“Since I can’t do much else, I spend most of my time playing guitar, recording shit to send her. Weekends me and my friends get together to jam down in the basement though. Thank God for that, or I’d totally be losing my mind.”
“I bet,” I said, looking at his guitars again. Part of me wished he’d ask me to jam with his friends. Another part was relieved when he didn’t. “Adiós, Shakira. Hope that leg heals soon,” I said, heading toward the door. I could hear Grub outside, shooting his bazooka.
“Amen, Jesucristo,” said Dylan, crossing himself like Se?ora always did.
I scooped up Grub from the front yard, and we headed back to the café.
FIVE
BY THE TIME GRUB AND I GOT HOME, MY LEGS FELT LIKE RUBBER. MAKING deliveries by car would have made a lot more sense, but Mom’s boxy red, stick-shift 1992 Ford Festiva had over a quarter-million miles on it, and gas money was tight. So, the Lego—as we’d somewhat affectionately nicknamed it—was only sanctioned for top-priority excursions.
Besides, I drove stick shift about as well as I could pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time. Which was to say, I was crap at it.
I carried my bike up the five steps to the front door. Grub covered me, watching the street as I unlocked the door and let us in. Mom was still at the café, finishing up some paperwork and cleaning.
Grub ran to his room.
“Hungry?” I called to him.
“Yeah!”
“Cheese bread or mac-n-cheese?”
“Mac-n-cheese!” he answered.
Interesting fact about Grub: he only ate foods that were white or yellow.
Or whitish.
Or yellowish.
That may sound limiting, but he found plenty to eat. Popcorn, corn on the cob—anything with corn, really—bananas, french fries, cereal, and cheese were the main staples of his diet. “He’ll grow out of it,” Mom always said.
I had my doubts.
That was one cool thing about my mom though—despite paving the vegetarian road to healthiness, she basically let us eat what we wanted.
After boiling up two boxes of mac-n-cheese, I plopped down on our fake leather couch in the living room, which doubled as my mom’s bed. The apartment only had two small bedrooms, and she’d let Grub and me have them. In Chicago, I’d always had the basement bedroom, where I could blast my music as loud as I wanted and my friends and I could stay up late without bothering anyone. Now we could hear one another’s slightest movements through the thin walls. But I tried not to complain. I knew Mom had sacrificed a bedroom of her own to make the move easier on me and Grub. Me especially.
I picked up my guitar and strummed a few chords. It felt like a toy compared to the ones hanging on Dylan Rafferty’s wall. For the past year I’d been wanting to get a black Fender Telecaster, like Joe Strummer’s, the guitarist from the Clash. That hadn’t happened, obviously. But three weeks before we moved from Chicago, Mom had walked in with an acoustic guitar she’d purchased at a garage sale. While it didn’t compare to anything in Joe Strummer’s—or even Dylan’s—collection, it was pretty badass of her to get it for me. Mom knew I’d been wanting to learn guitar ever since I’d discovered Combat Rock in eighth grade.
I still dreamed of buying the Telecaster, but considering the way my delivery career was going, it didn’t look like it would ever happen. I’d made a grand total of eight dollars and fifty cents in tips that day. At that rate, I could hardly afford to buy new strings for the guitar I already had.
I looked down at the sad piece of equipment. The old strings made my fingers smell like rust, and the few dead, pinchy noises I managed to squeeze from it were poor excuses for music, but still better than they used to be.
When I first got the guitar, I didn’t know a single thing about it. For instance, no one warned me that pressing down on the metal strings hurt like hell. But after a couple days, calluses started forming on my fingertips. Then after a few more weeks of watching videos online, I learned three important skills: (1) how to tune it; (2) how to form a couple chords; and (3) the fastest way to retrieve your pick after it fell into the sound hole.
Three months later, I could play a halfway decent rendition of “I Wanna Be Sedated” by the Ramones. I’d read somewhere if I learned the G, C, D, and E minor chords I’d be able to play one thousand songs. Only nine hundred ninety-nine to go!
Just as I realized that a C chord could slide up two frets into a D chord, Grub came bounding around the corner and plopped next to me on the couch. He opened a cardboard box and began assembling Battleship pieces.
“Grub, not right now.”
“One game,” he pleaded, his brown eyes looking huge in his small head. Both Mom and I had trouble saying no to him, not necessarily because he was so tiny, but mostly because he was such a good egg, rarely complaining or asking for much.
I sighed. “One game.” I set my guitar down, then placed my destroyer, submarine, cruiser, carrier, and battleship on the board. “All right, you go first.”
“B-2,” said Grub.
“Hit. So, fun time making deliveries today? A-9.”
“Miss. Yeah! I finally made a new friend. C-2.”
“Hit. You mean the old guy? F-7.”
“Miss. Sergeant Porter. He played army with me. The kids at my new school never played with me. D-2.”
“Hit. They just don’t know you yet. Give it some time. A-1.”
“Miss. I don’t think the kids here like the same things I do. E-2.”
“Hit. What, no World War II buffs in second grade? G-10.”
“Miss. No, they just talk about Pokémon and iPads and stuff. F-2.”
“Maybe third grade will be better. Hey, you sunk my battleship!”
“I know, you always put it in the same place.”
As we continued to play, I snuck peeks at my brother with equal parts affection and concern. Grub had handled the move to Buffalo Falls like a good soldier, dutiful and uncomplaining as always, but I knew Mom worried about him —and I did, too. The move had been hard enough for me and I was twice his age and relatively normal.
Both Grub and I had known our Chicago friends since we were in diapers. We’d never had to make friends; they were just always there, the neighborhood gang. We’d all roam from yard to yard, everyone’s parents looking out after everyone’s kids. When you grow up with people like that, maybe you accept them the way they are because you don’t know anything different.
Grub was a fixture in our neighborhood, army helmet and all, and everyone loved him. He was just Grub to them. But here in Buffalo Falls, he was just . . . weird.
We finished the game without any more talk of Chicago or friends, sticking to easier topics like naval warfare. Grub won handily, of course, picking off my fleet like a German U-boat, then retreated to his room.