Orbiting Jupiter

by Gary D. Schmidt

  At least in the classes he had with me, the teachers were careful around him. Not like they were afraid of him, exactly—they didn’t hear what he said in his sleep at night, how he’d holler, “Let go, you . . .” and then words I didn’t even know. Or how he’d start to cry and then he’d only say a name, and he’d say it like it was someone he’d do anything, anything to find. Maybe if the teachers had heard Joseph late at night, they might have been a little afraid of him.

  But they were still careful. I guess it was enough that once, Joseph tried to kill his teacher.That would make a teacher wish Joseph wasn’t at Eastham Middle.

  I’m really sure that’s what Mrs. Halloway thought whenever she looked at him.

  Joseph had a picture he carried around. Sometimes he took it out from his wallet and looked at it. He held it so no one else could see it. Not even me. During Language Arts on the second day he was at school, Mrs. Halloway told Joseph he wasn’t paying attention, and she walked down to the end of the row and held out her hand and said he should give her whatever he was holding. Joseph didn’t. He put the picture in his wallet and he put his wallet in his back pocket and then he stared down at his desk. Mrs. Halloway didn’t wait very long before she pulled her hand away. She closed her eyes halfway, walked back up to her desk, wrote something in her notebook, put the notebook in her top drawer, and then started in again on Robert Frost and stone walls and stuff.

  She never turned her half-closed eyes toward the end of the second row again.

  And there was Mr. Canton.

  A week after we got to school late, Mr. Canton found me by my locker. I was trying to open it but my hands were so cold, my fingers weren’t exactly doing what they needed to be doing. That’s what happens when you take your gloves off so you can hit the bell of old First Congregational.

  “Mr. Haskell said you weren’t on the bus again today,” said Mr. Canton.

  “I walked,” I said.

  “With Joseph Brook?” said Mr. Canton.

  Nodded.

  “What’s the last number?” he said.

  “Eight.”

  Mr. Canton twirled the combination to eight and opened my locker.

  “Listen, Jackson,” he said. “I respect your parents. I really do. They’re trying to make a difference in the world, bringing kids like Joseph Brook into a normal family. But kids like Joseph Brook aren’t always normal, see? They act the way they do because their brains work differently. They don’t think like you and I think. So they can do things . . .”

  “He’s not like that,” I said.

  “He isn’t? Jackson, when’s the last time you had a talk with a vice principal? When’s the last time you got a tardy?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Last Monday,” said Mr. Canton. “And who were you with?”

  I didn’t say anything again.

  “Exactly,” said Mr. Canton.

  Mr. Canton wore brown shoes that looked like someone shined them ten minutes ago. There wasn’t a scuff on them. Not even at the toes. How would you do that, wear shoes without a mark on them?

  “I’m telling you to be careful around Joseph Brook,” said Mr. Canton. “You don’t know anything about him.”

  He walked away with his unscuffed shoes.

  “He’s not like that,” I whispered.

  That afternoon, I met Joseph at the end of the buses, where he waited for me. Mr. Canton stood near the front doors, watching us. He nodded at me like we were sharing a secret.

  Joseph walked home behind me, looking like he didn’t want to share a secret with anybody.

  So a little after we passed old First Congregational, I stopped and turned. “You okay?” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “You okay?”

  “Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “Listen, what’s your daughter’s name?”

  He looked at me. His black eyes. “It’s not any of your—”

  “I’m just asking.”

  He waited a long moment. And it sure was cold. Maybe fifteen degrees, maybe fourteen, maybe not even that. The bus drove by and John Wall pounded on the window to let me know what a jerk I was.

  “Jupiter,” Joseph said.

  I guess I looked sort of surprised.

  “It was our favorite planet,” he said.

  “Our favorite?”

  Joseph nodded up the road.

  “You mean, yours and . . .”

  He nodded up the road again.

  Joseph followed me the rest of the way home. My mother took him to counseling a little while later, and when they drove off, his eyes were closed.

