Grendel's Guide to Love and War

by A. E. Kaplan

  Ed frowned. “That’s a tall order. We’ve tried unpleasant musical interludes, power outages, and invasions of livestock. So what’s left?”

  Zip picked up the celery and tossed it into the air. It landed with a splat in the kitchen sink. “I don’t know. Rain of toads? Blood in the Nile?”

  I smiled. “You’re thinking in the right direction.”

  “What? A biblical plague?”

  I shook my head. Ed swirled the ice in his drink. “You’re hoping for a natural disaster?”

  I nodded. “Not hoping. Manufacturing.”

  “What,” said Zip. “A thunderstorm?”

  “Bigger.”

  “Hurricane?”

  “Bigger.”

  Zip laughed incredulously. “Tornado?”

  I leaned back with my arms laced behind my head. “Bigger.”

  Ed said, “Bigger than a tornado. I think you may be having delusions of grandeur, Grendel.”

  I rocked forward in my chair and stood up.

  I’d waited eight years to find my mother’s painting. Eight years of wondering about it, when I could have just gone and found it. I’d made excuse after excuse: it was too far, I was afraid of upsetting Dad, I was afraid of not finding it. But eight years of hedging and refusing to act had done nothing but make me feel like an idiot in the end.

  I’d done the same thing with my dad. I should have pushed him into therapy. I should have called someone at the VA and demanded more help. I should have stopped letting him think that I was okay with things the way they were.

  I was done letting things go.

  I’d lost my one perfect memory of my mother, and I wasn’t in the mood to lose anything else. I was doing this for my dad, for Zipora, for my neighbors. And I was doing it for myself.

  I put my hand on Ed’s shoulder. “No,” I said. “This is not a delusion.” When he raised an eyebrow, I made a fist and pounded it against the middle of the table. “This is going to be a victory of epic, magnificent proportions. Wolf Gates is going to look each of us in the face and know that we took him down. That we pulled something so huge he never in his life could have seen it coming. He’s going to be outwitted, outmanned, and outclassed, and that weenie rat bastard is going to know it was by us.”

  I held up my hands, framing the view of the yard.

  “Volcano.”

  Zip stared at me blankly. A grin broke out across Ed’s face, slowly at first and then all at once. He chuckled and raised his glass to me. “Guile?” he asked.

  I clinked glasses with him. “Guile.”

  There are sixty-four houses in our neighborhood, including mine and the Rothgars’. I figured it would take me five minutes per house to talk to everyone in the neighborhood, which would work out to around five hours.

  You cannot talk to sixty-two old ladies in five hours.

  I ate pie. I looked at pictures of grandchildren. I collected money, because this brand of guile wasn’t going to come cheap. And I found out some things I hadn’t known about the relationship between the ladies of Lake Heorot and the Rothgar family.

  Some of the party guests had parked their cars on Mrs. Cicely’s front lawn and ruined her zinnias (I promised to help her replant). Wolf or Rex—most of the ladies didn’t seem to be able to tell them apart—had knocked down Cookie Schwartz’s mailbox last week without leaving a note (she heard about it later from Mrs. Lee). Dozens of people told me the parties had woken them up at least twice.

  In short, the Rothgars had been very, very bad neighbors.

  At the end, Mrs. Lee met me on her front porch, which was still full of extra chairs and bowls of snack mix from the book club.

  “This place,” she said, “was for us. And they’re driving us out.” She grabbed my arm. “You tell me where to be, Tom, and I’ll be there. I’ll call every old bat on this street if I have to.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I said, pretty sure I’d have a bruise where she’d been holding on to my elbow. “We’ll fix this. I promise.”

  Eight and a half hours after I’d started, I was hoarse and exhausted, but I still had one neighbor left to visit. I straightened my shirt, ran my fingers through my hair, and knocked on Mrs. Werm’s door, which was cracked an inch. When no one answered, I swung it open. “Hello?” I called, pushing my way inside. I turned toward the kitchen, where Virginia Werm was reading the newspaper with her eye patch pushed up onto her forehead. I accidentally bumped the doorjamb with my elbow, and she startled.

