by Jeff Parker
“You’re throwing away money,” one of the babushkas says. “You could use a manicure, but you are not accurate.”
“You cannot hear through Russian doors,” Andre says. “We were shouting. We thought we would die there. We were pounding on the doors, but this is like a mouse running on a pipe. We were on the top floor, Vadim screaming for help out the windows. Everyone thought we were just drunk.”
“We were fucking drunk,” Vadim, the other soldier, says.
“When the Captain finally arrived he tried to tell us that it had only been two days. I told him, ‘Prepare to suffer’ and he admitted that he had forgotten us, and he confessed—you will never believe this: He had been off playing Submarine himself. He was a player in two other games of Submarine before he remembered about us. Since he didn’t shower, he didn’t find the key in his pocket. He also lost our cell phones.”
I tell Andre my story about “barber” and “baba,” which he laughs at once I explain that in English a “barber” is someone who cuts hair. He elbows Vadim and tells him my story. He and Vadim crack up.
“Let me tell you,” Andre says, “all women are whores.”
“Watch your mouth,” one of the babushkas says.
“I’ve written an essay about this phenomenon,” I say to Andre. “It was awarded a very prestigious collegiate prize in the US.”
Choika sits like a statue. Her bag in her lap, her legs crossed official-like. She hardly jostles. I am more and more disappointed that she has not blown us all up. I contemplate peeing into an empty beer bottle. Instead I set the bottle on the floor and one of the babushkas snatches it.
The cops pull over our bus and the driver calls another bathroom break to deal with them. I am happy for the bathroom break, the first one off the bus. I whiz behind the wheel and climb back aboard before everyone else is even off. The cops and the driver are talking near the front of the bus, and I see the driver hand them some money.
Choika steps off the bus and walks around the cops and the driver. I hurry back to my seat to watch her. She goes across the street and chooses a thin birch. She plants her feet in front of the tree, then squats, staring at her knees. I wonder if I’m becoming weird.
She stands again, tugging down the hem of her skirt. She doesn’t even look when she steps onto the highway. She stands there in the middle of the asphalt. She lifts up one heel, wiping off the mud with toilet paper. Then she does the same to the other heel.
When she slides back into the seat, one of the babushkas holds out the paper hat of sunflower seeds to her and says, “Here, girl, you need to eat.”
“There’s no place to wash hands,” Choika says.
The police come aboard, forcing their way to the back of the bus. They crowbar the locked bathroom door open and a tower of shoeboxes collapses on them. The driver breaks for it, but Andre and Vadim trounce him in the aisle.
“You bitches,” the driver says. “They were in on it,” he says to the police as they bend him over the seatback and cuff him. “They wanted free pairs. Size forty-three and forty-five. Check them.”
“A cunt to your mouth,” someone in back yells. “You unscrupulous shit-ass,” another.
Choika stands awkwardly, like she has to sneeze, and whips some kind of ball with wires out of her bag. She pushes something on it and hunches. She hunches again, like she’s pushing in the top of a deflated volleyball with her thumbs.
“What is this?” one of the babushkas says.
I close my eyes.
When I open them again the aisle is a knot of perfectly unharmed screaming bodies.
“Move,” Andre says to me and I push out into the aisle.
The soldiers lunge across the seat, tackling Choika. A policeman pitches the bomb out the window. It lands in the street and rolls into the ditch.
As I’m swept off the bus, I’m thinking, Did she have that bomb before I thought it? “Did I do that?” I say out loud, and in English, but no one can hear me.
Once off the bus the soldiers yell furiously for us to get as far away from the bomb as possible. We are off the bus, dispersing into the woods, I more hesitantly than the group.
When the police stuff Choika into the back of the cop car I can see her knees are bleeding but she’s not crying or shaking. She sits in the backseat staring out the window just like she’d stared out the bus window the whole ride, like nothing mattered.
The police and the soldiers crouch over the bomb. Andre tinkers with it and Vadim and the police back up.
“I never saw a Muslim dressed like that,” one of the babushkas says.
“She was masquerading as one of our girls,” the other says. “Sluts,” she says and dumps a little purse full of coins on the ground.
