Grendel's Guide to Love and War

by A. E. Kaplan

  I pushed myself off the car, which I’d been leaning heavily on. “No. Wait. Maybe. Yes.” I ran inside and found the never-used valet key at the bottom of the junk drawer in the kitchen. I palmed it into my fist and ran back outside to unlock the car. “Are we sure,” I said, “are we sure this is the last dog?”

  “We have to be,” Ed replied. “Because it’s twenty minutes to three.”

  We shoved all five dogs into the back, and Ed and Willow had to share the passenger seat while I drove.

  “I suggest speeding,” Ed said. I threw my foot onto the accelerator and squealed out of the driveway.

  “So tell me,” I asked Willow. “Is everyone in your family a minion of evil?”

  She screwed up her mouth. “Only the men,” she said, and then I remembered that her father had recently run off.

  “So it’s sex-linked.”

  She barked a laugh. I realized, suddenly, that I was still shirtless. “You could say that, I guess,” she said. “Do you know where you’re going?”

  “Barely.” Stevens lived pretty far off the grid. It wasn’t an area I spent a lot of time in.

  “Left,” Ed urged. “Leftleftleft.”

  I almost missed the turn and ended up on the gravel. In the backseat, all the dogs slid hard against the passenger-side door and started barking again. One of them wiggled between the two front seats, and Ed had to shove him back. At least it wasn’t the mean one.

  It was two minutes to three when I pulled over next to Stevens’s gravel driveway. I didn’t dare risk taking my car in there. He’d hear it for sure.

  I flung the back door open and was practically knocked down by thrashing, stinking hounds. I looked over to Ed and Willow, who grabbed two dogs each and started dragging them toward the driveway. “How do we get them back in?”

  Ed had to jerk on the belt of his right-hand dog, who had stopped to scratch at a flea. “Bigger problem, dude: where did he leave the note for Stevens? If we don’t find that, nothing we do with the dogs makes a difference.”

  I paused to pull on my dog. “You think he’d come after me if all his dogs were here?”

  “I think he’s a nut and anything’s possible.”

  Willow gasped. “Damn it,” she whispered. “Damn it.”

  A hundred feet down the driveway was the edge of the perimeter fence, with a locked gate stretching across the road. A little farther in, I could just make out the edge of the house. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t have been able to see it.

  Except the lights were on.

  “We’re too late,” I said.

  “Look,” Willow said, pointing to the right of the driveway. Someone had cut a hole in the six-foot chain-link fence. “That’s how he got the dogs out.”

  Ed turned and looked at her. “How did you see that?”

  She shot him a narrow-eyed glare. “I was paying attention, idiot.”

  “Just get them in. Don’t forget to take off the leashes!” I spat. Only, the dogs didn’t particularly seem to want to go back. Apparently, running around in the woods with us and eating double-fiber whole wheat was more fun than whatever they did with Stevens. We had to shove most of them through the hole.

  “They’ll just come right back out,” I said. “We have to block it with something.”

  I heard the front door open and close.

  “Oh, holy hell. He’s coming.”

  At that, the dogs turned and hightailed it back to the house.

  “Just leave the hole,” Ed said. “We need the note.”

  “It’s up there,” Willow said, pointing to the barbed wire over the section of the fence with the hole.

  I craned my neck and saw, stuck on the barbs of the wire, a piece of paper. By now, the dogs were going nuts and starting to head back in our direction. A dark shape followed them. He was armed with either a shotgun or a baguette.

  Stevens didn’t really seem the baguette type.

  I scaled the fence as fast as I could, scratching my hand on the wire when I grabbed the note, and then jumped down.

  “Run,” I wheezed. “Run NOW!”

  So we ran. I slammed into the driver’s door, wrenched it open, and drove off without turning the lights on until we were a good mile away.

  Ed grabbed the note out of the cup holder, where I’d shoved it. Willow was in the back, and the entire car was redolent of wet dog.