  Underneath her eye patch, a perfectly sound left eye glanced up and stared straight at me. There was a small scar under the eyebrow.

  “You,” she snarled, snapping the patch back over the purportedly lost eye Martha Stewart had paid for.

  “I…I…uh…I knocked. I called. The door—”

  “If you ever tell anyone about this—”

  “I won’t!”

  “I will shoot you dead!”

  To be honest, I was getting kind of used to the threats on my life. I wondered if my father had had any idea how unsafe this neighborhood was when we moved in.

  I held up my hands. “Ma’am, what goes on under a lady’s eye patch is none of my business. I’m just here to tell you about the plan.”

  She was still sputtering and red in the face, but as I told her about the plan, her expression started to soften. Afterward, she gave me a smile that showed way too many teeth and said, “I may not shoot you after all.”

  It was moonless and pitch-black by the time we started dragging things out to the woods behind the Rothgars’ the next night. The people at Party City were understandably dubious when Ed tried telling them we were setting up a haunted house. In July.

  We ran back and forth between Ed’s RAV4 and the woods with all of our various supplies: three speakers, five fog machines, several bottles of fog juice to go inside the fog machines. Some ancient hard-boiled eggs. A megaphone. A strobe light. And about fifty extra batteries because nothing would have been worse than setting this up and running out of power.

  We set up in the woods between the lake and the Rothgars’, and it took us three trips to get everything back there. My cell phone bounced in my pocket. Zip had, under protest, lent hers to Virginia Werm.

  “Someone’s going to see us carrying all this stuff,” Zip said. “I can’t believe we’re doing this!”

  “You said you thought this was a good plan!”

  “That was before I knew you planned on dragging the entire contents of a Party City through the woods!”

  “Guys,” Ed said. “The stuff’s all here. The thing is, the foggers can’t be way back here. The smoke’ll dissipate before it gets out of the woods.”

  “If we set up closer, they’ll see,” Zip said.

  “We’ll have to camouflage them.”

  “I’m having second thoughts,” Zip said. “These people have to know there’s no volcano in Virginia.”

  “Zipora, most of these people are too drunk to find Virginia on a map. We’re good,” I said.

  “Fine. Then let’s start with the foggers.”

  We found a couple of hollowed-out logs, which we snuck within spitting distance of the tree line. “We need the fog juice,” I said to Zip. “And the eggs.”

  The eggs were to float in the juice inside the fog machines to give the vapors the sulfuric aroma that would make things smell plausibly volcanic. Zip returned with the carton, fanning her face after she handed it to me. “God, these are rank. What did you do to them?”

  “Mrs. Cicely found them in the bottom of her crisper, left over from Easter. Also, I peeled them last night and left them out on the porch. Let’s do four in each machine.”

  We slid the peeled eggs into the foggers, along with the juice. “I hope the smell washes out of these machines,” Ed said. “Or we’re never getting our deposit back.”

  “Not worried about the deposit right now,” I said, pouring in the last of the fog juice. “Okay. The manual says it takes three or four minutes for the machines to wa
rm up. Let’s set up the speakers first.”

  We had three, for a surround-sound effect.

  “Should we start with the noise or the strobe?” Ed asked.

  “The noise, I think. People might not notice the strobe unless they’re already looking over here.” I finished taping the red gel in front of the light. “I think we’re ready to go.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  I picked up my phone. “Mrs. Werm?”

  “We’re here,” she snarled.

  “Okay,” I said. “Here we go.”

  The timing, I’d explained to Zip and Ed, had to be perfect. The call to 911 had to be placed just before the actual riot started, to ensure that Wolf would be unable to do anything about a call that might come through on the police scanner.

  I pointed toward the fog cannons, which for all the world reminded me of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” and recited, “ ‘Cannon to right of them / Cannon to left of them…’ ”

  Zip gave a wolfish grin. “ ‘Boldly they rode and well / Into the jaws of Death! / Into the mouth of Hell!’ ”

  Ed said, “Didn’t all the guys in that poem get killed?”

