When We Were Vikings

by Andrew David MacDonald

  “I’m just watching,” I said.

  I had seen Gert playing poker before, in high school, and Uncle Richard used to play too. You put money in the middle and the winner who had the best cards got all the money. If you didn’t want to put money in, you could also put cigarettes. That was what Gert did during high school. Uncle Richard liked playing for money.

  The Fat Man I was standing behind ended up losing.

  “Man, you’re bad luck,” he told me. “Go stand behind someone else.”

  “I got something you can sit on,” said the poker player who had a red hat on. “Come on over here.”

  The Fat Man told him to shut his mouth. “That’s Gert’s sister.”

  The man in the red hat looked me up and down. “Doesn’t look like Gert’s sister to me,” he said, and then patted his knee and said to come on over.

  I decided to sit on one of the empty chairs, beside the person who had just won the last hand. He was thin and had his face hairs shaved into something called a Chin Strap that is thin and goes from your ears along the chin, like the straps you use to keep a bicycle helmet from falling off your head.

  He stuck out his hand and said his name was Hendo.

  “All right, Zelda,” Hendo said. “You can help advise me. Could use a bit more luck.”

  “Pffft,” said the Fat Man. “Your funeral.”

  * * *

  We played poker together, like one team. Hendo liked to make jokes while playing. Nobody else laughed as much or made jokes like he did.

  “So the chicken and egg are in bed together,” Hendo said.

  “Can you just deal?” the Fat Man said.

  Hendo passed out cards and kept talking. “So the chicken is really happy. Big fucking smile on its face.”

  He finished dealing the cards and everyone picked them up.

  “And then the egg, really frustrated, goes, ‘Well, I guess we answered that question.’ ”

  “Ha ha,” one of the other players said.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What was the question?”

  The man in the red hat lit another cigarette and turned to the Fat Man. “Is she for real?”

  I said that I was for real, but that I still wanted to know what the question was. Hendo said that the joke was that the egg and chicken just had sex, and that the chicken got off first and the egg was angry because it wanted to get off but it wasn’t going to happen.

  “Why wasn’t it going to happen?” I asked, and was going to add, “and what is it?” but people do not like it when you ask too many questions at once.

  “Is she retarded or something?” the man in the red hat asked, and the Fat Man punched him in the arm.

  “That’s actually not an okay thing to say,” I said. “Like the n-word.”

  “Like the n-word,” the man in the red hat said. “What planet are you from?”

  “The planet where we keep taking your money,” Hendo said, because we had won again. He made a smaller pile for me, where I got a little bit of money every time we won.

  While we played I told him about runes and drew one for him on a napkin.

  “It is supposed to protect you in battle,” I said, and Hendo liked that.

  “That’s perfect. Poker is like a battlefield. Winner takes all.”

  Before the part of the card game where everyone takes turns and decides what to do, whether to bet more money or give up, he wanted to rub the rune for good luck.

  “How much do you think I should bet?” he asked me, and even though I could not tell how good the cards in his hands were, I told him more or less. And he would always listen.

  There was a break in the game when the Fat Man went to get more beer, and the man in the red hat went to the bathroom, taking all his money with him. The other two players went for a smoke. Hendo apologized for how rude the man in the red hat was being.

  I told him that I was used to it. “People call me a retard all the time.”

  “Well, you don’t look it,” Hendo said, counting up the money in front of him. “I think he’s just jealous because you’re sitting over here and not with him.”

  Hendo stacked the five-dollar bills in front of him in one pile, the one-dollar bills in another. I helped him by putting the coins into piles, one for each number of cents.

  “Like if you hadn’t told me,” he said, “I wouldn’t have known you and Gert were related.”

  “Gert is more gargantuan than I am,” I said.

  “Yeah, but I just mean… you’re a good-looking girl. And good frigging luck. Those runes are for real.”

  The Fat Man came out with a six-pack of beers. He put one in front of Hendo, one where the man in the red hat was sitting, and the rest in front of himself.

  I thought about what Hendo said—how I was a good-looking girl, and how he could not believe I was Gert’s sister. While we played poker I pretended I was not Gert’s sister at all, and that I was a normal person playing poker. Things happened very fast in the game. I watched and tried to learn which cards were better than others. Hendo did not get mad when I picked the wrong cards or said what to do, and he high-fived whenever I told him to do something and he won.

  This made the man in the red hat madder and madder, because even when we didn’t win, the Fat Man won. The man in the red hat was the only person who wasn’t winning at all.

  “Why don’t I get my own retard,” he said, and turned to the Fat Man. “Do you think she fucks like a retard? Hey, do you swallow, retard?”

  “You’ve got a rotten mouth on you, you know that?” Hendo said, putting his cards down.

  “Swallow what?” I asked.

  The man in the red hat started unzipping his pants. “You want to see? It’ll be like sex ed—”

  “Goddamn it,” the Fat Man said. “Nobody wants to see that. Can we just play?”

  “And you don’t want to deal with Gert when he’s pissed,” Hendo said, holding his cards so I could see.

  One of the other poker players got up and said he was leaving. But the man in the red hat told him to sit back down.

