"And every evening at sundown

I ask a blessing on the town

For whether we last the night or no

I'm sure is always touch-and-go"

- Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood

"I thought I might find you up here."

Mickey flung open the hatch door to the treehouse and tossed a bag in ahead of him before dragging his lower half up to safety, taking extra care in minding the slick topcoat of ice on the final rungs of the ladder - the last step, in particular, being a doozy. Once inside, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the stark white glow coming from a double mantle kerosene lantern suspended from a nail on the load-bearing post by the entrance. The light was blinding in the center of the room, dissipating quickly into shadows where it neared the corners.

Dimitri lay spread out along the far wall atop an old camp roll sleeping bag with his neck wedged up against the plywood behind him in a partial sitting position that, while casual in appearance, couldn't have been very comfortable. His gaze flitted up from the book he held at the sound of his friend's voice, but he said nothing to acknowledge his arrival.

"Hello, Mickey, how are you doing tonight?" Mickey welcomed himself in a voice just above a whisper, knowing Dimitri could hear him. "Oh, me? I'm fine, thanks. No, please, don't get up." He bent over to slam the door shut and retrieve his bundle, the rattling hinges and screeling wood announcing his intentions of sticking around regardless of how cold the night or Dimitri's shoulder became. "Nice night. What is it, freezing? He asked louder, finally looking right at him. "A skosh below freezing?"

No reply.

"Yep. Who needs to be indoors when they can be out here communing with nature?"

Put out but unwilling to give Mickey the satisfaction of speaking to prove it, Dimitri marked the page he was on with a scrap of paper and dropped his book to the floor in a series of deliberately stilted motions while silently maintaining eye contact.

Mickey found the passive-aggressive display impressive in its simplicity but remained unphased. Shrugging it off, he set down the grocery bag of provisions on a small makeshift table by the opening that signified a window before leaning out to check the crazy happenings in the alley behind their row of houses. Things always went bump in the night down there, and none of the streetlights were burnt out at the moment, enhancing the viewing experience. "Hrrmmm, let's see what's on tonight… a couple of stray cats are maybe fighting - but I doubt it… a family of raccoons in a trash can feeding frenzy… Oh, hey! Look - the guy who's always drunk on the steps outside the Cash N' Save is taking a shit between two parked cars. Nature is amazing." Turning back to the room, he removed his wet gloves, just catching the tail-end of Dimitri's gravel stare. "Tough crowd."

Mickey blew into his hands a few times and rubbed them together trying to thaw out his fingers while remembering his reason for being there. The treehouse hadn't occurred to him as the first place to look for Dimitri on account of the brutal weather they'd been having lately, although in hindsight it should have. Of course, the stubborn bastard would brave the lingering effects of a Nor'easter in the name of solitude. It was Viktoria who tipped him off that her brother went out there sometime in the early afternoon, citing the generic excuse of needing a quiet place to read.

"Why can't he be depressed in the corner booth of a dark bar eating pickled eggs like a normal person?" He'd muttered to the tree as he scaled it, seconds before almost plummeting to his death - or at least to his severest of injury, weighted down as he was with a flashlight, cigarettes, a massive four-meat sub sandwich wrapped in wax paper, and his old Cub Scouts canteen full of naval strength liquid comfort. How he was going to manage the climb back down after they started drinking was entirely up to fate. With a little luck, he'd have the help of his occasional superhuman intoxicated dexterity. Dimitri was always surefooted no matter the conditions, but once into his cups, it was a crapshoot whether Mickey got sloppy or became a mountain goat as the night progressed. He comforted himself in knowing that if he took a major fall tonight, snapping his neck like a stale breadstick or splatting all over the ground in a pile of bodily excretions, it would be in the service of a friend.

His best friend.

The pair of them were still just boys when they built the large ramshackle monstrosity, scavenging for the wood and painting it a garish barn door red because the pre-mixed cans of that particular shade were on buy-one-get-one-free special at the hardware store - a discontinued brand, more lead than paint probably. The hideaway served them well throughout the years as the setting for so many of their lives occasions, both mundane and momentous - campouts on wickedly hot summer nights when a window AC unit couldn't cut it and sleep with even just a top sheet was out of the question, secret all-nighter games of poker and dice with other boys from around the block with real heavy clay chips just like they used in casinos to represent quarters, beers, stollen loose cigarettes from their moms' purses, and IOU's in place of the cold hard cash they wouldn't have until they were old enough to get part-time jobs, embarrassing first attempts at rounding the bases with girls they met in school, on the bus, or at the community swimming pools who were just as clueless as they were about the practical applications of sex theory. Those were the good times spent up there, or maybe even the great ones in some cases - once they figured out how to unhook a bra with one hand.

They spent less-than-great times there, too. The older they got, it seemed the only reason either of them went up there at all was to steal a few moments alone in which to feel spectacularly bad. Whatever was going on inside Dimitri right now that drove him out to their sanctum sanctorum to lick his wounds was probably a taste of the real stuff. Louder than failure. Rottoner than spoiled hopes.

Well too damn bad!

Enter Mikhail Tanner, the unstoppable force to Dimitri's immovable object. He'd given the man two full weeks of radio silence; that was plenty of time for introspection and sad-sacking. Enough was enough. He was going to drag that sorry excuse maker out of the doldrums tonight or they'd both die from all his trying. Everybody was counting on him to do it, and as Loretta was quick to remind him on his way out the door, "Yuh gotta earn your keep around here."

No more excuses.

"It's not that cold," Dimitri said, clearly annoyed by the chore of words.

"He speaks."

Mickey turned back to the table to unwrap the sub sandwich, an oil and vinegar-soaked gutbomb Yeva insisted he pick up on his way home from work - Yeva even going so far as to pay for it herself, shoving an embroidered coin purse full of nickels into the pocket of his coveralls. He walked into the garage that morning clinking and jingling like Yosemite Sam after he robbed a fucking bank. "Now we'll see if he eats. Here, wrap those chapped blue lips of yours around this." He handed half of the sandwich to Dimitri without leaving an opening for him to reject it, and sat down with his half of it beneath the 'window', keeping within lamplight range. There weren't many seating options available.

Under the banner of leading by example, Mickey tore into his second dinner of the night with relish; something about that treehouse always made junk food taste better, even if he wasn't hungry. Maybe it was the effects of lead paint?

"And by the way," he added between bites, wiping yellow mustard from his chin with a crooked finger, "freezing isn't a subjective term. It's scientific. You can't Wild Bill your way out of a liquid turning into a solid. Though I'm sure you'll try."

"What I meant was freezing isn't that cold if you're used to being cold." Dimitri looked down at the sandwich in his hands where his book used to be. A small part of him wanted to eat it, knowing he was hungry. A bigger part of him viewed it as a completely foreign object - what the hell does he expect me to do with this? He'd just as soon rip a big chunk out of the spine of his book with his teeth for all the appeal food held for him. Everything was ashes in his mouth.