  “What does it say?” I asked, jerking my head toward Ed.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Just read it.”

  Willow reached forward and snatched it out of his hands.

  Darling,

  No one is interested in the plight of an antisocial little boy or his screwed-up father. Welcome to the real world.

  Kisses,

  The Big Bad Wolf

  “He did not sign it that way,” I said. “No one could be that big a tool.”

  Willow wadded up the note and tossed it back into the cup holder. “He did. Unfortunately, he is that big a tool.”

  “So wait. Did we not get the note to Stevens?”

  “Knowing Wolf,” Willow said, “there was no note to Stevens. He’s a jerk, but he doesn’t want to go to jail. And if Stevens shot you…well.”

  “You couldn’t have mentioned this before we spent an hour running through the woods with the hounds of hell?”

  “But there could have been a note,” she said. “I wasn’t willing to bet your life on it.”

  I pulled up in front of my house. The party guests were long gone, but I could hear the thrum of the speakers through my windows. He was pumping them just to spite me.

  “What are you going to do now?” Ed asked.

  I closed my eyes. What more could I do? Rothgar was a thug and an idiot, which I could deal with. But Wolf was a psychopath. It was eleven days until my dad came home. I didn’t think I could fix this in eleven days without getting myself killed.

  I dragged my hand down my face. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  Sleeping in the next morning seemed like an imperative. I mentally moved all of my mowing appointments until after lunch, closed my curtains, and put my pillow over my head, determined to sleep as long as humanly possible.

  Unfortunately, the universe had other plans. I was awakened at eight in the morning by the horrible, brain-wrenching sound of a ringing phone. I stumbled down the hall just in time for it to go to voicemail.

  It was Mrs. DeLuca, asking when I was coming back to finish her interview. I thought of her alone in that dirty house and picked up the phone to call her back, then hung it back up. I’d had three hours of sleep, and I felt sick. I glanced at the calendar on the fridge: I had four lawns to do today. I leaned my face against the refrigerator.

  The problem with me is that once I’m awake, I’m awake. No amount of lying in bed was going to change that. So I spent the next two hours in a zombie-like state in front of the TV, then got up and mowed lawns until my arms felt like Jell-O. I hadn’t heard from Mrs. Coffey since she’d brought the casserole the other day, but I’d seen her driving around, so I figured she must have forgotten about me, which was fine, really. I hadn’t heard from my dad since he’d texted about the bagels.

  At nine o’clock that night, Rothgar’s speakers started up again.

  By then, my eyes were burning and my ears were ringing and my entire body just hurt. It was the kind of tired where you feel like you’re losing your mind, and I realized I’d barely had more than a few hours’ sleep in a row for almost a week. I sat down on my bed with my head in my hands and listened to car doors slam. Then I grabbed a bottle of Ed’s rejected wine, which I kept hidden under my bed, and my sleeping bag from the closet, got into my car, and drove away.

  There’s a tiny one-room church about ten minutes outside of town, on a back road on the way to Tolerville. I’ve never actually seen cars in the parking lot, so I wasn’t sure if they had services anymore; it’s the kind of place that was probably a local institution fifty years ago, but the cong
regation either aged out or moved away, and the only part of it that seems actively maintained is the graveyard out back. The graves there are mostly from my great-grandparents’ generation or older, and while the grass is mowed, I don’t think anyone ever visits them. That’s where I was headed. It was the quietest place I knew.

  I sat down under the oak in the middle of the gravestones, the leaves shading the moon so I had to uncork my bottle of Shiraz by touch. I tucked the cork into my pocket and took a long drag from the bottle, wishing I’d brought some crackers, because it was kind of potent to drink on its own.

  I offered a toast to the underground denizens, then sank back against the scratchy bark of the tree. Perhaps, I thought, this is why I don’t get along so well with my peers. I prefer the company of the elderly and the deceased. And the cicadas, which were so loud it would have been irritating had I not been used to the sound of Rothgar’s parties.