  “Just because he’s Toucan’s new butt boy doesn’t mean I have to suck him off like everyone else,” the man in the red hat said.

  “Gert is nobody’s new butt boy,” I said.

  “Toucan tells him to jump, and Gert asks how high.” The man in the red hat put another handful of coins into the middle of the table. “Raise.”

  A “raise” means that he believed he could win and wanted to bet more money to see if anyone else was just as confident.

  Hendo threw in all of his bills, even the twenty-dollar bills, before I could even say anything. I knew that his cards were not very good cards, since there were no same numbers, and they did not count in a row like two, three, four, five, six. Altogether with the cards on the table, he had a four of diamonds, a king of hearts, a two of diamonds, a six of spades, and a seven of clubs.

  “Put your money where your mouth is,” Hendo said.

  The Fat Man threw his cards down. “Well, I’m out.”

  “What about you?” Hendo asked the man in the red hat. “Going to spit or swallow?”

  There was so much money in the middle of the table that I couldn’t count it. But I knew that Hendo had at least fifty dollars in the bills from when we counted before. And then there were the coins and also the money that the Fat Man had put in the middle before giving up, and the money the man in the red hat put in.

  I felt my heart thump in my chest. Hendo was smiling and did not seem to realize that he had bad cards that would not defeat anything.

  Something incredible happened. The man in the red hat gave up too, throwing his cards down.

  “That’s what I thought,” Hendo said, pulling all the money toward him. “Like a bitch.”

  Hendo and I dabbed and the man in the red hat stood up and started swearing. I said that the honorable thing to do was accept defeat with courage. That was when he flicked his cigarette at me.

  Hendo sto
od up and they got in each other’s faces and started pushing each other, the man in the red hat saying ugly things about me and Gert and how Gert probably fucked me every night, which was a gross thing to say.

  Before they could fight, Toucan came in and asked what the fuck was going on, right when the man in the red hat was saying more things about me being a retard. Gert was with him, and when he heard the word retard, his eyes got wide and I knew that he was going into Berserker mode. Toucan put his hand on Gert’s shoulder and went up to the man in the red hat.

  “What did you just say?” Toucan said, pushing Hendo out of the way until he was almost nose to nose with the man in the red hat.

  Gert stood in front of me so I had to stand on my toes and move my head to see. The man in the red hat looked down and said nothing. The Fat Man and Hendo were standing back, like they were worried a bomb was going to go off but weren’t sure when and wanted to see anyway.

  Toucan slapped the man’s face. His hat fell off his head and Toucan slapped the man again and told him to apologize to me. The man in the red hat didn’t try to stop himself from being slapped. He let Toucan hit him again and again.

  He said he was sorry, looking at the ground.

  “Louder,” Toucan said. “I don’t think she heard you,” and the man in the red hat said sorry so loud that he was almost yelling, and Toucan held on to his head and made it so he was looking right at me while he said sorry for a third time.

  Toucan asked Gert if he wanted to hit him. Gert started moving toward him but I held Gert’s arm. “Don’t,” I said, because the man seemed very weak all of a sudden.

  “I accept your apology,” I told him, and told Gert it was time to go.

  Gert told me to thank Toucan, and I held out my hand for a dab. He laughed and said we were going to have a special handshake, and he took my hand, opened it, slapped our hands together, tightened the fingers, and then patted me on the back.

  I did not like being touched and stepped back as soon as he was done patting me.

  “You and Gert can practice that,” he said.

  Gert gave me the keys to the car and told me I could get it started, that he’d be out in a minute.

  As I was leaving, Hendo gave me a fist pound and told me I was the best good-luck charm he’d ever had. “You should come by every time I play. I’ll be a millionaire in a month.”

  He told me to stay cool.

  “I will. You stay cool too.”

  The man in the red hat stood by himself. As I walked by him he did not say anything to me, and when I took one last look at him I saw that he was crying.

  I went outside and saw that the woman and her children across the street weren’t playing anymore. The woman was inside of the house but one of the children was sitting alone on the front porch. I went to the car and got inside and turned it on. The air-conditioning whooshed in my face.

  Gert came out from the house with a gym bag and threw the bag in the backseat. He said we were off like a herd of turtles, something he sometimes said as a joke. He pointed to the clock and said, “See? Plenty of time.”

  Gert started the car and we started driving. The little boy in the yard waved at me and I waved back.

  “Are you Toucan’s new butt boy?” I asked.

  “Am I what?”

  “That’s what he said. That you were Toucan’s new butt boy.”

  “I’m nobody’s butt boy,” Gert said. “And I’m sorry about that. If I’d known that piece of garbage was going to be there, I wouldn’t have brought you.” He sighed. “You know I’d never let anything happen to you, right?”

  “I don’t like those people,” I said.

  He drove for a bit. “Yeah, well. You’re just going to have to trust me,” Gert said. “You trust me, right?”

  I stared out the window.

  “Hey, come on. Have I let you down yet?”

  “No.”

  “Because together we’re unbeatable.”

