Grendel's Guide to Love and War

by A. E. Kaplan

  “Damn,” Ed said. “That’s ink.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “That’s some tattoo.”

  “No. It’s ink. I mean actual ink. Like from a marker. Someone Sharpied Colin Farnsworth’s head.”

  I squinted. It did look like black marker. Celtic hounds and dragons met across the back of his head, and knots and other things spread over the top of his shiny bald pate. For some reason, this had me thinking of Willow, who went through some kind of Celtic-slash-druid phase a few years ago.

  It was then that I saw her, watching me from an upstairs window. Her face was pressed close to the screen, and her hair was dyed red at the ends, so it went from near-black by her scalp into this weird ombré effect. Her eyes were so dark from eyeliner that she might have put that on with a Sharpie, too.

  The music was loud, but when she called my name, somehow I heard it, even though she wasn’t shouting. “Tom Grendel,” she said, her voice all low and amazing.

  She shook her head and gave a lopsided smile. “I’ll come down,” she said.

  A minute later, she made her way down the deck stairs, and I followed her to the edge of the woods. She sat on an ancient tree stump, the light from the bonfire just reaching us.

  “So,” I said.

  “So. Tom Grendel,” she said. “Two nights in a row.” I wondered why she kept saying my first and last names together like that. It was a very Willow thing to do. I thought about coming right to the point, about the volume of the party, but I couldn’t stop looking at her. She has this very angular face that isn’t so much pretty as interesting and hard to look away from. As my eye traced her profile, I realized that her right ear was rimmed in a tattoo, which started at the crest of her ear, then followed the lobe down into a spiral. Celtic knot work, that kind of thing, and deep blue. Her left wrist was wrapped with about a dozen bracelet-like things: leather thongs laced through little silver plaques.

  “You Sharpied Colin Farnsworth’s head,” I said.

  She shrugged. “He paid me twenty bucks.”

  “He paid you for that?”

  “Well, to be fair, he may have been drunk at the time.”

  “You shaved a drunk boy’s head?”

  She laughed. I noticed that she still hadn’t looked at me face-on. “He’d already done that himself. I just embellished his scalp. I figured it couldn’t make things any worse.”

  I scraped my shoe through the dirt. “I guess not. Sorry about last night, by the way. With the beer.”

  “Mmm,” she said. “You owe me for thirty cents’ worth of laundry detergent.”

  I watched her watch some faraway place out in the woods, pulling her knees up to her chin and hugging her legs. “I hate this so much,” she said finally.

  “The party?” I asked.

  “The party. Being here. Being here without Minnie and Allie. Being here with Rex.” She stuck out her tongue sideways. “I just can’t believe my mom. She moves us out here and then leaves a week later, so we’re totally stuck. And Rex is such an unbelievable dick and now I can’t even get away from him.”

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “Out on a story,” she said. “You know, Hurricane Mandy’s expected to hit in a few days.”

  I sat down next to the stump, sensing this might be a long story. “I didn’t realize your mom covered the weather.”

  She snorted. “She doesn’t. But you know how whenever there’s a hurricane, every network has some jerk down on the beach getting blown all over the place? That’s Mom.” She pulled out the ends of her hair. “It’s because of her hair. It’s all long and blond and the network execs just love watching her get blown around like damn Rapunzel.”

  Back when I’d first met Willow at her aunts’ barbecues, her mom was just a sub-in for when the other reporters went on vacation, but about a year and a half ago she’d become a full-fledged reporter, and about that time her hair, which had originally been dark, dark brown like Willow’s, had suddenly become ash-blond. I asked Willow once what it was like to be related to a local celebrity, and that had been the one and only time she’d ever kissed me, her mouth tasting like the clove cigarette she’d smoked on a dare from her cousin. It seemed like everything I knew about Willow—which, admittedly, wasn’t much—came from before that moment. Afterward, she’d taken some pains to avoid me, and I’ve never been sure whether it was because of the kiss or the question I asked.