Mickey already polished off half of his half.

"I guess that's where we differ," he countered, "I'd never elect to be cold outside when there were other options available to me; your mother's lovely home right down there that always smells like cookies baking chief among them. Unless you're sitting near Yeva, then it's just sulfurous brimstone, the old battle-axe."

"They sent you out here to check on me, didn't they?"

"Oh, of course they fucking did." Mickey rolled his eyes. He wasn't going to lie to him, but he refrained from adding that Dimitri's mother and grandmother were sitting in their living room pretending to hem curtains, watching the clock, and waiting for their boy to come back inside when last he saw them. They poured him a cup of coffee so strong and sweet the spoon stood straight up on its own before tossing him out on his ear.

Dimitri leaned his head back further to look up at the ceiling, feeling at once bone idle and bone weary. "They shouldn't have. I don't want people to see me like this."

"Will you stop being a horse's ass?" Mickey demanded. "This is me you're talking to. What way am I gonna see you that I haven't seen you before?" He set his food aside, the novelty having already worn off due to the heightened levels of ennui circulating such a small space; it was suffocating and not conducive to noshing at all. Deciding cigarette smoke was preferable to malaise and mayonnaise, he grabbed the pack off the table.

Now they were both in a mood.

His motivations for this search and rescue mission weren't entirely selfless. He was getting tired of people asking him how Dimitri was going. Everywhere he went someone broached the topic - the other mechanics and customers at the garage, all the drunks at his usual divey haunts, the guys who worked out at the gym. Even his own home offered little respite from the prying eyes of their claustrophobic suburban township. His mother's phone kept ringing and ringing.

The grind of it, the incessant gently smiling invasion of privacy was enough to annoy anyone in his position, but for him, mainly it was the fact he didn't have an honest, simple enough answer to give that stuck in his craw. He couldn't pop off a casual, 'He's fine, thanks,' and go about his business because that would be two times a lie - Dimitri wasn't fine, and Mickey wasn't grateful they chose to inquire within. Mind your own goddamn business - that was the truth. Dimitri was almost a winner in a town full of losers - that was the truth. He wanted his friend back - that was the truth.

"Can I get one of those?" Dimitri asked, effectively derailing Mickey's train of thought. He recovered quickly, sticking a second cigarette in his mouth next to the one he'd neglected to light for himself, sparked them up at the same time, and surrendered one of the two.

The silence between them stretched. It was making Mickey antsy.

"So… thinking of taking up smoking for real now that you're not in training anymore?"

Dimitri fiddled with his cigarette in between drags. "I don't want to talk about the fight."

"I wasn't talking about the fight. You haven't been back to the gym yet, and I was wondering, is all. Just small talk."

"I came up here to read, not talk."

"Fair enough," Mickey forced a smile. "Whatcha readin'?"

"A book." Dimitri huffed.

A book.

Suppressing the urge to smart aleck him back, Mickey grabbed the discarded book from the floor between them and angled it toward the light, all the while thinking it was a sorry state of affairs when he was the grownup one in the treehouse. "The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark." He looked up. "Henry Fonda was in that one, right?"

His question received a noncommittal grunt from the book's owner.

Mickey turned the tattered paperback over intending to source a possible icebreaker - showing an interest never hurt. Unfortunately, the brief synopsis on the back cover wasn't brief enough for his taste. Something between a grunt and a full page was apparently too much to ask.

"What's it about? Lemme guess, two brothers accidentally get the farmer's daughter they're both in love with the same oxen for Christmas, and it's pistols at dawn to decide who has to take theirs back to the cattle auction, ehhh? Get it, Ox-Bow?" The cover design indicated a mountainous western setting, so he went with a holiday theme - no reading required for that book report.

Dimitri scowled.

"It's about a posse of average-seeming townspeople who turn into a bloodthirsty lynch mob and hang two innocent men for cattle rustling after taking a vote to kill them rather than bring them back alive to face the judge for their alleged crimes under the law."

"Doesn't sound very festive."

"It's a parable about fascism."

"Oh." Mickey set the book back down gently, not wishing to further rile the angry settlers. Clicking his teeth together a few times, he tried to come up with a better rejoinder than, 'man, I hate fascism'. Nothing was coming to him. He would have had blood from a stone by now, but Dimitri was giving him dick to work with. The man was playing three-dimensional chess at being difficult while he was having a difficult time playing fucking checkers!

He scratched his head.

Maybe there'd been something to the pistols at dawn idea? If you put a bullet in a man's belly, it didn't matter what board game he was playing, that game was over.

"Speaking of fascists," he gave Dimitri an arch look, "Yeva paid for that sandwich you haven't even touched yet. I suggest you consume it before she consumes what remains of your will to live."

Fire in the hole.

After a tense pause, Dimitri groaned, and Mickey knew he'd delivered the payday. "Thanks for the tip," he muttered, more to himself than to Mickey.

Food.

The solution to all of the world's problems according to Dimitri's family. Always, it was food, and if that failed - alcohol.

Eat something.

Eat something.

Did you get enough to eat?

All he sought for himself tonight was isolation with a nihilistic book about the corruptive influence of power on a man's spirit. With cowboy hats. But the world and its sonofabitching ways had other ideas. He studied the offering in his lap through new eyes, a fresh perspective clouded by pure adolescent resentment. No longer an object of temptation, it was now part of the second emerging trend in his life - sandwiches being forced upon him by women; sometimes through an intermediary as in the case of Paul's grape jelly castoffs.

Eat something, why don't you?

Dimitri imagined peeling off the top layer of bread and stubbing out his cigarette on the uppermost layer of cold cuts, the smell of nicotine and blistered sodium nitrite counteracting the effects of tannic despair festering beneath his own outer layers. A fleeting moment of having some control over the direction his life took.

But she'd know. Somehow, she'd know, and dead as he was inside, he still feared her knowing. Damn it all to hell, he'd have to eat the stupid thing.

Three Weeks Earlier

After his conversation with Loretta ended, Dimitri sat on the floor in the hall closet, phone receiver still in hand, allowing the pitch-black dial tone to flood his senses, shutting out the rest of the world for good. All he had to do was never leave that closet again under any circumstances.

Eventually, the dial tone on the line clicked off. He entertained the idea of hanging up the phone and taking it back off the cradle, but it seemed unlikely the same hallucinatory effect could be achieved so easily. Thus the decision to finally leave the safety of the closet was made for Dimitri by the telephone company. The Man bringing him down again.