  One of our favorite songs came on the radio, AC/DC’s song “Thunderstruck,” and he turned it up and started singing, and then I was singing, and I really did feel like together we could not be beat.

  chapter three

  It was 11:49 a.m. when we got to Dr. Laird’s. Going upstairs took exactly eight minutes, unless the elevator was broken, but I could see from the car that it was working, because someone got out of it.

  Gert asked me what our rule is.

  “I know the rule,” I said.

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  “We do not talk about Gert’s personal life.”

  He nodded. “Right. So, are you going to talk about the last hour?”

  “Hour and eighteen minutes,” I said. The clock changed. “Hour and nineteen minutes. And no, I will not talk about playing poker, or Toucan, or anything else.”

  “Good.” Gert smiled. He told me to wait and got the envelope from his gym bag. “Give this to Laird.”

  * * *

  Dr. Laird specializes in development, meaning he works with children who are smarter than other children, and children who are not as smart as other children, and the kinds of kids like me and Marxy.

  On his business card, which is stuck to our fridge with a magnet, he calls himself a “Developmental Psychologist.”

  Dr. Laird is not like other doctors. He doesn’t take your temperature or give you medicine, at least not usually. Dr. Laird is more about asking questions and writing things down. Sometimes I go to the hospital where he has me lie down on a cold table and sends me into a machine that looks like a can of Pringles. A blue light shines across my entire body. It takes pictures of the insides of me, especially my brain, and every once in a while Dr. Laird lets me see my brain, all orange and pink and blue, which he says means those parts of my brain were working really hard when the picture was taken. Mostly we just talk, which I like because he is good at listening and asks me questions that show he is not just pretending to pay attention. There is a folder all about me, almost as long as Kepple’s Guide to the Vikings, and Dr. Laird puts the notes he makes about me every week into the file.

  After I sat down, he took out a piece of paper from the file, moved his glasses down his nose, to the pointy end, and started writing.

  Dr. Laird is short and has a haircut that Gert says belongs in the seventies, longer on the top and in the back than on the sides. His office is full of books and papers and pieces of paper framed and stuck to the wall that show all the schools he went to. He has big forearms that have a lot of hair on them. Gert says those forearms also belong in the seventies, which I guess means he acts like we don’t live in today, but back in time when people had hairy forearms and hair short on the sides and long everywhere else. Sometimes I thought he looked like the pictures of Vikings in Kepple’s Guide to the Vikings.

  He is very good at making you talk. He does not get weird and wiggly during silences but waits for you to feel weird and wiggly and talk, which he was doing to me.

  Gert does not have insurance, so we have to pay Dr. Laird with our own money. If you have a good job they give you insurance and you don’t have to pay for things like doctors or dentists. In Canada, for example, everyone has insurance. Since Dr. Laird knows we don’t have insurance, he says we can pay on a Sliding Scale. Instead of making everyone pay the same, he makes rich people pay more, and poor people like me and Gert pay less.

  This is an example of Dr. Laird being heroic, even though he does not fight actual battles with his fists.

  Once Gert gets his degree and a powerful job, we will have insurance and won’t have to pay anything.

  Dr. Laird asked me how my birthday went. “Did you get any good presents?” he asked.

  I told him about the Viking that Gert got me. “He was really cool. He wasn’t a real Viking. I think he was a stripper who takes off his clothes, only he kept his Viking clothes on.”

  “A stripper,” Dr. Laird said.

  “Marxy came too, with his mother. We French-kissed.”


  “Ah. And how did that make you feel?”

  “Good,” I said. “Though it’s kind of gross too. Because you put the tongues together. Have you ever French-kissed?”

  Dr. Laird laughed and said he did, with his wife.

  “Can you explain a joke to me?”

  I told him the joke about the chicken and the egg. Dr. Laird listened until I was finished and didn’t laugh.

  “I didn’t laugh either,” I said. “It sounds like a stupid joke.”

  “I mean, it’s all right but not that funny,” he said.

  “And what does ‘spit or swallow’ mean?”

  Dr. Laird cleared his throat. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Nowhere,” I said, remembering that I promised Gert not to talk about Toucan’s house.

  Things were quiet, which happened a lot when I saw Dr. Laird. He always gave me time to think whenever I needed.

  “Do you think I’m good-looking?” I asked.

  “Did something happen with Marxy? Did he ask you about spitting and swallowing?”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “I just heard someone say it and didn’t know what it meant.”

  “It’s a very crude question some people ask about a particular sex act,” Dr. Laird said, and he put down his pen. “Have you and Marxy done anything besides kissing?”

  I shook my head and said no. “Just French-kissing.”

  “Have you thought about what it would be like to have sex with Marxy?”

  I shrugged and said maybe, even though it was the first time I had actually said the words out loud. Dr. Laird said it was okay to talk about Marxy and sex, that it was natural for people our age, adults, he said, to want to express their love for each other physically.

  “Gert does not like when I talk about sex,” I said.

  Dr. Laird looked around, his eyes touching everything in the room. He told me to look around, and then when I asked him why I was looking, he said, “Who else is in this room?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Right. Gert’s not here. It’s just you and me.”

  “Yes,” I said slowly. “I have thought about sex with Marxy, and what he looks like naked.”