  “So,” I said. “So when is she coming back?”

  She put her head all the way back and twisted her hair up into a messy bun. “Who knows? Dad’s in Aruba or whatever. She’ll probably come back before school starts.”

  “So…does that mean you guys are switching schools?”

  “I don’t know, Tom,” she said bitterly. “I just go where they tell me.”

  I wanted, right then, to hold her hand really badly. To tell her I understood about getting jerked around and having your parents let you down. Of course, it wasn’t exactly my mom’s fault that she died, or my dad’s fault that he nearly got blown up, but still, I had an inkling of what it was like to feel the weight of a childhood you never got.

  I reached out and brushed my fingertips against hers, but she jerked away and I tucked my hand up under my other arm. “I’m so angry,” she said. “I’m just so angry.”

  I didn’t say anything, still feeling the sting of her retreating hand.

  “You know what I feel like? I feel like an egg, like there’s this shell on me, and there’s so much hate that it’s just leaking out all the pores. I just hate everyone.”

  “Do you hate me, too?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Wow.” I laughed. “You didn’t have to think much about that, did you?”

  “Well,” she said, finally turning toward me, her face against her knee. “To be fair, I probably hate you less than most of the others.”

  “I bet you say that to all the boys just before you Sharpie their scalps.”

  She reached out and brushed her hand against my bicep. “I don’t want you to fix things for me,” she said. “If that’s what you’re thinking this is.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said, and I suddenly wondered if she was drunk like everyone else at the party. There was something heavy about her voice. “So what do you want?”

  She let out a raspy breath. “I want to hate everyone until the shell breaks and shatters and I’m just this big ball of rage, and I want to hate and rage and hate and rage until it all burns out, and the only thing left is me without all the hating-everyone bits.”

  “Well,” I said. “So why don’t you?”

  She let her hand fall away from my arm. “I’m afraid that once it all burns out, there won’t be anything left.”

  We sat like that, watching people throw sticks on the bonfire and laugh at the resulting sparks. It was a hot night—too hot for a fire—and my shirt was sticking to me, but still, I played out in my head what would happen if I leaned just a little to the left, and she leaned a little back, and then I turned my head, and she turned hers, and then I kissed her. I wondered if she would still taste like cloves.

  I had just made up my mind to do it and started my leftward lean when a dirt clod hit me in the back of the head.

  I clutched my scalp and spun around without getting up. There was Rex, Colin Farnsworth with his shiny Celtic-mythos-patterned head, and three other guys who must have been Rex’s friends from Chambliss. Willow turned around and rolled her eyes before turning back toward the fire.

  “Is this, like, a freak lovefest?” Rex asked. “Is that what this is, Will? Are you getting it on with the freak next door?”

  “Screw you, Rex,” she drawled without turning around.

  Rex mock-clutched his chest. “Oooh. You burn me, Willow.”

  “I will,” she said. “Later.” And then she did what I never would have believed, given that I’d been about to kiss her and she knew it.

  She got up and went back in the house.

  I
stood up and watched her go, opening and closing my mouth like an idiot.

  “Well,” Rex said. “You really thought that was going someplace, didn’t you?”

  I cocked my head, trying to remember that I had actually not gone over there to pitch woo to Willow Rothgar. “Actually, I came to talk to you.”

  Rex laughed. “Really. And why’s that?”

  I shifted uncomfortably. Where was Ed? It suddenly occurred to me that I had not planned this well at all.

  “See,” I said. “Here’s the thing. You know, my dad and me, we live right there.” I pointed in the direction of my house with my thumb. “Right?”

  “This is fascinating stuff, freak.”

  “Well, the thing is, my dad, he doesn’t really do that well with loud noises.”

  He laughed again. “What, is your dad like some little punt-me dog? Is he a chinchilla or something?”

  “A Chihuahua,” someone muttered. Rex turned and shot him a dirty look.

  I got that sick, mad feeling that starts in your stomach and pushes out until you’re hot all over. “He’s a vet, actually.”

