When We Were Vikings

by Andrew David MacDonald

  Gert came over to my bed again and whisper-asked if I would go to the bathroom for a little while. “Or the living room.”

  “But it’s my bed,” I said. “And my room.”

  “It won’t be for that long.”

  “Oh yeah?” Charlene said. She was leaning against the desk, her arms crossed against her chest. She was tapping the back of her heel against the wall. Gert put his hands on my shoulders. “Better be longer than that.”

  “Ha ha. Very funny.” Gert put his chin on my mattress and whispered, “Please? What do you want? I’ll do anything.”

  “It’s getting late.” Charlene was chewing gum and made it snap in her mouth.

  “Anything,” Gert said to me.

  There was nothing I wanted that Gert could give me. For example, I wanted Mom back alive, and I wanted to be more than I was, and I wanted to go to regular classes in the school, like Gert could.

  “Can you tell me more stories about Mom?” I said.

  “Right now?”

  “Tomorrow after school. For at least an hour.”

  Charlene’s gum snapped again. “I don’t have all night,” she said. “I’ve got kids too.”

  “Fine,” Gert said.

  “Pinky swear?”

  He looked back at Charlene, who was picking cat hair off her tank top and letting it fall to the carpet. Gert stuck out his pinky and our fingers wrapped around each other before snapping apart to make the promise unbreakable.

  * * *

  In the living room I put the pillows under my head and pulled the blanket up to my chin. Uncle Richard’s house was not very clean and the food from dinner that he hadn’t eaten was still on a plate. Sometimes he slept on the couch after watching TV and going to work, his stomach sticking out and his legs spread apart. If this happened we were supposed to shut off the TV and put a blanket over him so that he would not be angry when he woke up in the morning, or be too tired from being cold and waking up in the middle of the night to find a blanket.

  He was not on the couch so I made myself into a burrito and squished my pillow under my head, making it twice as powerful to sleep on. The television was on mute and I flipped channels. There weren’t many. Uncle Richard thought that cable was a rip-off and used antennas to try to get more channels. Sometimes the channels worked but mostly they didn’t.

  The only channel that worked was a show from a long time ago about a family from the frontier who drove in wagons and raised cows. The women looked like nuns and had big dresses and the men were always shooting things and getting into fights before drinking beer at the end on the front porch of their house, in chairs that rocked back and forth.

  I had just started falling asleep in front of the settlers on TV when I heard footsteps coming from Uncle Richard’s room down the hall.

  “What are you doing in here?” Uncle Richard asked. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping in your room?”

  I pretended to snore and not hear him. He said he saw me move a few seconds ago and that he knew what fake snoring sounded like.

  He pointed at the TV. “I can’t believe this is the best we can do.”

  On the TV, the settlers were in Church. Uncle Richard went over to the TV and moved the antennas around. He was very used to the antennas. Uncle Richard did not work very much, since he had hurt his leg after getting hit crossing the street by a postal truck. They gave him a lot of money after and he bought the house and opened a bar for a while, until it closed from the people working there cheating him out of money.

  The TV got fuzzier and he changed the channel to sports, which hadn’t worked when I first turned the TV on. He moved my feet out of the way and we started watching boxing.

  “I think I know how this one ends,” I said.

  “Well, don’t spoil it for me.”

  One of the fighters was a lot better at first. I already saw the end of the fight and knew that the fighter who looked crappier ended up winning by knocking his opponent out three times in a row, very fast.

  Uncle Richard scratched his chest and said he was going to get a beer. “Do you want anything?”

  “No thank you,” I said.

  He came back and sat down. We continued watching and somehow while the fighters punched each other, Uncle Richard had put his arm around me and was touching my shoulder with his fingers. I could feel him drawing something with his pointer. Then I recognized the shape. It was a letter Z. I started to wiggle, and he asked me what was wrong.

  “You need to lighten up or you’ll end up like your brother,” he said, and I did not like that and wanted to yell at him, but I also did not want to get Gert in trouble. Gert and I had made a pinky swear, which was like a Viking pact, only then I did not know that I was a Viking and did not call it that. I did not learn I was a Viking until Gert gave me Kepple’s Guide to the Vikings for Christmas. Gert and Uncle Richard were always fighting about something, ever since Gert got bigger than him. Uncle Richard used to slap Gert and call him “boy” and say that if he lived under Uncle Richard’s roof, then he would live under Uncle Richard’s rules too.

  Even though we were related by blood, we were not the same tribe because of how he treated Gert.

  While sitting on the couch, I tried to watch the television and prayed that Uncle Richard would not hear Gert.

  Some sex noises came from the bedroom and to hide them I made a coughing noise and said that I was starting to get a cold.

  “It’s going around,” Uncle Richard said. He told me to wait right there while he got some brandy. “An old family remedy,” he said, coming back with the small bottle that smelled sweet but also very strong.

  He poured a little bit into the cap that he took off the bottle and handed it to me. “When we were sick as kids, me and your mom, we used to take a nip of this and it would heat us right up.” I told him it smelled bad, and he said that was sort of the point. “Trust me,” he said. “Just make it all go down in one gulp.”

