“Please?” I pinched the weird flabby skin on his elbow and gave it a twist.
He said we could, “but only once through,” and put the can of soda on the coffee table, next to his pack of cigarettes and one of the Viking’s balloon-dragons. He came back with a plastic bag with the VCR in one hand and the VHS tape in the other.
I helped him set up the VCR by plugging the cords into their holes in the TV, putting the red cord into the red hole and the yellow cord into the yellow one, while Gert balanced the VCR on top of the DVD player.
Then I sat on the couch and he put in the videocassette.
The TV was fuzzy at first and then everything became clear. Gert turned up the volume so we could hear the laughter.
In the video we are by the beach. Gert and Mom are wearing sunglasses and their blond hair shines in the sun. The wind makes the waves of the ocean lap against the sand. I am very small and wearing a pink bathing suit, and I have sunglasses on too—big green ones that cover half my face.
“Do your handstand,” Mom says to me, and I am doing a handstand and Gert is holding one of my ankles, and Mom is laughing and holds the other and I am upside down. The waves splash into us, and then we are suddenly running down the beach, all three of us, and shouting as the camera follows us.
We are happy and wet. There are seagulls in the air and no clouds, so they look like letters of the alphabet flying through the sky.
“Where was this again?”
“Florida,” Gert said. “Outside of Fort Lauderdale. We went here on vacation in—”
I closed my eyes. “Nineteen ninety-four,” I said. “I was six years old.”
“You got it.”
The entire video is eleven minutes, then a TV show about the Amazon jungle comes on that someone accidentally taped over the beach video halfway through. The last thing the video shows is Mom laughing as Gert takes the camera and puts it right in her face, her teeth white and her lips wide and her hand pushes the camera away while she laughs like a famous person who does not want to be videotaped.
Then Gert hit STOP and the TV became black again. I had been holding my breath without realizing it and had to catch it.
“All right, time for bed,” Gert said, taking the tape out and putting it into its case.
We did not talk about how Dad was behind the camera, the one who was running after us on the beach, or how the only time I can remember seeing him is when the camera looks down at his bare, hairy feet.
* * *
Vikings spend a lot of time talking about people who are dead, especially those who have died bravely in battle. Our mother died of cancer, not fighting other people, though when Gert tells it sometimes it sounds like a kind of battle: her fighting against a tribe of villains inside her body.
He told me that her hair fell out, that she became skinny and died because they were poisoning her. I don’t remember her being poisoned with radiation, which is invisible. I don’t remember much of anything about her. In the pictures around our apartment, she looks beautiful and blond, which is the hair color of all the famous Viking women.
Gert is blond, when he has his hair and doesn’t shave it. I have dark hair, which is almost black. I do not shave it. Gert will not let me. At times I feel like I should have blond hair too, since I am the one who knows everything about Vikings, then I remind myself that hair color doesn’t make anyone a Viking.
Deeds and actions are what will make a person great and legendary.
Our father named Gert Gert because it is a traditional German name. Gert does not know that I found his box of pictures of our father, which he got after our mother died. There is a photo of our father on a bed, without his shirt, smoking a cigarette. He has a shaved head and tattoos and a mustache and looks very much like Gert. There is another one of him on a motorcycle and Mom hanging on to his stomach, with her arms around him. He has a leather jacket and no helmet, even though riding a motorcycle without a helmet is against the rules and dangerous because if you crack your skull your brains could come out.
We do not know what happened to him. Gert says that he was arrested for breaking into houses and then when he got out of prison he did not come back to the family.
“He’s probably six feet under,” Gert said, meaning dead and buried under the ground.
We are not allowed to talk about Dad, and only sometimes allowed to talk about Mom. Gert does not like to talk about either of them very much.
I don’t know very much about our mother, except what Gert told me. I make up stories about her and tell them to everyone. Vikings believe that telling stories here, on earth, will make a person in Valhalla very happy, and the best way to make someone happy is to make them into a legend that everyone talks about.
That is why I tell people my mother fought off fifty million boatloads of cancers with a single sword.
“She was the bravest woman to ever live,” I tell people.
Before going to bed, I took the photo of Mom that I had in a frame on my desk and, in my head so that I didn’t wake anybody else, sung her praise. If you think about someone before going to sleep, sometimes you dream of them. In my dreams sometimes I think that Mom died and became a Valkyrie, that one day, when I am in a battle, she will take me with her to Valhalla.
chapter two
It is important to have a schedule to follow, so that everyone knows where you are and you know what to do.
For example:
On Mondays, I go to the library after breakfast to read the books about Vikings. Gert comes home from school and we have lunch together. I like to also play basketball on Mondays, on the basketball court outside of the apartment building.
On Tuesdays, I see Dr. Laird during the day for one hour, then I have Recreation Time at the Community Center.
On Wednesdays, I go to the library to read National Geographic magazine, to see if any new Viking pictures are in them. I also like to look at the pictures of animals.
On Thursdays, Gert and I see Dr. Laird together. Gert has no classes on Thursdays, so we go somewhere fun together on that day too.
On Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, I go to the Community Center for Recreation Time, Literacy Class, or Social Class.
My birthday party was on a Monday, and the next morning was Tuesday, so according to the schedule I would be seeing Dr. Laird.
Normally we leave the house at 11:15 a.m. in order to get to Dr. Laird’s by 12 p.m. Today, Gert said, our schedule was different. He had gotten a very important call and said we would eat breakfast earlier and leave the house earlier, because we had a place we needed to go first.
“Is it another birthday surprise?” I asked.
“More like an errand,” Gert said, and he told me not to worry about it.
With Gert, I do not mind going to new places. If I am alone, I do not like new places, since it’s easy to become lost and kidnapped and held for ransom.
I also like Gert’s car, which he keeps very clean and shiny.
* * *
The place Gert took me to before Dr. Laird’s was not a place I had been before. There were a bunch of houses with dead flowers and lawns that looked like they hadn’t been cut in a long time. All of the houses were orange and yellow and looked very tired. Some had shrubs, and the leaves were brown and the grass on the lawns was brown and thirsty for water.
Gert pulled over by one of the houses, with a metal front door that had no screen. In front were two white plastic lawn chairs.
He parked the car and unbuckled his seat belt and turned the music off and the car engine grumbled until it was quiet.
“Where are we?” I asked. “These houses look sick.”
“Nowhere. Just chill out and I’ll be back in a couple minutes.”
“One hundred and twenty seconds,” I said. “Which is two minutes.”
“I don’t mean literally two minutes,” Gert said.
“So then literally how long?”
He sighed. “Fifteen minutes. Tops. But if I take longe
r, don’t freak out.”
This is a problem Gert has: he likes to not be precise, a Word of Today that I use a lot because it helps me know exactly what to expect. When you are the opposite of precise, imprecise or very general, people do not know when something is going to happen, or how.
I set my watch for fifteen minutes.
“Will that give us enough time to get to Dr. Laird’s? Because he gets angry when you make me late.”
“We’ll be fine. Plenty of time. Now roll down the windows so you don’t boil to death.”
Gert walked up the sidewalk toward the house, to the door, and I smelled my armpits. He knocked and it opened, and he went inside. After rolling the windows down I took out my phone and texted Marxy and asked him what he was doing. He texted back and said Nothing and asked what I was doing, and I said waiting for Gert to come out of a house so we could go to Dr. Laird’s.
He sent a smiley face that was kissing and hearts and said his mother told him to put his phone away. I sent him a picture of a smiley face and sunglasses, and also a fist emoticon to show that we were powerful.
Across the street, a woman in a green bikini sat in front of two young children who were splashing in a blue plastic pool. They started wrestling with each other and the woman in the bikini told them to quit roughhousing. They kept going so she put down her drink and got up and grabbed the child who had started the wrestling by the arm. She pulled him up and pulled down his pants and started hitting his backside until he started crying.
I did not want to keep looking at that.
In my opinion, parents should never hit their children. Uncle Richard used to hit Gert when he was younger. AK47 says it leads to emotional problems.
I turned away from the woman and watched the house Gert went into, which was number 334.
The time was 10:41 a.m. Eleven minutes had passed by. My appointment with Dr. Laird was always at 12 p.m.
We had exactly one hour and nineteen minutes to get there.
Since I did not know where we were, I could not do my problem-solving and minus the time it would take to drive from where we were to Dr. Laird’s office, which is downtown.
Gert came out of the house and walked to the car. It had been twelve minutes.
“Come in with me,” he said.
“But you said I should stay here.”
“I know. But this is going to take a bit longer than I thought.”
“We have one hour and seventeen minutes before we have to be at Dr. Laird’s,” I said, and Gert told me it would be fine, that we had plenty of time.
While walking I tried to take Gert’s hand and he did not want to hold hands. “Not now,” he said, and before we got to the door he told me to try not to say anything. “Just be quiet, and if you get asked questions, just answer them with as few words as possible. Okay?”
“Why are we here?” I asked.
“Got it?”
He took my wrist and squeezed it until it started hurting. I pulled my hand away.
“Got it, okay. Jeez. Hurting children causes emotional unstability as adults,” I said, and the woman in the green bikini watched us, while one of the children cried. He would be emotionally unstable when he got older.
That was a fact.
Inside, the house smelled like cigarettes and marijuana smoke. There was the sound of a toilet flushing and a door opened down the hall. Then a large man with tattoos came out and opened his arms. Gert said that his name was Toucan and that he was very important, so I should be polite. Toucan had a cigarette in his mouth and didn’t care when the ash fell off it and onto the floor.
“So you are the famous Zelda,” he said to me, and he dabbed Gert and held out his hand to dab me.
I stared at his hand.
“Is my hand dirty?” he asked me, and looked at Gert. “Why isn’t she dabbing?”
Gert said, “It’s one of her things. Zelda, come on. Dab the man.”
One of my rules is that I use dabs for people who I like, or who have earned my respect. Hugs are for members of my tribe only. I do not like being touched at all by strangers, and do not like being in places with a lot of people.
