The Taste of Penny

by Jeff Parker

  Hryushka heard somewhere that his name means piglet. He feels it but can’t directly translate. He feels the pigletness in the sound of his name. He hears things all the time around him, in The Briefcase of the Pregnant Spylady, from the luggage compartment of the Greyhound, he hears them.

  Once some grandma, one of the émigrés who used to shop in The Briefcase of the Pregnant Spylady, gave him a Russian language textbook. She felt sorry for him because he couldn’t speak what he could understand. His father caught him reading and burnt it in the wood stove.

  We not emigrate so you beet Russian, he said. Want that we go anywhere.

  When Hryushka hears a word in either language, it’s not like he hears the word. It kind of bypasses his ears and an image pops into his head. When he hears his own name a piglet pops into his head.

  The Library is across the street from The Briefcase of the Pregnant Spylady and their attached apartment. Now that he’s twelve his father lets him go on his own in the mornings to study. There is no need for him in the shop. It used to be the only Russian store in the city. There were always frozen pelmeni to sweep up (the bags break and the pelmeni skid across the restaurant floor like hockey pucks) or farmer’s cheese to rotate (the old stuff he opens out back for the pigeons). Now there’s two other stores. Even though his father’s prices are cheaper, no one comes anymore.

  At noon Hryushka walks across the street for lunch. His father has prepared kielbasa and cheese sandwiches and the stereo is blasting There Is No God, his father’s favorite song, the only song he ever listens to. It’s a seventies rock ballad repeating the words—and only the words, there is no God. It’s in Russian, so Hryushka is not sure how he knows what’s being said, he just knows. His father’s got a whole tape with that one song taking up both sides. Every day he plays it, over and over, the only pauses the time it takes to walk to the stereo and flip the cassette. His father sings along as he slices deli meats. It’s why none of the other émigrés shop here. They’re all Orthodox and that kind of thing gets to them. Like definite and indefinite articles, his father doesn’t understand. They eat and Hryushka cleans the store. He feather dusts shelves and boxes of flours and grains and mixes, vinegars the glass on the freezer doors. His father wipes off the cash register keys. Sometimes, an utterance comes out of Hryushka’s mouth and he has no idea why he says it. When he is perplexed and agitated sometimes: Horseradish doesn’t know! Before they play the game again, his father says, No fur, no feathers, and Hryushka replies, To the devil. He has no idea why.

  Hryushka knocks himself against the side of the storage cabinet when he’s done. His father lifts him out of the seventh sack and brushes him off with the back of his hand.

  How legs? his father asks.

  Cramped, Hryushka says. It’s hard to turn around.

  Not much time, he says. Your body wants grow. His father dumps out the seventh sack and checks the bottom of the storage cabinet. We do a real thing now. Once more.

  The real thing, Papa, one more time.

  The trick to the prices is logistics. Every two weeks Hryushka and his father take a trip to New York on the Greyhound. When they get there, Hryushka’s father rents a van one-way and drives product back, direct from the wholesalers; they pick it up themselves at the warehouses in Brooklyn. It’s still expensive but cheaper than dealing with distributors. The other stores have the goods shipped in and poppy seed buns go for two bucks each. The Briefcase of the Pregnant Spylady sells them for one dollar.

  The weather broke tonight, a freak cold snap on the heels of a front, rain then ice. On the way to the Greyhound station, Hryushka keeps bending down to pick up bracelets off the sidewalk but they’re frozen worms glittering under the street lights. He pockets them and they break like pencil leads in his pocket. Before they reach the station they step into an alley and his father opens up the suitcase, which is insulated with rabbit fur. Hryushka climbs in and his father snaps it shut.