The rest of the house was nearly as dark as the inside of the closet. He closed the door of perception behind him softly and crept toward the kitchen, winding up the thin telephone cable around his hand along the way, grateful at least something had cut him some slack tonight. His mother often talked on the phone to Loretta or her church friends while doing housework; they always had an extra length of cord neatly coiled and clipped next to the receiver, long enough to traverse most of the first floor should the latest gossip prove juicy enough. When she was still living at home, Karolina was notorious for disappearing with the phone into the downstairs powder room for hours on end, chatting away as she bathed, curled her hair, bleached her upper lip, and shaved her legs, leading to several instances of people trip-wiring themselves when they weren't watching their step in the hallway.

He should have known she was there by the strong smell of camphorated oil and steeping chamomile blending with the baking soda freshness of his mother's spotless kitchen. Or by the instinctive rising of hairs on his forearms and the back of his neck. Had his mind been firing on all cylinders, she wouldn't have succeeded in getting the drop on him - not that easy. Dimitri had just returned the phone to its designated resting place on the kitchen countertop after groping around in the dark for it when the pull chain on the swing-arm brass floor lamp in the corner behind the breakfast table clicked on and his grandmother appeared.

Materializing from the night air itself, Yeva was a small but imposing figure - a withered crime noir villainess, clad in her blue nightcap and bathed in low ethereal light, with a skein of yarn, knitting needles, and a teacup on the table in front of her in place of an art deco ashtray and a loaded revolver.

Was she knitting in the dark?

"Chert voz'mi!" Dimitri started at the sight of her. If he hadn't been so tangled up inside from nerves he would have leaped out of his skin. "Babushka, what are you doing here alone in the dark? You nearly gave me a heart attack!"

He leaned back against the counter, attempting to shield the phone from Yeva's line of sight. This could all still be played off as a funny thing that happened on his way to getting a drink of water before bed - her scaring the bejesus out of him. He used to raid the fridge all the time as a teen, it wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility that this was normal, above board -

"Sit."

He was fucked.

Dimitri's mind reeled, then stumbled and caught fire from trying to figure out just how blown his cover was. What had she overheard? What could she have possibly seen in one of those prophetic visions of hers he never fully gave credence to until this moment when she was staring right at him - right into him? He did as she bade, obediently taking his assigned seat at the drop leaf table.

Why don't you just roll over and show her your belly now and get it over with?

"You've been keeping secrets," Yeva observed after a lengthy spell of panic-inciting stillness.

"... Babushka, I don't know what you think you just -"

She cut him off.

"Don't play stupid with me, child." Her voice was stern but not unkind. Yeva meant business with him tonight, not violence. She waited a moment, allowing him the chance to come clean of his own volition. It was decent of her. "We can sit here all night if that's what it takes. I'm not the one who has to be at work first thing in the morning." She picked up her knitting materials to demonstrate.

Dimitri nodded once, resigned to his fate. He'd already had his one phone call, and he didn't have a lawyer, not unless Paul was willing to serve as his counsel in exchange for ice cream after bedtime.

"Where do I start?"

"The beginning."

For a reticent man, he sang like a bird, spilling his guts all over the floor at his grandmother's swollen, slippered feet. It was helpful that Yeva didn't so much as scratch her nose while Dimitri quickly and quietly recounted every relevant event of his life over the last year-and-a-half, beginning with Randall's sudden appearance at his place of work and culminating with his clandestine telephone call to Loretta roughly twelve minutes prior. Complying with her instructions, he gave it to her straight, down to the very last sordid, distasteful morsel.

"Your mistake was stepping outside of the family to deal with family business," Yeva finally remarked after Dimitri had finished saying his piece, but not before getting up to brew herself a fresh pot of tea. She set it on the table, retaking her seat - slowly. "If you came directly to me after he approached you the first time, as you should have done, I might have taken care of him with a few phone calls."

This was not the reaction he'd been expecting. She wasn't disgusted with his actions or even all that surprised by his confession. Rather than condemnation, she appeared to be offering critique.

"I always knew he'd come back. I was making preparations from the moment we set foot in this country. And do you know why?"

It wasn't a rhetorical question. Yeva was expecting an answer.

Dimitri sighed, shaking his head. "No." He hadn't the foggiest fucking notion of what she was going to say next. How did she know any of the insane stuff she always knew? Finger bones… tarot cards… a crystal ball… like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives… There was no predicting what fresh helping of disorientation she was planning on serving up next. He felt like a toddler. An infant. Frightened of everything and angry about it.

Her answer was brief.

"You can't kill bad grass."

The vacant expression on his face must have been enough for her to realize he'd need a bit more to go on than horticulture.

"I know people in this town," she explained, "people from the old country whom I made it my business to know. These people would slaughter a man like him for free and feed him in pieces to their pigs just to keep them hungry." Leaning in, she lowered her voice. "If there is one thing I've discovered to be just as true in America as it was in Russia, it's this - no body means no crime. And with these people, there would be no demand for favors."

Plain speech and it sounded very much to him like she'd been sitting back in her Barcalounger the entire time, knowing it all yet still allowing him to debase himself and compromise his future out of desperation to teach him an important life lesson.

He stared at her from across the table, willing his dark thoughts not to be true because, no matter how cantankerous or dogmatic his grandmother could be, she'd always been the one to clean up his scraped knees and slip him seconds on dessert while his mother's back was turned.

"Did you know he was here?"

He had to ask her, although it shamed him to do it.

"Not until tonight." She admitted, reaching for his hand as his body sagged in relief. Her next words were spoken looking him directly in the eyes so there would be no mistaking her meaning. "A man is dead. That is a terrible thing, but it was necessary. You took care of your family in the only way you believed you could because it was necessary. You are making a painful sacrifice now as a reckoning, but it is necessary. I only wish you had come to me first. This family has already made sacrifices, and I might have been able to save you from making yours. You know how much I love a good bargain."

They laughed to keep from weeping. 'I have a coupon for that…' was indeed a top contender for Yeva Belikova's epitaph. It was known.

"He alone can be certain of all things that come to pass." Yeva indicated upward to the god he no longer believed in. "Sight without clarity is a curse, not a blessing. There's only so much I can do, and it grieves me. You've always been a good boy, Dimitri."

She stood from the table. Before taking her leave of the room, she produced a crisp fifty-dollar bill from the pocket of her dressing gown. Slipping it to him she said, "Put this on Mendoza to win in the fourth. Your sister Viktoria needs braces to fix her overbite, or the poor girl will never find a boyfriend."

Then she was gone.

It wasn't until Dimitri heard the sounds of her cane clicking up the stairs that he realized the pot of tea she left untouched on the table was intended for him.

"Night, Babushka."

"Thanks for the tip."

Mickey was on the verge of saying something along the lines of 'anytime' or 'who loves yuh, baby', but stopped as sounds from what had evolved into a stray cat gangbang down in the alley below swelled up and overtook all of the loose oxygen in their immediate surroundings.

He grimaced. The yowling had taken a turn for the obscene; there were either four very enthusiastic cats or fourteen fairly enthusiastic ones in the orgy.

