The two policemen did not look very sure.
They looked at me. Yes, I knew Spicer's Deli—I worked there. No, I didn't hear my brother go out last night. No, I'd never seen him near Spicer's Deli. Nope, I was sure. Never. Just ask him.
The policemen said they would do that. Did I have any idea where he was right now?
I didn't. My mother didn't either.
They looked at each other. They said they'd ride around some and if it was okay with my mother, they'd ask my brother the same questions—if they happened to see him, that is.
My mother said that would be fine.
When they left, she leaned against the sink. Her breathing was quick and short.
"Douggie," she said, "you don't think..."
"He was here all night," I said.
She looked at me.
"He was," I said.
And in case you think I'm lying because of the lie I told about not seeing him at the deli—which, by the way, isn't that big a lie and one you probably would tell too—I know that he didn't leave last night because I was awake for most of it. I was awake with a flashlight and drawing the tern's feathers again, the way they were supposed to be. On a new page, I drew in the body lines lightly, and then I erased them as I went. The feathers came out pretty good. You could feel them moving through the air. They were moving the way no stupid Large-Billed Puffin's feathers could ever move. And I'm not lying.
So my brother didn't rob Spicer's Deli, no matter who says he did.
This didn't matter a whole lot to my father, who came home really late with Ernie Eco after someone had told him that he'd seen the police talking to his son. I heard the door slam open and his feet on the stairs— taking them two at a time—and him calling for my brother, who probably wished he hadn't come home that night, who sat up in bed and said, "I didn't—" before my father was on him.
I guess I should have been happy about what happened to him. Like he was when it happened to me. But I saw my brother's face when my father flipped on the light switch.
The terrified eye.
"Look at the way Audubon has arranged the two puffins," said Mr. Powell.
"You mean the two stupid puffins," I said.
"All right, the two stupid puffins. Remember the tern? Remember how everything was pointing down? The horizon lined the very bottom of the painting, but your eye hardly saw it. What's different about the setting of this painting?"
"You mean except for the two stupid fat birds?"
"Yes, Mr. Swieteck, except for the two stupid fat birds."
I leaned over the glass case. "The horizon is halfway up the painting," I said.
"That's right. If you drew lines out from these rocks, do you see how they would go across the page, just like the horizon?"
"So everything is going side to side instead of up and down."
"Good. That's thinking like an artist. Now, put one finger at the tail feathers of the bird on the left. Now another on the far foot of the one on the right. I'll put my finger at the top of the head of the left bird, and we've made..."
"A perfect triangle."
"Right. And a triangle whose longest side is at the bottom. So what is different about the feel of this painting?"
"Except for the—"
"Yes, except for the two stupid fat birds."
I shrugged. "Not much is moving."
"Not just that. What else? Think like an artist. Think of everything in the painting, not just the birds."
And then I saw it. The long horizons. The flat lines. The triangle resting on them. So solid. I traced the lines with my fingers.
"Exactly right," said Mr. Powell. "Do you see how if he had used the horizon lines and the triangle for the Arctic Tern, it would have been wrong? It would have warred against the downward motion. But for these birds, it's perfect. The artist gives them a stable horizon that you can't help but see."
I spread the paper across the glass case.
"Draw the horizon line at midpoint—lightly," he said. "Then we'll add in the lines for the two puffins and see where they intersect."
I suppose it was only a matter of time before Lil found me in the library. I didn't hear her come up the stairs. I was trying to trace the triangle and figure out how Audubon made you see a triangle without drawing a triangle and even while sticking things outside it—like the stupid foot of the stupid puffin on the right who was trying not to drown. This isn't easy work, so I was concentrating pretty hard. And that explains what happened.
"Your tongue sticks out of your mouth when you draw," Lil said.
I looked up. "It does not."
"It does too. Your tongue sticks out of your mouth when you draw. That's why you drool." She pointed to the paper. "There," she said.
"It isn't drool," I said.
"Maybe it's because of that funny thing you do with your Adam's apple."
"Is there something you want?"
"Mr. Powell said that you were up here drawing and that you were pretty good. So I came up to see if you were." She looked at my Large-Billed Puffin. "Mrs. Merriam says you're a hoodlum in training."
"What does Mrs. Merriam know?"
"What are these lines here for?"
"Nothing. Just something a hoodlum in training would draw."
She put her hands on her hips. "You don't have to be angry with me. I'm not the one who said it."
"You're the one who told me."
She sniffed. "Maybe she's right and I was wrong. I told my father that whoever robbed the deli, it wasn't you, even when he thought it might be. But maybe you did. Maybe you are a hoodlum in training. Maybe you're just a drooling hoodlum." She turned and went back down the stairs. Her hair waved back and forth with each step down.
When her head was level with the floor, I said, "Lil."
She stopped, looked up at me.
"Sorry about my jerk brother and the daisies."
She looked at me a little more.
"Mr. Powell was right," she said. Then she was gone.