  SUPPER THAT NIGHT was warm and dark—sometimes my mother likes to eat with only the candles lit, so we sat in the flickering yellow. Later, though, outside, it was cold and bright. No moon, but the stars were so lit up, we didn’t even need to turn the porch light on to stack splits for the kitchen wood stove. It only took a couple of trips for the three of us, and after we finished, I stopped in the yard and looked at the sky and said to my father, “Do you know which one is Jupiter?”

  “Jupiter?” he said. He looked at the stars. “Jack, I have no idea.” He pointed. “Maybe that big one?”

  “Over there,” said Joseph.

  He was pointing up above the mountains.

  “How do you know?” said my father.

  “I always know where Jupiter is,” he said.

  My father looked at him. That same sad look in his eyes.

  Joseph went inside.

  If only Mr. Canton had been there. If only he had. Then he would have known that Joseph wasn’t like that.

  two

  NOT all the teachers believed Joseph shouldn’t be at Eastham Middle School.

  Coach Swieteck thought he was terrific. When we got to the apparatus unit in the middle of November, Coach found out Joseph could do stuff better than any of the other eighth graders. Better than any eighth grader he had ever coached before.

  Do a flip on the trampoline? Joseph could throw a double.

  Do a handstand on the parallel bars? Not a problem. And Joseph could balance on one hand for longer than you’d think.

  Vault over the pommel horse? Easy. Joseph added a twist. Really. A twist.

  Climb the rope to the ceiling in under sixty seconds? Joseph climbed it in thirty-eight, without using his legs. Which was the only thing Coach could show him how to do himself, because Coach had lost both his legs to a land mine in Vietnam a long time ago.

  The first time they raced to the ceiling and back, Coach Swieteck won by four seconds.

  The second time, Joseph beat him by three.

  It was Joseph’s third smile. Sort of.

  “Don’t crow,” said Coach. “All you did was beat a legless old man by two seconds.”

  “Three,” said Joseph, still smiling. Sort of.

  “Three,” said Coach. Then he looked at the rest of the eighth graders, and all the seventh and sixth graders, too. “And that legless old man can still beat the rest of you by a whole lot more than three seconds, so let’s get to work.”

  And just so you know, I could do the rope in under two minutes—which hardly any other sixth grader could do—and so what if I had to use my legs. You’re allowed.

  MR. D’ULNEY WAS also glad Joseph was at Eastham Middle.

  Mr. D’Ulney taught sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade math. He loved numbers and what they did and even how they looked, and sometimes he couldn’t figure out why the rest of us didn’t love them as much as he did. But I mean, who could love an equation—except for Mr. D’Ulney?

  On a day that Mr. D’Ulney had bus monitor duty, I met Joseph at the end of the bus line and had to wait. Mr. D’Ulney was asking Joseph questions.

  Geometry questions.

  Really. Geometry questions.

  Joseph knew them all. I think. Or he could figure them out.

  The next day, during fifth-period Office Duty, Mr. D’Ulney saw Joseph and me sitting on the Office Duty bench,
doing nothing—which is what most Office Duty periods were. So he scribbled a bunch of stuff on a pad and handed it to Joseph.

  “Can you prove this theorem?” he said.

  Joseph took the pad. He worked on it the whole period. When the bell rang, he took the pad to Mr. D’Ulney’s classroom.

  After that, Mr. D’Ulney brought a new theorem to fifth-period Office Duty every day. He would hand it to Joseph and Joseph would get to work.

  Once Mr. Canton saw Mr. D’Ulney handing over the new theorem, and he said, “These boys are on Office Duty.”

  Mr. D’Ulney turned to face him. “Of course,” he said. “It’s so much more important for them to run around the school dropping off messages than be challenged to learn what great mathematicians have wrestled with for a thousand years.”

  “You’d think they would have solved those problems by now,” said Mr. Canton.

