Once Papanin went down, Vasili booted him in the ribs three or four times. He hoped he broke some of them. He thought he did. He didn’t believe in anything so stupid as a fair fight. He fought to win, and to teach a lesson the other guy would never forget.
Papanin was tough. Battered as he was, he tried to reach into his own jacket pocket for whatever equalizer he stashed there. Vasili stomped on his hand. Papanin screamed. Vasili plucked out the toy himself: a Tokarev automatic, Red Army issue.
“Naughty,” he said mildly. “Mine now-spoil of war.”
What Papanin called him then was a minor masterpiece of mat. Vasili gave him the critical acclaim it deserved: another kick in the ribs. He flipped his razor open and let the steel glitter.
“Now listen to me, you dumb pussy,” he said. “You fuck with me again, you try telling me how to run my business, next time you’re dead. Not just messed up-dead as your nose. I’ll gut you like a hog, too, and use you for sausage casings. You hear what I’m telling you?”
When Papanin didn’t answer fast enough, Vasili kicked him one more time. “I hear you,” the local choked out, and was noisily sick.
“Khorosho,” Vasili said, and then, “You’re disgusting, you know that?” Shaking his head, he walked away.
Papanin wouldn’t bother him for a while. He’d be weeks getting over what he’d walked into this morning. After that? He was tough, but how tough was he really? If he didn’t kill Vasili, he’d be dead himself. He had to see as much. He might leave bad enough alone. Vasili could hope so. If not, he’d deal with it.
As he walked back toward the center of Smidovich, a plump man came out of a shop that sold fur hats and mittens. He looked at Grigory Papanin, who was up on his hands and knees but not making any effort to get back on his feet. His eyes were wide as millstones as they swung back to Vasili. “You-did that?” he asked.
“I sure did,” Vasili answered. He hadn’t expected to come away with a pistol, but he wasn’t complaining.
“But-But-” The plump man groped for words. At last, he found some: “But he was the toughest guy in town.”
“Maybe he used to be,” Vasili said, “but he isn’t any more. I don’t like starting fights. If somebody else does, though, he’d better know I’ll finish them.”
“Bozhemoi! I guess so!” The man who sold fur hats looked at Papanin again. With puke and blood all over his face and with his nose mashed flat, he wasn’t an appetizing sight. “He’s lucky you didn’t finish him, though I’m not so sure he’d call it that right now.”
“If he leaves me alone, I’ll leave him alone, same as I would anybody else,” Vasili said. “If he doesn’t, it’s the last stupid stunt the fucker ever pulls.”
“Are they all like you in Khabarovsk?” the hat-seller asked-like most of the townsfolk, he’d already heard about Vasili’s story.
“Nah.” Vasili shook his head. “I’m one of the soft ones. Why do you think the Yankees bombed us?” He laughed out loud when the plump man crossed himself.
–
Aaron Finch used plenty of Mum before he put on his Blue Front shirt. “It won’t help,” he said resignedly. “A day like this, I’ll be shvitzing all over, not just under my arms.”
“So I’ll wash the shirt after you get home,” Ruth said. “I still don’t think this is as bad as St. Louis weather.” With her brothers and sister, she’d come out to Los Angeles when her mother and father died within months of each other right after the war. Aaron understood that. Staying where they were would have been like living in a haunted house.
“St. Louis never gets this hot,” he said, trying not to let her remember the bad times. “It’s supposed to be 105 today. Just what I want to do-shlep stoves and iceboxes and washing machines around.”
“But St. Louis is so muggy,” Ruth said with a twisted civic pride. “This is dry heat. It doesn’t feel as bad.”
“It gets past 105, it’s bad any which way,” Aaron said. He’d been in the black gang aboard a Liberty ship in the South Pacific, so he wasn’t a virgin when it came to heat and humidity. He did marvel that the L.A. area often got its hottest weather a week or two after fall officially started, but he’d seen before that that was how things worked around here.
“Well, come on to the kitchen and I’ll fix you breakfast.” Ruth didn’t have the relentless Finch urge to grab the last word. Aaron sure did; his brother Marvin had an even worse case. She was easier to get along with the way she was. He did wonder now and then how she put up with him. Sometimes, though, you just had to count your blessings.
Breakfast was two eggs fried in the grease from sausages, with buttered toast and jam and coffee. If you were going to shlep appliances, you needed some ballast in there. And a cigarette was extra nice after food.
Leon came out of the bedroom right before Aaron took off for work. He was carrying his Teddy bear. He’d got Bounce for his second birthday, and ever since had had to be forcibly separated from the bear. He would have taken it into the bathtub if Ruth had let him get away with it.
Stooping to kiss him, Aaron said, “See you tonight, Leon. I’ve got to go to Blue Front.”
Leon held out the Teddy bear. “Say bye-bye to Bounce.”
“So long, Bounce.” Aaron shook hands with the fuzzy plush toy. He was damned if he’d kiss it. Luckily, Leon seemed satisfied.
As soon as he went out the front door, Ruth locked it behind him. His hand went into the right front pocket of his gabardine work pants to pull out his keys. He was halfway down the concrete walk, the keys in his hand, before he looked up toward the old Nash parked in front of the house.
Except it wasn’t parked in front of the house. It was gone.
He looked up the street and down the street, as if he could have left it in front of some other house by mistake. He hadn’t, of course. Not only was it gone, it had had somebody else’s help in going.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said. Glendale didn’t have any refugee camps, but it was full of people who’d fled north after the A-bomb hit downtown L.A. Some filled cheap hotels and roominghouses. Others slept in their cars or on bus benches or in the bushes in parks.
Some of them peddled whatever they had. Some did such odd jobs as they could find. Aaron didn’t look down his nose at those people; he’d lived that way himself during the Depression. Some of the women hustled, more because they had no other way to get money than because they wanted to.
And some people stole. Crime in town had zoomed up like a V-2 the past few months. If your choice was between going hungry or seeing your kids go hungry and lifting what didn’t belong to you, you’d steal, all right.
Shaking his head, Aaron turned around and went back to the house. “Daddy!” Leon said when he opened the door. He was gladder to see Aaron than Aaron was to be seen.
“What did you forget, honey?” Ruth asked.
“Gurnisht,” he answered. “Look out the front window. What don’t you see?”
She looked. For a second, it didn’t register, as it hadn’t with him. Then her hands flew to her face. “The car!”
“Right the first time,” he said. “You win sixteen dollars. Wanna try for thirty-two?”
“It’s not funny!”
“No kidding, it’s not.”
“What are you going to do?”
Aaron had been working that out for himself. He ticked things off on his fingers. “Call the boss, tell him I’ll be late. Call the cops. Get through the rest of the week somehow. If the car isn’t back by Friday, go buy one Friday night or Saturday morning.”
“We can’t afford it,” Ruth said, which was true.
“We can’t afford to be without one,” Aaron said, which was also true. He feared he’d never see the Nash again. Odds were it already sat in some shady garage, getting butchered for spare parts. With a sigh, he went on, “I’ll get something cheap, something where I can do a lot of the work myself.”