Authors: Gary D. Schmidt
poetry anthologies?
I'm not lying, the whole class loved us. You can only take so much poetry, especially when it's
poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who is still going to get it right in the face someday.
When Coach Reed found out about the Broadway play, he smiled and said he wasn't surprised.
Maybe he's turning into a good guy too.
When Mr. Ferris found out about the Broadway play, Clarence didn't stop rocking during the whole
lab (which involved sulfur, which is something you really don't want to smell like but which we all
did by the time we were finished but Mr. Ferris promised we wouldn't smell like that by the time the
curtain came up).
And when Mr. Powell heard about the Broadway play, he went over to
Birds of America
and
turned pages until he came to the one he wanted. "Look at this one," he said. We did. "The Great
Esquimaux Curlew. An actor if ever there was one."
He was right. The Great Esquimaux Curlew looked like he was just coming onstage, his body
leaning forward, his neck stretched out, his bill stuck up in the air like he was about to sing or
something. The composition was stable, with his body right in the center against a mound of grasses
—also in the center. And the only thing that upset all this was his bill, which you looked at first
because it seemed to stick out above the scenery—and it was upside down.
"Am I supposed to look like that when I come on stage?" said Lil.
I'm no chump. I didn't say a thing.
On Tuesday and Friday evenings and Saturday afternoons for the rest of May, Mr. Spicer drove Lil
and me down into New York City and dropped us off at the Rose Theater, where Mr. Gregory was
always standing outside waiting for us and making it look like we were late. On the drive down, Lil
went over her Helen Burns lines again and again. And again and again.
"'Miss Scatcherd is hasty—you must take care not to offend her.' Do you think it's
Scatcherd,
or
Scatcherd
?" she said.
"Scatcherd," I said.
She tried it out.
She tried it out again.
"Scatcherd," she said.
That's how it was pretty much the whole way down to New York City. And just so everyone knows
the stats:
Number of times I repeated Lil's lines with her: Something over six thousand.
Number of times I had to correct her: Something over sixty thousand.
Number of times we drove down to New York City before I had all her lines down myself: Six.
Number of times she asked me to say my lines: Zero. (Which is probably because she didn't
want me shrieking like an insane woman who has been locked in an attic for a great many
years while we were locked inside a car.)
And I'm not lying, I was a great shrieker. I'd been practicing too. If you're going to get this right, you
can't just shriek. Anyone can do that. To shriek like an insane woman who has been locked in an attic
for a great many years, you have to practice.
The first time I practiced was in our bathroom, and when Lucas heard it, he tried to roll his
wheelchair right up the stairs because he figured there was a bloody, bloody murderer at my throat.
He got three steps up before I heard him.
After that, he said I had to practice outside.
So I went to the green field on the way to Mrs. Windermere's house and hoped that no one was
around.
Here's how you practice shrieking like an insane woman who has been locked in an attic for a great
many years:
You stand in the middle of the field.
You look around to be sure that no one is going to hear you.
You breathe in a couple of times to get as much air into your chest as you can.
You stretch your neck up like the Great Esquimaux Curlew.
You imagine that it's Game Seven of the World Series and it's the bottom of the ninth and Joe
Pepitone is rounding third base and the throw is coming in and the catcher has his glove up waiting
for the ball and Joe Pepitone is probably going to be out and the game will be over and the Yankees
will lose.
Then you let out your shriek, because that's how everyone in Yankee Stadium would be shrieking
right then.
That's how you practice shrieking like an insane woman who has been locked in an attic for a great
many years. And you keep doing it over and over again until all the birds in Marysville have flown
away.
I'm not lying, I got good at this. If you had heard me shrieking, you would have thought someone
was being murdered too. It was so eerie, you might have thought that someone who had been
murdered was shrieking. You might even have thought that someone who had been murdered had
come back and was murdering the murderer, who was shrieking. That's how good I was.
When the cast of
Jane Eyre
heard me shriek from offstage for the very first time, they all looked
around to see who had done it, and then they started clapping.
That's pretty good.
Lil said I was a natural. It hardly sounded like I was acting at all. And how was I doing on the
Transcontinental Railroad in the United States?
Mr. Gregory said I might have to tone it down a bit since we didn't want people in the first two
rows fainting away.
Mrs. Windermere said I might have to tone it down a bit since we didn't want people in the first
two rows wetting their pants.
It got so that I liked the rehearsals, even though it meant that I couldn't be drawing the Great
Esquimaux Curlew with Mr. Powell on Saturday afternoons. But I loved watching Lil on stage. I
loved listening to her lines, which, as you might remember, I already knew by heart. (It was, for the
record, Scatcherd, and I didn't say anything, even after Mr. Gregory had to correct her for the third
time.) And I loved when Lil looked out into the seats to see if I was watching her—which I always
was.
In May, Lucas was hired for three stupid jobs.
You can imagine how that felt.
And you can imagine how it felt when he got fired from all three stupid jobs.
