Steve showed up stoned on something when he came over in his Chevy, laughing, munching on a bag of Fritos.
“I have a dog for you guys,” he said. “A real cool dog waiting in the car.”
“How’ve you been Steve?” My mom and him were sitting at the kitchen table and she was pushing her hands together like she was trying to squash some invisible bug. “We haven’t seen you around here lately…it’s been a long time.”
“God this little dude’s gotten big!” Steve looked at me with some red eyes and I think by this point he was on to our chocolate milk stash when he said, “Come here little dude, I’ve got this dog in the car. Irma, come check him out, too. This dog’s so outta this world.”
My mom stared pensively at a fly buzzing near a window, banging its little fly body on some invisible surface it just couldn’t understand.
“C’mon, let’s go, let’s go, come see,” Steve said.
I was standing by the table now, not sure whether I should bother to sit down, listening to this guy, my mom’s little brother, jabber on and on about how this dog can learn anything—a real show dog with a future, “The smartest thing on four legs ever since my ex-girlfriend decided to get off her hands and knees,” Steve said.
Steve was halfway out of his chair, and his mind.
“Steve, where are you coming from?” my mom asked. “We haven’t seen you in a while, I mean this is all a bit surprising.”
“A good surprise though, right?”
“A surprise,” she said.
All three of us stared at a boiling pot of water filled with rigid sideways leaning spaghetti noodles that stuck out like the straws of an upside down broom. It was almost six o’clock and the sun was getting lower and shooting thick streams of fading sunshine past the windows, onto the counter, making certain kitchen appliances gleam bright with detail—and other things seem dark and faded in the slipping natural kitchen light.
“Oh Jesus, I’m not interrupting anything am I?” Steve muttered. “I’m so sorry guys. I should’ve called. God I’m so stupid, stupid, stupid.” He got up and his eyes got even redder and tears began to well up, like he was going to start blubbering up right there. In a lot of ways, Steve, a man in his mid-thirties, was a lot like a child. I felt like the two of us could have been close friends—a six-year-old befriending and understanding the inner workings of the soul of a man with a full beard and more than one addiction.
“No Steve, we’re happy to have you back here.” My mom was staring at the table like there was an episode of Oprah playing somewhere in the fake wood. “You’re not imposing. You’re okay, Steve.”
“God thanks, Irma.” The tears in his face dried up fast like water sitting under the sun. “You don’t know how good that feels to hear. It’s like we’re a big family again, you know? Huh? Just like the old times. Remember mom? Remember? Oh my God, oh my God. Those were some times. And Sylvia and Elva? The VW?” Steve was back to his normal bloodshot eyes now and he was smiling like he had never cried in his life. “Family is the most important thing in the world so—”
“Let’s go see the dog, Steve.”
“Right. C’mon little dude.” Steve picked me up. “This dogs so cool, so cool. Let’s go Irma,” he said. “Let’s go big sister.” He opened the door by kicking it with his foot and the heat from the waning summer sun felt like a blaring wall of blow driers. Before we exited the house, he asked how long until the spaghetti would be done. He said he was so happy to be back and that he knew we loved him all along.

I’d seen images of Steve in old family albums that consisted of yellow-edged pictures with thin plastic covers over them. Steve was always smiling, dressed in fashions of the time: plaid pants with a white belt and silly brown shoes. Sometimes we look silly. In other pictures he had a seashell necklace that hung tight from his large neck—a neck he inherited from his father, my grandfather. Also inherited from his father was a thirst for alcohol, which led to other addictions for Steve. My mom had given me a very watered down version why her brother lived on the streets of Austin for a while—but my older brothers picked up the slack.
“Yeah, Steve killed a guy there, man,” my eldest brother Pat said to me one time. “Gouged his fucking eyes out and then bit out his tongue.”
“A real fucking psycho. I’m glad I get to share a name with the dude,” my other brother said.
We were three brothers living in the Southwest desert. I was the youngest. My parents named each one of us after an older member of the family. I was named after a great grandfather who had lived in a mud hut somewhere in Mexico. Pat was named after some Mexican cowboy who owned two pistols and was our great grandfather’s uncle. And my brother Steven was named after a psycho—our uncle Steve, my mom’s brother. All three of us didn’t know Spanish and had never been more than a mile into Mexico. And none of us knew who Uncle Steve was named after.
“Yeah man,” my brother, Pat, had said. “He’s into some bad stuff over there in Austin. That’s why the family had to throw him out. He wouldn’t get help.”
“They just kicked him out?” I asked.
“That’s how it works, dude. That’s how interventions go: you either get help or you get disowned,” My brother Steven said.
“Uncle Steve was fucked up,” Pat said.
“He was beyond fucked up. He didn’t choose anything that night, man. Was so loaded Grandpa had to hold his head up while we all sat around a table and read letters to him about how we liked him better sober. Fucking bullshit man. How we liked him better sober—I’ve never even seen the dude sober and I’m fucking nineteen years old. Imagine writing about something you don’t know.”
“Yeah, like trying to write about a million dollars or a mermaid. It’s just blank. Nothing. We’ve never known the dude other than as fucked-up Uncle Steve.”