  The first time I was in a graveyard was when I was six years old and some ancient relative—a great-aunt, I think—had died. I remember hiding behind a mausoleum during the graveside service and when I came out, my mother was crying into my father’s lapel, and he was rubbing her back. I was annoyed that no one had come to look for me, and then scared that my mother was crying, because I’d never seen her do that before. And then my father said something to her, and she smiled at him in this private way I’d never seen her smile before. That was the first time it hit me that my parents really, really loved each other. And it was totally irrational, but for a second I was just writhing with jealousy, because they loved each other so much in a way that didn’t include me. So I ducked back behind the mausoleum and didn’t come out until Zip found me and dragged me off to play with the rest of our cousins.

  I heard the crunch of dry grass as someone approached from the other side of the tree. It was a girl, I decided, and then she spoke and confirmed it.

  “So,” she said. “You prefer drinking in graveyards to partying with the living?”

  It was Willow, I realized, and then realized I wasn’t surprised.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “I didn’t. I was driving by on my way out for cereal when I saw your car.”

  “And it didn’t occur to you that I might be summoning the dead or conducting a séance, and I want to be left alone?”

  “No,” she said. “It didn’t occur to me.” She sat down next to me, and I caught the scent of something pleasant I couldn’t quite name. “Are you going to share that with me?” she asked, pointing to the bottle, which I handed to her. She took a swig and then choked. “Oh my God,” she said. “That isn’t Boone’s Farm. It tastes like pepper or something.”

  “It’s a Shiraz. I got it from Ed. He’s kind of a collector.”

  “Huh. So you’re drinking twenty-dollar wine straight from the bottle in the middle of a graveyard. By yourself. In the dark.”

  I nodded. “That’s a fair accounting of things. Only I don’t seem to be alone anymore.”

  “No,” she said. “You’re not.” She handed the bottle back. “I think I’ll pass on the expensive stuff, thanks.” She looked out at the sea of headstones. “So,” she said. “Um. Is your mom buried here?”

  I shook my head, wondering how well she could see me in the dark. “No. I prefer the company of the anonymous dead.”

  She settled back so that her shoulder rested against mine. “That’s good. Can I use that?”

  “Use what for what?”

  “The anonymous dead. I have some friends that want to start up a band. It would be an awesome name.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, drinking again. “Sounds like a really unfortunate Jerry Garcia tribute band, don’t you think?”

  I could almost hear her make a face in the dark. “Oh. The Anonymous Dead. The Grateful Dead. That’s horrible. Never mind.”

  We sat and listened to the cicadas for a while, and somewhere in the woods a fox screamed, and we both jumped a little. It’s the kind of noise that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

  “It’s not close,” I told Willow.

  “I hate that sound,” she said. “It used to give me nightmares when I was little.”

  We heard the fox again, but it was quieter this time. “I think it’s moving away,” I said. We listened for a while longer, but it seemed to have gone.

  “Why are you here, really?” I asked.

  “I told you, I saw your car.”

  “Fair enough, but why did you stop?”

  She fidgeted with her hands. “Do I need a reason?”

  “You are sending me some massively mixed signals here, Willow Rothgar.”

  She looked past me, toward the rolled-up sleeping bag I had on my other side. “Wait,” she said. “Are you sleeping here?”

  I nodded.

  “Because of the noise? Can’t you sleep at Ed’s or something?”

  “I could. But I was in the mood to be alone.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Do you want me to go?”

  Did I? I thought about it for a minute. “No, I seem not to want that. But you didn’t answer my question.”

  “You didn’t exactly ask one.”

  “Semantics,” I said, waving my hand.

  She pulled her knees up to her chin and folded her arms across them. “You are pretty direct, you know that?”

  “I aim to be. It generally leads to my being beaten up or thrown into lakes, but I think you are unlikely to do either of those things.”

