Moon Dog Magic

by Jennifer Willis

  Thor picked up a small, odd-shaped plastic part in his toner-smeared fingers and rotated it first left, then right. He had no idea what it was or where it was supposed to go. He’d have to consult the manual—a massive, six-inch, three-ring binder packed full of enough useless diagrams and minuscule print to make the old god’s head hurt.

  He hated having to consult the manual.

  “I used to command entire armies, and the very storms in the sky . . .” Thor growled to his father.

  “We’ve all had to make adjustments, son.” Odin shifted his position against the doorjamb and started reading the telephone messages. The creases in his broad brow deepened as he sighed.

  “Here we go. The mother of one of my ninth graders called about her son’s daily homework load.” He leaned down and spoke in low tones to his son, still hunched over on the carpet. “Seems he gets restless after forty minutes and needs to blow off steam by playing more video games.”

  Odin shuffled the papers in his hand. “And here the father of one of our less promising football players is complaining about his son being cut from the team.”

  Thor chuckled. “If he’s off the team and has all that extra time on his hands, he’s welcome to my job.”

  Odin stared down at him. Thor stopped laughing. He shrugged and hefted the vinyl tome of torture that masqueraded as a repair manual out of his utility bag—and caught sight of Jeanine checking out his butt. He grinned at her, but she immediately bristled and pivoted her chair toward her computer terminal. Thor could see the back of her neck flush pink.

  Odin read the next telephone message. “Even better. Pastor Brown has called again from True Shepherd Church next door.”

  Thor paused before opening the manual. “Trouble again in the cemetery and parking lot?” He didn’t really care about Pastor Brown or the church, but he’d happily talk to a mouse about stale cheese if it meant putting off consulting the manual a few minutes longer.

  “Mmm.” Odin’s frown deepened as he read further. “Sending those students over to pick up litter during Saturday detention wasn’t enough of a deterrent, it seems. The fast-food wrappers and discarded soda bottles have escalated to beer cans and condoms in the hedges, and graffiti on the headstones.”

  The bell rang in the hallway beyond the outer office.

  “First period.” Odin offered his a son a wry smile, nodding toward the repair manual. “Better finish up. Lots of copying to do today.”

  A loud blast of music erupted from the parking lot outside Odin’s office window. Balling up the telephone messages in his fist, Odin turned on his heel, strode across the office floor and threw open the window.

  “Mr. Jamieson!” Odin bellowed.

  Thor glanced down at the massive volume in his lap. Wasting hours on end thumbing through repair manuals written in unintelligible techno-ese would make even a Valkyrie cry, and not in a good way. He slid the binder onto the carpet and got up to join his father at the window.

  Two stories below in the parking lot, a trio of students lingered around a beat-up Mustang. One scrawny dark-haired kid in frayed jeans danced by the open driver’s side door, while an overdeveloped girl with stringy hair and a hefty boy with stains on his shirt stood by and laughed. The driving bass from the car stereo reverberated off the surrounding buildings. The larger boy had the stub of something in his mouth and was raising a lighter to it. Odin grimaced, lifting the worn leather eyepatch slightly off his cheek, and growled deep in his throat.

  “Mr. Jamieson! I’m speaking to you!” Odin called down again to the skinny boy. The heads of all three kids swiveled up to look at their principal in the window. The second boy quickly pulled the joint from his lips and shoved it and the lighter into his back pocket.

  Thor moved away from the window to hide his smile.

  “I know you wouldn’t want to be late to Mrs. Holbert’s English class.” Odin raised his eyebrows.

  The kid smiled sheepishly. “No, sir. I guess not.” He leaned inside the car and snapped off the radio, then reached for his backpack resting against the front wheel. He and his friends shuffled off with obligatory glances in Odin’s direction.

  Odin’s single eye narrowed as he watched the three head toward the school’s main entrance. Once they were satisfactorily out of sight, he turned to look at his desk—and the unfinished paperwork stacked in two meandering piles on top of it. He sighed and faced his son.