  “It’s not the solution, Mr. Canton. It’s the path to the solution that’s fascinating,” said Mr. D’Ulney.

  He left and Mr. Canton went into his office. He came out with fifteen slips of paper, folded over. “You need to deliver these,” he said. “When you get back, I want to clean up the attendance files.”

  After that day, we were pretty busy during fifth-period Office Duty.

  So Joseph began to eat lunch in Mr. D’Ulney’s room.

  Mr. D’Ulney said that maybe, by the end of the school year, he’d throw a little trig at him.

  Those were the two teachers who liked Joseph.

  JOSEPH NEVER TALKED about his family, but I met his father. Joseph wasn’t home because he was at counseling. We were getting ready to milk, and I was cleaning the stalls in the Big Barn when suddenly he was right next to me, standing by the manure traps. As soon as I saw him, I knew he was Joseph’s father. Same black eyes.

  “Joe around?” he said.

  The cows looked over and their eyes got big and their tails swished and they started to hold their heads up and moo, which means they’re pretty upset. Cows don’t like strangers near the tie-up. They especially don’t like strangers near the tie-up when they’re about to be milked. Unless they’re the right kind of strangers—like Joseph was.

  “No,” I said.

  “They got you doing chores, huh?” he said. “What are you here for?”

  Dahlia stamped her hind foot. When Dahlia stamps her hind foot, you know she’s really upset.

  “I live here,” I said.

  “I figured you live here. I mean before.”

  The milk pails clanged down behind me. It was my father. He was rubbing Dahlia’s rump because she loves it almost as much as Rosie does. It always calms her right down.

  “You Joseph’s father?” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  My father nodded. “Jack,” he said, “you come back over here and spread some more shavings for Rosie, would you?” Then he said to Joseph’s father, “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  “I came to see what kind of a hellhole they put my son into.”

  “Like I said, you’re not supposed to be here.”

  “You have him shoveling manure, too? Is that what you get out of this? A bunch of kids who have to shovel manure for you?”

  My father took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “We’re taking good care of Joseph,” he said, “and now it’s time for you to go.”

  “You know, I can—”

  “I’m sure you can, but like I said, now it’s time for you to go.”

  My father put his glasses back on and they looked at each other for a while. Then Joseph’s father said a few words I’m not allowed to say, and he looked at me. When my father took a step toward him, he said a few more words I’m not allowed to say, and left.

  Dahlia was watching the whole time. If Joseph’s father had come within range, you know he’d have limped out of that barn.

  Like I said, you can tell a whole lot about someone from the way cows are around him.

  BY THE END of November, it looked like my father was right: we were in for a wicked winter. It snowed hard on Thanksgiving Day, maybe nine or ten inches, and then another couple of inches over the weekend. And it was cold. Fifteen on Thanksgiving Day, ten on the Saturday after, and then up to twelve on Sunday—“a regular heat wave,” said my father.

  When it’s that cold, you’re glad to lean in to your warm cow in the morning. And Joseph did—after rubbing Rosie’s rump and listening to her say she loved him. He always milked her first now. Morning and afternoon. Sometimes I wondered if he was still so slow at it just because she loved him and told him so and Joseph didn’t want to hurry any of that up.

  Maybe.

  It stayed cold that Monday, and even though it was pretty bright out, there were snowflakes in the air that afternoon again, drifting like they didn’t care if they landed. The bus passed us at old First Congregational while we were heading home. Its windows were all fogged up, but I could hear Mr. Haskell yelling at John Wall over the diesel to Close That Window, Close It Right Now—because John Wall had opened it to throw a snowball he’d smuggled aboard.

  His throw, by the way, didn’t even come close. Probably because he didn’t throw off his back foot.

  The bus rolled off through the high snow, and when it was gone, everything around us was only white. The ground, the trees, the clapboard of the church, the sky. Even the Alliance was frozen white, and maybe that’s why Joseph dropped his backpack on the road, clambered into the high snow, and headed down to the river.