  “Okay. Well. Tom Grendel.” She sighed. “Okay.”

  “You’re nervous?”

  “Yes.”

  I reached across the space between us and took her hand from her knee, then pressed my mouth against her palm.

  “Direct,” she said again, only this time it came out rather breathy.

  “Yes.”

  “I think you are absolutely dead strange, Tom.”

  “And?”

  “And I like that you’re dead strange.”

  I laughed. “I am not your manic pixie dream boy, Willow Rothgar. I serve only myself.”

  She laughed, too. “Okay, but I will tell you this: my brother cannot know.”

  I leered at her. “What can’t he know?”

  “This,” she said, reaching to lace her fingers through the hair on the back of my head, then pulling me in to kiss me.

  There was a familiarity to the shape of her mouth, which surprised me after all this time. Only, sixteen-year-old Willow knew a lot more about kissing than fourteen-year-old Willow. It occurred to me that we were very, very alone, and I was very slightly drunk, and she was very definitely hot.

  She pulled back before I did. “I can’t believe I’m making out in a graveyard.”

  I grinned. “When I die, I hope to see a little action now and then. Must be pretty boring here otherwise.”

  “I think you overestimate your chances, Grendel,” she said, as if she hadn’t been the one who stalked me in the middle of the night and then kissed me in the dark. She leaned back against the tree again. “Do you really think they’re here? The dead, and all that?”

  “No, I don’t. A body is just a body.”

  “And what about the rest of it?”

  I shrugged. “I wish I knew.” I didn’t tell her how badly I wished I knew. How often I lay awake at night wondering about the strange intangible stuff that makes up a human being. Wondering not just what it is, but how you could get at it: know it, understand it, touch it. Wishing I hadn’t missed my chance to understand my own mother.

  I didn’t tell her, because she already thought I was weird, but just weird enough to be exciting and worth kissing in a graveyard. If she knew the rest, well. I doubted she’d still want to stick her tongue in my mouth, and I was hoping she’d do that again at least once.

  “Do you believe they go to heaven? Or reincarnate or something?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’m more interested in what people are while they’re alive. The after
part…that’s in someone else’s hands. Or it’s not. Or whatever.”

  “So tell me,” she said. “What are you? Since you’re alive.”

  I swallowed another swig of wine. It really did taste like pepper. “If you could explain it that easily, it wouldn’t be worth bothering about.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I don’t think people are really that complicated.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then. Explain Willow Rothgar.”

  She gave me a smile I can only describe as wolfish, and for a second I was oddly afraid of her. She said, “I play the game that is laid before me. And I play it better than most.”

  I put the wine bottle down in the grass. My stomach spun with peppery alcohol, sleep deprivation, and a slightly scary girl. I didn’t have a clue what she meant by that, but I figured asking was not likely to get me anywhere.

  “Willow Rothgar,” I said. “I am going to sleep now. Are you staying?”

  “Here? In the graveyard? What, am I going to climb into your sleeping bag with you?”

  Parts of me found that a very agreeable suggestion. I shrugged.

  “I think not,” she said. “Perhaps another time.” She stood and watched me with crossed arms.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “You. To get in your sleeping bag.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can tuck you in, Tom Grendel.”

  I play the game, she’d said. And now she was playing one with me. But I knew that if I said no, if I took my marbles and went home, that would be the end for good of whatever game we were playing.

  I unrolled my sleeping bag and tossed it out in front of me. She watched me with that same predatory face while I untied my shoes and got in. Then she knelt on the ground next to me.

  “Good night, Tom Grendel,” she whispered. And she kissed me again.

  When I woke up the next morning, there was a leather-thong bracelet wrapped around my two-thirds-full bottle of Shiraz. The engraving on the plaque read TRY AGAIN. FAIL AGAIN. FAIL BETTER.

  I wasn’t sure that I wanted to. But I smiled anyway.