John was the ugliest man Alex had ever seen, and the smelliest living creature his nose had ever had the misfortune to encounter. As Alex—12 year old straight-A church-shoes Alex—stood lost like a boy before the hut of a barbarian chief of some lost tribe of bikers who had run out of gas and become marooned on this trash heap urban island, he considered his reason for being here.

Joe, whose father had been slain in Afghanistan and mother was in a mental hospital, was now his foster brother and his responsibility. Sure, they had only been brothers for a day, but Alex had always secretly dreamed of a brother, a little brother who he could teach algebra and the Gospels to, someone who would love him unconditionally and look up to him like Mickey’s little sister Vanessa.

Yet here he stood, behind and lost, looking up at the broad shoulders of a person who was really not known to him, who was as big and strong as a man, and who had disturbingly agreed to risk his toes playing this insane game called chicken, a game so crazy it was difficult to believe that any self-respecting representative of poultrykind would have a thing to do with it! Joe was wearing cream colored cargo shorts and a black wife beater. His arms were tattooed with Mickey Mouse—all kinds of crazy Mickey Mouse: Mickey Mouse as a sailor, as a soldier, as a wild Indian, as a Spartan, as a cyborg, as a cave man standing beneath a witch’s dark castle—in blue pen ink, which Alex was beginning to think was going to present a visual obstacle to their joint employment.

Both Joe and John were standing with their backs to Alex with one shoed foot on the moist filthy earth and one bare foot on the makeshift milk crate and plank bench. John was holding a giant commando knife which they were about to throw at their feet in competition to see who was stupid enough to let it nick them for the mere $9 dollars that sat weighted beneath less than a dollar in change between their feet.

Alex walked up behind Joe and placed his hand on his shoulder and said, “It’s time to go Joe—we have to go.”

John’s stinking hand then came to Alex’s arm and squeezed it until it hurt and his bad breath proclaimed, “Listen kid, no interference with John’s Game!”

Joe’s body turned and tightened just as the grip on Alex’s arm began to really hurt. All of a sudden Joe was holding John’s wrist and John’s knife was to Joe’s throat. The two teenagers, old and young, were now locked in a needle-eyed stare down.

John snarled, “I’ll cut your throat boy.”

Joe’s brown eyes seemed to become black in answer and John’s grip began to weaken as Alex could see, inches from his face, Joe’s hand squeeze so hard that the dirt on John’s arm began to ‘goo up’ like jelly of filth between his fingers which seemed to be digging into John’s thin dirty arm.

John snarled more savagely, “I’ll run this shank through your fuckin’ throat boy!”

Joe did nothing to fend off the knife, did not speak, did not flinch; just stared into the eyes of the dirty homeless John, who seemed to deserve little of the sympathy that Alex’s parents were known for directing at his unfortunate kind. John’s grip weakened to the point that he released it. Alex now stood free to watch in dreadful anticipation as his new brother stood with a big gleaming knife at his throat and continued to squeeze the wrist of the man that held it there.

John seemed shaken with whatever pain Joe’s grip might be accounting for but remained threatening, and dialed his voice down to a hissing whisper, “I will do it bitch—will slit your damned throat!”

Joe seemed far away in his eyes now, lost in some inner place as he lifted his chin where the knife gleamed against it in the late morning sun that filtered down through the space where these two trees had fallen together.

John spoke now in a firm voice through the teeth that he gritted against the pain of his mud-oozing wrist, sounding all of a sudden like a parent and not some dirt bag teen, “You need to step off son. You’re in over your head.”

The knife blade was now pressed against Joe’s Adam’s apple, who was looking farther away still in his eyes. In place of any verbal answer, he pressed his throat against the blade as he squeezed the left wrist of John with a singular intensity. Blood began dripping from Joe’s throat. Seeing this John blurted, “Jesus kid!” and dropped the knife.

Joe just kept squeezing his wrist. Alex now stood over the kneeling form of smelly John as he moaned at the pain in his wrist that was now shaking in Joe’s insane grip and looked up at the blank-eyed teen in agony, tears streaking his face, and finally moaned, “You win—Uncle, uncle!”

Joe let go of the dirty arm, which now had a clean grip print around the wrist. John crawled over to the bench and curled up against it like a dog that had been abused on those animal rescue shows, looking up at Joe accusingly, as if he were the abusive owner, and then hid his dirty face in shame beneath the stringy hair that hung from his greasy head and sobbed.

Joe picked up the knife and placed his now dirty foot on the bench right in front of John’s face.

“Joe, what are you doing?”

The spooky apparition that was his new brother mumbled, “Eal’s a deal,” and threw the knife into the wood with a ‘thunk’. Alex looked down with concern and saw that the knife had sunk deeply into the wood between Joe’s big toe and the next one, which were spread apart as if he had often practiced spreading these toes into a V. Alex bent to look on in awe even as John burst into tears and sobbed, “Just take it, leave me alone. I ain’t never gonna shank no one.”

Joe looked down at John’s tear-streaked dirty face with what appeared to be disbelief. This angered the man to squinting tears, “Leave mutherfucker, leave me alone!”

Joe slowly reached down and took the knife out of the wood, folded it in half, put it in his side pocket, pocketed the money, and then put on his shoe, never taking his eyes off of John, who he seemed to regard with a morbid curiosity, like a kid gazing through the bars of a zoo pen. Something about this look seemed to hurt John deeply, who then snuffled, “You some kind of fucking sadist bitch! You enjoy seeing who you ruin? I feel sorry for your kids if you ever have any. Hopefully your ass dies before that tragic act becomes fact! You’ll be some kind of prick old man that kicks his kid out at eighteen to get jacked by pigs and beat by thugs—yer fuckinn’ kid ‘ill be livin’ under a trashbag roof one day bitch!”

Joe seemed quietly hurt by those tearful words, then shook his head, turned to look in Alex’s eyes, and shrugged his shoulders. Alex just wanted to leave the site of this sorrow as fast as possible and nodded down the left path to the stream path, and said, “Let’s go to the golf course Joe.”

Joe turned and stalked off down the path with Alex prancing behind him, oh so nervous about the recent encounter, and wondering if he should have directed Joe to the shopping center so they could get a bandage for his neck. The sound of their sneakers slapping on the descending trail mixed with the sobs of John up behind them to remind Alex of Pastor Manfred’s recent sermon about The Left Hand Path and the joyless horrors of the descent into Hell.

“I’ll be right back Joe!”

Alex ran back up the path the fifty paces or so that it took and found John still there in a sobbing heap. He took a knee next to John and the bench and put his hand on his back and recited Father’s favorite lines from Featherstone,

“I love Thee because Thou hast first loved me,

And purchased my pardon on Calvary’s tree;

I love Thee for wearing the thorns on Thy brow;

If ever I loved Thee, Jesus, ‘tis now.”

John was now sobbing even more deeply and snuffling more abjectly as he tightened his fetal clinch on his knees.

Alex emptied his pockets: a stick of gum, seventy-five cents, two dollars, and his pocket bible, the playing card size New Testament Father purchased from the dollar store by the bag load and handed out to anyone in need, and placed these things on the makeshift bench that was the centerpiece of John’s scrap-built world.

“I will stop buy and pray with you John, as soon as I get my brother a job.”

In answer John omitted a less pathetic snuffle that was nearly a sniffle and curled tighter yet.

Alex got to his feet and skipped down the trail after Joe, wondering all the while how much longer he had before life put him on the cruel adult side of the Devil’s ledger, and if worldly woes did someday impinge enough on his blessed life, could he end up like John, crying alone beneath a fallen tree against a bench made of cast off things.