“What are you doing?” one babushka says.
“She gave me four rubles for the toilet paper.”
A little boy runs up and starts collecting the money. His mother yells at him to put it down and come back to her. When he does she hugs his head and says, “I wish we’d be there” or something like that—I don’t understand the exact phrasing.
I approach the soldiers and the police. Andre is still fiddling with the bomb.
“I know her name,” I say.
The police turn around. Their faces twitch. They’re really shaken up. “Who are you?” one of them asks.
“Foreigner,” Vadim says.
“I know her name,” I say. “I heard her say it.”
“It’s crap,” Andre says, “total crap.” He leaves the bomb in the ditch. “What’s her name?” Andre says.
“Choika,” I say.
“Choika,” one of the police says. He says it again louder and looking her way and she turns her head. I suddenly feel ashamed, like I gave her up.
“What is that?” Andre says. “Choika.”
“Chukchi?” Vadim says.
“Never heard of it,” Andre says.
“Friends,” the driver says. He’s still in the handcuffs. “Feel free to retake your seat, friend,” the driver says to me.
I’m the first one back on the bus and one of Choika’s gorgeous shoes is on the floor near my seat. There’s a scrap of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of the heel.
The driver talks to the police and the soldiers as the other passengers reboard, absolutely silent. Even the chatty babushkas. They sit cramped together in the exact same spots they sat in before, leaving a wide space where Choika had been. A policeman unlocks the driver’s handcuffs and he comes aboard. He goes back to the bathroom and selects two boxes, restacking those that had fallen. The door refuses to latch at first but eventually clicks. He hands the two boxes to the policemen. Then the soldiers and the driver reboard.
I point to the shoe on the ground.
“Don’t touch it,” Andre says. “Forget about it.” He kicks it under the seat and hands me a beer. From the first sip, I feel the pressure build in my bladder.
The driver stands at the front of the bus. “Any more crazy terrorists here?” he says. No one says anything. “I sure hope not. Next stop is Novgorod. Unfortunately, I’m sorry to say, that the bathroom on the bus is still out of order.”
Our Cause
I KNEW WE WERE IN FOR TROUBLE THE MOMENT the locals, who call resort workers “spank tourists,” showed. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a crowd of Carhartt flannels. We couldn’t figure who invited them. It was me and Patsy and a few others who have jobs like vacuuming moose heads in the main lodge.
I tried to make them feel welcome. Patsy was the only woman and loving it. I offered them some detergent. We did bumps in the bathroom in case management descended. We got off-kilter and imprecise, and the detergent flew, dusting the floor and toilet seat.
Then I taught them all how to dryer-ride. I programmed thirty-second spins in the Vapor Electro-Heat Roller Dryer, which beat them up good. I gave instruction and advice: Roll at precisely nine o’clock. Land frog push-ups.
All the while I kept my arm locked around Patsy’s, knowing how she gets
with men like this around. At one point she broke away, saying that she had to go to toilet. She always says this: go to toilet. I don’t know where the the goes.
About then the locals suggested that it was my turn in the dryer, that I should show them how it’s done. I said, “Nah, fellas. I get into this all the time. It’s you all’s moment.” Brick, the biggest one, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Really, I would like to see what you can do.”
You do not go this far, all of the locals dizzy and warm to the touch, without taking your fair shake. I glanced around and noted that all the moose head vacuumers had left already. It was just me, Patsy, and the Carhartt flannels. I climbed in and at that moment Patsy returned from the bathroom. She wore the feather roach clip in her hair. She switched on the boom box and I heard muffled new wave country reverberating through the dryer drum. I remembered her telling me at the start of the trip, “One thing you’ve got to realize, Scoma, I am the type of girl who eats her pudding with a fork.” She was skeptical about how a winter spent washing rich people’s come out of sheets was going to fix us.
Brick hooked his arm around her elbow and spun her into the open floor. One of the other locals tapped on the dryer control pad, and I could tell from the three beeps he didn’t program me the same thirty-second joyride I programmed them.