  Thor lifted his eyebrows expectantly. After the display in the parking lot below, Thor imagined his father would send him to deal with the unruly, disobedient children. Knock their heads together or tie them down to their desks. Or maybe there was another crisis—a forest fire, a flash flood, a small village being harassed by a troll—that required his immediate attention. Anything to give him a reprieve from the photocopier hell that awaited in the outer office.

  Odin clapped a strong hand on Thor’s shoulder, and gestured toward the reception area beyond the office door.

  “That copier isn’t going to put itself back together, you know.”

  Thor’s spirits sank. He lumbered toward the door, dreading his return to the machine he’d eviscerated, and nearly collided with Jeanine again as she stuck her head in. Startled, she staggered backward and held a hand to her chest. Thor forced a pleasantly apologetic expression onto his face. His mother had warned him against needlessly upsetting or frightening the humans, particularly the ones who could get him fired.

  Jeanine avoided eye contact and cleared her throat. “Principal Wyatt?”

  “Yes,” he groaned back, lowering himself into his office chair behind the desk.

  “Kyle Mackey and Trevor Chase are here to see you. Again.” The resignation in her voice almost made Odin smile.

  “Ah, the Hooligans are up to their tricks again.” He nodded to Jeanine.

  She glanced quickly between Odin and Thor—who had the same fair skin, broad shoulders, square jaw, and thick muscles as his father, but on a larger scale—and then fled the room.

  “The Hooligans?” Thor stepped away from the door and hovered over his father’s decrepit desk.

  Odin crossed his arms over his chest and nearly laughed as he shook his head. “These boys have been in and out of this office, probably every other week since the beginning of the semester.”

  Thor leaned forward on the desk. It creaked under his weight. He was large to begin with—colossal, he used to be described; they called it “big-boned” these days. The truth was he wasn’t getting enough exercise. He’d risen up in a time when men filled their days hunting and making war. Now he spent half of every day behind the wheel of a car, and the rest of his time sitting on the carpet doing his best not to destroy yet another photocopier.

  Thor looked down at his father and was grateful he didn’t have to sit behind a desk from 7:30 to 4.

  “You got a soft spot for them.”

  Odin looked down. “Maybe.”

  Thor glanced through the open doorway, trying to catch a glimpse of the trouble-makers. “What sorts of things do they do?”

  Odin pursed his lips and thought quietly. “It’s not like the old days,” he responded in hushed tones. “You can’t just crack their skulls and then let them sort themselves out. The same boyish behavior Vikings encouraged—pranks, petty theft, vandalism—that all has to be punished now.” He gestured toward the open door. “These two can’t seem to ever do anything right.”

  Thor snorted. “And so they’ve got the Chief of the Norse Gods meting out their punishment!”

  Odin looked sharply at Thor, who immediately lowered his voice. “Sorry. It just struck me funny.” He cleared his throat and looked hard at his father. “It just seems that even on your best day, those kids would be in serious trouble.”

  Odin reached for his coffee mug, then thought better of it. Thor looked at the PSU Vikings football logo and smiled.

  “I can’t believe you’re actually using that thing. Kids in shoulder pads and shin guards calling themselves Vikings?”r />
  “One day, this mug is going to have a serious accident.”

  Thor chuckled. “And maybe the XXL Portland State sweatshirt Frigga gave me might get shredded in the wash. Unfortunately.”

  He shoved his big hands into his trouser pockets and tried to remember where he’d stashed the Vikings sweatshirt his mother had foisted onto him a few years back. Maybe he could accidentally-on-purpose mistake it for a drop cloth or cleaning rag on his next repair assignment. It would be a shame if large amounts of black toner got inextricably ground into the fabric, obliterating the logo.

  Odin sighed. “Your mother means well. She’s trying to help us acclimate.”

  Thor rolled his eyes. “Yeah, well, as they say . . . Whatever.”

  Odin scratched at the corner of his empty eye socket, then readjusted the patch over his right eye and grinned. “There’s a rumor in the halls here that I used to be a pirate off the coast of Portugal. Raiding cruise ships, running contraband, searching for sunken treasure.”

