big steve

We didn't get too scared when Big Steve waved a crooked stick and brandished a pocket full of rusty nails at us down by the sale barn. We just scattered, left and right. The cowboys on horseback running the cattle in would step on it to calm him down and Steve would break down and cry. We'd laugh, but we weren't sure we should. Big Steve was OK most of the time. Crying concerned us. He was the crazy guy that chased us through the goat pens and out across the field towards Dart's Dam. And back again. We didn't like it when he cried.

Big Steve was a Vietnam veteran and his time in Vietnam broke his brain, body and spirit. He walked around town with a thick leather belt on his head. Not on his forehead but underneath his chin and over. So adorned, he wandered. In and out of here and there. He ate for free but no one knew where he went at night. He was good at disappearing.

One night while walking home from work, I passed by the sale barn and ran into Big Steve on the old dirt road next to the Fire Department. He was bedding down in the ditch by the old Fisher Implement shop (next to the old laundromat). He had a boom box with Cheap Trick's 'Surrender' playing very loud. As I sat there with him and his boom box, Big Steve began to evaporate. Somehow he lost his gravitational relationship with the ditch and began a molecular disintegration. I was fascinated and compelled.

He hasn't been seen since.