I had a perfect view of Brick and Patsy out of the dryer glass, and I simply employed my technique, turned at nine o’clock, landed frog push-ups. Simple. Just like I told them it’d be. They applauded for me. Patsy gyrated on Brick’s leg. Brick spun his arm above his head like a lasso. It’s nothing I hadn’t seen before, used to recline with a BLT while she wiggled it on some creampuff’s haunch.
I dryer-ride these days better than I skate vert. But when I saw the whole group of them through the glass, her and the locals heading out of what we might call the public area of the facility and into the back, I mistimed and came down hard. The metal drum knobs slamboed me. I got caught in the revolutions and couldn’t get out. I could feel the blood racing to the contours of every future bruise.
Patsy danced her way out of what we might call the public area of the facility, finger-tip-feeling the underside of Brick’s chin, not her slinky stripper dance but kind of Indiana, slithering ledges. She walked them right out there with those ledges, one of which Brick tried to tame. She fired it at him.
They didn’t take her. She left with them.
Everyone told me. “Damn, Scoma,” they said, “that girl lives in a necklace.” I thought that if I could get her away from the place where she shed her clothes while folks mowed the breakfast buffet, we’d be all right.
When the dryer cycle stopped, I pushed the door open and flopped out. I lay on the floor and the wooden trusses cutting across the middle of the ceiling spun like helicopter blades for a long time. When they finally slowed, I stumbled to the back. The locals were all passed out in the dirty sheets, our neglected responsibility. Wrapped together tightly in sheets, Brick and Patsy.
I toppled one of the laundry carts for commotion.
Brick’s eyes popped open. He tried to roll away from Patsy but he was tangled in the sheets. I punched his face a few times before he got up. Patsy didn’t wake. She lay there nude, curled on her side like a letter S. And he was facing me, fists up.
Now, I took some boxing. I threw a few jabs, missed. He ducked, bobbed. His dick and balls smacked around, distracting me. He didn’t even try to cover himself. I remembered hearing somewhere that naked men don’t fight good.
The trickle of blood from his nose got me overconfident, and I threw a knockout, a real Popeye. I missed again, over extended, still dizzy. I have this habit of sticking my tongue out during physical activity. He got underneath me with the uppercut, a nice one.
What I remember last is the tip of my tongue sailing away from me.
When I come to, there’s a tarantula in my mouth. My knee is wedged under the emergency brake. A ziplock baggie on Patsy’s feather roach clip dangles from the rearview mirror. Inside the baggie is some kind of salted slug.
There are no operative mirrors in the Civvie. Ditches snapped off the side-views. At first I think I might have been in a wreck. Then it all comes roaring back to me. Not a tarantula, the swollen nub—what’s left of my tongue. That would make the salted slug the unfortunate tip. The rearview mirror is stuck in that mode where headlights don’t shine in your eyes and all you can see is a transparent reflection of yourself.
I un-wedge my knee from the emergency brake. I squeeze the tip of my tongue in the ziplock baggie. Me and Patsy drove to Big Sky Resort from Florida just a few weeks ago to spend our winter working laundry. Right about now, on an ordinary morning, we would have already laundered the very sheets her and Brick are probably still twisted up in. We’d be pushing them in carts up to the resort. We’d have folded tight and flat. We’d have tucked in corners to boomerang them at maids and run.
I don’t go back inside the laundry room to get her or ask how it was I am put into the Civvie. I drive away. I drive until I see a Taco Bell and utilize the facilities. I wad up a ball of toilet paper and press it to the swollen nub of my tongue. Flecks of toilet paper stick to it. I self-serve a cup of ice, pushing the tip of my tongue—ziplock baggie, roach clip, and all—down in there. The boy at the checkout eyes my blood-smeared face and hand. He doesn’t say anything. Then I drive away from Montana. I’m all giddy, delirious, lightheaded. I am going ninety, minus some percentage of tongue.
The road in front of me is blank, interrupted every couple miles with dead deer. I start to count out loud like Patsy and I always did, and that brings on the tears. I punch the steering wheel. Sixteen, seventeen, seventeen and a half, eighteen—how much for torso? Leg? A furry stain? How do you count that? Me and Patsy tried. We counted carcasses in high fractions, her always looking way over the ditch, singing, “Four and two-twenty-eights. Where’s the hell the rest of the thing go?”
