Grim. It’s not the kind of name you hear every day. Unless, of course, your name is Grim.
Grimner Hallbjörn Magnusson, to be exact, which was a rather hefty name to bestow on a tiny newborn, but Grim’s father, the distinguished Professor of Scandinavian Studies, had been persuasive. Grimner was another name for Odin, the chief god of Norse mythology, Hallbjörn was the name of Grim’s great-great-grandfather, and you couldn’t ask for a more respectable Icelandic last name than Magnusson.
But since Grim had weighed only five pounds at birth, his mother was a little concerned that the next day’s newspaper might bear the headline:
Infant Crushed By Weight Of Own Name
So she had called him Grim from the moment he was born, as if by dropping the weight of those last three letters she’d be increasing his chances of survival. She never called him by his full name, even when she was angry. It had never been, “Grimner Hallbjörn Magnusson, you come down here this instant!” Instead, she had turned the “r” into a growl. “Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrim!”
But despite his scrawny beginnings, he’d grown into his name quite nicely. Now 17 years old, he was six feet tall and 165 pounds, with his father’s dark hair and olive complexion. Grim had always been a little envious of his younger brothers, Thor and Njal, who had their mother’s blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin. When he looked in the mirror, the only thing he had to remind him of his mother was half his eye color. It was as if they’d mixed his father’s brown eyes with his mother’s blue eyes to come up with his green.
At the moment, Grim’s eyes were closed. He was standing in the middle of east lawn, head back, shirt off, arms outstretched, waiting. Three, two, one…and there it was. The gurgling and sputtering of water flooding PVC pipes, followed by the angry hiss of sprinkler heads. Grim needed to cool off and the fine spray of the No. 18 Fixed-Pattern Nozzles on the east lawn should do that quite nicely. Should, but after a few seconds he realized that the only thing being cooled off nicely was his left shin.
He opened his eyes and looked down at the sprinkler in front of him. Instead of a strong, round spray pattern, it was spitting limply on his left leg. He looked around, spotted two other sprinklers with similar problems, and started making the rounds. He loved doing sprinkler work when the weather was hot. After you reach a certain age, running through the sprinklers is considered to be “immature.” But if you pick up a screwdriver and walk through the sprinklers you can call it “maintenance.”
Within a few minutes, he’d taken care of the three misbehaving sprinklers and was standing back on the sidewalk, his soaked cargo shorts dripping water onto the hot cement. The water evaporated almost as fast as it hit the ground. It was only the end of May and the temperature had been hovering in the mid-90s all week. It was going to be a long, hot Idaho summer. Grim was almost glad he wasn’t going to be in St. Albans to experience it.
Grim heard the familiar squeak, followed by the familiar slam, of the screen door and the clicking of heels across the front porch. He knew what was coming.
“Mr. Magnusson,” said Florence Peterson, who looked down from the porch as a queen looks down on her subjects. “It’s not enough for you to abandon me for the summer to go traipsing around the English countryside. You now seem intent on giving my nosy neighbors the impression that I hire male strippers to do my yard work. Would you kindly put your shirt on before one of the town spies sees you and starts another round of vicious rumor-mongering.”
Grim glanced down the hill to Agnes Johansson’s house. The 98-year-old Mrs. Johansson was the only neighbor, nosy or otherwise, in a one-mile radius. And while he didn’t doubt Mrs. Johansson’s ability to put together a crack surveillance team and information network, he did doubt her eyesight. She’d been legally blind for the past 12 years and had to position the Lay-Z-Boy two feet from the TV just to make out Pat Sajak’s face.
“My shirt’s in my car, Mrs. Peterson,” he said, motioning to the old Toyota Tercel station wagon parked at the bottom of the driveway. “But I’d be happy to go get it.”
“Oh, don’t bother,” she sniffed. “If you got a scratch reaching into that rust bucket, you’d probably get tetanus and sue me for millions. I certainly hope that when you return in the Fall it will be in a vehicle from which you haven’t had to evict chickens.”
“Oh, I didn’t evict them,” Grim said with a grin. “I told them they could stay if they helped with the car payment.”
“Has the toxic brigade arrived?” Mrs. Peterson asked, changing the subject.
“No,” Grim replied, “They won’t be here until four o’clock. And don’t worry, I’ve talked with Mr. Nelson and he’s assured me that he won’t be doing any spraying while I’m gone.”
“Well, I’m not going to take any chances.” And with that she turned and went back into the house, the screen door slamming behind her.
Grim took one more walk around the grounds to make sure that everything was in order. He’d spent the entire Spring getting things to a point where they should be able to coast through the Summer, but he still worried about what condition the grounds would be in when he got back in September. It’s not that he didn’t have faith in Mr. Nelson and his ChemoGrass franchise….OK, it was that he didn’t have faith in Mr. Nelson and his ChemoGrass franchise, but he didn’t have much choice. ChemoGrass was the only other horticultural game in town.
ChemoGrass was a father and son concern, with Mr. Nelson handling all of the hazmat work (fertilizer, insecticide, etc) and his son, Michael, doing the mowing. Michael was 14 and was a comic book nut, which had a definite negative effect on the quality of his work on the riding mower. He’d been a little more careful since the incident with Mrs. Knudsen’s cat, but you’d still see him weaving back and forth across lawns, steering with his left hand while clutching the latest graphic novel in his right.
Mr. Nelson was a firm believer in ChemoGrass’ unofficial motto: “There’s no problem that a heavy application of petrochemicals can’t solve.” But Grim had been even more firm when he’d talked with Mr. Nelson about taking over the groundskeeping duties at The Fortress for the summer: No spraying, period. It had been a bitter organic pill for Mr. Nelson to swallow, but in the end he’d agreed.
Grim walked through the orchard, checking the apricot trees for any sign of last Fall’s powdery mildew. He tied up a few errant canes on the climbing roses, pulled a couple of weeds from the west flower beds, and was turning the compost pile one last time when he heard the diesel engine of the ChemoGrass truck making it’s way up the driveway. He got to the top of the driveway just as the truck came to a stop, the ChemoGrass mystery liquid sloshing back and forth in its large translucent tank. Mr. Nelson hopped down from the cab. Michael sat in the passenger seat, glued to his copy of Ultimate X-Men.
“Hello, Mr. Nelson. How are you today?” Grim asked, shaking Mr. Nelson’s hand.
“Well, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about meeting Mrs. Peterson,” Mr. Nelson said quietly, glancing anxiously at the house.
“Why’s that?” Grim asked, though he already knew the answer.
“Well, I’ve never met her before, but my wife did once and she said it was one of the most unpleasant experiences of her life. I asked her if she had any advice, and all she said was, ‘Be confident, she can smell fear.’”
Just then, they both heard the screen door open and looked up to see Mrs. Peterson emerge from the house wearing a World War II-era gas mask.
Grim couldn’t help but smile, but he could hear Mr. Nelson chanting under his breath, “Be confident, she can smell fear. Be confident, she can smell fear.”
Grim leaned over and whispered, “I think you’re safe. With that gas mask on, she can’t smell a thing.”
Posted: Wednesday, March 3, 2004 at 10:39 PM
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