Authors: Gary D. Schmidt
Okay for Now
Okay for Now
Gary D. Schmidt
Table of Contents
Sneak Peak: The Wednesday Wars
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children's Books Educator Guide
CLARION BOOKS
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Boston New York 2011
CLARION BOOKS
215 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10003
Copyright © 2011 by Gary D. Schmidt
All illustrations courtesy of The Audubon Society.
All rights reserved. For information about permission
to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions,
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Clarion Books is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
The text of this book is set in 13-point Garamond No. 3.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010942981
ISBN 978-0-547-15260-8
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
My dear Anne,
all of these pages are for you—
except a few of them.
Those are for Mark Hutchins, of New Portland Hill, Maine.
You'll know which ones are his.
But the rest are all yours,
because I love you.
CHAPTER ONE
The Arctic Tern
Plate CCL
JOE PEPITONE once gave me his New York Yankees baseball cap.
I'm not lying.
He gave it to me. To me, Doug Swieteck. To me.
Joe Pepitone and Horace Clarke came all the way out on the Island to Camillo Junior High and I
threw with them. Me and Danny Hupfer and Holling Hoodhood, who were good guys. We all threw
with Joe Pepitone and Horace Clarke, and we batted too. They sang to us while we swung away:
"He's a batta, he's a batta-batta-batta, he's a batta..." That was their song.
And afterward, Horace Clarke gave Danny his cap, and Joe Pepitone gave Holling his jacket
(probably because he felt sorry for him on account of his dumb name), and then Joe Pepitone handed
me his cap. He reached out and took it off his head and handed it to me. Just like that. It was signed on
the inside, so anyone could tell that it was really his. Joe Pepitone's.
It was the only thing I ever owned that hadn't belonged to some other Swieteck before me.
I hid it for four and a half months. Then my stupid brother found out about it. He came in at night
when I was asleep and whipped my arm up behind my back so high I couldn't even scream it hurt so
bad and he told me to decide if I wanted a broken arm or if I wanted to give him Joe Pepitone's
baseball cap. I decided on the broken arm. Then he stuck his knee in the center of my spine and asked
if I wanted a broken back along with the broken arm, and so I told him Joe Pepitone's cap was in the
basement behind the oil furnace.
It wasn't, but he went downstairs anyway. That's what a chump he is.
So I threw on a T-shirt and shorts and Joe Pepitone's cap—which was under my pillow the whole
time, the jerk—and got outside. Except he caught me. Dragged me behind the garage. Took Joe
Pepitone's baseball cap. Pummeled me in places where the bruises wouldn't show.
A strategy that my ... is none of your business.
I think he kept the cap for ten hours—just long enough for me to see him with it at school. Then he
traded it to Link Vitelli for cigarettes, and Link Vitelli kept it for a day—just long enough for me to
see him with it at school. Then Link traded it to Glenn Dillard for a comb. A comb! And Glenn
Dillard kept it for a day—just long enough for me to see him with it at school. Then Glenn lost it
while driving his brother's Mustang without a license and with the top down, the jerk. It blew off
somewhere on Jerusalem Avenue. I looked for it for a week.
I guess now it's in a gutter, getting rained on or something. Probably anyone who walks by looks
down and thinks it's a piece of junk.
They're right. That's all it is. Now.
But once, it was the only thing I ever owned that hadn't belonged to some other Swieteck before
me.
I know. That means a big fat zero to anyone else.
I tried to talk to my father about it. But it was a wrong day. Most days are wrong days. Most days
he comes home red-faced with his eyes half closed and with that deadly silence that lets you know
he'd have a whole lot to say if he ever let himself get started and no one better get him started because
there's no telling when he'll stop and if he ever did get started then pretty Mr. Culross at freaking
Culross Lumber better not be the one to get him started because he'd punch pretty Mr. Culross's
freaking lights out and he didn't care if he did lose his job over it because it's a lousy job anyway.
That was my father not letting himself get started.
But I had a plan.
All I had to do was get my father to take me to Yankee Stadium. That's all. If I could just see Joe
Pepitone one more time. If I could just tell him what happened to my baseball cap. He'd look at me,
and he'd laugh and rough up my hair, and then he'd take off his cap and he'd put it on my head. "Here,
Doug," Joe Pepitone would say. Like that. "Here, Doug. You look a whole lot better in it than I do."