Right before the state border, there’s a line of trucks parked on the shoulder. I slow to a crawl and roll down the window. A bumper sticker on a Chevy reads, “Gut Deer?” There’s a huddle of folks with knives and Igloo coolers in the ditch. They’re knelt around a moose carcass in the snow.
A pear-shaped guy with ice in his beard waves at me. He is holding a lime-green paring knife. When he comes toward me I see the moose’s side is split open. I’ve never seen a dead thing so big. Maybe a thousand pounds. There’s a chain between the Gut Deer? truck’s hitch and the moose’s leg. A trail marks where the chain dragged the moose from the road. Another guy buries the guts in the snow a few feet away. Steam rises when he shovels snow over the guts.
“You signed up?” the guy says. A Ford Pinto honks and screams around me. I make my face into a question. “Buzzard Workshop,” the guy says. “Roadkill 101. You signed up?” His tone is recruity. I figure, it’s a curious scene. I figure, I’ll check it out. I pull the car over.
“You got a blade?” he asks. I point to my mouth and shake my head. “It’s okay,” he says. “We have some spares.”
He opens the door to the Gut Deer? truck and hands me a hunting knife with a compass in the butt of the handle, the flea market kind I used to covet as a kid. Then we walk to the moose carcass and the old lady and a woman with a green bandana tied around her head scoot aside to make room for me. I kneel next to the moose’s shoulder.
There’s a girl about my age wearing a Skoal T-shirt that matches the guy shoveling guts into the snow and a woman sitting in a lawn chair behind the moose reading a copy of Better Homes & Gardens. The bearded guy stands at the moose’s head. The smell is warm and sour.
The bearded guy hands out oversized freezer bags, then props his boot on one of its antlers and begins to lecture: “Now as I was saying, roadkill is a right and a privilege…” He says some things I don’t understand about anatomy and about the unjust laws we are in violation of by taking apart this already-murdered creature in the ditch. I want to clarify. It does not seem right that somet
hing like this would be illegal. But I can’t speak. My tongue swells, filling my mouth.
Then the moose’s carcass vibrates, and I realize everyone is cutting into it. The bearded guy appears behind me. He takes my hand, which is holding the hunting knife, and guides me through the muscle of the shoulder. It’s thick, tougher than I ever imagined. Once the knife is in, he releases me and traces the line in front of the knife with his finger as I work it—the meat pushing against the blade before opening a seam. I manage around what you might call a hock.
“That’a boy,” he says and pats my shoulder. An old lady crouched over the moose holds up something red and stringy in her veined hands.
“Can you eat this?” she shouts to the bearded guy.
“Leave something for the real buzzards,” he says. They laugh.
He moves on to the woman in the bandana whose knife is stuck in some dense material around the back leg. I’m wearing thin black gloves and my hands start to go numb from the cold. I split my hock into two freezer bags. When I look up, the woman in the bandana is smiling and cradling the detached leg. She says that she used to butcher moose she found on the road with a chainsaw. She is thankful for this clean cut. She is thankful for the bearded guy sharing his expertise with us like this. “Being able to take an entire leg off,” the old woman says, “to know how to work the knife and find the joints.”
She is taking both back legs, for living-room lamps, she says. She stands them up against an Igloo cooler. The other two are rationed out for soup bone and marrow. The girl in the Skoal T-shirt slices off the tail, about the size of a yam, and slips it into her coat pocket.
The bearded guy pries open the moose’s mouth, revealing its tongue, which is like a giant purple snail. “Who wants to pickle this beauty?” he asks, sawing at the back of the tongue with the thin paring knife. It ekes out like a monstrous conch. He holds it in his gloved hand and it seems to pulse. I bolt to the Civvie, abandoning the freezer bags and my hock. “Hey,” the bearded guy yells. I drive away and only realize that I stole his knife when I look down and see it bloodying my passenger seat. I tear into Wyoming on a little route. And when a prairie dog farm with a little store is the first thing that appears, I make it my first Wyoming thing.