It was so damn cold and Dimitri had been quietly staring at half a sandwich like it was a war criminal and not a free meal for the last five minutes; he'd officially begun to reevaluate his stance on falling out of that tree as the night's worst possible contingency. A draining toilet bowl's descent into a crippling depression of his own was starting to look like the real wildcard on the table.

Dimitri was bumming him out.

"Well I don't know about you," he drawled, rising from the floor to sit on the bottom wooden ledge of the window, casting his line out into the night for inspiration, hoping whatever he came up with would be good enough to change the shape they were in, "but I for one am having a fantastic night so far. Really, I mean it. Quality time with my boy Dimitri, smoking cigarettes, sharing some food, and freezing my gizzard off. All while listening to the cashmere harmonies of Mother Earth's nighttime serenade -"

A particularly horrific string of cat noises picked up his cue perfectly, and a thought occurred to him. He'd asked the night for ideas, and the night delivered - misty water-colored memories.

"Now I think I'll just take a moment to admire the stars over the top of Mr. Gorecki's roof and send up a small prayer to the heavens that Mrs. Gorecki doesn't forget to wear her robe tonight when it's time to close the upstairs curtains and put that red light on. Because her chest is hairier than mine is. And yours." Mickey struggled to keep a straight face through his bit but failed. Shifting around again so his back was to the cold, he choked out, "Combined."

Neither young man would ever forget the various times growing up they'd unintentionally seen their neighbors naked. It became a sort of ribald running joke between them, and to this day it was difficult to maintain decorum when politely greeting the couple in passing on the street, knowing as they did that the Gorecki's had a regularly scheduled weekly sex night complete with a red light and smooth jazz records. Mrs. Gorecki, god bless her, was a real lowdown gal with a collection of nipple tassels and a Rubenesque figure who'd missed her true calling as a star of the burlesque stage, and Mr. Gorecki… always made sure to call if he was going to be late coming home from work.

"And don't even get me started on her bush!"

Mickey pressed his arms and face up against the side of the window to smother another bout of laughter. And to spy. A quick peek through his crooked elbow allowed him to glimpse a slight feathering in the muscles of Dimitri's steely jaw, a hairline crack in his sourpuss he only permitted because he believed Mickey couldn't see it.

Forget chess and fuck-off, checkers - this was Bingo, baby!

"Never know how much I love you, never know how much I care." Mickey began singing Sheila's favorite song of seduction into the sleeve of his coat - slow, sultry, and painfully out of key. "When you put your arms around me, I get a fever that's so hard to bear…" He threw out his arms and slumped against the windowsill, trying for Bob Fosse but looking more like a corpse that was inexplicably horny even in death. "FEVER! In the mornin', a-fever all through the night…" He tossed in a couple of pelvic thrusts.

"You are such an idiot," Dimitri muttered, pointedly looking in the opposite direction of Mickey's bouncing crotchal region but unable to hide the smile on his face.

He didn't laugh, but he smiled.

Mickey was immensely proud of his tiny victory over the scourge of melancholia. "Uhhh… the idiot who just got a smile out of you!" Dodging the insult, he reached back to the table behind him and grabbed the canteen his mother sent with him. "Here. Drink up and be somebody, big fella." He added, tossing it to Dimitri.

"What is this?" Dimitri asked, eyeing the container as mistrustfully as he had Yeva's Trojan horsemeat sandwich. He'd long since learned not to drink anything without a label.

"Don't worry about it." Mickey smiled wryly. "Just something to temporarily slake the thirst of the unquenchable soul of man."

Wondering who died and made him James Joyce all of the sudden, Dimitri gave up on life, removed the cap, and took a swig. He refrained from smelling the stuff before and during the act of swallowing, preparing for the worst - and boy, howdy.

"Yebena mat'! Fuuuuuuck!" He nearly did a spit take. "Is this… is this… did you bring Irish Wine? Oh, God! Somehow it's even worse than it sounded."

Too late, Dimitri remembered Mickey wasn't privy to information regarding his talk with Loretta - the creation story for Irish Wine. "Hey! how do you already know about Irish Wine?" He demanded. "Ma told me she just invented it!"

"Don't worry about it," Dimitri answered, parroting Mickey's previous words as smugly as he could through the caustic churn in his gullet.

It was a good save.

"Loretta Tanner." Mickey spat his mother's name out like a dirty word and yanked the canteen from Dimitri's hands. "I swear, that woman'll steal your drawers and sell 'em back to you if you're not careful."

He took a drink and cringed.

The beverage was rough; it was sidewalk juice. However, a bottle of wine and over half a bottle of whiskey mixed together sure made for a real kick in the everything - a motivator of sorts. Mickey wiped his mouth on his sleeve, allowing the chemicals some time to soak into the nooks and crannies of his frontal lobe before taking another crack at opening up a meaningful dialogue with a Russian brick wall.

"So, I hear you put in your notice at the shop. Olena said something about a new job?"

The Irish Wine exchanged hands again.

"Yeah."

"... Really? That's all I'm getting? Yeah." Mickey growled skyward. "Two steps forward and forty back with you at all fuckin' times! Can't we just talk, huh? Like civilized people do - people who communicate."

A moment passed.

"One of the shop regulars has been after me for a while now about the Electrician Technicians training course they teach at the trade school." Dimitri relented, knowing full well he was giving Mickey a hard time tonight and finally beginning to feel bad about it. Loretta's party liquor at work. "The certification program is only ten months long, and he said he can get the manager of the project he's working on now to sponsor me into the union by hiring me as an apprentice while I'm studying."

"That's great, man! Why didn't you tell me about this before?"

"I hadn't decided yet if I was going to go for it or not."

"What's there to think about? You're bored to tears working at the shop most of the time, and it's not humanly possible a gig could pay you less than you're making now. Maybe if it was a textile factory inside of a coal mine."

They each took another drink, mutually appreciating the not-so-slow burn as it turned their blood to battery acid and loosened their tongues. If the beverage was stupefying, which it was, at least it was relaxing.

"The entry-level pay scale is nothing to write home about, but there would be full benefits after a year and a pension. The hourly rate for a certified electrician is more than I thought I'd ever make by hanging around here."

"Sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me. You would be on a - what did they call 'em in school? A career path." Mickey wiped the air with his hand in a rainbow arc. "You, Dimitri Belikov, will be on a new career path." He made another arc. "It rings so friggin' responsible in my ears it probably comes with a house, a wife, and a bun in the oven."

Dimitri wasn't able to match his friend's enthusiasm. Any of it. "When I went to hand in my two weeks to Mr. Giordano, part of me just wanted to run." He confessed.

"Whaddya mean, like run for your life before Mary Angela Giordano tried to bosom you to death?" Mickey laughed awkwardly, sensing something he couldn't identify in his friend's voice - a bad something. "That's just fight-or-flight kicking in, man. Christ but that young woman does heave with lustiness whenever you're nearby."