That's what Joe Pepitone would say. Because that's the kind of guy he is.
That was the plan. And all I had to do was get my father to listen.
But I picked a wrong day. Because there aren't any right days.
And my father said, "Are you crazy? Are you freaking crazy? I work forty-five hours a week to put
food on the table for you, and you want me to take you to Yankee Stadium because you lost some
lousy baseball cap?"
"It's not just some lousy—"
That's all I got out. My father's hands are quick. That's the kind of guy
he
is.
Who knows how much my father got out the day he finally let himself get started saying what he
wanted to say to pretty Mr. Culross and didn't even try to stop himself from saying it. But whatever he
said, he came home with a pretty good shiner, because pretty Mr. Culross turned out to have hands
even quicker than my father's.
And pretty Mr. Culross had one other advantage: he could fire my father if he wanted to.
So my father came home with his lunch pail in his hand and a bandage on his face and the last
check he would ever see from Culross Lumber, Inc., and he looked at my mother and said, "Don't you
say a thing," and he looked at me and said, "Still worried about a lousy baseball cap?" and he went
upstairs and started making phone calls.
Mom kept us in the kitchen.
He came down when we were finishing supper, and Mom jumped up from the table and brought
over the plate she'd been keeping warm in the oven. She set it down in front of him.
"It's not all dried out, is it?" he said.
"I don't think so," Mom said.
"You don't think so," he said, then took off the aluminum foil, sighed, and reached for the ketchup.
He smeared it all over his meat loaf. Thick.
Took a red bite.
"We're moving," he said.
Chewed.
"Moving?" said my mother.
"To Marysville. Upstate." Another red bite. Chewing. "Ballard Paper Mill has a job, and Ernie Eco
says he can get me in."
"Ernie Eco," said my mother quietly.
"Don't you start about him," said my father.
"So it will begin all over again."
"I said—"
"The bars, being gone all night, coming back home when you're—"
My father stood up.
"Which of your sons will it be this time?" my mother said.
My father looked at me.
I put my eyes down and worked at what was left of my meat loaf.
It took us three days to pack. My mother didn't talk much the whole time. The first morning, she asked
only two questions.
"How are we going to let Lucas know where we've gone?"
Lucas is my oldest brother who stopped beating me up a year and a half ago when the United States
Army drafted him to beat up Vietcong instead. He's in a delta somewhere but we don't know any more
than that because he isn't allowed to tell us and he doesn't write home much anyway. Fine by me.
My father looked up from his two fried eggs. "How are we going to let Lucas know where we've
gone? The U.S. Postal Service," he said in that kind of voice that makes you feel like you are the dope
of the world. "And didn't I tell you over easy?" He pushed the plate of eggs away, picked up his mug
of coffee, and looked out the window. "I'm not going to miss this freaking place," he said.
Then, "Are you going to rent a truck?" my mother asked, real quiet.
My father sipped his coffee. Sipped again.
"Ernie Eco will be down with a truck from the mill," he said.
My mother didn't ask anything else.
My father brought home boxes from the A&P on one of those summer days when the sky is too hot
to be blue and all it can work up is a hazy white. Everything is sweating, and you're thinking that if
you were up in the top—I mean, the really top—stands in Yankee Stadium, there might be a breeze,
but probably there isn't one anywhere else. My father gave me a box that still smelled like the bananas
it brought up from somewhere that speaks Spanish and told me to put in whatever I had and I should
throw out anything I couldn't get in it. I did—except for Joe Pepitone's cap because it's lying in a
gutter getting rained on, which you might remember if you cared.
So what? So what? I'm glad we're going.
After the first day of packing, the house was a wreck. Open boxes everywhere, with all sorts of
stuff thrown in. My mother tried to stick on labels and keep everything organized—like all the kitchen
stuff in the boxes in the kitchen, and all the sheets and pillowcases and towels in the boxes by the
linen closet upstairs, and all the sturdiest boxes by the downstairs door for my father's tools and junk.
But after he filled the boxes by the downstairs door, he started to load stuff in with the dishes, stuff