Steve’s Chevy truck had seemed a lot cleaner when I spied him pulling up into our driveway from our kitchen window. But now, up-close, standing there, I could see crusted mud clinging to the chrome grill and wet smashed-up fly bodies spread out all over the windshield like jam on toast.
“Taa-daa,” Steve said. He opened the door and a heavily breathing puppy jumped out and began to roll around in our front lawn grass.
“He’s breathing pretty hard,” my mom said. “You should have cracked a window for him.”
“This dog doesn’t need that. This dog isn’t like other dogs—slobbering all over the place and shitting and making messes that other people have to clean up. This dog handles his own. Could of left ‘em in there all day without a puff of air and he would’ve been fine.”
“I’ll get him some water. Bring him over by the front door. I’ll get him a bowl.” My mom went inside walking slowly. She had her hands pressed together like before, trying to hold something in or keep something down.
“So what do you think, little dude, cool dog, huh?”
I stared at the dog for a long time. He was a cute dog. Just a puppy, with white legs and a black coat of fur that hung long over his back, kind of shaggy. He looked like other dogs to be honest. I stared at Steve.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Moses,” Steve said. “Like the dude that parted the river and wrote all those rules and stuff. This dog is like him. This dog makes stuff happen.”
“I thought God gave Moses the rules.”
“To Moses? Is that how the story went? I’m not sure about that. I guess you’re the Catholic school kid—you would know.” Steve looked at the high mountains in the distance. “But Moses carried them rocks down the mountain. I know that for sure.”
“Yeah, I think that’s right.”
“It’s easy to make rules, little dude. It’s hard to follow them. Any bum can say do this and do that and make this and make that. It takes a man to actually dig it though. Moses lugged those fucking stones all the way down the mountain in his sandals and told his people what was up.”
“But God made the rules.”
“God makes a lot of things, little dude. God makes hurricanes and tornados and earthquakes, too. Sure god makes the sun and moon and shit, but he also makes cancers that eat bodies and steal children and fathers and mothers from their families. God makes families hate each other. God doesn’t always create things. He’s just as responsible for the night as he is the day.”
I was staring at the dog that was now lying on his back and kicking his legs in the air when my mom came back out with a bowl of water and put it on the ground.
“Thanks Irma,” Steve said.
“He’s very cute,” my mom said. “Where’d you get him?”
“In Austin. I found him. He’s a diamond in the rough, huh. I got real lucky, huh.”
“Yeah.” My mom put her eyes back on the ground and didn’t look up for a long time. Her eyes looked red now, too. Her mascara was smudged.
“So what do you say, you guys wanna keep him?”
My mom kept her eyes down. “The dog? Oh wow, Steve. I don’t know.”
“Just hang on to him for a little bit. I need to get some stuff straightened up here in this city and I don’t know if I can hang on to Moses right now. I don’t exactly have a place for him to stay. It’ll just be for a little while. God I love that dog.” Steve kicked at some dirt with his boot and winked at me. “But hey, look, the little dude loves him already. They match up nicely.”
“Okay Steve. Leave him here.”
“It’ll only be for a little bit, I swear. And he’s such a good dog, too. He won’t make messes he can’t clean up himself. He won’t do things that make other people angry. He’s a special little guy. In a lot of ways—”
“Steve,” my mom said. “It’s just a dog. It’s fine. We’ll keep him for you. You’re my brother. Don’t worry about it. It’s a dog.”
“Right.” Steve said. He hugged my mom. He hugged me and then lit a cigarette and we went inside and he stood outside smoking for a long time before he got into his truck and we didn’t see him again until we heard his engine and saw that he was pulling out of the driveway and we didn’t know what to do or when he was coming back.

After Steve left that night, my dad came home and put Moses up in our kitchen with a bowl of food and a bowl of water. He used chairs to kind of box him in so he couldn’t roam through the rest of the house. Moses slept through the entire night without making too much noise but in the morning he started to whimper and it woke me up. When I went to check on him I found him sitting down, shaking, by the shut back door, next to a small puddle of yellow pee. He had managed to jump over the chairs in the kitchen during the night and get into the trash and tear up the white plastic bag and eat old, rotting food. I wondered if he knew what was on the other side of the door he was sitting by. If he did, he might not be too excited. It’s all desert here. All sand. All day and all night. Maybe it was enough for this little dog to have food and just know that there was another side to every door. This little dog; stuck somewhere he doesn’t know, being fed by strangers, boxed in by unknown forces. Maybe the real Moses didn’t know what was on the other side of the Red Sea when he split it in half, either. Maybe he didn’t even break up the river—but swam across it. Or boated. Maybe people just need something miraculous to believe in…A savior…Maybe Steve would come back. I thought this dog wasn’t like other dogs and Steve wasn’t like other people—even if they did still fall into mistakes. Maybe I should just clean up Moses’ piss and trash mess and not tell anyone what had happened. It was a secret worth keeping. The morning was early on. I wouldn’t want Uncle Steve or Mom thinking Moses wasn’t what he was all built up to be—because I think I still wanted to believe in him, too.