The Dogs of Winter

by Bobbie Pyron

I scratched at something crawling in my hair. My head had been crawly since the bread woman gave me the hat. “I’m not sure what month it is,” I admitted.

  “How can that be?” she asked. “Everyone knows when Christmas and New Year’s are.”

  I scuffed the toe of my wonderful boot in the snow and shrugged.

  Anya said, “Mummy says my little brother will get a new coat for Christmas, Sobachonok. I will bring you his old one. And I think Papa is taking us all to St. Petersburg to see Grandmother and Grandfather and all the aunts and uncles and cousins.” She clapped her hands and twirled like Rip did when he was excited. “Oh, we will eat and eat until we can’t eat anymore.”

  The smile dropped from her face. “What will you do, Sobachonok? Where will you go for the holiday?”

  I buried my cold hands in Lucky’s fur. He licked my face. “Oh, we have many, many places to go. We will be very busy, the dogs and I.”

  The teacher blew her whistle. Rip barked and wagged his tail. Smoke stood and stretched. Lucky pressed his head against the wire fence for the rub he knew was coming from Anya’s small hands.

  A cold blast of wind blew open her coat. I shivered in my sweater. Finally she said, “I must go, Dog Boy.”

  I lifted my hand. “See you later, Anya.”

  “I’ll see you back here in three weeks,” she said. “Right here, like always.”

  “Like always,” I said.

  For days and days and days, it snowed. Snow upon snow upon snow.

  It snowed for so long, I forgot when the snow started. I forgot colors other than white and gray. It snowed so long and so hard the crumbling brick wall disappeared. Even in the night, I had to push the door to the Glass House open and shut, back and forth so we would not be trapped. After days and nights, the snow was too deep for the dogs — except for Lucky and Smoke.

  When the sun was its strongest, I waded with Lucky and Smoke through the drifts of snow to the great plaza in search of food. Gone now were the stalls selling black bread and sausages. The bookshop was closed for the holiday. The man with the big black mustache was closed too.

  I dug through the garbage bins in the train station. How wonderful it was to be warm, I thought, as I ate the last of a discarded sandwich. How wonderful to be in a place where it was always light.

  “Leningradsky was not so bad,” I said to Lucky as I checked the last trash bin in the station. “I don’t know why Smoke brought us here,” I complained over the growl of my stomach. “People are stingy, the food in the shops is expensive.” I forgot about the wonders of the Glass House and Anya.

  I sat on the marble floor. “How am I going to keep us fed?” I asked the painted faces of the people on the wall marching toward something shining and wonderful. These painted people were healthy and had new clothes, and the children held their mother’s and father’s hands. They all looked with eyes like steel at something up ahead, something grand.

  A pair of tall brown boots stopped in front of me. Brown boots with fur the color of Rip puffing from the tops. A red coat brushed the tops of the boots. A red coat with black buttons. I counted the black buttons, one, two, three, four. The last button pressed against the throat of a woman, a woman with hair the color of dried blood. Had my mother’s hair been that color? Or had it been dark as a raven’s wing? Or perhaps yellow like a lemon.

  I shook my head. “I cannot remember,” I said to the woman’s red coat. “But I do remember the red coat. She loved her red coat.” Lucky pressed in close to my side and leaned against me.

  I put my arm around his shoulders. “She — she lost one of the black buttons and I found it, but then I lost it again.”

  “I am so sorry,” the woman said.

  I blinked up at her. “You see me?” I asked.

  The woman nodded and wiped her face. She reached into the leather bag that hung from her shoulder.

  She handed me a fistful of colored papers — rubles of every amount. My mouth dropped open.

  “There is a place you must go, child. They are the Sisters of Mercy. They will feed you there, give you some clothes. You will find them on Petrovsky Boulevard.”

  I frowned. “Is it an orphanage?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “It is not an orphanage,” she said, “but you must go there.”

  I felt Lucky stiffen beside me. A low growl rumbled in his chest. Two policemen in long gray coats and tall black boots walked toward us, swinging their nightsticks lazily from their hands.

  The woman raised one white-gloved hand and waved to the policemen. “Officers,” she called. “Over here.”

