In the dark, Fellis leaned against an oak.

“We can wait for it to come down,” I said. “What else do we have to do?”

Fellis lit a smoke, and in the lighter’s flame I saw his swollen, puffy nose, saw the corners of each eye filled with a dense, thick red. He took two deep, deep drags, and with each inhale the orange glow grew brighter. He handed me the cigarette and set to making a fire. When it was blazing, I pitched the butt into the flames and sat next to Fellis.

“You want to bet how long it takes for him to come down?” I said, and Fellis laughed.

“No,” Fellis said. He took out from his jacket pocket an opened bag of something. He reached in it and took whatever was in there and then he handed the bag to me, and against the fire’s light I saw it was that thick foggy plastic filled with a stack of saltine crackers.

A can opened. Fellis slurped and handed me some of the other Steel Reserve.

“Why not?” I said. “You afraid you’ll lose again?” I took a sip and passed the can back to him.

“It’s not that,” he said. “I’m afraid that neither of us would win.” He tossed a stick at the tree. “I have a feeling that fucker ain’t coming down.”

FOOD FOR THE COMMON COLD

The snowy graveyard looked to be burning. Gray branches swayed like smoke against dark pines. The farther I got down the hard dirt path, the more I wanted the smoke to be real, wanted to see the place engulfed in flames, so the matter between Mom and Frick would be settled.

They’d been going at it when I left in the late afternoon. Well, they’d been going at it for five years, but that afternoon they fought about the headstone. Frick had said the graveyard needed to go, that the one and only headstone needed to be ripped out and smashed, that we needed to bring back the old way.

“What old way?” Mom had said, and Frick tried to remember, or tried to summon some answer that sounded good, but he’d been drinking too much. He was a medicine man who had been forgetting to pray in the mornings and at night, forgetting to feed the spirits once a month. “That headstone will stay forever,” Mom said, and Frick looked at me, then at Mom.

“I wonder what will stay longer,” Frick said. “Me or that headstone.”

That was what made Mom run to the bathroom and cry privately. That was what made Frick get another drink. And the whole thing was what made me grab the slingshot my father had sent up for my eleventh birthday—the slingshot Frick hated and called the “little white-boy toy”—and go on down to the graveyard to shoot at the headstone, as if all our problems weren’t buried cold below but were actually right there on the surface, facing us all.