Nicky tossed pieces of bread to Weasel and poked at the fire.

We drank more wine.

“Thanks for replying to my letter,” Nicky said. “You were one of the few.”

It was the first I had ever written to somebody in jail.

We both stared into the fire.

Then Nicky opened up and began to describe his demise.

The details of his arrest remained mysterious and he replayed them in his mind many times. That summer, a few nights after he was fired from his job on the winery’s processing line, he drank several bottles of wine. In the middle of the night he had found himself stepping over the sill of Mrs. Carpenter’s porch window and slipping between lace curtains one leg at a time, into the darkness. In her kitchen he finished off another bottle of Meritage and rummaged through the old woman’s cabinets for alcohol. He then came upon a stairway. He didn’t remember climbing the steps so much as floating up to the foot of her bed. Moonlight dusted her shrouded body in pulsing phosphorescence and cast barred shadows from her headboard onto the wall. He drifted through the room in a semiconscious state collecting items to redeem at a pawnshop out of town. A bronze incense tray decorated with robed men, a jeweled rosary, and an antique painting of “The Last Supper” framed in gold that he had lifted off a nail. Booze money. Drug money. Food money. Rent.

The residential street had been dark and silent until he misjudged the distance between his car and the Volvo parked behind it, reversing into its headlight with a crack and triggering an anti-theft alarm. The neighbors roused to investigate. He sped away. At the village limits a deer materialized in the road, hypnotized by his headlights. Spooked, he jerked the steering wheel and rolled his minivan, skidding into a guardrail at the top of a gully. Mrs. Carpenter’s belongings scattered across the pavement and glimmered in the high beams of the responding police cars, Nicky’s vehicle wedged upside-down under the twisted metal barrier.

“Trespassing, theft, DWI,” Nicky said. “I felt so much poised against me.”

And because he was my brother, I felt it, too.

In jail, he thought often about the company of friends and what they shared, the company of fools and what could be learned. He wondered if any of us would visit him. Send him letters. Remember him in conversations. Flooding regret accompanied his thoughts. Jealousy soaked his core like wine into a cork.

“Wondering what you all were doing outside the walls consumed me,” he continued. Then, a moment later: “It’s not possible to light a moment’s ashes on fire again.”

So, without naming what we were doing, we reminisced about moments when we were all together, to squash that lingering wondering Nicky did in jail. Remember the time…we repeated, again and again. Remember the time in high school when we snuck those girls to the lean-to? When, sober as stones, we abandoned our apprehensions and clothes and one by one splashed in the snow? We howled to the world because we were alive. Into the drifts we dove like swimmers, naked and rolling through the white sandy surf, needles pricking our skin under ancient light from billions of white bulbs in a blue-black ceiling. Nothing went numb. We backstroked nowhere in the icy air and involuntary tears flooded our vision. For a moment we floated on the snow under a cloud of my breath. We reached toward the mysterious sky to unscrew the stars and retrieve the unknown.
Nicky tossed a few sticks on the fire and rummaged through his backpack.

He held a Tawny Port up to the firelight.

“Bottled at the bottom of this hill,” he said, handing it to me.

“The good stuff, for special occasions only.” I pulled the cork, took drink, and passed the bottle back.

“We only get one sip of that divine nectar,” he said, taking his drink.

“Can’t ask for seconds at the altar.”

We looked at one another in the eye for a moment. A breeze pushed the surrounding trees back and forth, their silhouettes waving at the sky. Branches snared starlight and pulled gleaming rivers of cosmic glow together. We remained silent, absorbed in the flames licking the cold air and the confessions and celebrations, communions and blessings of our time together. The sustainability of our friendship seemed to be a function of the land.