“Whassamatta, doncha wanta leetle drinkee?” Feeney teased him. Looking over at his dark friend, Feeney grinned, showing his small, brown teeth, and he wet his thick lips like a horse.
Alvin said no, explaining that he was tired tonight and just wanted to be out of the house, not out of his head, for chrissake.
Feeney chuckled salaciously and asked for the bottle again. Alvin passed it to him.
“You’re just pissed we didn’t scarf any quiffs at the fuckin’ movies,” Feeney said seriously, trying to be sympathetic. He noted the car’s rapid slide toward the side of the road and whipped the wheel to the left, spinning the vehicle back into line, just missing a two-foot snowdrift.
“No,” Alvin said. “Nothing like that. It’s hard to get too down when you strike out with a batch of fuckin’ sixteen-year-olds giggling in the back of a fuckin’ small-town moviehouse. Besides, I really liked the movie,” he added. Picnic it was, with Alvin played by William Holden, Betsy Cooper by Kim Novak in a sexy lavender dress, the plot basically a brief, melancholy meeting between a hungry, lonely, trapped woman and a profound man, the meeting born in conflict between the characters, carried to tragic, compassionate fruition by sex and coincidence, resolved by the sad yet spiritually necessary departure of the man. “That’s my idea of a good movie,” Alvin said, half to himself.
Feeney handed the bottle back to him. “You sure you don’t want a slug?” he urged.
Alvin said no and continued staring out the windshield, the snow firing out of the darkness into the path of the car. Without looking, he put the bottle back into the glove compartment.
They drove a ways farther in silence, through Crawford Parade, along the road to the Center, past the fairgrounds, with the river on their right, iced over, the ice whitened by the snow, following alongside the car as the vehicle wound a careful way home. Driving into the Center, they approached Feeney’s house, dark and dilapidated, like an old railroad hobo, and Feeney asked Alvin if he wanted to come in and have a drink and maybe watch some television or play some cards awhile. “Christ, it ain’t even eleven yet,” he said in a whining voice, pulling nervously at one thick eyebrow with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand while he steered the car with his other hand.
“No thanks. I might’s well go on home. This snow’s starting to build up now and I’d probably have to walk if I stayed at your place. Nights like this, I start to thinking about my grandpa, y’know,” he added half-jokingly. But half-seriously, too, because it was true that he never remembered any of the stories of how the old man, his father’s father, had died, except on nights like this, when there was a hard, cold snow falling in drifts, and he remembered, pictured, a man he’d never actually seen stumbling home in the dark, drunk, angry, snarling at the wind and snow, and halfway home falling over a stone frozen into the dirt surface of the road, and tumbling off the road into a high drift, forgetting in that second of spinning collapse his anger, the hard, ancient center of his focus, coming softly to rest in the drift and letting go there, falling backward into sleep, at last — to be found there in the morning, rock-hard, with his hands and arms and legs extended, splayed, as if, when he had died, he’d been dreaming of swimming easily underwater, or as if he had been hurled to earth by a god. It was the reason Alvin’s father did not drink, or so his mother had told him.
“Okay,” Feeney said slowly. “I’ll take you up the fuckin’ road. But hand me that bottle one more time, will ya?”
Alvin once again retrieved the flat, brown bottle and passed it to his friend, who took a quick drink from it and blindly passed it back, bumping the bottle against Alvin’s beefy shoulder in the darkness, spilling rye whiskey down the front of his wool loden coat and over his lap. Alvin grabbed the almost emptied bottle from his lap and cursed. Feeney apologized thickly, and they drove the rest of the way to Alvin’s house in grumpy silence, passing no other car on the road, barely making it up the hill from the Center.
Alvin got out, said nothing, and walked through the snow to the house, stamped his feet noisily at the door, and walked in as Feeney drove off, the red taillights of his car swiftly disappearing behind high fantails of snow.
His mother heard him come in. “That you, Alvin?” she called from the kitchen. “I was worried, with the snow and all…”
“Yeah,” he said sourly. He was standing near a table lamp in the living room, holding part of his coat out in front of him as he studied the whiskey stains on it. “Shit,” he said in a low voice.
“Will you come and have a cup of tea with me, son? I’m glad you came home early,” she called. Alvin could hear her get up from her chair and walk quickly, eagerly, to the cabinet over the sink for a cup and saucer.
Oh, well, why not? he thought. Maybe she’ll know how to get the stain out of my coat. “Yeah, sure, I’ll have a cup of tea with you.” And he walked out to the kitchen, shedding his bulky coat as he entered the room.
She stood next to the counter by the sink, pouring him a cup of tea. Picking up the cup and saucer, carrying it across the room by pinching the saucer between thumb and forefinger, she walked past her son, tiny next to his enormous size, and suddenly, as she passed, she groaned, “Oh-h, Alvin!” With an expression on her face that joined disgust with self-pity, she placed the cup and saucer on the table in front of him, sat down opposite, and petulantly pushed the sugar and milk at him.
“What d’you mean, ‘Oh-h, Alvin’?”
“You know what I mean!” she exploded at him. “You! You’re what I mean! You’re what’s the matter. Look at you!”
“You think I’m drunk?”
“Think!” She kept stirring her spoon in the cup of tea, her hands shaking as she moved, her rage barely contained by the act. Her dark eyes glowered at him, her head twitching nervously from side to side, her feet tapping against the linoleum-covered floor. “You, you’re nothing but a bum, a drunken bum! That’s all! I don’t know why I even bother to … to hope. You’ll probably end up like your grandfather, the way you’re going now.”
“Not that one again. Jesus. My grandfather. As if ending up like my father is an improvement. Anyhow, I’m stone sober, Ma,” he said quietly.
“You’re a drunken bum! You smell like a brewery. You come in here smelling like a brewery, and then you have the gall to tell me how sober you are, and making cruel cracks about your father, too. You’re a drunken bum, no good for anything. And now you’re a liar, too.”
“Ma, I am not!” he cried, and he stood up, facing her.
She wouldn’t even look at him then, talked into her teacup instead and made him overhear her. “I work and I slave year after year, for what? For this? A drunk who can’t even speak kindly to me? A thankless bum who can’t say anything kind about his father?” She continued talking loudly at the teacup and about him, as if he were in an adjacent room, and he moved erratically away from the table, then back again, and finally grabbed her shoulder with one huge hand and shook her, which made her scream directly up at him, “Leave me alone! Don’t you touch me! Get away from me! You’re drunk!”
At that instant his father came crashing into the room from the bedroom. The man was dressed in a wildly billowing flannel nightgown, he was barefoot, and the gray hair on his narrow head stuck out like a spiky crown. His face was knotted in fury, and as he rushed for Alvin, he roared, “You son of a bitch, I’ll kill you! Raising your hand against your mother! I’ll kill you for that!”