. Probably James felt the same way,
because he never talked about it. And when he told me what it was, he said that he was only telling
me because I'd probably figure it out the minute I walked into his house. But I couldn't talk about it to
anyone, he said. Promise?
I said I'd keep his secret, and probably you shouldn't tell anyone either.
James Russell's father is the First Flutist of the New York Philharmonic.
Do you know what my father would say if he knew that?
And James was right: you could tell as soon as you walked into the house. I mean, how many
houses have flute music playing on the stereo in the middle of the afternoon, and loud? And how many
houses have books about flutes right out on the coffee table that anyone could see right off, and sheet
music everywhere, and this huge piano and next to it a music stand with a silver flute across it?
I'm not lying, you could tell pretty quick.
What you might not be able to tell pretty quick when you meet Mr. Russell is that he is the First
Flutist of the New York Philharmonic, because Mr. Russell is bigger than Joe Pepitone and Mickey
Mantle put together. And I don't mean he's fat, because he isn't. He's just huge. He stands over you like
this little mountain, and he's got this dark beardy shrubbery all around the peak, and arms like pines,
and legs like oaks, and feet the size of small lakes. His hands look too big to hold anything but a
boulder—one in each.
And I said, "You play the flute?"
And he said, "Sweetly and beautifully."
Then he showed me.
He was right. Sweetly and beautifully.
He started with Mozart, who isn't as bad as you might think. Then some Brahms, who is as bad as
you might think. Then some Joplin, who's good, and then some Aaron Copland, who Mr. Russell said
was his favorite composer even though he didn't write anything for a flutist. And then he did some
Beatles stuff. It didn't sound exactly like the Beatles, but it wasn't bad. And when he finished, I asked
him to play the Copland again, and he smiled and did.
Copland knew how to say what he wanted to say. Unlike certain poets I could mention.
Then James took me upstairs. He had a house big enough to fit fourteen of The Dumps into. Maybe
more. His own room was the size of our downstairs, and he had his own bathroom and tile with the
grout still around it. And on the third floor, they had this room that ran the whole length of the house,
about as big as left field in Yankee Stadium, which I have walked on, by the way. And right where the
stairs came up to this room, the Large-Billed Puffins were hanging.
Okay, this is going to sound dumb. You know how sometimes when you haven't seen someone in a
long time, and suddenly there he is, and you look at him, and for a second it's almost like he's a
stranger and then that second is gone and it's all the same? Sort of like when Holling Hoodhood came
by and dropped Joe Pepitone's jacket off last summer? That's what happened, except that at the same
moment, Mr. Russell was downstairs playing that Copland piece again. And there were those fat
puffins, looking like chumps, bumbling around like they had no idea how to get on in the world,
looking dumb and stupid, and so beautiful that I wanted to ... nothing.
"They're kind of dumb-looking," said James Russell.
"Yeah," I said.
I couldn't take my eyes off them.
And still, the music played sweetly.
"They don't even look like they can swim," he said.
The music played beautifully.
Tuesday after school, I went home to do all the homework that I wouldn't be able to do that night
because Mrs. Daugherty had called and wondered if I could come over on such short notice, and so
now I had the Daugherty kids to read to and we were up to this place where this spider is going to die
and a pig has to get her egg sac. I know—it sounds dumb. But it wasn't bad. So I had to get all my
homework done before I went, especially for Mrs. Verne, who had already dropped two people from
Advanced Algebra because they didn't get all their assignments in on time, and I wasn't going to be