  “Oh, so he takes care of little Chihuahuas?”

  “Not a veterinarian,” I said. “A veteran. He was in Iraq. He’s got some…issues…and I was wondering—”

  “I don’t give two shits about your daddy’s issues.”

  I looked up sharply and glanced around at Rex’s friends. Colin Farnsworth, to his credit, at least had the decency to look surprised. Everyone else just seemed kind of bored. And drunk.

  “Hey,” I said. “You think I like that he almost got blown up? But he’s—”

  “Do. Not. Care.”

  I fumed, jumping ahead to my last resort: fear of The Law. “You are aware,” I said, “that every person at this party is underage and sucking down beer like mother’s milk?”

  Rex cracked his neck. “Are you threatening me?”

  I held up my hands. “Clearly not. I’m only suggesting that you are holding an illegal party on a street inhabited entirely by ladies over the age of seventy. If you keep the noise down, they’ll probably all sleep right through it. But with this”—I jabbed a finger in the direction of the speakers—“going on, one of them is going to call the cops.”

  Rex took a slow step toward me. “I don’t care to be threatened, little guy. And I think you are no longer invited to this surrey.”

  “Soirée,” someone said.

  He grabbed one of my arms around the bicep, and some guy in a seasonally inappropriate flannel shirt grabbed my other arm, and it was right then that I realized that, damn, I really am skinny, and I should probably do something about that.

  Between the two of them, they carried me into the woods, and the next thing I knew, somebody else had shoved someone’s shirt over my head, so everything was pitch-black and stank of beer and body odor.

  For the first time that night, I found myself angry at my father, because the world was a deep, dark, scary place and I was in it, and my father had never bothered to teach me to throw a decent punch. Would it have been so terrible, I wondered, just to teach me to land a couple of good hits when the situation called for it?

  Then I felt awful, because none of this was his fault. It was Rex’s for being a jerk, and mine for not handling it.

  I started shouting, using every expletive I ever learned and inventing some new ones, but the music was louder, and I couldn’t hear anything besides my own voice until we headed further into the trees, and then I just heard Rex and the rest of them shouting at each other and laughing, over the sounds of feet rustling the leaves on the ground.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I shouted.

  Somebody smacked me in the back of the head, and someone poured one beer, and then another, through the neck hole of the shirt that was over my face and reached down to rub it into my hair. It would take days, I knew, to wash out the smell.

  “Call the cops now, princess,” someone said.

  I could tell by the sounds of the footsteps now that we were on the wooden dock that leads out to the middle of the lake behind our houses, and I really started to struggle, because there are snakes in that lake, and I don’t mean, like, cute little garter snakes. I mean like copperheads and water moccasins.

  “Dude,” I said. “No. NO. You are not throwing me into—”

  But they were, and they did. Somebody grabbed my legs, someone else my arms, and they flung me up in a high arc.

  I hit the water on my side and came up stinging and panting as I tried to pry the wet shirt away from my mouth. There was a lot of whooping and hooting, and when I finally got the shirt off my head, I could see the guys standing over me on the dock, looking on impassively as I flailed around. Rex leaned down to the edge of the dock, so his face was maybe fifteen feet from mine. The moonlight made his face craggy and menacing.

  He said, “Stay away from my house, and stay away from my sister, Grendel.”

  I swam down the lake so that I could get out closer to my own house. Ed was standing on the bank when I got there. He waved at me while I staggered out of the water.

  “How long have you been standing there?” I gasped, collapsing onto the ground by his feet.

  “I walked down after you started swimming this way. Grendel,” he said, “you are really going to have to stop pissing people off. I can’t always be there to save your sorry ass.”

  I wiped my wet, beer-scented hair out of my eyes. “I don’t actually mean to piss them off.”

  “Sure you don’t.”

  “What I don’t get is why the police haven’t already been here. There’s just no way Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Werm are sleeping through this.”

