The Taste of Penny (11 page)

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.

Mostly the usual stuff. He shines the flashlight on an expensive-looking silver luggage set. He climbs toward it but once there his eye catches something back in the corner of the compartment. He points the flashlight and sees the very same Phuket Thailand bag he stole the CD player from. This had never happened before, that he'd encountered the same bag twice.

He climbs over the expensive silver luggage set and punches the Phuket Thailand bag, not knowing exactly what to expect. It does not react. He unzips it and shines the flashlight in. It's packed much like it was before, like it's missing something about the size of a body. He climbs in and pushes his shoulders back into the flannels, extends his legs as far as they'll go. He zips himself in. The bag is longer and stretchier than his father's suitcase.

He takes out the stolen CD player, fits the headphones over his ears, and starts the piano music again, dulling the bus noise to a background buzz. He breathes in the smell of this kid's bag—not nuts exactly, more like the underneath of library desks. He closes his eyes. He grips denim, feels his hands into a small cardboard box. He shakes it and it flutters. Band-Aids, he guesses. He sees only dark and hears only this strange piano music. He puts the box of Band-Aids into his pocket.

It's more comfortable in this bag, Hryushka thinks. I feel all here.

When the Greyhound comes to a full stop—how did he miss the pulling off the highway?—he doesn't hit pause on the CD player. The door on the luggage compartment roars open, annoying him. He's lifted with the Phuket Thailand bag and thrown on the sidewalk.

Hryushka hears people move all around him, picking up other cases that are not him. It seems like he waits forever, for all of the buses to pull away, for someone to give the now seventy-pound heavier Phuket Thailand bag a puzzled tug, and then comes the unzippering.

When the bright bus station lights shine in, Hryushka prepares a big smile for a boy who turns out to look exactly like he expected him to look. They stare into each other's faces, each of them thinking the other is something he is not. Hryushka breaks the silence. A pancake in general, he says.