  As his father rolls the suitcase across the asphalt, Hryushka loses himself. He forgets where he is, does not turn on the keychain flashlight, closes his eyes as tight as possible so as not to witness all the dark. He thinks how the cold snap came on like his growth spurt, from nowhere, pang to the bone. He shot up three inches this month. He cries in the night, massaging his legs and starving. His father brings him carrots and tells him to think small. He tries to think small. He tries to imagine his legs the size they used to be, but he finds that he has a great deal of trouble picturing his legs without looking at them.

  It is easy to tell when his father hands him off. The driver is never as careful with the suitcase. He is dropped, then flipped upside down, then thrown. He hears his father ask the driver to be more careful. The driver gives the suitcase an extra hard shove to the back of the compartment.

  This is the part that always seems to take forever, idling at the station. His father watches where his son is positioned in the luggage compartment and tries to sit above him. The bus is full of other émigrés going from Cleveland to Squirrel Hill. His father talks so loud that Hryushka can sometimes hear his sputtering voice over the engine noise.

  The real thing is quite a bit different than the game. For one, there is no scoop. The scoop was his father’s idea, to get Hryushka to concentrate on process and technique. There are no prearranged bags of granule; instead piles of suitcases, most of them locked at best with a little padlock, which Hryushka can easily pick. The little padlocks his father buys for the game are much higher quality than these.

  Other things are similar. He is only to take one thing from each bag, just one thing, his father always said. If you took just one thing, he said, no one notice. He wanted them not to notice as much as possible. If it was just one thing, they could never be sure they hadn’t left it, no one could make a case. It should be something valuable, usually jewelry. Sometimes he found cash, a laser pointer, massagers, a prosthetic hand. Another of his father’s rules: if there is nothing of value, he still has to take something from each bag for consistency and fairness. Here Hryushka’s own rule comes into play: he never takes anything he himself wants. He leaves the candy. Once he happened on a porno collection—he looked, but left it. Instead, from these bags, he takes toenail clippers, Rogaine, and XXL t-shirts, which are too big for him even to sleep in.

  The first leg of the trip—mostly Russians—he is to stay put. His father always told him to forget about what’s going on outside, to relax, because he can feel by the speed of the bus how fast it’s going. If it slows, it’s getting off the highway and a stop will come soon. If it slows, he’s to climb immediately back into the suitcase. As long as the speed is constant, they’re still on the highway and everything’s fine. Highway = fine. He should forget about what’s going on outside, relax. The first time they pull off the highway—you cannot miss that from the luggage compartment—they will be in Pittsburgh, some bags will be pulled off, others put on, better bags. But there will be plenty of time from that first slowing to Pittsburgh, so he can relax.

  Hryushka does not stay put this time. His legs are cramping. There is a special pocket on the top of the suitcase, which looks like a zipper pocket. The zipper is on the inside. He squeezes his skinny body out of the pocket like a stick of chewing gum from its pack. The compartment vibrates and he bangs his head on the steel sheet of flimsy metal separating the luggage from the people.

  He turns on the keychain light and looks around. He knows how to spot the good bags, the kind kids his age or a little older pack. They’re like sports bags athletes carry. They say Nike or Reebok or Fine Young Thing on the outside. They are never locked. He shines his keychain flashlight on a green one. He pulls up the side of the bag and reads: Phuket Thailand. The bus is barreling, maybe seventy-five, eighty.

  Ordinarily he would avoid the temptation of a Phuket Thailand bag, but his legs are stretched and better feeling, though he’s hungry again. Hryushka can barely remember a time before he had taken this trip in the luggage compartment. It was always
there, something he understood but couldn’t explain. He tried to remember the first time he’d played the game, but he couldn’t remember that either. He might never get the chance to root around in another kid’s bag. And this bag—he can’t figure out how to pronounce this word. It wouldn’t hurt to peek, he figures.

  He opens the zipper and crawls in. There is no sound more exciting to him than that of a zipper. Inside, the bag smells of pecan. To him, the flannels and jeans are softer than his father’s fur. His head knocks against something hard and flat. He reaches under a stack of undershirts and removes a CD player with headphones, something he’s always wanted. He can’t understand why the kid wouldn’t take the headphones with him to listen on the bus. If Hryushka had headphones and he was riding on the bus with a ticket, he would surely take them with him. Hryushka hits the open/close button.