  “See, if you talked to people before going off half-nutted, you’d find out things like this the easy way. The police did come, about half an hour ago.”

  I looked up at him, and he hauled me up by the arm. “So why’s the party still going on? Why isn’t everyone in the drunk tank downtown?”

  “Because Rex Rothgar paid McCulsky off with two hundred-dollar bills.” Officer McCulsky was the deputy who patrolled our part of town. If he’d been paid off, we wouldn’t get somebody else, at least not tonight.

  “Damn.”

  “Indeed.”

  “I was just coming out to tell you this when I saw you getting into it with Herr Doucheface himself. That was some uninspired work, by the way.”

  “Yeah, I maybe could have handled that better.” I pulled my wet shirt away from my chest. “What the hell am I going to do now?”

  We were almost at my house then, and I could see that my dad’s car was still gone. I wondered how long he’d stay away.

  “Well,” he said. “Appealing to his sense of honor and decency didn’t work, and the cops are out. What does that leave?”

  A piece of gravel had embedded itself in the tread of my shoe. I knew I needed to pry it out, but I was so bone-tired I just let it poke me every time I put my foot down.

  I said, “There’s a rock in my shoe.”

  Ed said, “Dude. Is that, like, a metaphorical rock?”

  “No. It’s a literal rock.”

  “Well. Good. Then I suggest taking off your literal shoe.”

  I cast a glance back at the Rothgars’ house, bathed in orange light from the bonfire. “That won’t help.”

  Dad was sitting, bleary-eyed, at the table with a cup of tarlike coffee when I came into the kitchen the next morning.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said.

  “Good morning, Tom. There’s a babka by the toaster, if you want some.” I looked over, and there was indeed one of Dad’s famous chocolate babkas on my mother’s old blue china plate. The things take three or four hours to make since the dough has to rise, and this one didn’t even look like it was still warm, which meant he probably hadn’t slept at all last night.

  The first time my father ever baked anything was two weeks after my mother died. I came home from school, and he was in the kitchen surrounded by trays of burned chocolat
e chip cookies, looking like I’d just caught him at something sordid and embarrassing (which I had: the cookies were terrible). He progressed to coffee cakes and madeleines in the months that followed, all made from my mother’s falling-apart copy of Joy of Cooking.

  According to my sister, lots of men turn to alcohol or drugs after their wives die. Our father turned to bundt cake.

  He didn’t start with the yeast breads until after Iraq, though. I think it began as some kind of physical therapy, all the kneading and stuff, but that didn’t explain why he tended to do it in the middle of the night. It was a thing to do, a mindless, physical, nonaggressive thing that seemed to get him through those awful hours when it’s too late to go to bed and too early to get up. The babka was my grandmother’s recipe.

  I didn’t particularly want to eat chocolate babka at seven in the morning, but I cut a piece anyway. The chocolate was still a little soft, but just barely. “Thanks, Dad. It smells great.”

  I sat down across from him and ate the babka out of my hand. “So,” I said. “What time do you think you’ll be home from work?”

  He pushed his coffee mug across the table. “I needed to talk to you about that, Tom. They want to send me down to Tampa for a while. I was trying to get them to send John Garten instead, but they’re insisting it has to be me, so I can’t get out of it.”

  I set my babka down on a napkin, wondering about the vast difference between can’t and don’t want to. I nodded. “Will you be back by the weekend?”

  “Um,” he said, “I’m afraid not. I’ll be there until the twenty-sixth.” Today was the twelfth. I counted the days on my fingers.

  “Oh,” I said. “So, like, two weeks?”

  “I think Mrs. Coffey will be fine to look in on you while I’m gone,” he said. “But if you want, I can call your grandmother to come and stay with you.”

  Mrs. Coffey was the neighbor across the street who brought me casseroles and made sure I didn’t die when Dad had to go out of town for a night or two every now and then. He’d never been gone more than three days, though. Never for two weeks. Not since he’d been deployed. I shifted in my chair; the cushion was loose and slid off the front.