(This is the opening of a story about two boys—who appear as college students in another story—deciding to take a risk.)
According to Lee and Jay, it never snowed—well, sure it snowed, it had snowed all night, a good six inches on the ground—but still, it hardly ever snowed, so the two boys leaped on this opportunity like a singing frog on a lily pad, straight and solid and shining with the sun shining on the snow that soon would be crusted on their clothes. They had bundled up in twos: socks over socks, pants over long johns, coats over jackets, mittens over gloves, caps over caps; if possible, they would’ve worn two pairs of buckle boots. Lee and Jay; names like two little birds; first Lee, nine, who slid his sled to Jay’s; then Jay and Lee eventually quick through the streets—stopping only four times for snowplowed king-of-the-hill jousts—then trudge across a field and towards a pond, walk around it and there’s the hill.
—But before the hill: Jay, nine and a half, who had no sled. Lee knocked at Jay’s house, Jay came out ready to go, a porky-pine of scratchy wool and dungaree.
“I don’t have a sled,” Jay said in the doorway; his mother came up behind him to shoo him out the door and close it on the cold—”You working for the power company?”
“But,” Jay continued, “Mickey Gorky has a—”
“Mickey? Micky, for shitssake?”
“Language, Lee!” his mother said from behind the door.
Mickey, the middle Gorky brother; they came not only in threes but in three sizes, like Russian nesting dolls—similar shape too, round at the base, and hard as wood. These were genuine maniacs in the kind of family where the youngest brother bolts naked and free from the house, squats on the curb and poops into the street like a terrier, hops on a tricycle and hightails it around the block; where the oldest brother keeps his head buried under the hood of a ‘55 Bel Air all day, blasting the radio and surrounded by grease monkeys and beers; where a loose-limbed level-eyed cat sleeps sitting up in the middle of the yard then charges you as you walk by; and where the parents storm around like enraged elephants—and damn they had every right, those Gorky brothers were wild stuff—not always mean, but always tensed up all the time from not always having something unexpected to do or say or blow up.
“No, it’s cool, I talked to Mickey, he said he found—”
“I’ll bet stole.”
“Sure, OK, stole a Pepsi sign.”
“A what?”
“A big round Pepsi sign, like a Pepsi bottle cap but huge.” Jay smiled. “Big enough for two, for two-zee-woo-zee-me-n-you-zee. We’ll cut through those trees like a flying saucer.”
“Trees?”
“You’ll see.”
“Do I have to see?”
“You’ll see. Let’s go.”
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