  I followed him. If you don’t know the river, it’s easy to miss where the bank ends and the river begins. And the Alliance flows pretty fast, so it doesn’t wear safe ice until winter has hung around for a while. And it gets deep quicker than any river has a right to.

  I didn’t think Joseph knew the river.

  The snow was thick, but Joseph was breaking a path through it, so it slowed him down more than me. Even so, he stepped onto the ice before I reached the bank.

  “Joseph, what are you doing?”

  “Figure it out, Jackie.”

  His other foot onto the ice.

  I thumped through the snow alongside.

  He shoved against his back foot and skidded along the ice, heading up the river.

  Me following on the bank.

  “You know,” I said, “this is pretty new ice.”

  He didn’t answer. He shoved again, and then again, and that second time, he didn’t slide alongside the bank. He slid out toward the middle of the river, where the ice was darker.

  “Joseph, I’m not kidding.”

  It was like I wasn’t even there.

  The wind came up hard and Joseph unzipped his coat and held it out like wings, but it didn’t push him along, so he shoved against his back foot again, and the ice was slicker now, and he spun twice and shoved again.

  Toward the dark center.

  “Joseph!”

  I think it must have sounded like I was crying. Or screaming. Maybe I was doing both. But however it sounded, Joseph looked at me.

  Then he turned back toward the dark ice.

  So I screamed the name I’d heard him say in the dark of the night—the name I’d heard him say again and again: “Maddie! Maddie!”

  He turned toward me.

  And the way he looked at me—I don’t ever want anyone to look at me like that again.

  But he was so close to the dark ice.

  “Maddie,” I said.

  “Shut up,” he said. “Shut up.”

  I stood on the bank of the Alliance, in all that white, and waited for Joseph to come. But he did not move. He did not move.

  On the road above us, a car drove past. Another car, and then another—but this one stopped. A voice crying out—“Hey, you idiot kids. What are you doing down there? Get off the ice!”

  Joseph looked up at the driver, then started to jump up and down.

  Hard.

  Pounding at the ice.

  The car drove away.

 
Joseph stopped jumping. Suddenly, he looked like he was all tired out.

  “Joseph,” I said.

  He looked at me again, and he started to come back, one tired step after another. He wasn’t sliding at all.

  Every step, the ice got whiter.

  The winter I was six, I saw a yellow dog on thin ice on the Alliance. I was with my mother, and we were walking back from a breakfast potluck at First Congregational before it became old First Congregational. The yellow dog was out farther onto the ice than Joseph, but not much, and it had fallen through and its eyes were huge and it was grabbing on with its front paws, scratching, looking for something to hold on to. It wasn’t making a sound. I told my mother we had to go get it, but she held my arm so I wouldn’t go down to the river. Her other hand she held over her mouth. Once the dog almost got out, but the ice broke under it again and it was scratching like anything—until suddenly it stopped, put its head down on the ice, slid into the dark water, and was gone. Gone.

  I live on a farm. I see animals die all the time.

  Never like that.

  I cried about that yellow dog every night for I don’t know how long. I dreamed about that dog. I dreamed about me being that dog, and the cold water under the ice pulling my legs and dragging at me, and then my hands getting so cold they wouldn’t work, and then the moment when I put my head down on the ice and slid into the dark water.

  I always woke up then, sweating, wondering if I really had screamed or not.

  That’s why it felt like a nightmare when Joseph, maybe three steps away from the bank, fell through the ice of the Alliance River.

  He didn’t go under. He spread out his arms and caught himself, but the water splashed up around him and he went in almost to his shoulders and his eyes got huge—just like the yellow dog’s—and you could almost see the current pulling his legs, and he started to reach for the shore, scratching at the ice, scratching at the ice.

  I might have screamed.

  I took off my backpack and dumped everything out into the snow.

  Joseph still scratching.

  I put one foot out onto the ice—he was only three steps away—and held on to the end of a strap and tossed the backpack out to him.