This realization crystallized one morning after an all-night binge; a morning with nothing, not pot, not glue, not beer, not nothing to take the edge off. It depressed Stevie to a point near suicide. He wasn’t sure this life was for him. He completely dropped out of school and spent a few weeks doing nothing but getting stoned. He finally decided that if he knew for certain, with no doubts in his mind, then he could move on. He resolved to find out once and for all what Earl was up to in that old, abandoned house in the woods. He’d seen it one day when Earl and he drove down one of the sand roads in the Barrens. Earl told Stevie he was hunting and took him along for company. Then it appeared out of nowhere – this big old house like colonial Freehold plopped in the middle of the woods. Earl stopped the van and got all quiet, like he was parked in a church or something. Then he pointed it out to Stevie. He told him the house was just like the one he and his mother had an apartment in where he grew up in Camden. Earl said when he first came across it hunting he thought it was some kind of practical joke. But then he said that he realized it was a sign for him to do what he did. Stevie had never been as afraid in his whole life as that moment when he thought Earl was going to bring him into that house. Earl looked slow, but Stevie had seen him once snatch a rabbit off his lawn. In the blink of an eye, he had it and was stuffing it into a little utility bag like a magician’s handkerchief. But to his relief, instead, they drove away. Stevie hiked there after he found Earl wasn’t home one Saturday with the idea of spying on him. He found the van parked near the house. But Stevie only came as near as the edge of the clearing. He thought he heard a kid crying somewhere but couldn’t be sure – it was so far off sounding.
Things went on like that for a while and Stevie felt like he was just waiting for what he did to finally kill him – for the morning he would not wake up. But then one day a miraculous thing happened. Earl took him to a strip club up in the City to try and cheer him up. He bought Stevie a lap dance. The girl had been so beautiful. She looked right in his eyes and smiled. She had been so nice. She smelled like flowers. Not perfume. But honest-to-god clean and pure like flowers. The way she treated him made him feel what? The only word that came to mind was ‘forgiven’, – as though he had his do-over. He couldn’t get it out of his head after that. He returned to the club to try and see her again but without Earl to bribe the doorman, they wouldn’t let Stevie in. He was about to ask Earl to go back with him when the craziest thing happened. He saw the girl at the playground. He was thunderstruck. There she was not two miles from the trailer park where Stevie’s grandmother lived. He began to sense that there might be perques to being Earl’s helper. Maybe he could acquire Destiny for his own private idol to have her dole out do-overs whenever he needed one.
Stevie bit into his tongue until it bled and then doused the inside of his mouth with a swig of warm beer using the sting to brace for the transgression he was about to commit; it was an unspoken rule in their cult never to discuss the kids. He swallowed and spoke in one quick gush of words through the invigorating pain, “You know, I don’t ask about them kids, but you keep promising me something, and you never deliver. This is it. Destiny’s what I want.” Then he cringed and sunk down into the seat. This was the first time he’d ever acknowledged aloud that there were kids, little boys mostly.
