“Will you stop your damn singing, you bastard?”
The boy is silent.
“I’ve had it with you, you hear me? I hear one more peep from you, I’ll bite your head off. I want to sleep.”
Lyudka goes back into the house and slams the door. The boy chuckles, remembers the name Granny calls Lyudka, “heathen.” And – he can’t help himself – begins to sing again:
“Eeny, meeny, miney...”
But Lyudka’s smarter – she hadn’t gone anywhere, she waited behind the door, and now she jumps out and slaps him with his slipper, once, and again!
The boy breaks free, tumbles down the steps into the yard, and yells back at her, angry, through tears:
“You heathen, heathen! You go out God knows where all night, you’re a curse!”
Lyudka doesn’t come down from the porch, preferring to yell back at him from there. She calls him a rickety bastard.
The boy goes out to the street, scratches his butt – the slipper left a mark. Heathen! But you just wait, when you bring one home in the oven we’ll see how you sing! That’s what Granny says. What’s supposed to be in the oven? The boy doesn’t know, but it must be trouble, if Granny keeps talking about it like that.
It’s better not to mess with Granny right now – she’d bite his head off too for her tomatoes and cucumbers.
The boy takes up his complicated song again, but just as he figures out his steps and makes a skip down the street, he stops short again. The mailman has come to the Koldayevs. His horse is grazing untethered, which means Uncle Vova the mailman has come drunk. He’ll be totally drunk when he comes out – the woman Koldayeva makes her own booze.
The boy crawls ahead close to the fence; there, in between acacia bushes, he’s beaten a special path. He is crawling closer to the horse. To Star. First he stares at her, without moving, then finally, slowly, emerges from the bush. Star rolls her eye at the boy, blows air onto his hand, and licks his empty palm. Is anyone listening? The boy looks around to check, then says,
“Star, hare-ware, wonac?”
No, no one’s heard him. Star nods her head in agreement. The boy picks up the reins and climbs onto the cart. Star obediently walks off. She is thirsty, and she pulls the cart to the lake. She goes in deep, until the wheels sink in the mud to the axle. She drinks.
The boy is cut off from the shore. Star stands in the water quietly, waiting for someone to pay attention to her; she moves her ears every so often, and swishes at the flies with her uncombed, burr-studded tail. The boy is scared – there’s water all around him, the cart is stuck. He begins to sing, in a begging, tender voice, “Star, Star, harrico-warico, wo, wac?”
Star doesn’t move, only turns her head now and then to look at the boy with her big, dark eye. She is waiting for help to come.
There’s nothing else to do – the boy resigns himself to his fate and, not letting go of the reins, starts under his breath:
“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe, Catch a spider by the toe...”
Uncle Vova the mailman comes running along the shore, cursing as he runs and swinging his arms like a windmill. But there’s nowhere to hide – the boy’s trapped by the water, and in the water there’s the undertow cold as a sea-dog. Uncle Vova has a long switch. He pulls off his boots and his pants, walks gingerly on the slippery bottom, sways, shakes the switch at the boy. Uncle Vova reaches the cart, grabs the reins from the boy, but loses his balance, slips, and falls into the muddy water. Uncle Vova is very angry. He gets up, and, instead of helping Star, begins whipping the boy with his switch. It hurts a lot.
The boy can’t think straight, dashes around the cart, but there’s nowhere to hide, and he rolls off into the cold water. He runs to the shore, wailing. Undertows or sea-dogs, he’d rather drown!
“You bitch! Bitch!” he yells at the mailman. He picks up a rock but he can’t throw it far enough.
Whimpering, the boy crawls deep into the acacia bushes. His shorts, his belly, his legs – everything is covered with gooey mud. He can’t go home now. Granny will twist his ears, she sure will.
The boy sits in the bushes and rubs spit into his arm where the switch left a red mark. The boy howls in short, small bursts. Then he lies back on the grass – there’s a small patch of green turf in the bushes; here, when the older kids come home from school, they have their headquarters or the trench. Sometimes, they tell scary stories: about the Red Mask, and the dead man, about the White Sheet, and the Black Door, and the Red Boy, and the White Glove, and the Cut-Off Finger, and the Bloody Mary... He is afraid of all of them, but he listens every time, even though he knows the stories by heart. The boy rolls over onto his back, looks at the sky and very soon begins to hum:
“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe, Catch a spider by the toe...”
“Eeny, meeny, miney, moe, Catch a spider by the toe...”
He even begins to drum the beat on his muddy belly. What is this “eeny-meeny-miney-moe” anyway? And where do spiders have toes?
Petty Officer
When he is drunk, he sits on the bench with his head thrown back, mouth open. He stares into the sky. When he is very drunk – his head is in his hands, between his knees. He cries when he is very drunk. He smears his tears across his unshaven cheeks with his dirty, motor-oil stained hand. He cries because he is sorry for the kids. Afterwards, he goes to give Nadka a beating. But she’s wised up, too – she jumps at him first and grabs his hair, and aims to get her fingernails into his eyes. That’s how they live: he forever scratched, she forever covered in bruises.
In the morning, he goes to the sailing club’s boathouse – there, he works on the boats’ diesels, welds and rivets things until half past four. Then, if he hasn’t had anything to drink yet, he spends a couple hours working on the small side jobs people send his way. Then he takes the cash he’s made from these and spends it on liquor, for himself and the other guys. Sometimes he drinks with Nadka. He likes to chase down his booze with kvas, but first he lets his favorite – Svetlanka – have some. The three-year-old Svetlanka is smart: when she rattles off her “motherfuckers,” everyone cracks up. Svetlanka is his fifth. The last one. Nadka swore not to have any more. But she’s always like this: she swears on her mother’s grave to this or that, and he forgives her. He’s all right with it – she’ll tell everyone if she’s knocked up, way before she shows. After four boys, who knew they’d get a girl? Nadka now uses her as a shield, when he comes to beat her. And he backs off. He never beats her when she’s got the girl in her arms. He goes to sleep instead. And leaves the next morning without breakfast. His boys – they’re always trying to slip away from school and hang out with him in the boathouse instead. He doesn’t send them back – no point in forcing it if they don’t want to. The three oldest had to repeat each grade anyway. Grandma Katya, his mother, only shakes her head: why torment the poor kids if they just don’t have school in them? She, for one, never learned to read and has lived her life just fine; she’s had a good, working life – some’d be lucky to live like she did. And books are trouble, that’s all they do. There’s an example right here in the family: Olen’ka, his sister’s daughter, got into reading, and read day and night, you couldn’t drag her away from the books. And then she started feeling sorry for everyone; all she did was cry – out of pity. Now she doesn’t even recognize anyone; doesn’t know her own mother when she comes to visit. No, thank you – it’s better without books.
Grandma Katya goes to church. She knows the service by heart better than some literate folks, but she’s had to stop singing – her thyroid’s got the better of her. She got all ready to die last winter, but her oldest daughter, Valyusha, came and rescued her. She carried grandma out of their place in her arms, warmed her up, and nursed her back to health. Now grandma Katya stays two doors over, with Valyusha. She comes out to sit on her bench, and her son sits on his bench, head rolled back, staring into the sky. Or crying. Because he’s sorry for the children.