Clair Huffaker: The Cowboy and the Cossack

About our only greeting was from some occasional unfriendly dogs, who barked from a distance and slunk away growling if we passed by up close.

And then we saw a few lights from windows in a small building down closer to the water. There were three sleepy little horses that looked like undersized mustangs tied up outside, and there was a small hand-painted sign hanging over the door.

“What’s it say?” Shiny asked Keats, staring at the strange, meaningless lettering.

“Hell,” Keats muttered, “could be Chinese for all I know. But I think it’s a bar.”

We tied the mules to the hitching rail near the horses and went into the small building.

Old Keats looked around and said hesitantly, “I guess this is one a’ those bars without a bar.”

We were in a plain, poorly lighted room with nothing more than six or eight wobbly tables and some rickety chairs in it. Sitting at a table near the corner were three men in flea-bitten fur hats and thick brown homespun coats that came down to their ankles. They were all dressed enough alike to maybe be in some sort of uniform. They were drinking something that looked like water, and all three of them stared up at us with just barely controlled shock, paying particular attention to Shiny and his jet-black skin.

Then a fat man came out of a back door and we saw our first familiar sight in Russia because he was wearing a filthy grease-stained apron that had probably been white some years back.

“Thank God,” Keats murmured. “A bartender.”

Seeing us, he stopped short. Then overcoming his surprise, he started slowly toward us, asking some kind of a question in a deep, rasping voice. Like the others, he seemed particularly fascinated by Shiny.

Keats said just one word, so I remember it all right. The way things turned out later I’d sure as hell have remembered it anyway. He said, “ Vautkee. ” Then he added to us, “That’s their name for whiskey.”

The bartender waved us to a table and went back out the rear door. As we were sitting down he came back quickly with a bottle full of colorless liquid like the Russians in the corner were drinking and four glasses. He put it on the table and Shad poured a glassful. “Hope this stuff ain’t as weak as it looks.” There was a silence in the room as he lifted the glass, looked at it, sniffed it, and then shrugged. “Sure don’t smell like much.” The bartender and the three men in the corner were frowning at him with close, curious interest.

“Well,” Keats said, “try it.”

Shad raised the glass to his lips and downed it in two, or maybe three, gulps. I couldn’t tell exactly because at one point his throat seemed to become briefly paralyzed. He finished it all and put the glass down without a word. I could tell by his dead-set face he was either awful thoughtful or suffering something fierce. As Shiny pointed out later, Shad “looked like an iron man who’d just swallowed a large cannon ball.”

“I think,” Shad said finally, in an unusually husky voice, “this may serve our purpose.”

“How ’bout us tryin’ it?” I asked.

Shad just nodded, and I poured for Keats, Shiny and myself.

“Well, here’s how,” I said to them, raising my glass.

But the way I did it wasn’t how at all.

I took one gulp and thought I’d die right there on the spot for sure. Pure, burning fire started scorching and searing down my throat at the same time that a massive flood of salty tears surged up around my eyes.

Gagging as slightly as possible and forcing the nearly blinding tears back with fast, hard blinks, I put the drink down. Shiny was putting his nearly full glass back down too, not hardly breathing at all.

“Embarrassin’,” I gasped.

Shiny just nodded, not yet able to speak.

Between short, mercifully cooling gulps of air, and trying to joke away my own failure as a drinker, I at last managed to tell him, “You almost went white there, Shiny—or at least gray—if I can make light of the subject.”

Shiny swallowed slowly and then said, “Any—any color’s better’n pale green, like you.”

Old Keats had finished his entire glass, and without any noticeable side effects at all he shook his head admiringly. “Now that, by God, is one hell of a drink!”

“Tell him that we want t’ buy a lot of it,” Shad said.

“ Vautkee, ochen horosho !” Keats said to the bartender, pulling up a chair and gesturing for the man to join us.

The fat man sat down, but he was suspicious and uncomfortable.

With the help of a newly poured drink and his language book, Old Keats went into an earnest conversation with him, using his hands and checking back and forth in his book from time to time. The bartender stayed unsmiling, just short of being hostile.

Finally Keats turned to Shad. “He and a couple of friends make it themselves for the whole town. I think he’s got about fifty bottles here, and a keg of it at his house, I think. Which is about another forty bottles, I guess.”

“Tell ’im we’ll take it all.”

“I already did, I think. But I think what he’s curious about now is how much’re we gonna pay him. And what kind of money.”

Shad took a silver dollar out of his pocket and tossed it on the table. “In American dollars like this.”

The fat man picked up the dollar and examined it closely on both sides, frowning. Finally he pointed at a part of the coin and said something to Keats, who started looking through his book.

At last he said, “He wants t’ know what that thing in the lady’s hair is, with those spikes above it.”

“It’s a headband that says ‘Liberty.’” Shad leaned forward impatiently. “Tell him what it means and tell him that’s a word no goddamned Russian could ever understand in the first place!”

“The hell with all that, Shad,” Keats told him. “I’m havin’ a hard enough time already!”

After another few minutes of searching the book and talking, Keats said, “He’ll sell his vautkee , I think. But I think he thinks we’re tryin’ to cheat him.”

Shad stood up, angrily shoving the chair away behind him. “How the hell can we be cheating him? We haven’t talked money!”

Keats, equally angry, said, “Cool off! I think he thinks we’re tryin’ to buy his whole supply for that one dollar!”

Shad hesitated, taking this in, and then said, “Oh. Well, tell him we’ll give him one dollar for every one bottle.”

Keats explained, pointing at the dollar and the bottle on the table, and for the first time the fat bartender began to nod eagerly and say “ Dah ” in such a way that you couldn’t help but know it meant “Yes.”

About half an hour later Shad and I got back to the camp with one of the mules packing forty bottles. The Russians Keats had talked to on the beach had brought maybe fifty big containers. There were washtubs, large earthenware pots and even wooden and iron barrels that were cut in half sideways, probably to catch rainwater or to feed stock. But by the time we got back, there wasn’t a Russian in sight any longer.

Slim and the others had brought our ton or more of oats and barley and corn up from the beach and piled the gunny sacks near the fire.

“Hey, them Ruskies ain’t half bad,” Slim said. “Look at all these barrels and such they brang.”

“We told ’em we’d pay ’em,” Shad said flatly. Then he walked off toward the herd.

“Where the hell’d they all go?” I asked Slim.

“They just brang these things an’ then took off. Maybe they have t’ git up pretty quick. They’re mostly fishermen, an’ some farmers.”

“How d’ you know what they are?” I started unloading the bottles from the pack sacks. “Your Russian’s not too fluent.”