  I scrambled to my feet. The side of my face throbbed at the memory of the crack of my head against the stone steps.

  I may not have been able to run as fast in boots as in my Famous Basketball Player shoes, but I could still run faster than any policeman. As Lucky and I flew up the long stairs rising up and up into the almost-dark day, I remembered my manners. “Thank you!” I called over my shoulder to the woman in the red coat.

  Lucky and I ran and ran, my boots slipping and sliding in the snow and ice. First we went to the butcher shop. I pulled the cloth bag that had carried my boots over the schoolyard fence out of the front of my pants. “Six sausages and two of your meatiest bones,” I said. “Please.”

  Lucky licked his lips.

  Then we went to the shop that had everything. I bought a fat loaf of bread, a can of sardines, a bottle of pickled vegetables.

  I counted the last of my money. I looked across the street at the fancy bakery. The white cakes trimmed in swirls of red stood like queens in the bakery window. Even through the glass and across the street I could smell the hot cross buns, the sugared cookies, the braided fruit bread, and the frosted sticky buns. I remembered the skinny woman chasing me away from the bakery with her broom when she caught me going through her garbage. “Get out of here, you filthy little beggar,” she had said, whacking the backs of my legs with her broom.

  As was his habit, Smoke appeared out of thin air. He sniffed the cloth bag. He nudged my side.

  “You’re right,” I said.

  I marched across the street; my eyes fixed like steel, my shoulders thrown back with purpose just like the painted people on the train station wall. Lucky and Smoke marched like good soldiers by my side.

  I pushed through the front door. A bell tinkled. I almost wept from the warmth and the smell.

  The stingy woman looked up from behind the glass case. “Get out of here, you filthy little tramp,” she snapped. “I won’t have you stinking up my place and offending my customers.”

  I marched right up to the tall glass case and pointed at the frosted sticky buns resting, glowing in the case. “How much?” I asked.

  The woman shook her head. “Get out, boy.”

  I handed her the last of my money. She unfolded it like it was covered in rat poop. She looked at me and looked at the paper money smiling from the counter.

  She sighed and snatched a paper sack from under the counter. She slid open the doors to the glass house where the sticky buns lived. “God only knows who you stole the money from,” she muttered.

  Anger burned my face. “I do not steal,” I said. “I never steal.”

  She eyed me again and dropped one and then two buns in the bag. She flung the bag across the counter. I grabbed it just before it slid to the floor.

  “Now get out,” she said.

  I bolted out the door and skittered onto the sidewalk. I danced and laughed in the swirling, wheeling, blowing snow. “Two buns!” I cried. “Two hot sticky buns for the pathetic little boy,” I sang. I raced Lucky and Smoke all the way home through the snow, the bag of food and the bag of precious buns bouncing against my legs.

  After the snow stopped, a bone-cracking cold encased The City. The remaining sausages from our shopping spree froze on the wooden shelf along with the last of the bread. The jar of water I kept on a window ledge froze solid.

  On the third night of the crushing cold, the dogs �
�� all the dogs, including Smoke — and I piled together for warmth. Still, I shook and shivered, rattling the old newspapers I had stuffed in my pants and under my sweater for extra warmth.

  “It must be New Year’s by now,” I said. “We don’t have a yelka tree to light, so I have lit all our candles.”

  I snuggled down deeper into Lucky’s side. Rip lay across my legs. “My mother and Babushka Ina used to make the most wonderful kutya on Christmas day,” I said. One of the puppies whimpered in her sleep.

  “My mother would stir and stir the big pot on the stove. And at just the right time, Babushka Ina would say, ‘Mishka, I need your help.’” I stroked the top of Grandmother’s head. “I was always a big help,” I assured the dogs.

  “It was my job to help my grandmother add just the right amount of fruit and honey to the kutya. She said she had old taste buds and needed my young ones to tell exactly the perfect amount to add.”

  Grandmother thumped her tail in her dream.