It was an accurate depiction, though wrong in this case. Dimitri shook his head. "I mean I wanted to run away. From this place, from everything, and never come back - like a child. I thought about my savings and how I could leave half of it for Mama to help until I found work somewhere new. Just pack a bag, get on the next Greyhound heading west, and stop when I found a place that looked different enough."

"Different enough from what?"

Dimitri looked to the window hole, searchingly or longingly. The world outside had to be full of more things than just cats humping themselves to death. Pleasanter things. Beauty. Otherwise, what was the point of it all? "Different enough for me to feel differently, or just -" he shook his head slowly, trailing off absently. "Anything. Anything at all. There's nothing right now. There's no Dimitri. No wants or needs. It's a void inside."

He was slipping. That precipice again.

"Yeah. Life sure knows how to stick it in and break it off." Mickey lamented, handing him the canteen. "Here. If you can't fill the void with this stuff, at least it'll put some hair on your chest. Shit, by the time that canteen is empty we'll both be a couple of regular Sheila Goreckis." He moved to sit next to Dimitri on the sleeping bag, keeping a space between them to make room for emotions should they emerge. "Just so you know, it doesn't work."

"What doesn't work?"

"Running away. I tried it once. Or maybe it works if you do it right, but I sure as hell didn't."

"You never told me that," Dimitri said, honestly surprised. Mickey never shut up when they were just hanging around; he talked about everything. He'd probably heard about the time Mickey thought he saw Marlon Brando in a doughnut shop in Poughkeepsie when he was eleven a hundred times, but he couldn't remember him ever saying anything about running away before.

"It was right after Pop died. Fathers were always a sensitive subject with you on account of Randall being such a major piece of shit." He paused to light another cigarette. Just one this time. They could share. "He was already dead by the time you moved here, but when Pop was alive, he was beautiful. At least to me, he was. Talking about him too much would've hurt us both, I think."

He handed the cigarette to Dimitri, swapping him for the canteen.

"A few days after the funeral I dumped the shoebox full of birthday money I kept hidden in the back of my closet into his old army rucksack, threw some clothes on top, and took the bus to Penn Station. I spent the night there on a bench, wide awake and colder than I am right now, just trying to decide where to." The canteen was lighter in his hands. His head felt lighter too. "I wanted to go to San Francisco. Pop was a 49ers fan for as long as I could remember, and the idea was a friggin' lightbulb of genius going off in my head. The Summer of Love hadn't happened yet. I don't think we were even calling them hippies by then, but Ma had bad-talked beatniks enough for me to know there was probably something really to the place. San Francisco was gonna be it… or it would have been if I could pay the fare. I had a little less than twenty bucks. After that, I just skipped down the line. New Orleans sounded pretty sweet - the Big Easy, but again, not enough money. Chicago was also out because Ma had too much family there and I was convinced they'd find me by family radar or something. I finally settled on Baltimore. I could afford Baltimore and still have some money left over for food, so that was the plan. Blue crabs, Lady Day, Orioles' games, and whatever the fuck else they had in that place because all I knew was that it was in Maryland, not New Jersey."

"What happened?"

"I fell asleep on the train to Baltimore, and someone robbed me," Mickey chuckled ruefully. "I woke up when they announced the next stop with nothing, not even my boots!" Dimitri handed him back what was left of the cigarette. "Anyway, the point of my tale is that it doesn't do you any good to run away if all you're trying to feel differently about is you. You're still you in Santa Fe or Galveston, just like you are here. I was a stupid kid stuck in a train station with no clue what to do, no money, no shoes, and do you know what I felt?"

Dimitri shrugged.

"Fuckin' nothing. I missed my dad, and I was cold, but that's it. I wasn't scared I'd get hurt or worried about Ma killing me when I got home. I was the same numb nothing as before, the only difference was I was in Maryland, not New Jersey." Mickey licked his fingers and pinched out the glowing end of their cigarette. "Spoon drove out there to get me. Ma still couldn't get out of bed, and none of my sisters could drive legally yet, not over state lines. I had his number memorized. He picked me up from the station in Baltimore in a borrowed car after I called him collect, he took me to a diner nearby and ordered us both tuna on rye and a prairie oyster - which are disgusting if you're not hungover like he always is, and then he dropped me off at home. No hugs. No talking about what happened or what was going on with me. He fed me, didn't bust my chops too bad about it, and brought me back."

The invocation of Spoon's name nearly broke Dimitri in two. He was unworthy of the people in his life, he'd never been more certain of that fact. He didn't deserve Mickey's generosity or his vulnerability, he wasn't worthy of Spoon's tutelage and the faith he'd always placed in him, his mother's unconditional love was wasted on a man in his condition - he was a murderer by proxy and a pathetic coward. No matter how his grandmother framed it.

"It feels wrong comparing your father's death to me losing a stupid fight."

Weak words from a weak man.

Mickey studied Dimitri's face, convinced there was something he wasn't telling him. Sorrow was there, blotting his features, and a ton of guilt, too, which didn't make sense given the circumstances. What did he have to feel so guilty about? Being beaten? He couldn't help that, and there was no way Spoon or anybody else besides the odd scumbag who lost too much money betting on what they thought was a sure thing would hold that against him. He knew he couldn't drag whatever it was out of Dimitri, not without a second canteen of Irish Wine and some very dirty pool, that is. He could manipulate it out of him by working the guilt angle, the "Catholic approach" as his mother called it, but was that wise? The bonds of brotherhood were difficult to navigate at times like these, and he was certainly no head shrinker.

With words of wisdom in short supply, Mickey said what he felt.

"I never read any rule that said you're only allowed to mourn people. Loss is loss. I mean, you and your family were all mourning Russia for a long time when you first came here. You missed your home so much you were breaking your hearts for it. I know you, Dimitri, better than almost anyone. This was the end of fighting for you as number one in your life. You might spar and do your routines to keep fit like the rest of us, but you'll never be the Russian God again. That was a huge part of your life for nearly a decade gone in a muzzle flash. You're allowed to mourn for a piece of yourself that's never coming back."

Dimitri's heart was still breaking.

Mickey felt the moment called for chain smoking. Two more nails in the coffin were lit, and one passed to the left. "Can I ask you a question?" He said after a few thoughtful drags.

"Hrm?"

"What the hell is that thing you keep picking up and futzing around with?" He pointed at the white plastic lump in Dimitri's left hand. "I saw you holding it with your book when I came in. I'm over here trying to talk to you about our feelings, real dark night of the soul type stuff, and you're sitting there all -" He wiggled his fingers around, crumpling his face. "It's distracting! And rude, I might add."

"It's an oven timer."

"...Oh. Is it Olena's?" Mickey was powerfully confused.

Dimitri shook his head. "No."

"Is it yours?"

"It is now. I stole it."

Mickey tapped his chin, unable to tell if the world had gone mad or if he had. "Okay, I'll bite - why?"

