Okay for Now

Life came to a screeching halt for Doug. He was mocked at school and in town. He stopped trying to learn to read or draw and stopped participating in all his classes. He no longer visited the library. The only thing he continued to do was work for Mr. Spicer and that was because his father forced him to continue.

One Saturday, his father made the whole family attend the company picnic, even though he insisted it was a sham. He wanted to go because of a trivia contest based on Babe Ruth. He once met Babe Ruth, and Babe Ruth called him “a helluva good guy” (153). Since then, he memorized all Babe Ruth’s stats and therefore was sure he could win the trivia contest. When they arrived, the picnic was nothing like his father had described. It was full of happy families, happy music, fun activities, and delicious food. Doug and Christopher both received Timex watches as gifts from the company, a gift their father insisted was fake. Doug started out having a great time at the picnic, especially because his mother seemed genuinely happy there. 

After they ate dinner, Doug decided to try to throw some horseshoes. He wasn’t very good, but a man sitting nearby offered him some guidance, and after a few tries, he got better. The man then asked him if he would be on his team for trivia in exchange for the guidance. Doug agreed and thus they partnered up. Doug knew all the answers, even the obscure ones, leading him and his partner to win. When the judge realized who won, he became flustered, unsure how to portion out the prize between a child and the owner of the company. Only then did Doug realize that his partner was Mr. Ballard, his father’s long-hated boss.

On the car ride home, his father told Doug he was used, that Mr. Ballard had pretended not to know the answers so that he could keep all the prizes for himself. Doug said that he was promised a signed baseball. His father told him not to count on it, so when the time came to pick the baseball up, Doug decided to skip it, too afraid that his father would be right.

Over the next week, Doug continued to get beat up and sent to detention but a little less than the week before. Feeling a little better about life, he decided to go get the signed baseball. When he arrived at the paper mill, he immediately noticed that his father and Ernie had the best parking spots in the lot, one of the prizes Doug won. For a second, he let it bother him that his father never told him this, but then he decided to move on and pursue the baseball. He walked into Mr. Ballard’s lush office, where both Mr. Ballard and his secretary welcomed him jovially. When they sat down, Mr. Ballard asked him if he planned to put the one hundred dollars he won into “a savings account for college” (170). When Doug failed to answer, Mr. Ballard realized he never received the money he had sent home with Doug’s father. Doug quickly assured him his father gave it to him and that he would take Mr. Ballard’s advice about how to invest it. Mr. Ballard asked if Doug received the baseball. Doug lied, saying “It’s in my room right now” (171). Mr. Ballard asked Doug how he could help him, and Doug said that he was visiting for more horseshoe lessons. 

Doug and Mr. Ballard went down to the river, where Mr. Ballard usually played, and Mr. Ballard helped Doug work on his “arc” (172). After a few games, they came inside and were about to order up some lemonade when his secretary approached with a choice of three frames for Mr. Ballard to choose from. They were about to frame his page from the Audubon book, an image of a Yellow Shank. Mr. Ballard pondered over the different shades of wood, then turned to Doug and asked for his opinion. Doug blurted without thinking that he thought it belonged “back in the book” (174). The secretary and framer tried to distract him from Doug’s awkward comment, but Mr. Ballard asked that the drawing be put away and discussed later. 

The following Saturday, Doug felt “cosmic” as he climbed the stairs of the library and handed Mr. Powell the picture of the Yellow Shank in its tube (176). Both he and Mr. Powell felt renewed and determined after this successful return. That night at dinner, Ernie joined them, as he and Doug’s father were about to go try and buy a pickup truck. Doug turned to his father and told him what Mr. Ballard said about the baseball and the hundred dollars. His father insisted Mr. Ballard was lying. Doug refused to back down and only said “Someone’s a liar” (178). His father and Ernie then tried to beat him, but he got away, hiding out at the library until it closed, watching the yellow shank safe in its case.