  The world in the Glass House glowed gold in the candlelight. It waved and folded and danced in the cold. My eyelids slid halfway down, as I remembered the warmth in my mother’s kitchen and the golden strings of honey swirling in the pot of kutya. I could not see my mother’s face anymore. I was not sure of the color of her hair or eyes. But I remembered her hands, her beautiful white hands on the handle of the wooden spoon, stirring and stirring the pot.

  Something woke me. Barking and growling. Teeth pulled on my sweater, hard. I curled into a ball. It was so warm. I just wanted to sleep.

  A high, frantic, piercing bark. A howl of utter despair right beside my ear. Sharp, hurting teeth on my hands and my legs.

  I sat upright. “Leave me —”

  My words were cut by flames. Flames danced and licked all around me. The Glass House was no longer a Glass House. It was now a house of smoke and fire.

  Smoke.

  I staggered to my feet. The dogs crowded and cowered around me, whimpering, their eyes huge with fear.

  Smoke was at the far end of the Glass House hurling his body violently against the wooden door. I ran to him and threw my weight against the door too. It barely budged.

  “It’s the snow on the other side,” I said, coughing. I pushed with all my strength. Smoke and Lucky scratched frantically at the frozen dirt. Rip dug beneath the door until the snow was streaked with blood. Little Mother, the puppies shivering beside her, looked up at me with those eyes, the eyes of the Little Match Girl.

  I beat my fists on my legs. “I am just a pathetic, motherless boy,” I wailed. One of the tables crawled with flames. The wooden ribs joining the glass panes together smoked and sizzled. One rib fell away, crashing to the ground. Glass shattered.

  “Mother,” I whimpered. I looked around the Glass House.

  And then my eyes came to rest on the wheelbarrow. I ran to the end where we slept and ate and nested together. I grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow. Flames licked at my back.

  I dug the toes of my boots into the frozen earth. “One, two —” and I shot down the length of the Glass House and rammed the wheelbarrow against the door. A sliver of night shone through the tiny bit the door opened. But it was not enough. None of us could squeeze through.

  The house grew hotter. Smoke stung my eyes and burned my chest. The burlap bags fed the flames.

  I ran with the wheelbarrow back down to the other end of the Glass House. A spark came to rest on my cheek. I smelled burning hair.

  Once again, I dug my toes into the earth — softer now from the heat — and prayed. I prayed to my mother wherever she was and I prayed to Babushka Ina and the saints with their wooden faces and I prayed to God and the angels and hoped they were not asleep on this cold and fiery night.

  The table we slept under collapsed in a heap of sparks. I pushed off and ran as fast as any boy who is five years old without Famous Basketball Player shoes has ever run. I hit the wooden door so hard I flew over the handlebars of the wheelbarrow, crashed against the door, and landed on my back in the snow. I looked up with wonder at the star-filled sky. Sparks spiraled and floated like tiny red and orange eyes above us, looking down in wonder. “The angels are not sleeping this night,” I said to the eyes. “They are watching us.”

  A cold, wet nose pressed into my cheek. A tongue licked the other side of my face. Teeth pulled on my arm.

  I sat up and counted: Smoke, Lucky, Rip, Grandmother, Little Mother, and the two puppies. I felt underneath my sweater. The pages from my book of fairy tales were right where I’d put them.

  We sat together in the snow and watched our home burn bright, like a firebird in the night sky.

  “Well, Smoke,” I said to the dog sitting beside me. “Where do we go now? Our house is gone. The bread woman and the man with the sausages is gone, and so is Anya.”

  For the first time since I had met him, Smoke’s eyes were sorrowful and his ears were pinned against his sleek silver head in apology.

  I pulled from my memory the place the woman in the train station gave me. I said the words aloud to the light of the fire: Sisters of Mercy.

  I stroked the top of Smoke’s head and cradled the puppies in my lap.

  “I’ll take care of us.”

  And so it was, the dogs and I left The City center and the great plaza and Anya on a bitter January morning. We rode the train past one stop, then another. The dogs followed me past the sleeping children on the floor and on the benches. I looked for the faces of Pasha, Tanya, and Yula. I did not see them. I saw only dirty faces troubled in sleep, hands outstretched and begging.