Dimitri held the timer up in front of them. "I was thinking of smashing it with a hammer. Or with my forehead." He said matter-of-factly.

There was an unsettling element of distance in Dimitri's voice, a haunting that led Mickey to believe he was likely better off not knowing where that timer had come from or what it had done to deserve his friend's contempt. Considering the state he was in, the explanation was either bad or it was worse, and since he didn't have to choose, he wouldn't. It didn't matter anyway - not now that he had himself a plan. And a damn fine one at that!

"Well," he declared, springing up from the floor, "if something's worth doing, it's worth doing right. I'll help you destroy your enemy, but it'll require a change of venue."

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Dimitri asked a fifth time since he and Mickey entered the double-wide garage behind the Tanner homestead. His arm was beginning to go numb from holding it in the same position for so long, angling the ceiling lamp toward the pine workbench where Mickey was toiling away on something a smidge illegal and most assuredly a safety concern. Somehow the garage was colder than the treehouse - an implausibility for multiple reasons, but mostly because he was drunk. No substantial food for days and a quart of Irish Wine should have been all the jacket he needed - but not tonight.

He shivered.

"Oh, yee of little faith, Belikov. Trust me, this isn't as easy as I'm making it look." Mickey smirked. His current posture of bending at the waist with all of his weight bearing down onto his elbows atop the workbench where he'd been tinkering away for the better part of twenty minutes wasn't any more comfortable than Dimitri's. Still, you didn't hear him bitching about it. "Scientific achievement, like the gentle art of lovemaking, cannot be rushed." He added, humming a few bars of Fever as a warning. This time he'd sing the whole damn song - Elvis's version with infinite more crotch action.

"My arm is falling asleep," Dimitri grumbled.

"Well, that is very precisely your problem as my brain is otherwise occupied." Mickey knew Dimitri was drunk. His mild accent had grown moderate. "Look, once you've gotten through your electrician classes, you can be the one rigging fuses for all of the explosive devices we build moving forward, with me on lamppost duty, but for now I'm the one with the most experience in a related field."

"Automotive repair and explosives?" Dimitri closed one eye and skipped over the implied future full of pipe bombs Mickey just hinted at to address the more obvious inconsistency.

"The internal combustion engine, my man. Now quit yappin'. Every time you talk the light moves, and I'm just about done…" Mickey needed to finish his work before the drink took over. Right now he was in that buzzed sweet spot, the nebulous zone of pre-drunk where a man played the best game of pool in his life or owned all of his friends at darts for the first time. It wouldn't last long. Even a foundation of two dinners was no match for the likes of Irish Wine.

Irish Wine.

That damn Loretta who bore him was another Yeva in the making - witchy women weaving their influence from afar, casting spells without even taking off their aprons. There wasn't a man alive who stood a chance against them, himself included. If they ever combined forces, the world would weep.

He took a deep breath, exhaling in a long string of variations on the word "yep," and closed his eyes in a private celebration. He'd done it! It was time for the frigid night air to behold his firstborn brainchild - a bunch of small explosives tied to a plastic timer with a yard of fuse string, adhered to an old roofing shingle with wood glue and caulk. It was a painter's tape-covered Frankenstein, built to self-destruct on the principle that close enough only counted with horseshoes and hand grenades.

That timer was going down.

Or rather, up.

As expected, descending the tree was a treacherous process, one for which they each had their own approach. Dimitri relied on his considerable upper body strength in lowering himself down the icy ladder rungs, his hands doing most of the work. Hitting the grass on two feet, he wobbled a little but still managed to avoid taking a step back for balance. Mickey wasn't sure how he made it to the bottom successfully given his technique was less of a climb and more of a controlled plunge, with him cursing a blue streak the whole way down.

Once grounded, the ruckus they'd made continued with Mickey stumbling around in the dark laughing, looking for the flashlight and Dimitri trying to brush bark off his clothes and drink liquor at the same time. They were so loud that Mickey halfway expected one of the stray cats in the alley to object.

'Do you mind, sir? Some of us are trying to fuck out here behind this old discarded mattress! Meow-meow!'

On the walk to his garage, Mickey supplied Dimitri with the backstory for the master plan. "Karolina came by the shop a few weeks ago to ask me if she could buy my old moped off of me as a birthday surprise for Paul next month. I told her hell no she couldn't buy it from me, but she could have it for free and I'd fix it up for him, too, since I'm not a miserable cheap bastard and it saves me the trouble of having to pick out another square gift in a long line of square gifts for the kid. I love your nephew, but he's a strange little man. What nine-year-old kid asks for college-ruled spiral notebooks for his birthday?"

Dimitri smiled to himself - they were coming on a little easier now the seal on his face had been broken, or perhaps it was merely that Paul on a motorbike was a contradiction in terms. His personality was more suited to a sensible family station wagon. Something he could carpool in to save money on gas.

"Anyway, I sorta shot myself in the foot with that gesture because, if you'll remember, my moped was always a huge pain in the ass. It's Italian, and all of the parts for it have to be specially ordered every time it craps out, which it does constantly. This will be a recurring transaction." Mickey raised the beam of his flashlight from the ground in front of their feet to the garage doors in front of their faces. Unhooking the latch, he ushered Dimitri in ahead of him on the off chance he was planning to bolt. "I went digging around out here when I got home from work that night to see what I already had on hand materials-wise, and I found something way more interesting than a cylinder rebuild kit buried under all the mouse turds."

After turning on the light and closing the doors behind them, Mickey motioned for Dimitri to join him at the workbench in the corner. "Voila!" Too excited to lay on the suspense any thicker, he pulled up a crusty old piece of burlap sacking to reveal a large pile of individually papered firecrackers and an unopened package of pre-made fuses. "So, fancy a little Cape Canaveral action?" He challenged, eyes glinting in the dim light. "Boldly send that thing where no kitchen tool has gone before?"

"Uhh…"

Not trusting his mouth, Dimitri plugged it with the canteen. He thought there'd maybe be a sledgehammer underneath the wadded-up fabric or a mounted table vise. He wasn't expecting Mickey's brilliant plan to be a short-notice Apollo mission. The whole thing sounded ill-advised, a folk or country song in the making about a down-and-out boxer who, days after hanging up his gloves for good, blew his hands clean off his body while on a bender in a tragically poetic turn of events.

Bloody Stumps and Broken Hearts

Warm Beer, Cold Women, and the Man With No Hands

Mickey took Dimitri's silence as a yes.

The device was set and ready for launch.

Despite his protests, Dimitri took up the task of clearing off the blast site himself. It was bitterly cold now with the wind blowing, even he couldn't deny that. Physical labor would get his humors flowing a lot faster than moping about. After pacing out the flattest spot without tree coverage in the yard, he borrowed Loretta Tanner's snow shovel to level a 3ft x 3ft space for all Mickey's hard work to pay off. He was careful to return the shovel to its designated resting place the moment he'd finished his task, understanding the consequences would be dire should he accidentally forget and skip that last step.