  I said, “Turn on the foggers.”

  Ed and Zip warmed up the foggers, crouching low to the ground to avoid detection from the yard, which was already full of semi-intoxicated teenagers and the sounds of bad music. We crouched behind the fallen logs, waiting for the noxious, rotten-egg-scented fog to start blowing toward the yard. “Wow, that really does stink,” Ed said.

  “Should we wait for people to notice the fog first?”

  “If we do that, they might come over here and start poking around. Wait for it to hit the lawn and let’s go.”

  The fog started to inch over the grass, crawling along like something out of a haunted house and smelling like the insides of a thousand Porta-Johns.

  I took a deep breath and called 911.

  “Help!” I shouted into the phone. “I’m at 212 Lake Heorot Lane, and there’s a riot or something! There are armed men breaking into the house!” At that, Zip let out an Oscar-worthy scream. “Oh God, please come quick!”

  I hung up and nodded at Ed. “Go go go,” I said, and we ran in two different directions to man our respective speakers. I hit the recording of the air-raid siren first, with the volume at maximum. Zip and Ed clapped their hands over their ears, and I reached for the megaphone.

  “Alert,” I shouted. The megaphone shrieked and I tried again. “Alert. Mount Saint Helens has gone critical. Repeat. Mount Saint Helens has gone critical. Evacuate this area immediately. Repeat. Evacuate to higher ground immediately.”

  “Mount Saint Helens?” Zip hissed. “Really?”

  “Drunk idiots,” I said, switching off the megaphone. “Remember?”

  I hit the air-raid siren again, and then Ed hit the thunder-slash-eruption recording. It started with a low rumble and then built. When it reached its climax, Zip hit the strobe, which filled the woods with a slow-motion flashing red light.

  The people in the yard, who by now were totally engulfed in sulfur-imbued fog, started to scream.

  They dropped their cups and scrambled, running into each other in an attempt to get to their cars. The thunder cracked again, and there were more screams.

  I got a text from Mrs. Werm.

  Sirens.

  I nodded at Ed and Zip. “Let’s go.”

  Ed pulled some branches over our speakers, which were still roaring with volcanic noise, and we ran through the Rothgars’ side yard toward the front of the house, behind a crowd of kids trying to get to the driveway.

  There was a gunshot, a huge one, and everyone hit the ground. I looked up from where I was crouched on the grass to see Mrs. Werm with a .22 held up over her head.

  Behind her was the entire population of Lake Heorot Lane.

  They stood as one, with walkers, canes, and orthopedic shoes, and they were pissed.

  “I have had enough!” Werm screamed. “This horseshit stops now, or I start shooting you little bastards one by one! There isn’t a damned jury in the state of Virginia that would convict me!” She took aim at Wolf Gates. In the dark, I couldn’t tell if she had the safety on. Everyone ran.

  “I think,” said Ed from the ground, “that this constitutes a riot.”

  Then there were sirens. Lots of them. Zip grabbed me by the arm, trying to drag me back to our house, but I was rooted to the ground. It was all so surreal.

  One of the cops was shouting through a bullhorn for people to stay where they were, but when faced with the choice between volcano and jail, most people picked the volcano and bolted en masse into the woods.

  Mrs. Werm rested the butt of her gun on the ground, and Ed, Zip, and I moved behind her, back in the direction of my house.

  “Did you tell her to shoot people?” Zip asked me, her voice rising into a shriek.

  “No! She was just supposed to keep everyone from leaving before the cops got here!”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rex heading for the front door. Regina Lee stormed out from behind me. “Oh no you don’t, you little weasel,” she muttered, then shouted, “You! Rothgar! You come here right now! You and I are going to have a conversation!”

  Rex froze with his hand on the doorknob, appearing to wonder whether he could make it into the house before she got there.

  “We’re armed, you idiot,” Mrs. Werm hollered.

  Rex lowered his hand from the door and turned around, slumping back in the direction of the neighbors. Mrs. Lee jabbed him in the chest with her finger. “You rotten little cow turd! Minnie Taylor was my best friend, and she invited you into her home, and look what you’ve done with it!” She waved her arms around for emphasis. “You’ve destroyed the place!”