When he came home, his father left, and his mother was nowhere to be found. As soon as he saw him, Christopher chastised him for not playing along with his father. When Doug explained that he felt like he needed to rebel, Christopher explained that rebelling wasn’t an option because the person who always gets hurt is their mother. His father had turned his anger towards her the second Doug left. Christopher then started to tear up as he explained how badly he wanted to defy his father and how worried he was that he was already becoming his father. He then told Doug to go check on his dresser, that he left something there for Doug, which Doug needed to hide from his father. He also told Doug that he thought Doug “had guts” (181). Doug couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw the signed baseball awaiting him. Christopher explained his father had been hiding it in his vehicle. Doug thanked Christopher, but Christopher pretended to ignore him.

After that incident, Doug re-invested all his energy in school, doing even better in his classes than before. He even read aloud from Jane Eyre, and Lil called him “the best reader” (182). He decided to invite Lil to play horseshoes with him outside of Mr. Ballard’s office. He taught her how to throw and then they kissed. 

The gym teacher had been looking the other way since the day Doug’s tattoo was revealed, allowing him to run laps while the other students participated in the sports he organized, but in November, he started the volleyball unit and insisted Doug participate.

Soon after the volleyball unit began, Doug was called into Principal Peattie’s office again. Principal Peattie said the gym teacher had reported Doug for skipping class. Doug explained that he ran while the other kids did something else, but Principal Peattie would not accept his reasoning. He told Doug he would no longer be getting a lunch period but instead would be attending gym twice a day from now on. As Doug was leaving his office, Principal Peattie said something so awful about Doug that Doug cannot bring himself to repeat it. Although everything else in his life was going fairly well, Principal Peattie’s comment hung like a cloud over everything Doug might otherwise have enjoyed.

One Saturday afternoon, as Mr. Powell was trying to help Doug draw a Snowy Heron, Doug commented that, given the skilled hunter approaching in the background of Audubon’s drawing, the bird should be considered “dead” (197). When Lil contradicted him, saying the bird didn’t “look dead,” he sarcastically replied, “Shows how much you know” (197). She left without speaking to him, robbing him of all desire to keep drawing, so he left his supplies at the library and went home.

On Thanksgiving, Doug’s family received a postcard from one of Lucas’s friends saying that he should be home within a month and warning them again that he looked physically different. His mother was overjoyed and happy all day until Ernie arrived.

In Doug’s first additional gym class, he was asked to participate in the Wrestling Unit. He participated, but he did not try to win any matches. This upset the teacher, so the teacher whispered something to Doug’s next opponent. When his opponent and him began their match, the opponent revealed that the teacher instructed him to call Doug “Mama’s Baby” (201). He told Doug he wouldn’t do it and that he thought the teacher was “a jerk” (201). So instead of fighting, the two just circled and circled, going faster and faster, eventually growing dizzy and delirious with laughter. The teacher quickly put an end to their charade, but all the following pairs did the same thing, refusing to fight each other. The teacher said that no one was going to get credit in his class that day, but all the boys were too giddy with rebellion to care.

Doug decided to wait out in the cold for Lil so he could talk to her and see if she was still mad. She was standoffish at first, but when he smiled, she gave in and took him to her dad’s deli for two Cokes.

In mid-December, Doug rode with his mom and Dad to pick up Lucas in New York City. They took his Dad’s recently purchased pickup, which despite being “pretty dinged up,” was treated as if it were pure gold by his father (204). They got lost several times, and his father spent forever finding the cheapest parking spot, but they made it in time to pick up Lucas. At least Doug and his mother did; his father chose to dilly dally behind. His mother was bursting with joy and dressed in “her best blue coat” for Lucas’s arrival (204).

They waited until every person exited the bus before they started to worry that Lucas wasn’t going to be there. The bus driver asked if they were waiting for someone in a wheelchair. Doug’s father said no, but Doug’s mother was already halfway up the steps of the bus to see if it was Lucas who was in the wheelchair. It was, and he was missing the lower half of both legs and had bandages over both of his eyes. His mother knelt in front of Lucas while Lucas talked to Doug. He told Doug he got “dinged up,” and then he smiled exactly like Doug’s mother always smiles (208).