Gert gave me THE LOOK and so I held out my hand and dabbed Toucan’s hand.
“I asked Gert to bring you in so we could meet,” he said. “Plus it’s hot as hell out there and I didn’t want you cooking in the car. We’re going to be seeing a lot of each other, so I’d prefer you weren’t, you know, burnt to a crisp.”
“I’m not that famous,” I said.
Nobody took off their shoes, which meant that the Rules of the House here were different from those at home. Most houses allow you to wear shoes, and so I kept mine on.
“Mi casa es su casa,” Toucan said. He stopped. “You know what it means?”
“My house is your house,” Gert said.
Toucan took his cigarette out of his mouth and moved it around while he talked. “True. Now, do you know where it came from?” He was looking at me so I shook my head and said I did not know. Toucan continued explaining. “When Cortés first met Montezuma, the king of the Aztecs, Montezuma said, ‘This is your house.’ You know who Cortés was, Zelda?”
“He was an explorer.”
Toucan nodded. “The right word is conquistador. And you know what they did to the Aztecs?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Toucan bent over until his cigarette was close to my face.
“He fucked them and took everything and killed them all.”
I coughed from the cigarette smoke going into my face. It was quiet for a second.
Then Toucan laughed. Gert laughed too, not a serious laugh, but a quiet one. I did not know what was funny.
“He sounds like a shit-heel,” I said. “Cortés.”
“He was a badass motherfucker, is what he was. Now. Come, I need to talk to your brother about some things, so we’ll set you up in here.”
Toucan brought us to the living room, where there was a couch and a big TV. The carpet needed to be cleaned. We also have carpets in our apartment, and once a month Gert drives to the grocery store and rents a machine to wash the floor in our apartment, which gets very dirty after a while, even when we take off our shoes. Toucan for sure needed that machine.
At a round table in the living room some people were playing cards and smoking cigarettes. Toucan clapped his hands and they stopped playing their card game.
“Everyone. I am pleased to introduce Zelda, Gert’s sister. Zelda, this is the gang.”
I waved. “Hello, gang.”
All of them turned to me and I felt like a stick standing around trees.
They started playing cards again. Toucan threw his cigarette so that it landed right in the middle of the table.
“She said, ‘Hello, gang.’ ”
The gang put their cards down and each of them said hello to me. Toucan took out another cigarette and lit it.
“We’ve got some good games, Zelda,” Toucan said, pointing to the TV. “Have a seat on the couch there.”
I sat after Gert gave me a slow nod to show that it was okay. Toucan asked if I wanted anything. “Like a soda or something?”
I said I was thirsty and he asked one of the card players to bring me a Coke. “We’ve got the new NBA game. You like basketball, right?”
“We actually can’t stay that long,” Gert said.
I checked my watch. “We have one hour and twelve minutes until we have to be somewhere else.”
“Relax,” Toucan said, patting Gert on the back. “Plenty of time.”
Toucan pointed to one of the people playing cards and told him to set me up. “Get her going on some NBA2K,” Toucan said.
Gert told me he’d be right back. “I won’t be long,” he said.
And then he and Toucan went down the hall, talking in low voices. They looked like two large Vikings.
The person who was setting it up had low-hanging black Nike shorts so that you could see the top of his butt while he pulled out cords and untangled
the controller. It was almost as bad to look at that as the woman who was hitting her child.
He handed the controller to me.
“Make sure when you play you do a new account,” he said. “I don’t want you fucking with my season.”
He went back to playing cards with the gang.
I drank my soda and began playing. The game was very good. I had played older versions of it at the Community Center, during Games Nights, and I picked the Boston Celtics, who were my favorite team, even though nobody else liked them. Everyone else liked either the Lakers or the Warriors. People thought that the Celtics were boring.
I played for a while. I won one of the games, against the Denver Nuggets, and then lost to the San Antonio Spurs, who were the champions, so their team was very good. They are boring to watch on television but get things done on the basketball court. Gert likes that they do not get fancy and do things like behind-the-back passes or dribble too much. They pass a lot and are like a good tribe doing battle and working together instead of trying to do everything on their own.
The people playing cards drank beer and kept smoking. The house was full of smoke. I finished my can of soda and put it on the coffee table, next to the ashtray, which was very full. One of them got up and left because he had run out of money, and the others tried to get him to stay but he left anyway. After he left, another person left too.
After winning another game, I checked my watch. Twenty-one minutes. Gert had been gone for a while.
I put down the controller and I walked over to the people playing cards. I stood behind the person who had set up the NBA2K and watched the game. There were five people left playing cards and they all wore baseball caps and had tattoos.
There was money and cigarettes in piles in front of them. One was smoking from a vaporizer box. I knew that many people stopped smoking regular cigarettes and instead smoked from the boxes because they smelled better and looked like bathroom steam whenever it breathed out. The man was very large and fat and looked at me over his shoulder.
“Can I help you?” the Fat Man asked.
When We Were Vikings Page 2