I went back to the drawing. I erased the three triangle lines I had used to guide where I put the birds.
And then I looked up and over at the stairs.
Mr. Powell thought I was pretty good.
And Lil thought I was pretty good too.
I tried to remember the last time anyone told me I was pretty good at anything.
You know how that feels?
I went back to the drawing. I kept my tongue in my mouth. No drooling.
The police came back to The Dump twice more. The first time, they came with Mr. Spicer so that he could identify my brother, which he could. My brother swore up and down that he didn't break into anyone's store. But Mr. Spicer didn't listen—mostly because he was looking at me. He didn't look happy.
The second time the police came back, my father was there, and he swore up and down, until one of them took a step closer so that he was practically standing on top of my father's feet and said that if my father wanted to say one more thing—just one more thing—he could say it in a cell. I could see my father's quick hands twitching.
The whole time the police were there, I sat with my mother on the couch.
The police only came those two other times, and since they couldn't prove a thing, they stopped coming. Their last line was to my brother: "We'll be keeping an eye out." You could tell they thought he was as guilty as sin, which usually wasn't a bad way to describe my brother. But not for this.
So he wasn't arrested. Still, word got around anyway. That's how it is in a small town like stupid Marysville. All you have to do is spit on the sidewalk, and the whole town figures you're the kind of guy who might commit homicide, and everyone in your family is likely just the same. You could see it in the eyes of the mailman, the eyes of the guy who came to collect our rent, the eyes of Mrs. Merriam—who was sure now that I was no longer in training—even the eyes of the priest at St. Ignatius, who asked my mother her name when we went for our first Mass in stupid Marysville and then righ
t away looked down at me like I was the one with the twisted criminal mind and not my brother.
You could see it in the eyes of Mr. Spicer, who didn't say much when I came in that Saturday for the deliveries but who looked at me in a new way and who told me that I could let Mrs. Windermere put her bill on account. He would ride up some other time to collect the money.
You could see it in the eyes of Mrs. Mason, who didn't invite me in for a chocolate doughnut, even though she had ordered two dozen. And Mr. Loeffler, who didn't have any chores for me, thanks anyway, not today. And Mrs. Daugherty, who kept her kids back from the front door like I was contagious and who didn't even answer the door. Her husband came out instead. Mr. Daugherty. Who happened to be a policeman.
You could probably have seen it in the eyes of Mrs. Windermere, except she never stopped typing while I put her groceries away.
I hate this stupid town.
You could see it in the eyes of the secretary in the Main Office of Washington Irving Junior High School that first day too, and in the eyes of Principal Peattie, who came out of his office so that he could identify me better if he ever had to pick me out of a lineup, and in the eyes of the guidance counselor who worked on my schedule, handed it to me, hesitated, and then decided to walk me to my homeroom because, she said, I didn't know my way around the school yet—but probably because she thought I was going to rob some lockers while I was passing by.
And you could see it in the eyes of my teachers: Mr. Barber in geography, who handed out brand-new textbooks while holding a huge cup of coffee and who made us all swear to keep our new textbooks neat and clean like they were Joe Pepitone's cap or something and who paused a couple of seconds before he handed the book to me because he probably thought I was going to throw it in the gutter like it was a piece of junk.
Mr. McElroy in world history, who announced that we were going to start by studying the barbarian hordes of western Russia, and then looked at me.
Miss Cowper in English, whose first words were "This fall, we will be reading Jane Eyre by Miss Charlotte Brontë, and I am not naive enough to believe that you will all like it." Then she looked right at me. "The original novel is over four hundred pages long—no groaning, please, you are not cattle being led to slaughter—but you will be reading an abridgment. Even this is a hundred and sixty pages long, but that should not discourage you. Those of you with character should see this as a challenge. Those of you not so favored..." And she looked at me again and didn't finish the sentence.
One hundred and sixty pages of Jane Eyre.
Terrific.
You could see it in the eyes of Mrs. Verne in math, who wouldn't call on me even when I raised my hand—even when I raised my hand and the only other hand up was Lil's and Mrs. Verne had already called on her twice. When Lil got called on again, she looked back at me and then turned to Mrs. Verne and said, "I think he knows," and Mrs. Verne's face got all pinchy and she said, "I will choose who is to speak in this classroom, Miss Spicer," and she went on so that no one answered the question.
x—17, by the way.
You could see it in the eyes of Coach Reed in PE, who lined us up in platoons—he was just back from being a sergeant in Vietnam, and he still had his army crewcut—and told me in his sergeant's voice that I'd better not try to pull any funny business in his class, no sirree, buster, just before he toured us through the locker room, taking us past his office that was Forbidden to All Students, and then told us to shoot baskets the rest of the period.
So that's how it went until I got to Mr. Ferris in physical science. I'm not lying, he was wearing a white lab coat and—I couldn't believe it—dark glasses on a chain looped around his neck. Don't people know how stupid that looks? Worse than a Large-Billed Puffin. His hair was cut like he had just gotten back from Vietnam too, and up on the lab table in front of the class, he had a toy horse that he set rocking back and forth while he talked with us. "His name," Mr. Ferris said, "is Clarence."
