The song on the radio told us it was waiting for the sun, and that was the best song we’d heard in a long time. Outside it was snowing hard and the roads were covered in it. No plows had even made it to the backroads yet, but if you knew what you were doing not only was driving safe, it was a lot of fun, like when I was younger and out with this Aryan-looking kid I knew, who’d stolen his dad’s Nissan so we could skitch behind. Steve and me were pretty drunk, though, so if we were careful it wasn’t on account of the snow, it was because we didn’t want to get caught and arrested. We were on a mission: Steve’s dad had knocked up some barmaid half his age. Steve wanted company, a witness really, to be there when he gave his father a piece of his mind. I was that witness.
“If anyone knows what a piece of shit he is,” he said, “I do,” because Big Steve left Little Stevie when Little Stevie was only a few days old, and he’d done the same thing again a few years later with another woman and who knows how many more after that. Steve had more half-brothers than most people have fingers and toes.
The song was still going, like it would never end which to us was a good thing because it was the best song come out since the early nineties when the whole grunge thing was happening. Then, we stopped the car to take a piss. We were on a winding one-lane road just off Long Island Ave in Yaphank, and we were the only two people for miles except for the dark woods now filling up with the hushed snow. It all felt divine too especially listening to the muted sound of our peeing, the more muted sound of the music and the red taillights glowing fiercely on the whitened asphalt. I felt good, happy, full of purpose. I didn’t even care if this was a good idea, and it wasn’t.
His dad’s house was a little place he rented behind one of the larger farmhouses Yaphank is full of. A cottage really with two rooms, a kitchen and a bath. We knocked loud for a minute straight. Well, Steve did, while I stood there holding a diminishing twelve pack of Bud in the snow. I wasn’t cold but I should have been, my jacket was too thin for the weather and I was wearing beat up sneakers. I think they were those pump ones. Stupid.
“Maybe no one’s,” I said just as his dad’s girlfriend came to the door. She’d been sleeping and she was wrapped in a measly comforter. When it fell aside you could see how pregnant she was, not about to pop, but healthy pregnant, well-along. She was young, too, maybe a year older than Steve and me but young looking, baby-faced, and her hair was greasy like she hadn’t bathed in a while. She looked tired, but behind it all, she was pretty. I envied Big Steve for a moment and thought about how different things would be if she and me were together even if the baby wasn’t mine, I wouldn’t mind. The year before I’d tried to date the pregnant waitress at The Pizza Place, but she had bigger fish to fry and wasn’t having it. Steve eventually dated the pregnant pizza waitress but after she had the baby, and that ended terribly. Steve was morose for weeks. I suppose he thought this was his chance really to make up for what his dad did to him and his mom, but then the waitress got back together with the guy who knocked her up, so what can you say about that?
Big Steve’s girlfriend invited us in.
“I don’t have anything to drink,” she said.
I held up the half-empty twelve-pack and offered her one. She shook her head, of course.
“Where is he?” Steve said.
“I don’t know.”
“When will he be back?” He sounded more menacing than I think he meant to. She was a little frightened.
“I don’t know.”
She hadn’t seen him in three days, she thought we were him at first, but now she wondered if she’d ever see him again.
“What’ll I do?” she said.
Steve didn’t know and I didn’t know, so he hugged her, called her sister. I don’t know what to make of that.
We left and drove back to Old Man, to the hangout we called The Wall, where we spent another hour or so finishing off the beer until one of us had the bright idea to call LJ for a fronted gram of coke which we did. Then it was morning again. Nothing was accomplished and nothing was resolved. The light first darkened the naked trees, then the world was awash with light because the snow crusted every surface except for the roads now. The plows had come, done a fine job, working all through the night.
Big Steve did come back, and Steve did catch up with him. I wasn’t there, but the next weekend, Steve and Mike DiCicco were invited for Sunday football. Maybe it was the Super Bowl. At first things were friendly until they weren’t, because that’s how these things go. I don’t know who started it but I know what the plan was the week before, so I both believed and didn’t believe Steve when he said his dad hit him first, closed fist, to the jaw. I could tell he’d been whapped, too, because there was a fist-sized bruise where one should to be from a blow like that. Steve had a line of stitches too up his right forearm where he’d cut it on the glass.
“Glass?”
“Yeah,” Steve said, “after he punched me I tossed him like a fucking sack of dirty laundry. He landed on this glass coffee table.”
“He was fucked up,” Mike said.
“We all were,” Steve said, “and then we were rolling around and blood was everywhere.”
The cops came before the ambulance but nobody was charged with anything. Steve swore he’d never see that fucking asshole again, but we all knew he didn’t mean it. That guy had been disappointing him from the day he was born, but it was Steve’s job to keep getting his hopes up only to have them smashed. Right, I mean how much sadder to give up, to surrender, to recognize once and for all that that dog won’t hunt, as cousin Franky, another one of my overdoses, used to say.
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