I close my eyes, fighting back the urge to vomit as the spinning room gradually slows. “Buff, is that you?” I slur.
“Dazz?”
“Yah.”
“You breathin’?”
“Nay,” I say.
“What the freeze happened?” Buff asks.
Before I can answer, a third voice chimes in. “You two and your icin’ prideful stupidity tore up my pub, is what happened,” Yo bellows. Yo. The slapper. I’ve never seen a day when his hands were clean. I’ll have to wash my face a half-dozen times…just as soon as I can figure out the difference between up and down.
“Sorry, Yo,” Buff says diplomatically. “It won’t happen again.”
“That’s two fights last week and three this ’un. Nay, it freezin’ won’t happen again, ’cause you ain’t welcome back.”
My eyes snap open and I see three Yo’s standing over me, looking angrier than a skinned bear in a snowstorm. His thick mess of beard is right over my face and I clamp my mouth shut for fear of getting a hairy appetizer before lunch.
“But, Yo, you can’t do that—we’ve always come here.” Buff’s words come out as a plea, which is exactly what it is. I expect if he was physically able to, he’d be on his knees with his hands clasped tight, praying to the Heart of the Mountain for Yo to reconsider.
The red hot anger leeches from Yo’s face, leaving him paler than one of the Pasties from the Glass City out in fire country. “You think I don’t know that?” he says, dropping his voice to a whisper. “Chill, I practically raised you boys.” Wellll, I wouldn’t go that far. I respect Yo and how well he runs his business, but honestly, I’d rather be raised by wolves, and not the tame, gentle kind who pull our sleds; the sharp-fanged vicious ones who are known to drag children into the forest.
But at the same time, there’s a degree of truth to his words. Most of what we’ve learned about life has come from our time spent in Fro-Yo’s. First, when we were just kids, brought by my father after school to “learn how to be men,” and then, after he caught the Cold and passed on, we kept going back. Yo could’ve turned us away, because we were too young without having a parent there, but he didn’t. Knowing full well from the gossip that my mother would probably never be motherly again, he served us wafers and goat’s cheese and gumberry juice, never charging us a thing. And we learned how to be men, or at least the ice-country-tavern version of men, drinking hard and fighting harder.
Look where it’s got us.
I don’t say a thing, because the memories are caught in my throat.
“C’mon, Yo, we were provoked,” Buff says, less nostalgic than me. Really what he means is that Dazz was provoked, and even that’s a lie. There’s a chilluva difference between saying a few nasty words in someone’s general direction and throwing a full-force punch between the eyes, although sometimes the nuances of good behavior and manners are completely lost on me.
“No ’scuses, boys,” Yo says. “Look, the best I can do is that I’ll consider lettin’ you back if you can prove you’ve changed your fightin’ ways.”
“And how are we supposed to do that?” I ask, finally dislodging the memories from my windpipe.
“Get a job. Pay for all the damages. And if I don’t hear about you startin’”—he cocks his head to the side thoughtfully—“or endin’ any fights, I’ll let you come back.”
I groan, but not from the pounding headache that I suddenly feel in the back of my head. From where I’m lying, his requirements seem impossible. Bye, bye girlfriend number two.
“Sure, Yo, whatever you say,” Buff says, but I can hear the dismay in his voice. “We’ll prove it to you.”
“Now you best run home and put some ice on those heads of yours. My oak stools pack a wallop, all right.”
He helps Buff to his feet, and then me. We stand side by side, two fierce warriors, swaying and unsteady on our feet like we might topple over at any moment. Some warriors.
Buff flops a heavy arm around my shoulders, nearly knocking me over. I cling to him just as tightly. We stagger for the door like drunks, open it awkwardly. Before we leave, I look back and ask a final question. “Who hit us from behind?”
Yo shakes his head. “You’ll just go and start a fight if I tell you.”
“Naw, Yo, I just wanna know how we lost. We don’t usually lose.” Never, really.
Yo closes one eye, as if he’s got a bit of dirt in it. “One of those stonecutters,” he says. “The third one, who you both thought was out of the picture.”
We close the door, welcoming the cold.
~~~
“Yah, she was pretty icy,” Buff says, “but there are plenny of fish in the ice streams.” The thing about that is, I’ve gone ice fishing twenny times this winter and I ain’t never caught a freezin’ thing.
“Yah,” I say, not really agreeing. It’s just a bit of bad luck, I tell myself, referring to the three broken and mangled “relationships” I’ve left in my wake. If bad luck’s got two-mile-long legs, a deadly white smile, and more curves than a snowman, then that’s exactly what I got.
“You’ll bounce back. We both will,” Buff says, scraping a boot in the snow. We’re sitting in a snowdrift, having never made it home. Neither of us has much to go home to anyway, and there’s plenny of snow and ice to treat our throbbing heads.
“How?” I say, adding another clump of snow to the snow helmet I’m wearing. “How in the chill are we supposed to get enough silver to pay for everything we broke?”
“There’s always boulders-’n-avalanches,” Buff says, referring to our favorite card game of the gambling variety, another vice we picked up the moment we turned sixteen and were permitted into the Chance Holes.
I feel a zing of energy through my bruised body. It’s a longshot, but…
“How much silver do you have to put on the line?” I ask.
Buff shrugs, removes the snowball he’s holding against his skull, chucks it at a tree, missing badly. “Twenny sickles,” he says.
I frown, scrape the snow away from my own head, doing the math. Combined we have maybe fitty, give or take a sickle. Probably a quarter of what we need to pay Yo back. We’d have to get awfully lucky at b-’n-a to win that kind of silver. I pack the snow into a tight ball, launch it at the same tree Buff aimed for, missing by twice as much.
I look up at the gray-blanketed sky, striped with streaks of red, like bloody claw marks, where the crimson sky manages to peek through the dense cloud cover. When I look down again, I know:
We have no other choice—we’ve gotta try.
Luckily, cards have nothing to do with throwing snowballs.
~~~
The bland gray of the daytime is long past, giving way to a heavy night. I end up stopping at home to get my last bundle of silver coins. When I pry it from behind the bearskin insulation we’ve got pressed against the stacked-tree-trunk walls, it feels lighter than it should. Turns out I’ve got even less than I thought, only twenny sickles. The missing sickles are probably because Mother found my stash and stole what she needed to buy enough ice powder to keep her in a sufficient stupor to forget about me and my older brother, who she says, “Reminds me of your father more than anything.”
Wouldn’t want to do that.
Not that it matters. If she didn’t find some of my silver, she’d have found another way. She always does. That’s one thing I’ve learned about addicts: they’ll get what they need one way or another. Sell a piece of furniture, steal it, trade something. Whatever it takes.
I don’t confront her about it, because it wouldn’t do any good anyway. She barely knows I’m there, sitting blank-eyed and cross-legged in front of the dry, charred fireplace logs, holding her hands out as if to warm them on the invisible flames. “Oooh,” she murmurs softly to herself.
I sigh. If we do win anything tonight, I’ll have to find a better place to hide whatever’s left over after paying Yo back. Like somewhere in another country, fire country perhaps.
Shaking my head, I light a small fire so my mother doesn’t freeze to death.
My brother, Wes, isn’t around, because unlike me, he has a job doing the nightshift in the mines. Ain’t much of a job if you ask me, but without his dirt-blackened face we’d have died of starvation months ago. He’s only two years older than me, but if you asked him, he’d tell you he’s ten years my senior in maturity. Not that I’m arguing.