Doug and another soldier tried to carefully get Lucas off the bus, but it was a messy business. Christopher did not complain, however, no matter how many times they accidentally hurt him. After the other soldier departed, they started to walk, but an anti-Vietnam protest taking place near the bus terminal swarmed them. They shouted at Lucas that he “got what he deserved” for murdering innocent “Vietnamese babies” (210). He accepted their anger, allowing them to “spit on him” (210). Doug thought that Christopher must feel exactly like he felt in Principal Peattie’s office when Principal Peattie told Doug that “not a single teacher in the whole school gives a rip about you” (210).

When they got back to the car, his father yelled at Doug to be careful that Lucas’s wheelchair not hurt his new pickup. When they got home, their father disappeared inside, not saying a word, while Doug and his mom tried to figure out how to get Lucas out of the pickup and back into his wheelchair. After a few minutes, Doug’s brother, whom Doug referred to as Christopher rather than criminal for the first time since he started recounting this narrative, came out of the house and carried Lucas out of the pickup and into his wheelchair. Inside, their father asked how they were going to get Lucas’s wheelchair up the stairs, but the brothers all insisted they would figure it out.

Inspired by Lucas’s nobleness, Doug decided to try harder in gym class. It was no use, however, no matter how hard he tried the teacher picked on him, calling him “Mama’s Baby” and constantly punishing him for nothing (213). On one of the last days of the wrestling unit, the gym teacher said he randomly selected their names from a pile to pair them up. He paired Doug with a student much larger than him. The other student went easy on Doug, but Doug still lost pitifully, something that instigated the teacher’s laughter. After class, the teacher had Doug and his partner stay after and roll up the mats, while he went “back to his office” (215).

He left his clipboard behind, however, so Doug decided to see if he really randomly selected the partners. The blank page quickly proved that he purposely set Doug up. Doug continued to flip through the clipboard, however, and ended up finding several highly skilled drawings. Some were scenes from Vietnam, and some were drawings of the boys he went to school with playing sports. There was even a drawing of Doug playing volleyball with “no shirt. And no tattoo” (217). As Doug skimmed the drawings, the gym teacher walked up, found him, and started screaming. The next time Doug was supposed to attend gym class, Miss Cowper wrote him an excuse so he could work on the County Literacy Unit instead.

At home, Lucas and his mother stayed up late into the night talking and weeping. Lucas’s phantom limbs bothered him often, and he seemed miserable. He was supposed to go to a doctor in New York City every two weeks, but his father refused to take him. Instead, he found a doctor closer to home who offered to take care of Lucas for free. Even in those circumstances, Doug’s father was rude and dismissive of the doctor. Lucas rarely followed the doctor’s advice, and when it came time to remove the gauze from his eyes, his face looked melted from all the burns. At night, after Christopher and Doug had gotten Lucas into bed, they would lie awake and listen to his nightmares—the constant replays of the violence and carnage in Vietnam, and Doug could not help but think of his gym teacher’s graphic drawings of those same scenes. Doug and Christopher wanted to help Lucas, but Lucas said since they “weren’t there,” they couldn’t (222).

In Mr. Ferris’s class, Mr. Ferris was getting the students excited about the upcoming moon landing, insisting that the astronauts “will find possibility there [on the moon]” (223). The idea of possibility excited Doug so much that he sought out the gym teacher to see if he could reconcile. He started out by telling his teacher he thought he was a good artist. He then explained that his brother recently came home from Vietnam and that he was a mental and physical mess. The gym teacher nodded knowingly, saying that this was to be expected of anyone forced to endure Vietnam. Doug suggested his teacher talk to Lucas, that they would be able to understand each other in a way that no one else in town could. He then offered to help the gym teacher by recording all the students’ stats for him. At first, the teacher denied Doug’s offer, but after thinking about it, he decided to accept. At the library, Doug was becoming a more confident artist and a more confident romantic, even getting Lil to hold his hand.