The Taste of Penny (10 page)

“What is going to hurt us, boy?” I say. “Come on.”

We drive to the dollar store.

To wit the boy makes a stupid point. You can't go down in size by half and expect it not to hurt you in dramatic effect. And I don't even know rightly if they make the Illuminator in 25-foot. And what then? Put floodlights on it from the roof overhang? Might as well cross the border and go to jail free. Maybe it's where we both belong.

I count the Canadian flags on porches and mailboxes and hanging off siding. They might be postage stamps as much as they're flags. Got zero meaning. A leaf is not a symbol. It's a picture, a drawing. At best you get nature off it. But you take an American flag and you know an American flag is in the room with you, or on the street with you, or in the neighborhood. You can
feel
an American flag, especially when presented all 50-foot Illuminator Hurricane and all.

At the dollar store, the boy wanders the aisles. I tell the woman straight off, “Ma'am, I am not speaking French with you. But I am returning this Iranian curtain rod on account of it's Iranian.”

She seems puzzled, then twirls it behind the counter like a baton.

“No exchange.”

“I don't want to exchange. I'm giving it back. Just take it. And accept my friendly customer-service suggestion to discontinue the stocking of this and all Tehran product.”

“Made in Iran?” she says. Her co-worker comes over and they speak in French. Theirs is not redneck French. Something different. You can hear it in the expression.

The boy appears at my side. “What are you doing, Dad?”

“I'm returning this Iranian curtain rod.”

“Why's it Iranian?”

“That's the most natural question you've asked in a time.”

The woman points to the metal stamp on the rod and shows it to the boy.

“It says, ‘Made in Taiwan,' Dad.”

“What'd you say to me?” I have a look, hold it up to my face and pull it back. “Still don't want it.” I drop it on the counter and walk out, wait for the boy in the car.

The boy drives. Little piles of snow form peaks on the sides of the road. He slips a CD out of his breast pocket. The CD has a metal ring through it, looped around a silver thread. The CD has an American flag print and the letters “USA.” The bilingual packaging says “Hanging CD / CD Colgante.”

“I got you something, Dad,” he says. “It's not a 50-foot flagpole, I know.”

“Some kind of decoration?” I say.

“It's only a decoration if you put it facing out. If it faces you, then it's just for you. All anyone else sees is the reflective back of a CD. Here.”

He takes it out and hangs it over the mirror. We drive and it swings from the rear-view, slicing the air between us.

“What's
colgante
mean in frog?”

“It's Spanish. It means hanging, or pendant.”

“Why's it Spanish.”

“I don't know.”

It was another stupid notion the boy had. It was clearly a decoration. But something about it endeared me to wit I respected its Spanish, the second language of the USA.

“Music on there?” I ask.

The boy shrugs. I pry the metal ring off the colgante with my side teeth. I feed it into the CD player and there's a long silence while the player tries to read it. The boy turns the volume knob all the way up and then it starts. The “Star Spangled Banner” played on little Mexican guitars, a maraca keeping the beat.

He turns it down, and I slap the back of his hand.

“Jam that colgante, boy!” I say.

We ride the streets like that, windows down so the cool air bites, the “Star Spangled Banner” playing on repeat. I picture myself busting up the cement base of the Illuminator Hurricane with the sledgehammer when we get home. I picture the boy, while I am busting, propping his feet on the sofa and eating what's called here a Wagon Wheel but is a Moon Pie. Though it seems to be my lot, bringing up things that in the end I will tear down, I start to feel a little good again, riding around like that, picturing only the immediate future, with the “Star Spangled Banner” cranking, with my boy and the colgante.

LET'S PLAY A GAME, HIS FATHER SAYS.

The
game, Hryushka wants to say, a specific member of a group. But two things his father will never figure out: articles and customer service. So Hryushka says nothing. He goes and gets his scoop.

Six burlap sacks are prearranged in the old chest freezer they've converted into storage. The cooling fans no longer work, and Hryushka himself severed the power cord, which his father used to power a bucket that he turned into a leaf blower. Each sack contains a different granule: sugar, flour, salt, dog food, buckwheat, semolina. His father has sewn zippers into the sacks and locked them with little padlocks.

His father zips Hryushka along with his keychain flashlight and scoop into a seventh sack, then lifts him, with some difficulty, into the freezer and closes the lid. Hryushka's job, once zippered into the seventh sack and closed in the
freezer, is to unzipper himself from the seventh sack, to jimmy the little padlock on the other sacks one-by-one, taking one scoop of granule from each, depositing it into a ziplock bag, rezipping and relocking each sack—if he breaks a little padlock while jimmying it he has to superglue it back together—then to rezipper himself, the keychain flashlight and scoop, and the six ziplocks of granule into the seventh sack.

He has done it so many times he no longer gets claustrophobic or breaks a sweat even when his father kicks the freezer, even when he tips it all the way over and then rights it. Hryushka stays focused. He spills one scoop of dog food. He knows one scoop holds roughly thirty-two kibbles. He feels around on the floor, counting as he retrieves them, until he hits thirty-two, then he feels around more, shining the keychain flashlight to where he can't reach. When he's done his father will check the floor carefully. For now, Hryushka doesn't even think about what might be happening on the outside. That is how his father taught him.

Even when he breaks a little padlock and glues two of his fingers together while trying to glue the lock back together he doesn't spaz. He has plenty of time actually, and he sits long after he's done, zippered in the seventh sack with his single scoop of sugar, flour, salt, dog food, buckwheat, and semolina, sucking on his glued-together fingers before rocking himself back and forth against the side of the freezer, signaling to his father that the game is over.

 

Itchy, this guy in a pickup says to Hryushka.

I don't know what you mean, Hryushka says from the sidewalk, unsure what language the guy is speaking.

Hey, chief, he says. Where's the library?

Oh, Hryushka says. You're right in front of it. It's here.

Then he walks into the library and sits down with the ESL pamphlets. He is trying to rid himself of reflexive particles. He knows he should not feel himself bad. He should feel bad. He should not feel himself like his bones are exploding in the night. He should feel like his bones are exploding in the night. His father never spoke Russian to him, only self-taught English with his thick accent, the same accent that home-schooled him, and now he's the only kid around who doesn't really speak English or Russian, no native language, just a thick accent all his own.

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.