  I did what he said and the brandy went into my stomach, where it did warm it up. I made a face.

  “It doesn’t taste very good,” I said.

  “Yeah, but it feels good. Right?” Uncle Richard smiled, showing his teeth, which he had gotten whitened so that they were not so yellow anymore from the coffee and the cigarettes.

  He put his arm around me again, and this time I felt his finger go from my shoulder to my arm and then his hand was between my arm and my body. Gert sometimes put his arm around his girlfriends like that. Then I felt his hand touch my chest, and I froze.

  The sex noises got louder from Gert’s and my room, and this time I forgot to cough. The fingers stopped. Uncle Richard had heard them.

  “Motherfucker,” he said, and got up to go to Gert’s room. I tried to hold him back and he pushed me down. “Not the time to be fucking around,” he said.

  I threw off my blanket and ran and tried to stand in front of the door.

  “Move,” he said.

  “No,” I said, and like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings said, “YOU SHALL NOT PASS.”

  Uncle Richard pushed open the door. The lights were off in the bedroom but the light from the living room made everything bright. Gert stood behind Charlene, who had her arms on the chair at Gert’s desk. They were both naked.

  Her face turned away and she ran to the bed and Gert asked what the fuck was going on.

  “Get out of here, you little whore,” Uncle Richard said, throwing clothes at Charlene. “Your mother would be ashamed of you.”

  There was a lot of shouting and Charlene started putting on her shirt. Gert stood up to Uncle Richard, who was wearing clothes while Gert had no clothes on.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he said, and Uncle Richard slapped him across the face.

  Charlene screamed and ran by me in her underwear, holding the rest of her clothes.

  “You’re a piece of white trash, just like your father,” Uncle Richard said.

  When Uncle Richard said that about our father, Gert punched him.
It was the first time Gert had ever hit Uncle Richard, while Uncle Richard had hit Gert a lot. They started wrestling and I didn’t know what to do to make them stop. They knocked into the desk and knocked over a light. Uncle Richard’s leg bent in a weird way, and for the first time, Uncle Richard could not be more powerful than Gert.

  So I started shouting, as loud as I could, until they stopped wrestling. Uncle Richard pushed himself off of Gert and stood between us, breathing fast and hard.

  “Stop it,” he said.

  Gert wiped blood off of his mouth. “Don’t yell at her,” he said.

  And Uncle Richard threw up his hands and walked out of the room, saying that he regretted the day he ever took us in. Once he was gone I stopped screaming. Gert put on his underwear and sat on the bed, holding a T-shirt to his face to stop the blood.

  “Fuck,” he said, hitting his knees. “Now everyone at school is going to hear about this. Why did you tell him?”

  “I didn’t tell,” I said. “He heard you being loud.”

  “Fuck,” Gert repeated, and threw the shirt on the ground and grabbed a sock to stop the bleeding.

  We sat together on the bed.

  “We need to get out of here,” Gert said, turning the sock inside out so that he could use the clean inside part to wipe his nose again. “By any fucking means necessary.”

  chapter seven

  The next morning, the morning of the Midterm Exam, I meant to wake Gert up and make him a powerful breakfast before his test, even though I was pissed at him for drinking and having sex all night with someone not AK47.

  But he was gone and so was the girl. His door was locked and his shoes weren’t there, and the house was silent. Outside the day was getting loud with cars and people going to work.

  “Crap,” I said.

  The Word of Today was incongruity, which is when things do not fit together. It is a very old word, the Dictionary said, and can also mean “disagreement.”

  Last night Gert and I had incongruity about who was allowed in the apartment.

  “We will have to stop our incongruity,” I would tell Gert when he came home from his test, to make sure that he knows I do not appreciate strange people in our home.

  After practicing the Word of Today, saying it in three sentences to help me remember, I remembered that I wanted to help Gert for his test. I checked my watch to make sure I would have enough time to perform a sacrifice in Gert’s honor before taking the 11:15 a.m. bus to the library to read.

  Kepple says that animals can be sacrificed, and humans, and also objects to show the gods how much you respect them, and to ask for things. For my sacrifice, I wanted to ask that Gert succeed and prove to everyone that he is not a thug or dumb.

  For the sacrifice to work, the object has to be important. That is what the word means: to give up something that you like. I went around the apartment, trying to find something important to sacrifice in the coffee container.

  The most important objects to me were:

  The picture of Mom and Gert and me as a baby.

  The video of Mom.

  The letter that Marxy wrote for me, saying he loves me.

  Kepple’s Guide to the Vikings, which Gert gave me for Christmas.

  I took a deep breath. I did not want to sacrifice any of these things. The thing that I loved the most was the picture of us. It had the most power, even though it was very small and could fit into my pocket.

  “Okay,” I said, taking out the picture from the plastic. “This is my sacrifice for Gert.”

  I was proud of Gert for going to college, since nobody thought he could do it. Or almost nobody. AK47 and I thought he could do anything. He didn’t have a high school diploma. If he had a high school diploma, he could have gone to the school that said they would pay for everything if he played football for their team.