I don't know why, so don't ask.
Mr. Ferris told us how we were going to have lab partners and do experiments and create vacuums and aspirin tablets and investigate the concept of mass versus weight and how we'd have to measure with the metric system and we didn't need to fuss about it because it was for our own good and how the first thing we needed to become familiar with was the periodic table starting with H for ... does anyone know?
"Hydrogen," said Lil, who turned out to be in every one of my classes, except for PE, of course. Did I tell you that she has green eyes?
"Right!" said Mr. Ferris, and he started Clarence rocking happily.
Terrific again.
Physical science was the last period of the day, and when the bell rang, everyone gathered up their books—and I'm not lying, I was really careful with Geography: The Story of the World—and was heading to their lockers when Mr. Ferris asked me to wait for a moment. You think there was a single eye that wasn't looking at me when they left? Even Lil's? They probably figured that Mr. Ferris was going to tell me that I'd better not try to pull any funny business in his class, no sirree, buster.
I thought if I had to hear that again, I'd start plummeting into the sea.
"Doug Swieteck," Mr. Ferris said, "do you know the basic principle of physical science?"
A trick?
"No," I said, sort of slow.
He rocked Clarence. "The basic principle of physical science is this: two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Do you understand that?"
"I think so," I said.
"Do you understand what the principle means?"
I shook my head.
"It means, Doug Swieteck, that in this class, you are not your brother."
Mr. Ferris started Clarence rocking again, and I felt the horizon settle.
The next Saturday, after a week of being my brother in everyone's class except Mr. Ferris's, I found Lil waiting by the Large-Billed Puffins when I came back from the deliveries. "You can't really say that they're beautiful, can you?" she said.
"They're not."
She looked down at the birds. "I didn't mean to embarrass you in math. Everyone knows that Mrs. Verne is mean. But I didn't think the other teachers would—"
"They're jerks. It doesn't matter."
She reached out her hand. "You're right. It doesn't matter. Let's shake on that."
You know, maybe the puffin in the water isn't bobbing around like a chump just because he's trying not to drown. Maybe he's swimming, but he has no idea what to do because there's this other puffin standing beside him, and maybe she's a girl puffin—and no matter how dumb Large-Billed Puffins look to us, they probably look pretty good to each other. And so the puffin in the water is looking at the girl puffin standing next to him, and he doesn't know what to do, because suddenly he's thinking, I should tell her that she has the most beautiful green eyes in the world, but he doesn't know how to say it, so he just bobs in the water like the chump he is.
"You're supposed to shake my hand," said Lil.
That is what I did.
After she left, I worked on my drawing of the Large-Billed Puffins. And even though their round eyes are looking away and out of the picture, I decided to change one small thing, so when Mr. Powell came up to see how I was doing, he looked at them, then at me, and then back at them. "It seems that they like each other," he said.
"Maybe," I said.
A week later, while we were taking another try at the puffins—you can't believe how hard it is to make a puffin not look like a chump—I told Mr. Powell about Miss Cowper and Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre. Mr. Powell wanted me to work on the bills and the feet, since they were at crux points in the composition, he said. (Artists know what this means.) But it was hard to make these look right, mostly because they look so stupid.
"Jane Eyre," he said. "Jane Eyre," he said again.
"The original novel is four hundred pages long," I said.
He nodded.
"We have to read an abridgment, and it's
still a hundred and sixty pages long."
Nodding again.
"I'm not reading it," I said.
"Mr. Swieteck, if it's an assignment—"
"I'm not reading it."
I went back to getting the feet right, and the stupid bills.
"I can help," Mr. Powell said after a bit.
"I can't get this one foot that's underwater right."
"With Jane Eyre," he said.
I looked up at him. "I don't need any help with Jane Eyre because I'm not going to read it."
We didn't talk about Jane Eyre anymore. I went back to the puffins.
And I know you think you know why I don't want to read Jane Eyre, but it's not really any of your business, is it?
When I got home from the library, my mother was cooking everything in sight. Here are the stats for what was on the kitchen table and counter:
Three loaves of fresh-baked white bread.
One angel food cake with chocolate icing dripping down its sides—Lucas's favorite.
Probably two hundred carrots she'd sliced.
Probably three hundred green beans she'd cut.
Probably four hundred yellow beans she'd cut.
Three dozen ears of corn shucked.
Thirty-five huge patties of hamburger already cooked and wrapped in tinfoil.
One bowl of Italian macaroni salad.
Two bowls of German potato salad.
One bowl of green grapes.
Two platters of tomatoes, sliced.
One platter of onions, sliced.
"Mom," I said.
Everything was piled almost on top of everything else. Bacon was frying on the stove. She was cutting up canned peaches and pears to go in three chilled Jell-O salads.
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