T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

Suddenly the wind came up — a gust that raked at our hair and scattered refuse across the parking lot — and the bird’s feathers lifted like a petticoat. It was then that I understood. Secret, raw, red and wet, the wound flashed just above the juncture of the legs before the wind died and the feathers fell back in place.

I turned and looked past the neighborhood kids — my playmates — at the two men, the strangers. They were lean and seedy, unshaven, slouching behind the brims of their hats. One of them was chewing a toothpick. I caught their eyes: they’d seen it too.

I threw the first stone.

(1981)

There was a commotion near the head of the queue, people shouting, elbowing one another, wedging themselves in, and bracing for the inevitable shock wave that would pulse through the line, tumbling children, pregnant women, and unsuspecting old pensioners like dominoes. Akaky craned his neck to see what was happening, but he already knew: they were running out of meat. Two and a half hours on line for a lump of gristly beef to flavor his kasha and cabbage, nearly a hundred people ahead of him and Lenin knows how many behind, and they had to go and run out.

It was no surprise. The same thing had happened three days ago, last week, last month, last year. A cynic might have been led to grumble, to disparage the farmers, the truckers, the butchers and butchers’ assistants, to question their mental capacity and cast aspersions on their ancestry. But not Akaky. No, he was as patient and enduring as the limes along the Boulevard Ring, and he knew how vital personal sacrifice was to the Soviet socialist workers’ struggle against the forces of Imperialism and Capitalist Exploitation. He knew, because he’d been told. Every day. As a boy in school, as an adolescent in the Young Pioneers, as an adult in on-the-job political-orientation sessions. He read it in Pravda and Izvestia , heard it on the radio, watched it on TV. Whizz, whir, clack-clack-clack: the voice of Lenin was playing like a tape recording inside his head. “Working People of the Soviet Union! Struggle for a communist attitude toward labor. Hold public property sacred and multiply it!”

“Meat,” cried a voice behind him. He squirmed round in disbelief — how could anyone be so insensitive as to voice a complaint in public? — and found himself staring down at the shriveled husk of an old woman, less than five feet tall, her babushkaed head mummy-wrapped against the cold. She was ancient, older than the Revolution, a living artifact escaped from the Museum of Serf Art. Akaky’s mouth had dropped open, the word “Comrade” flying to his lips in gentle remonstrance, when the man in front of him, impelled by the estuarine wash of the crowd, drove him up against the old woman with all the force of a runaway tram. Akaky clutched at her shoulders for balance, but she was ready for him, lowering her head and catching him neatly in the breastbone with the rock-hard knot in the crown of her kerchief. It was as if he’d been shot. He couldn’t breathe, tried to choke out an apology, found himself on the pavement beneath a flurry of unsteady feet. The old woman towered over him, her face as stolid and impassive as the monumental bust of Lenin at the Party Congress. “Meat,” she cried, “meat!”

Akaky stayed on another quarter of an hour, until a cordon of policemen marched up the street and superintended the closing of the store. It was 9:00 P.M. Akaky was beat. He’d been standing in one line or another since 5:30, when he left the ministry where he worked as file clerk, and all he had to show for it was eight russet potatoes, half a dozen onions, and twenty-six tubes of Czechoslovakian toothpaste he’d been lucky enough to blunder across while looking for a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Resigned, he started across the vacant immensity of Red Square on his way to Herzen Street and the Krasnaya Presnya district where he shared a communal apartment with two families and another bachelor. Normally he lingered a bit when crossing the great square, reveling in the majesty of it all — from the massive blank face of the Kremlin wall to the Oriental spires of Pokrovsky Cathedral — but now he hurried, uncommonly stung by the cold.

One foot after the next, a sharp echo in the chill immensity, ice in his nostrils, his shoulders rattling with the cold that clutched at him like a hand. What was it: twenty, twenty-five below? Why did it seem so much colder tonight? Was he coming down with something? One foot after the next, rap-rap-rap, and then he realized what it was: the overcoat. Of course. The lining had begun to come loose, peeling back in clumps as if it were an animal with the mange — he’d noticed it that morning, in the anteroom at the office — balls of felt dusting his shoes and trouser cuffs like snow. The coat was worthless, and he’d been a fool to buy it in the first place. But what else was there? He’d gone to the Central Department Store in response to a notice in the window—“Good Quality Soviet Made Winter Coats”—at a price he could afford. He remembered being surprised over the shortness and sparseness of the line, and over the clerk’s bemused expression as he handed him the cloth coat. “You don’t want this,” the clerk had said. The man was Akaky’s age, mustachioed. He was grinning. Akaky had been puzzled. “I don’t?”

“Soviet means shoddy,” the man said, cocky as one of the American delinquents Akaky saw rioting on the televised news each night.

Akaky’s face went red. He didn’t like the type of person who made light of official slogans — in this case, “Soviet Means Superior”—and he was always shocked and embarrassed when he ran across one of these smug apostates.

The man rubbed his thumb and forefingers together. “I’ll have something really nice here, well-made, stylish, a coat that will hold up for years after this shtampny is in the rubbish heap. If you want to meet me out back, I think I can, ah, arrange something for you — if you see what I mean?”

The shock and outrage that had seized Akaky at that moment were like an electric jolt, like the automatic response governed by electrodes implanted in the brains of dogs and monkeys at the State Lab. He flushed to the apex of his bald spot. “How dare you insinuate—” he sputtered, and then choked off, too wrought up to continue. Turning away from the clerk in disgust, he snatched up the first overcoat at random and strode briskly away to join the swollen queue on the payment line.

And so he was the owner of a shabby, worthless garment that fit him about as snugly as a circus tent. The lining was in tatters and the seam under the right arm gaped like an open wound. He should have been more cautious, he should have controlled his emotions and come back another day. Now, as he hurried up Herzen Street, reflexively clutching his shoulders, he told himself that he’d go to see Petrovich the tailor in the morning. A stitch here, a stitch there, maybe a reinforced lining, and the thing would be good as new. Who cared if it was ill-fitting and outdated? He was no fashion plate.

Yes, he thought, Petrovich. Petrovich in the morning.

Akaky was up at 7:00 the next morning, the faintly sour odor of a meatless potato-onion soup lingering in unexpected places, the room numb with cold. It was dark, of course, dark till 9:00 A.M. this time of year, and then dark again at 2:30 in the afternoon. He dressed by candlelight, folded up the bed, and heated some kasha and spoiled milk for breakfast. Normally he had breakfast in his corner of the kitchen, but this morning he used the tiny camp stove in his room, reluctant to march down the hallway and disturb the Romanovs, the Yeroshkins or old Studniuk. As he slipped out the door ten minutes later, he could hear Irina Yeroshkina berating her husband in her pennywhistle voice: “Up, Sergei, you drunken lout. Get up. The factory, Sergei. Remember, Sergei? Work? You remember what that is?”