  I shifted the heavy weight of the puppies in my cloth sack as we went up and up and up the gleaming moving stairs. “Sisters of Mercy,” I whispered.

  I touched the sleeve of a man sweeping the street. “Please, sir, can you tell me where Petrovsky Boulevard is?”

  He squinted at my face and shrugged before turning away.

  “Petrovsky Boulevard,” I said to the dogs. “We must find Petrovsky Boulevard.”

  I tried to stop the people coming and going from the train station. “Excuse me, sir,” “Pardon me, madam,” but they all pushed past me. Finally, an old woman in a gray headscarf stopped long enough to wave her hand and snap, “Three blocks that way,” before she disappeared below ground.

  So off the dogs and I went, the puppies whimpering in their bag. We trotted past heaps of snow-covered garbage in the gutters and grown-up bomzhi sleeping in doorways. We wound our way around sleeping dogs and empty bottles on the sidewalk. “This is not as nice a place as the great plaza,” I said as we waited for Grandmother to catch up.

  Finally, we found the street named Petrovsky and a low, gray building with the faded words SISTERS OF MERCY on a sign in front. Peeling painted wings spread across the door.

  No light shone from the two small windows. I pushed on the door. It did not open. “Perhaps they are sleeping,” I said to Lucky. I knocked on the wings. The door rested in silence. I pounded on it with my fists. Still, it did not open.

  I slid down to my knees and leaned my head against the door. “Pozhalsta — please,” I said to the outstretched wings.

  “They’re not there today. It’s Christmas.”

  On the sidewalk stood a bundle of rags with a boy inside.

  “Today is Christmas?”

  “Of course, stupid. It’s January seventh.” The boy cocked his head to one side. “Don’t you even know what day it is?”

  I shook my head. I had not known what day it was for a long, long time.

  “Will they be back tomorrow?” I asked.

  The boy shrugged and picked at a scab on his face. “Who knows? Maybe yes, maybe no.”

  Every bone in my body ached under the weight of disappointment. I could not remember the last time I’d eaten or gotten food for the dogs. I could not remember the last time I’d been warm.

  “What’s that in your bag?” the boy in rags asked.

  I hugged the puppies closer to me. “Nothing,” I said. “Just
stuff.”

  The female puppy poked her head out of the top of the bag and whimpered.

  “Puppies!” the boy yipped. He hurried over to the doorway where I sat with the puppies in my lap. “Can I see?”

  Little Mother and Grandmother closed around me, eyeing the boy warily. The boy reached out to touch the puppy’s head. Little Mother growled.

  “This is Little Mother,” I said. “She doesn’t know you well enough to let you touch her puppies.”

  The boy pulled his hand back and nodded. “She’s a good mother to protect her babies.”

  The puppies squirmed and mewled with hunger. “How many are there?” asked the boy.

  “Two,” I said. “There were three but one died.”

  The boy nodded again. “My friend Janina died too.”

  I reached into the bag and stroked the puppies, feeling their ribs against my fingers. “They’re hungry,” I said. “I need to find food for us.”

  The boy jammed his thumb against his chest. “I’m the best there is at getting food,” he said. “Come on.”

  And so the dogs and I followed this skinny bundle of rags away from the Sisters of Mercy. By the middle of the day, we’d collected enough food from the garbage cans behind the shops to feed us all.

  The boy stretched his legs across the heat grate. “I’m Vadim,” he said. “Who are you?”

  I stroked Grandmother’s head resting on my leg. “Sobachonok,” I said.

  Vadim laughed. “Your mother named you ‘Dog Boy’?”

  I shrugged. “Not my mother,” I said.

  Vadim took a deep breath. He closed his eyes and let loose the loudest, longest belch I had ever heard. I laughed.

  “Try it,” he said. “Take a real deep breath and swallow lots of air.”

  I closed my eyes and did just like he said.

  “Now, let it rip.” And I did.

  We laughed and laughed as people hurried by.

  “I am King of the Burps!” Vadim cried.

  “No, I am King of the Burps!” said I.

  Vadim socked me in the arm. I socked him back. I had seen boys play like this on the playground at Anya’s school.