  It was AK47 who convinced Gert to go to college. He had blown out his knee during his last year of high school, meaning he ripped part in a way that made it hard to walk. He got a job at a gas station and started getting a big roll around his stomach. You couldn’t even see the veins in his arms anymore.

  Some days AK47 and I would go to visit him. She would drive her car to see him and have him pump gas into her car. She thought it was funny, making him do that, but after she would always complain that the gas where he worked cost too much. She did not approve of him working at the gas station. She said that it was bullshit, that he was wasting his talent and she thought that he could be a hero again, even though she didn’t use those words exactly.

  Gert is the leader of our tribe, and when people thought he was a thug and not smart, it was like they were talking about the rest of our tribe. Gert had protected me in high school from people who called me a retard, and now people thought that he was stupid and would never become a hero.

  One day AK47 brought him a piece of paper that she had seen posted at the Community Center. It was for a scholarship at the college for people like Gert, who were in financial need and had experienced something called “Hardship.”

  “If you actually meet the deadline, I’ll do that thing you like,” AK47 said, slapping the paper down on the kitchen table in front of Gert.

  “What thing you like?” I asked her, but they were staring at each other and not listening to me, and finally Gert said, “For a week,” and AK47 smiled and said they had a deal.

  Every night after he came home from the gas station he worked on his essay.

  AK47 wouldn’t tell me what the essay was about. She wouldn’t let me read it either. “It’s up to him to tell you.”

  “So why did you get to read it?”

  “Because I’m a hypocrite and you’re just going to have to get used to it. Okay?”

  Hypocrite is one of the ten words on my Favorite Words list, along with words like bloom and pedigree and cursive. I don’t use any of those words, and nobody ever really uses them around me, so when I hear them I get excited. A hypocrite is basically someone who says one thing and goes ahead and does the other while expecting everyone else to do the first thing. So if I told you to not run on the deck beside a pool and then ran on the deck later, I would be a hypocrite.

  Gert ended up getting the scholarship and quit his job at the gas station.

  In order to keep the scholarship, Gert needed to have high grades, which is why he studied Macroeconomics so hard. His scholarship gave us money for food and for his car and things like Dr. Laird.

  The essay he wrote in order to get the scholarship was powerful. He did not allow me to read it, though.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “When you’re older,” he said, but even when I was older he said no, that it had things that were private and I would not like.

  “Try me,” I said.

  He did not want to try me.

  When I went to the kitchen, I saw that Gert had forgotten his special graphing calculator, which cost him almost one hundred dollars. It was on the kitchen table. It was a critical weapon for defeating the tests he studied for.

  “Holy crap,” I said.

  Without the special calculator, his test would go disastrously.

  He did not answer his phone when I called to tell him that he had forgotten it. I looked at the clock. Then I went to his schedule on the fridge and looked for the box that said MACROECONOMICS.

  His test was coming up and I did not know if he would have time to come back for his calculator.

  My heart began racing around in my chest.

  I sat down and took ten breaths. AK47 did not answer her phone. The photograph of Mom and Gert and me stared at me and everyone was smiling in the photo. It was like they were trying to tell me something, even me as a baby.

  There was a rule that said I could only take the bus to places that Gert and I went to together at least once, so that I knew the right way to go and didn’t get lost, and to make sure that they weren’t dangerous places. I had never been to Gert’s college except once, when me and him and AK47 went to visit i
t, before he agreed to go. Kepple would call the college foreign territory, and it was a place that I hadn’t conquered. I found the address on the schedule, then I went on Google Maps and found out what bus to take to the college.

  I did not like breaking the rule about the bus, but Gert would be defeated without his calculator, and fail his test and lose his scholarship, which will take treasure away from the tribe’s hoard. And sometimes the heroes of legends have to break the rules in order to save the people they care about.

  I got my bag and put the special calculator in it. I whispered a prayer to Odin to bless me on my quest.

  * * *

  The bus stop near our apartment has a lot of graffiti on it and usually smells like pee. I made sure not to sit on the bench, because that is where a homeless man sleeps at night, on the seat with food that people leave for him on the ground.

  Someone must have left him Burger King. There were a bunch of wrappers from the hamburgers and fries.

  I brought my map to show the bus driver. “I need to go here,” I said. “Do you go there?”

  He nodded. I paid the fare, which was three dollars, and sat down next to him on the bus, the way I would next to AK47 while she drove.

  The bus driver had a large beard. At first he did not want to talk and just stared straight ahead through big sunglasses that showed what he was looking at like a movie screen.

  When I started talking to him, he turned down his radio so he could hear me. I told him that I needed to go to campus in order to save my brother.

  I said that Gert saved us from living with Uncle Richard, who was a gargantuan fuck-dick. Uncle Richard’s house was always full of villainous people who got angry with Gert and sometimes fought with him. Gert got his college scholarship and moved us to the apartment we were living in, which was very far from rich people, but also not so close to really bad people like Uncle Richard.

  “Sounds like your brother needs to save himself,” the bus driver said.

  “I have a son like that,” the woman across the seat from me said. “He doesn’t listen to nobody.”