  As the CD player opens, Hryushka hears the squeal-hiss of the bus brakes, then the slow pull as it merges into the exit lane. He removes a length of frozen worm from his pocket and shines the flashlight on it. It’s beginning to thaw and come back to life, writhing almost imperceptibly. He places it under the stack of undershirts then climbs out of the Phuket Thailand bag, rezips it, scales the stacks of luggage back to his own suitcase. Still clutching the CD player, he dives back in.

  He is sweating and nervous as the brakes—Hryushka imagines the collective whine of a million beagles—bite then release. He hears the driver pop the luggage compartment door, toss out bags around him, chuck others in. Then, to his shock, his own suitcase and he himself are removed, plopped to the ground briefly then picked up and carried, a circuitous route by very sure steps, distinctly his father’s calculated steps. The suitcase is dropped to the ground again, then the latches snapped and the top lifted open.

  Hryushka blinks. He is in a stall next to a toilet, his father standing over him, saying, Come out, Hryushka. You have a whole life to ride bus. Might well as start now. His father leaves the stall and washes his hands. Hryushka steps out of the suitcase, sticking the CD player and headphones down his pants. Then they leave the bathroom together.

  Hryushka’s father buys an additional ticket from the attendant, and Hryushka watches the driver’s face as he and his father emerge from the terminal, a place awash in such white a light—Hryushka can hardly imagine having seen a place so bright before. His father hands the driver his stub and Hryushka’s ticket. Then he hands over the empty suitcase.

  I deposited some things for my wife and picked my son, his father says, motioning toward Hryushka.

  Fine, the driver says. He frisbees the suitcase into the compartment. It lands right on top of the Phuket Thailand bag.

  Hryushka doesn’t understand what’s going on, but since he has never ridden in a bus like a normal ticketed person he doesn’t worry. He takes the window seat beside his father and absorbs all the silence, amazed at how quiet the bus is from up here. He always thought he heard so much talking, but here there is nothing but the silence of strangers absorbed in their seats. He glances at his father, whose eyes are closed, his head held perfectly straight.

  He closes his eyes and briefly imagines himself back inside the Phuket Thailand bag. He looks over the seatbacks for a little boy to go with it. He goes to the bathroom and on his way stares intently at the crooked sleeping heads of the other passengers. No boy. He balances the CD player on the little bus-bathroom faucet. Something occurs to him then as he’s peeing: perhaps whoever’s bag that was was someone like him, another boy whose father hides him in the luggage to steal what there is to steal. Suppose that little boy snuck out of the bag before Hryushka, and he was investigating another suitcase—maybe even his own—as he stole the kids’ CD player. More likely, the kid rode the bus the first leg, then had his accomplice—someone like his own father—install him in the luggage at the same time as Hryushka’s father inexplicably let him out. The idea was just outrageous enough. Hryushka had never considered a possibility like this before.

  On the way back down the aisle he looks not for people like himself, but for people who look like his father. They pretty much all could be him in one way or another.

  Hryushka’s father has ordered special pies from the distributors. He is taking the store in this direction, in the direction of desserts. He’s specifically ordered Napoleon, Stump, and Kiss of an African Man. He asks the wholesaler in English for his pies, and the guy replies something about credit and then Hryushka’s father shoos Hryushka out and he and the wholesaler argue in Russian.

  Hryushka and his father leave with no Napoleons, Stumps, or Kisses of African Man. They have a couple boxes of candy Squirrels and frozen chocolate bars filled with farmer’s cheese. They rent a Kia rather than the mini-van because they have only a trunkful of product to transport and Hryushka sleeps most of the way across New York when something else strange happens: In a town called Corning above the Finger Lakes, Hryushka’s father pulls off the highway and into the parking lot of the Corning Museum of Glass.