  Rex did the wrong thing. He smirked.

  Mrs. Lee hauled her ten-pound purse behind her shoulder and flung it into the side of his head.

  “Ow!” he said. “Hey!” She whacked him again, and then again. Cowed, Rex held up his hands and protested.

  “Why are you blaming me for all this?” he cried. “Blame Wolf—half of this was his idea!”

  “We’ll deal with him later,” she snarled. “We’re not done with you yet.” She hit him one last time and then, probably because her arm was getting tired, reached out and twisted his ear.

  One of the cops, the one with the bullhorn, approached Mrs. Werm and pointed toward her rifle. “Did you fire that thing?”

  “There was a raccoon,” she said. “It appeared rabid.”

  “Ginny, you know better than to have a gun out here. Go on home. I’d hate to have to call your probation officer.”

  “Officer McCulsky,” she said. “I am a taxpayer, and you are neglecting your duty to the citizens of this street!”

  He stared at the line of angry women backing Werm up, and then down at his shoes, and then over his shoulder at the rest of the officers, who were chasing drunk teenagers into the woods. Then he sucked his teeth and turned around. “Go on home, Ginny.”

  Then, from around the side of the house, I saw Wolf sprinting into the woods.

  I ran after him.

  I’m not as fast as Ed, not even on my best day, but I was stone-cold sober and mad as hell, and, damn it, no matter what else happened, Wolf Gates was leaving in the back of a cop car tonight. Wolf was threading his way through clusters of partygoers, who were running aimlessly to and fro like headless chickens. I caught up with him right after he made it through the tree line. I hurtled forward and took him out by the legs with a flying tackle.

  He rolled over and planted a foot on my forehead, kicking himself free. I let go, but he was still too stunned to get up, so we both lay on the ground, panting.

  “Christ, Grendel,” Wolf said. “I’ve really had enough of you.”

  “Good,” I said. “Then it’s time for you to leave.”

  He laughed. “I’m sure you think you’ve won something here, but it doesn’t mean anything. You’re ju
st some stunted little Boo Radley who can’t even have fun at a party.”

  I rolled over and rubbed my ribs. “This was never about the parties. This was about being a decent human being. But you don’t give a damn about anyone else, and you never will.”

  He pushed off the ground and sat up. “Decency,” he said, “is a concept invented by losers to get laid.” He laughed again. “Just ask Willow.”

  Something bright and angry flashed behind my eyes and I lunged for him.

  “Sore subject?” he asked, shoving me away and pushing himself backward a few feet.

  I saw a flashlight approaching from across the lawn and I tackled him back to the ground. He kicked at me, and I grabbed at him, coming away with his shoe and a scratch across my face.

  He kicked me in the shoulder, but I grabbed onto his calf and held on. “Idiot,” he said. “We’re both going to get arrested, asshole!”

  “I’m a minor and I’m sober,” I said into the back of his knee. Wolf, being neither of those things, swallowed and, for the first time, looked worried. He tried to get up again, and I shoved him back down. I told him, “I know at least fifty people who like me enough to bail me out tonight. How about you?” I smiled grimly. “Who’s going to bail you out, asshole?”

  He stared at me, glassy-eyed, and I realized that there was not one person who would come to Wolf’s rescue.

  A cop grabbed me by the shoulder. “Okay, boys,” he said. “The party’s over.” He cuffed my hands behind my back while another cop patted Wolf down.

  “What’s in your pocket, kid?”

  Wolf’s eyes went huge. “Nothing. There is nothing in my…” But the cop was already pulling a plastic bag out of his pants.

  “This one’s got a joint!” the cop called. “Samson, you’re buying the rounds tonight!”

  “That’s not mine,” Wolf said quickly. “That kid”—he nodded at me—“must have planted it on me when he tackled me just now. I saw him selling those earlier. It must be the only one he had left.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I shouted. “No. NO. You can’t believe anything he says!”