The first time was from the Gulf station, and it wasn't his fault. Things started out all right, but then
there were three stupid days of stupid rain in a row. When people drove up to get gas, Lucas would
wheel out from the garage as quick as he could. He'd come around to the door to find out how much
gas they wanted, then wheel around to the pump and pump it, then come back around to the door to get
the money, then wheel back to the garage to get their change and their Genuine Crystal Goblet, since
Gulf was running a special. By then he was pretty drippy. So when Lucas's boss was driving home
and he saw one of his old customers at the Sunoco station instead, he stopped and asked him how
come he wasn't at his Gulf station, and the jerk told him he couldn't stand to have a guy with no legs
wheel himself out in the rain all that time just to pump gas and so he'd decided to go to the Sunoco
station. Lucas got fired the next morning. "We can't be losing our most dependable customers," his
stupid exboss said.
The second time was from the A&P, when Lucas had to hold on to the edge of a display to shove
some oranges high up and the stupid edge broke off in his hand. You can imagine what happened to all
the oranges. His boss fired him right there, with all the oranges around him. He wouldn't even give
him his salary, because who was going to pay for all those stupid ruined oranges?
The third time was from the Bank of the Catskills, where Lucas was a teller for a whole two and a
half hours on a Saturday morning until Mrs. Roethke came in and asked him to deposit three checks
and to cash the fourth and he cashed the wrong one—she said. She complained loudly enough that the
manager came over and Lucas explained that he had cashed the one she had asked him to cash and he
was already fixing the problem and Mrs. Roethke said she wasn't going to be lied about by the likes
of him and she had heard what soldiers did in Vietnam and he was probably so drug-addled that he
couldn't take proper directions from anyone and how was someone like that to be trusted in a bank
and it wasn't a bank's business to take up hard-luck cases like him, at least, not a bank that she would
care to put
her
money into.
Lucas didn't even wait. He wheeled himself out of the bank. Christopher was supposed to meet him
after work to get him down the stairs out front, but Lucas decided he would take them himself.
At the bottom, he wouldn't let anyone help him back into the chair. He told Christopher it took him
half an hour. It was probably longer than that.
I guess he wasn't actually fired from that job. I guess he quit. Sort of.
When I got back from New York City that night, Lucas was alone in the living room watching some
John Wayne Western where John Wayne was riding horses and climbing over fences and walking that
way he walks. The television was the only thing on in the room. At the first commercial, I asked him
how things were going.
Swell, he said.
I asked him how work was.
He told me.
We left all the lights off so that I couldn't see that he was crying.
If Mrs. Roethke had been there, I would have punched her right in the face.
The play was going to open at the Rose Theater in New York City on the last Friday of May.
That week, you would have thought that Lil was blasting off to the moon, she was that nervous. She
had stomachaches almost every day. She missed two of her Advanced Algebra assignments, which
had never happened before even once. She forgot to read the first act of
Our Town,
which wasn't
missing much, and I'm not lying. And she never even asked how I was doing on the Transcontinental
Railroad in the United States, which, if she would have asked, I would have told her was going to get
the Golden Spike Award, which she wouldn't have understood because, as you might remember,
there's only one of us working on this report.
During classes, she mostly held her stomach and chewed on her pencils.
She bit all the erasers off and ate them.
Then she gnawed on all the metal tips until they came off.
Then she started in on the wood.
There were yellow splinters all around her desk.
Mrs. Verne said it was perfectly normal for an actress. When she played the tragic Jocasta, she had
gone through three fountain pens.
On that last Friday, Mr. Ferris set Clarence rocking on the lab table as soon as class started. "This
is, if I am not mistaken, the day," he said.
Lil turned red, then white, then red again.
"Lil Spicer," said Mr. Ferris, "what little I know of biology suggests that neither the gum of the
eraser, nor the tin of the metal top, nor the wood of the pencil shaft, nor the lead of the interior will do
much for your digestive system."
"I can't help it," she said.
Mr. Ferris went over to her desk. He took the pencil from her hand and examined it—and since
there wasn't much left, it wasn't a long examination. "Lil Spicer," he said, still looking at the pencil,
"perhaps during today's experiment, you should allow Doug Swieteck to handle the more toxic
chemicals."
Lil nodded.
Mr. Ferris went back to the front. "A few days ago," he said, "
Apollo Ten
descended to eight-point-
four miles above the lunar surface to practice a moon landing. The astronauts described the Earth as a
tiny blue, brown, and white basketball suspended in the void of outer space. They said that the moon
is pitted with holes, and that it is illumined clearly by Earth's reflected light. They said that some of
the craters seemed to glow softly." He threw the pencil stub in the garbage can. "Lil Spicer," he said,
"you and Doug Swieteck are doing something extraordinary in an extraordinary time. You are the first
Washington Irving Junior High School students to perform in a Broadway play. As far as I know, you
are the first citizens from Marysville to perform in a Broadway play. There is no need to be nervous."
He leaned forward over the lab table. "The Apollo missions have already descended close to the
moon's surface. And you two have already succeeded."
If you could have seen Lil's smile. If you could have seen her relax into her chair.
And if you could have seen my mother, in hat and white gloves, when she got into the Spicers' car
to go see a Broadway play that her son was in. If you could have seen her.
We recited Lil's lines together all the way down into New York City that afternoon.
And even though she was so nervous that she had a stomachache again, she got every line right.
Except
Scatch
erd.
We stopped at a White Castle on the way down and ate about two dozen hamburgers. Lil gave me
her onions, and I scraped my pickles onto her hamburger. But my mother and Mr. and Mrs. Spicer
couldn't eat at all. They were too nervous, they said. And even Lil ate only one.
At the theater, Mr. Gregory was, of course, waiting for us. He looked pretty nervous too. He