AFTER MY BROTHER died, everything fell apart. It was like that trial had ripped off the outside layer of skin, and what was left of my family was just a lot of blood and guts with nothing to hold it together anymore. My father split and went to live in a condo where everything was green—the walls, the carpet, the toilet, the stove—and every time I visited, I couldn’t help but feel queasy. My mother started drinking—a glass of wine with lunch and then the whole bottle. She lost her job as a paraprofessional at the elementary school when she passed out on the playground and her charge—a kid with Down syndrome—fell off the monkey bars and broke her wrist. A week later we put everything we owned into a U-Haul and moved in with my grandfather.
Gramps was a vet who had never stopped fighting a war. I didn’t know him all that well, because he’d never liked my dad, but now that that obstacle was out of the way, he took it upon himself to raise me the way he thought I should have been raised all along. My parents, he said, had been too soft on me, and I was a sissy. He was going to toughen me up. He’d wake me up at dawn on weekends and drag me into the woods for what he called Basic Training. I learned how to tell poisonous berries apart from the ones you could eat. I was able to identify scat so I could track animals. I could tell time by the position of the sun. It was sort of like Boy Scouts, except that my grandfather’s lessons were punctuated by stories of the gooks he fought in Vietnam, of jungles that would swallow you if you let them, of the smell of a man being burned alive.
One weekend he decided to take me camping. The fact that it was only six degrees outside and that snow was predicted did not matter. We drove to the edge of the Northeast Kingdom, close to the Canadian border. I went to the bathroom, and when I came back out my grandfather was gone.
His truck, which had been parked at a pump, was missing. The only hints that he’d been there at all were the impressions of the tire tracks in the snow. He’d left with my backpack, my sleeping bag, and the tent. I went into the gas station again and asked the attendant if she knew what had happened to the guy in the blue truck, but she just shook her head. “Comment?” she said, pretending like she didn’t even speak English even though she was still technically in Vermont.
I had my coat, but no hat or mittens—they were still in the truck. I counted sixty-seven cents in my pocket. I waited until another customer pulled into the gas station and then, when the cashier was occupied, I shoplifted a pair of gloves and a hunter-orange hat and a bottle of soda.
It took me five hours to track my grandfather—a combination of racking my brain to remember what he’d been yammering on about in terms of directions that morning when I was half asleep, and walking down the highway looking for clues—like the wrapper from the tobacco he liked to chew, and one of my mittens. By the time I found his truck pulled off on the side of the road and could follow his footprints through the snow into the woods, I wasn’t shivering anymore. I was a furnace. Anger, it turns out, is a renewable source of fuel.
He was bent over a campfire when I stepped into the clearing. Without saying a word, I walked up and shoved him so that he nearly fell into the burning embers. “You son of a bitch,” I yelled. “You can’t just walk away from me.”
“Why not? If I don’t make a man out of you, who the hell will?” he said.
Even though he was twice as big as me, I grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and hauled him upright. I drew back my fist and tried to punch him, but he grabbed my hand before the blow could land.
“You want to fight?” my grandfather said, backing away and circling me.
My father had taught me how to punch someone. Thumb on the outside of your fist, and twist the wrist at the very end of the throw. It was all talk, though; I’d never hit someone in my life.
Now, I drew back my fist and shot it forward like an arrow, only to have my grandfather twist my arm behind my back. His breath was hot in my ear. “Did your pansy-ass father teach you that?” I struggled, but he had me pinned. “You want to know how to fight? Or do you want to know how to win?”
I gritted my teeth. “I…want…to win,” I ground out.
Gradually he relaxed his grip, keeping one hand clamped on my left shoulder.
“You’re small, so you come in real low. Then you’ll be blinding me with your body, and I’m expecting you to bring the punch up. If I duck, my fist will hit you in the face, which means I’ll stay upright, and leave myself wide open. The last thing I’ll be expecting is for you to come up over the shoulder like this.”
He raised his right fist, looping it up and over in a dizzy arc that stopped a breath before it kissed my cheekbone. Then he let go of me and took a step back. “Go on.”
I just stared at him.
This is what it feels like to beat someone up: like a rubber band stretched so tight it aches, and starts to shake. And then when you throw that punch, when you let go of the elastic, the snap is electric. You’re on fire, and you didn’t even realize you were combustible.
Blood sprayed from my grandfather’s nose onto the snow; it coated his smile. “That’s my boy,” he said.
—
EVERY TIME BRIT gets up during labor, the contractions get so bad that the nurse—a redhead named Lucille—tells her to lie back down. But when she does, the contractions stop, and so Lucille tells her to take a walk. It’s a vicious circle, and it’s been seven hours already, and I’m starting to wonder if my kid is going to be a teenager before he decides to come into this world.