  Thor threw back his head and laughed heartily. Last year, the story had been that Odin had lost an eye while on a mission in Central America as a mercenary soldier. Thor had rather enjoyed that one, but not as much as Odin loved the scuttlebutt that had him parachuting into an active volcano in the South Pacific to save the 1997 prom queen from being sacrificed to the lava gods by cannibals.

  “Next year, I’ll get the grapevine buzzing that I got my eye knocked out in an ultimate fighting match in a Cambodian POW camp.”

  Thor was about to laugh again, then stopped short as he watched his father labor to get up from behind his desk. Odin was fast becoming an old man, and he grunted quietly with the effort. Thor saw it every morning in the mirror, with a few more gray hairs streaking his own dark blond mane. He told himself it was the stress of hunting for the Yggdrasil, and that once the new World Tree was located, all would be well again. Their strength and vitality would be restored.

  But looking at his father’s nearly pure-silver sideburns and wrinkled brow, Thor wasn’t so sure anymore. He couldn’t pretend he hadn’t noticed Odin’s creaking knees and popping spine. These past decades especially, Odin’s posture was more stooped, his gait slowing.

  Odin rested his fists on the desk and paused to catch his breath. “Son, I’m getting too old for this.” He looked again at the piles of paper on his desk. “For this job, for living among mortals.” Odin exhaled slowly. “Maybe even for preserving the Yggdrasil.”

  Thor’s expression turned grim. He patted his own thickening waist self-consciously, then rested a firm hand on his father’s shoulder. “We’ll find the Tree. And then when Iduna’s apples come into season . . .”

  Odin cut him off with a wave of his hand. “We’re getting old. It is uncertain whether the Tree or the apples can stop that now.”

  Straightening his spine, Odin forcefully pushed the rolling chair away from him, and it slammed back into the wall behind his desk. He smiled at the crack of metal and plastic against the cement blocks.

  “Waning powers or not,” Thor nodded appreciatively, “you can still throw your weight around.”

  Odin chuckled as he stepped past his son and crossed the office floor in a few large strides. He stopped in the doorway, with just a hint of a raised brow over his one good eye, and looked down on the Hooligans seated against the wall in the outer office. Dressed in metal band t-shirts and oversized blue jeans, their expressions appeared somewhere between affected cynicism and what you might expect from a teenager facing a firing squad.

  Odin leaned against the doorjamb. “Boys.”

  The two looked up at him from beneath lowered brows. Odin glanced down at the photocopier parts still littering the carpet outside his door, and smirked back at Thor.

  Thor offered an obligatory shrug and noisily squeezed past his father to resume his duties to the office equipment. He growled as he knelt on the floor and caught sight of the repair manual.

  “Boys, I’m not even going to ask.” Odin stepped around Thor and his collection of photocopier parts and stood beside his secretary’s desk. He tilted his head toward her, never taking his bloodshot eye off the boys. “Call in their parents. We’ll sit down together and sort this out.”

  There was a soft groan as the boys sank down in their chairs. Odin rubbed a hand across his whiskered face to hide his smile. Calling the parents was frequently the worst possible punishment.

  “Miss Metcalf, please show these young men into the conference room, where they can consider their actions until their parents get here.”

  “Yes, Principal Wyatt.” Jeanine got up from her desk and gestured toward a side door. The boys made no move to comply until Odin gave them a hard, questioning look. He had only one eye, but it was sharp. Kyle shrugged and got up from the metal chair. Trevor followed. The boys dragged their bookbags across the beige carpet, passing the secretary’s desk. Trevor offered a weak attempt at a smile.

  Thor crouched on the floor, flipping through the manual with such frustrated force that he nearly ripped the laminated pages out of the binder. He muttered a new string of ancient curses under his breath.

  The conference room door clicked closed. Odin’s gut produced a familiar rumble and he jangled the coins in his trouser pocket. He stepped over to Thor, grabbed the collar of his gray uniform shirt, and yanked him up to his feet.

  “Let me buy you a soda, son.”

  Dropping the three-ring binder unceremoniously to the floor, Thor frowned at his father. “I thought you hated that diet stuff.”