Survival 101 where Mickey's mother was concerned - never take anything without asking first and always clean items thoroughly before bringing them back, or death would soon become your fervent wish. It made him anxious just thinking about it; the woman kept a closer watch on her yard equipment than she did on her children. Even where his mother was concerned, Olena Belikova, her dearest friend - Loretta would lend a neighbor in need a weed cutter or an aerator, but they'd be signing for it in blood first.

"You can't argue with results," he observed sardonically, standing in the dark potting shed, wiping the nicked shovel blade with the hem of his favorite flannel shirt. For as long as he'd known Loretta, she never lost so much as a gardening glove.

Mickey was still engrossed with the final positioning of what he bombastically dubbed his "finest achievement" when Dimitri reemerged from the shed. After a little digging around in the garage, he'd come up with the ingenious idea of taking the metal grate out of the bottom of the raised fire pit his father bought the year before he passed away to serve as a platform and moisture buffer between the damp lawn and the shingle base of the, for lack of a better term, rocket.

The wrought iron and steel decorative fire pit was an uncommonly bourgeois article amongst the Tanner family's possessions, but Mickey's father was always a sucker for a good bonfire and Loretta had felt strongly at the time that an old-fashioned burn barrel in the yard - front or back - made them look like gypsies. The removable cinder catch was just the right shape and size to suit his purposes tonight, and it felt good to include his father's memory in their misbehavior.

"The payload has been delivered," Mickey whispered reverently to his explosive device when perfection was theirs. The planets were aligned - maybe, the moon was in the Seventh House - probably, and he was ready to blow some shit up - for sure!

But first, a little audience engagement.

"Launch Control, this is Houston." He announced loudly into the back of his right fist after a series of spitty crackling noises. The pantomime read a little more Secret Service than NASA, but Mickey wasn't striving for authenticity. "We are go for launch, but before we commence the countdown, we have an important question for you - do you copy? Over."

"What?!"

Dimitri heard him just fine; they were only ten feet apart and shouting. He was just lost for a second there, slow to parse that he was supposed to be Launch Control in the proposed scenario, and Mickey was using an invisible walkie-talkie, or similar, not hocking loogies of cigarette smoke phlegm through his fingers. It was six of one, half a dozen of the other which explanation was more repulsive to him.

The walkie-talkies.

"Uhhh… Houston's going to need Launch Control to speak into the communication technology if he wants Houston to copy. Over. And he'll need to say 'Over' at the end of each transmission. Over."

"Houston," Dimitri replied flatly, "what's your stupid question? Over." His hands remained firmly at his sides. He'd let his sisters apply a permanent fucking wave to his hair before he used a make-believe walkie-talkie at Mickey's behest.

Dimitri's reply didn't sit well with Mickey, who was expecting a lot more pushback from his drunk, difficult friend. He hadn't even told him to fuck off. Or to go fuck himself! Reluctant compromise in response to overt antagonism might as well be full-blown capitulation for how out of character it was.

The patient still wasn't cured, and that simply would not do.

Mickey repeated his previous line with a last-minute addition in the form of a gambit. One of his old reliables.

"We are go for launch in T-Minus sixty seconds and counting, but first, Launch Control - do you know how to Pony like Bony Maronie? Over."

"Mickey, I am not doing that right now."

Silence.

"Mickey, I'm not doing that right now. Over."

"Oh, c'mon!" Mickey cajoled. "It's a simple yes or no question, Launch Control. Do you, or do you not know how to Pony like Bony Maronie? Over."

More silence, capped off with a long, defeated release of carbon dioxide through the nose and a slurred Russian cuss word.

"Yes, Huston, Launch Control knows how to Pony like Bony Maronie. Over." Dimitri recited, rolling his eyes, hard. Mickey's Land of a Thousand Dances routine was something he used to pull in the locker room to get the team amped up before football games in high school.

"Excellent. Can Launch Control do the Twist? Over!"

The pause that followed was shorter this time.

"Yes, Houston. Launch Control can do the Twist. Over."

"Copy that." Mickey shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet to keep from falling over. He was still in a full squat next to the launchpad with his lighter poised to strike and his glutes aching. "Can Launch Control Mashed Potato? Over."

"YES, Houston, Launch Control can Mashed Potato."

"...Over?"

"OVER!"

"That's more like it! BUT can Launch Control DO THE MUTHAFUCKIN' ALLIGATOR - OVER!?"

Suddenly they weren't the only ones yelling.

"Hey, wouldja cool it!"

The neighbors, finally fed up with all the noise, became vocal objectors. Heads stuck out of windows. An angry fist shook. Someone down the lane chucked a tin can into the yard as a warning shot.

"Cállate!"

Mickey paid them no mind. He was used to pissing off his neighbors after so many years of practice, and a lot of them were less than courteous in their own right. It was fortunate for him that Loretta always put in her earplugs before bed on paydays, expecting at least one drunken disturbance before dawn, as her input would have been the first, the angriest, and the most likely to be accompanied by a pail of water.

"ROGER, HOUSTON!" Dimitri yelled, using his feelings of aggravation to amplify his raspy voice, drowning out another harried neighbor's exclamation in the process. "LAUNCH CONTROL CAN DO THE ALLIGATOR!"

"Woooooooo!" Mickey flicked open his lighter with a moonlit howl, the fuse of their bomb damn near lighting itself. He made sure it wasn't snuffed out by the blustering wind before adding, "We are go for launch, Houston! T-minus 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 -"

"Wait! Am I Houston or Launch Control?"

"Huh?"

"You just called me Houston. I thought I was Launch Control. That's what you said before -" Dimitri couldn't ignore a continuity error, regardless of his state of mind.

"IT'S TOO LATE TO FIGURE THAT OUT NOW! We'll decide once we reenter the Earth's atmosphere!" Mickey shouted, gleefully disregarding the slip-up. Springing back into a standing position, he stumbled a bit, righted himself, and galloped over to where Dimitri stood. The Jerry-rigged main fuse on his creation was burning fast and he didn't want to miss a second of the live broadcast.

They stood waiting for the spectacle to commence, fingers at the ready to plug their ears. Mickey's excitement was barely contained. Any second now that white plastic oven timer would shoot way up into the sky, splintering into a billion shimmering hateful pieces, bestowing upon Dimitri immediate, sweet relief from the darkness that plagued his heart.

Any second now.

Yep.

An eerie stillness followed the fuse's fizzling disappearance into the first firecracker. Nothing was happening. The severe anticlimax had Mickey beginning to wonder if maybe they were all duds. All eight of them on the shingle - duds. It was a stretch, but still a possibility, otherwise why no boom boom!? He reached for the flashlight in his back pocket, trying to determine if it was safe to approach the thing yet, or if -

Suddenly there was a loud RAT-TAT-TAT accompanied by a geyser of sparks. A CRACK dovetailed with a mighty BOOM caused the earth beneath their feet to tremble and in an instant, the flashlight's beam was swallowed up by a massive plume of displaced dirt.