  The building itself, surprisingly, is brick. But inside everything is glass. Hryushka can see, across the room, a glass Egyptian pharaoh at least four times bigger than himself. His father, for the second time in so many days, hands him a ticket. On this one is written Corning Museum of Glass: After spending time here you will understand glass in a very different way.

  Hryushka looks down at the ground as he’s stocking the candies and chocolate covered farmer’s cheese in the reach-in cooler. He gets slightly dizzy then walks over to the mark on the wall his father uses to track his height.

  Hryushka presses his back against the wall trim. His father is flipping the tape and restarting There Is No God.

  Can you measure me, Papa? he says.

  His father runs a pencil across the top of Hryushka’s head. He steps away from the wall and they both look at it. The new mark is separated from the old one by approximately the height of one poppy seed bun.

  His father falls back into a corner, then slides down to a sitting position below a speaker. Both of them stare at the bun-sized space. His father’s legs are stretched out in front of him. The only sound, except for the There Is No God refrain, is the reach-in cooler fans.

  Hryushka wants to ask why he was pulled off the bus in Pittsburgh, but he doesn’t. He is thinking about some and any. He is not sure when to say Is there any problem? or Is there some problem? He’s not sure what the difference is.

  His thoughts are interrupted by his father’s voice in Russian, explaining something, though at first Hryushka is not sure what. Then he realizes that he is telling the story of the store’s name. Hryushka listens, and it is difficult, but images begin to appear in his head: His father’s father used to walk with him through the common wagons on the Russian trains and slip him into the compartments under the seats when people went to the bathrooms. He had to be quick. In those days he wouldn’t get much but everything was worth something. He’d be happy if he found half a loaf of bread wadded in a head scarf. But there came a time—as with Hryushka—when he started to grow. Hryushka’s father was sad not because he particularly liked stealing from people, but because he liked climbing among their things. On what Hryushka’s father’s father said would be his last trip in the luggage compartment, he made a fabulous discovery, one that stands to this day as his most exciting moment. Amid a compartment of canvas bags and musty suitcases tied together with rope, he discovered a small shiny black briefcase. The locks on it were difficult to pick, but he had a good knife, and though his father would have killed him if he had found out, he broke the locks to get in. In that briefcase was the most strange combination of items. He first noticed a pistol and a kind of radio, both made by Japanese. There were also stacks of folders containing documents labelled SECRET. Underneath them, smushed at the bottom of the briefcase were women’s underwear and a pacifier with a piece of ribbon around it, a gift tag that read, For Mashinka—my favorite pregnant spylady—and offspring.

  Hryushka’s father goes on with the story,
but Hryushka stops listening. He now has an image in his head of his father as a little kid, hunkered under a seat compartment and fumbling through the belongings of a pregnant KGB agent. He takes that image with him to bed, where he gets under the sheet and toys with the CD player he’d stolen from the Phuket Thailand bag. Inside is a CD with a piece of tape and the word Rach written on it. He puts the headphones on and hits play. He’d expected Van Halen or Aerosmith, but it’s classical, piano. He lies there listening.

  Later he pads down the hall and across the corridor into The Briefcase of the Pregnant Spylady, where his father is still crouched in the corner, his back to the wall, his hands on his knees, mouthing the words to his favorite song.

  Let’s try one more time, Papa, Hryushka says.

  Hryushka’s father tells him to take a pillow but he says it like pilaf. He can curl around it since he is really too big for the suitcase and with the CD player again shoved down the front of his pants it cushions things. During the hand-off he hears the driver ask his father what the hell he’s got in there.

  Barbells, his father says. Sorry.

  Hryushka relaxes through the idling, until they’ve pulled out and he knows they’re on the freeway by the vibrations of the flimsy sheet metal lining the luggage compartment and the whoosh of air beneath him. Then he slides himself out of the suitcase and shines the flashlight around.