  A wide grin lit up Odin’s gruff face. “I do.”

  “Frigga’s going to kill you.”

  Odin put an arm around his son’s broad back. “What your mother doesn’t know . . .” He pulled Thor with him toward the school’s main hallway. “I can’t take any more of that cheap coffee. I’ve had three cups already this morning, and it still tastes like something between roof tar and lava ash.”

  Thor grimaced. “First sip’s always the worst. Makes my teeth feel fuzzy.” He paused in the doorway to the mostly empty hallway. “I don’t know that sugar water is all that better.”

  “Whatever it takes to get through the day.” Odin closed the door to the office behind him.

  Thor followed his father down the hallway. “One day after another, one bloody boring year after the next.”

  Odin glanced back. “What was that?”

  Thor shook his head.

  A pair of students dashed down the hallway, running full-speed toward classes they were already late for, then skidded to a stop when they caught sight of the principal. Odin nodded at them and passed by silently. Several others meandered slowly toward the music room or library, pretending not to notice Odin, but giving him a wide berth nonetheless.

  Odin and Thor turned to descend a double staircase to the basement.

  “What’s down here?” Thor asked.

  “Science labs and vending machines.” They reached the bottom of the stairs, and Odin led Thor down another long hallway.

  “You keep the food next to the labs?” Thor held up his hand in surrender. “Never mind. Don’t think I really want to know.”

  They stopped in front of a bank of vending machines. Odin pulled a handful of coins out of his pocket. He pretended to survey the rows of carbonated sugar water and stale cookies.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a leg of lamb roasted on an open spit, a steaming bowl of fish stew, a hunk of hearty bread, and a heavy stein overflowing with dark mead,” he grumbled.

  “Outside Frigga’s kitchen, I think we’re stuck with canned cola and plastic-wrapped cakes.” Thor’s stomach churned. Looking at the Jujubes, cheese-flavored crackers, and chocolate-coated candy bars behind the glass gave him a sour feeling in his stomach.

  “These people,” Odin grumbled, “have no idea how to eat.”

  Thor nodded in silent agreement. Everywhere he drove for his repair calls, his senses were assaulted by the smell of hot frying oil and the neon signs of one fast-fo
od operation after another. Even on the grocery shelves, nearly everything that passed as food was pre-packed for “freshness,” frozen, or processed to within an inch of its original nutritional value.

  No wonder modern humans were weak, Thor concluded. Chubby, limp adults who lacked the strength to so much as lift a broadsword, and children prone to bouts of depression and uncontrolled tempers. So many lives waning under fluorescent lights and in front of televisions.

  Odin slipped a few coins into the slot and watched the silver screws behind the glass go to work loosening a bag of pretzels. The bag dropped with a salty thud. Odin sighed.

  Thor knew instantly what Odin was thinking. They were living among people who had no knowledge of the land, strangers to the very ground they walked on—probably because they’d paved nearly every last square of it. Too much mindless entertainment, not enough ritual bonfires. Too little time exercising bodies and brains. In his prime, Odin would have crushed such a people as easily as flattening an ant beneath his boot.

  But now he was one of them. Odin, Thor, and the rest of the clan drove alongside them on highways, picked apples and potatoes from the same produce bins, and worked in the same offices.

  “And now I’m repairing their photocopiers, and you’re overseeing the education and discipline of their children,” Thor lamented.

  “Discipline.” Odin snorted as he tore open the bag and shoved a few pretzels into his mouth. “What those boys upstairs need is a sound hide-thrashing, followed by a week-long hunt with their fathers. Or a season on a fishing vessel. Make men out of them.” He offered the open bag to his son. Thor waved him off.

  Odin stepped to the left, fished a worn dollar bill from his pocket and began the usual battle of trying to get the machine to accept his paper currency. He presented the bill. The machine spat it back out. He held the dollar against his chest, smoothed out the creases and tried again. Same result. Stupid western technology, didn’t know its own currency.

  “You mother-disgracing sow of a servant,” Odin cursed. “You should be so lucky to serve the Chief of the Gods.”