They were gazing upon a mushroom cloud of landscaping.

Side by side, Dimitri and Mickey watched, wholly transfixed by the sheer magnitude of the mayhem they'd wrought, eyes like saucers, mouths hanging open incredulously. This was no ordinary holiday light show, somehow Mickey managed to detonate a TNT charge blast in the southeast quadrant of his mom's front yard with Dimitri as his accomplice. The dust began to settle revealing a crater in the scorched grass about two or three times the diameter of a hula hoop.

Mickey slowly reached for a cigarette, still agape. "Well, shit."

A heavy THUNK and the sounds of rubble settling a few feet to the left of where they stood drew their attention away from the steaming hole. Mickey aimed his flashlight toward noises and nearly dropped it. His family's garden statue of Saint Alexandra was now a jagged pile of low-grade granite. He approached her slowly with Dimitri close behind, the sacrilegious carnage shocking enough to halt their steps. Closer inspection revealed that something must have fallen from the sky and landed on her head, taking her out in a single blow with blunt-force trauma to the crown.

The whodunnit was easily solved. Beside her lay the body of her killer - the metal bottom of Mickey's father's fire pit, solid steel glowing hot with a hole blown clean through the center. Alexandra was a double martyr now, beheaded once and baptized in her own blood by Emperor Diocletian, and beheaded again tonight as a direct result of Mickey's pyrotechnics.

What the hell was in those fireworks? C-4!

Mickey took a long drag from his cigarette.

The neighbors' shouting picked up again, far more impassioned. The English expletives were filthier, the Spanish harder to follow as it increased in speed. They got the gist of it, though. Somewhere in the night, a baby started crying.

Dimitri pinched the bridge of his nose. "Mickey?"

"Yeah."

"Where did you get those fireworks?"

Mickey hesitated. "They were a gift."

"... Scorpion?" Dimitri guessed, already knowing full well that he was right.

Mickey nodded and swallowed hard against the lump in his throat, not expecting it to help. A fat gulp of cold March air wasn't going to be enough to wash down hindsight's bitter pill. For there was once another young man they knew who decided to leave it all behind…

Marie Tanner dated Gary Sirico for two years before the great metamorphosis took place - he came home from a friend's bachelor party weekend in Las Vegas with an inflamed ten-inch scorpion tattooed on his back, telling everyone he was no longer going to answer to the name Gary. He was Scorpion now. No first name. No last name. Just Scorpion. He even went to the Social Security office and the DMV to make it a matter of public record. Not long after the change, Scorpion broke up with Marie at a big Sunday dinner, announcing to everyone at the table his plans of going out west to join the Hells Angels. It was a shitty thing to do in front of so many members of her family, and Marie was crestfallen, crying into bowls of ice cream and glasses of André for months after he left. She'd gladly have become Mrs. Scorpion or Marie Therese Tanner-Scorpion if only he'd asked her to be his old lady.

Nodding gave way to bemused head shaking as Mickey tried to lock down a pathology for the scene before him into a pattern that didn't make him look like a moron. Not quite a chain reaction of events, it was more a lengthy series of orbiting bungles resulting in a less-than-ideal outcome. Gary used to buy fireworks in New York on one of the reservations and sell them out of the back of his van during summer months. The fireworks they set off tonight were leftovers Gary had been looking to unload, which he took and promptly lost after doing too good of a job hiding them from Loretta.

Perhaps it was a rationalization, but he never would have accepted a stash of illegal fireworks from a biker named Scorpion. That would be crazy. He accepted them from a CPA in training called Gary, and there was a difference!

Mickey tossed his cigarette butt into the crater.

"My mom is gonna be so mad at me."

Dimitri surveyed the mess they made, trying to piece together something helpful to say. He was never one for telling white lies, and even if he were, Mickey wouldn't believe him. There was no sugarcoating it, Loretta was absolutely going to murder him, or possibly give the neighbors permission to do it for her since it was a small wonder that none of them were outside with pitchforks or roasting effigies.

All that careless destruction made him feel, well, nice. Mickey did this just for him, to make him feel better. He didn't know what that oven timer signified. He just knew they were friends, and that's what friends did for each other - any damn thing they needed. Stupidity could sometimes mean more than anything else in the world. He smiled... and then he started laughing. A low rumble from deep down inside of him spewed forth from his mouth in a warm, unexpected, cleansing burst. Early that afternoon, he'd stolen away to their treehouse feeling desolate, believing it impossible he'd ever find cause to laugh again, but here he was, incapable of stopping. It was like the giant hole Mickey blasted into the Earth's crust - accidentally on purpose - filled up part of the gaping hole in his chest.

He laughed until tears formed in his eyes. Tomorrow they'd deal with the fallout together. There would be bawling out to endure from both of their mothers, penance required, acts of contrition demanded, but for tonight they'd be fine.

He was going to be fine.

When his laughter finally subsided, he looked up to find Mickey smiling back at him, self-satisfied and chapped from the cold. The night certainly hadn't gone off without a hitch, but by hook, crook, and possibly sticks of straight-up dynamite, he'd carved out a victory for them both.

"Can I sleep over at your house tonight?" Mickey asked, sparing a brief glance at the crater and ex-statue before shrugging and quirking a brow.

"Yeah. But I don't know how much good it'll do you."

They gathered up what bits of debris they could locate with just the flashlight, returned the damaged fire pit base to the garage, and covered Alexandra's remains with a moving blanket as a sign of respect for her many sacrifices. The rest would keep till morning. On the way back to Dimitri's house they played Rock Paper Scissors in the dark alleyway to determine whose job it would be to climb up to the treehouse to get the rest of their sandwiches.

Mickey won, best three out of five.

Notes

There is a scene with Olena and Dimitri that was supposed to take place before everything above - a lot of angsty bonding and tears - but I kinda gave up on it for the time being (it was taking too much out of me to write and plan, and I've had 10,000 words already done for weeks.) I'll add it in later when I post a future chapter and make a note for people to hop back to this chapter and check it out if they want the full, cohesive progression of the story. The "Directors Cut".

The last 1/4 of the chapter is likewise a little rough. I shall re-edit soon.

Chert voz'mi!: Damn it!

The next chapter takes us back to the club in 1978. We finally meet Sonya, and Rose starts a bar brawl in her Halston gown while Dimitri dutifully holds her purse.

Soundtrack

Fever - Peggy Lee or the Elvis Live from Hawaii version if you're feeling extra frisky (Sheila G's Dirty Jam)

Caravan - Van Morrison (Mickey and Dimitri at Cape Canaveral)