I found it in the crawl-space.
It was a mouse-chewed cardboard box about five inches on a side, wrapped with yellowed cellophane tape, covered with curling Lenin and Tsiolkovsky postage stamps and bearing delivery and return addresses in Cyrillic smudged well beyond recovery. There was nothing in it, but I wouldn’t call it empty.
I opened it on a Tuesday, shook out the dust, and threw it in the trash. That evening, the last two jars of Uncle Dave’s corn liquor disappeared.
On Thursday morning, we found every bottle in our last half-case of Chianti opened and partially drained. A few of the bottles had phlegm floating near the top. Late that night we heard Dad’s telex begin transmitting all by itself. By the time we were able to break into his office the transmission had ended.
On Friday at 10AM a Ford half-ton rolled up and delivered 137 cases of Georgian red wine, COD. The drivers had Marakovs stuck down the front of their greasy slacks, so my dad paid for the wine with four albums of Roman coins and the Heuer wristwatch his grandfather had left him. (First he tried to pay with a check, but that just made the Marakovs come out.)
On Saturday we found cigarette burns in the den furniture and papirosi butts all over the carpet—a third Primas and two-thirds Belomorkanals (to judge by the crushed packs).
On Sunday morning we found a dozen shattered wine bottles in the fireplace.
At two in the morning on Monday we heard the sound of air brakes. When we got outside there was an anhydrous ammonia tanker parked in front of our house. No one was in the truck, but the driver’s headrest had a quarter-sized patch of half-dried blood on it. Six hours later a Linde truck pulled up trying to deliver a hospital’s-worth of liquid oxygen. Dad tried to explain to the driver that there had been a mistake, but at that moment the three Dobermans from the Kellys’ farm appeared, snarling and barking, and chased the driver clear across the county line. Don Kelly showed up in his pickup a few minutes later and we pointed the way his dogs had gone. He called later to say the dogs were okay but the Linde driver never showed back up.
That night was a new moon. We woke at three to an earthquake and a deafening roar. We ran outside just in time to see Dad’s mint-condition 1967 BMW 2000CS lifting into the sky above a tower of flame.
Schastlivogo puti, tovarishchi!
Image CC-BY-NC by Emily Barney
Comment on this post.
0 Responses to “Korobka”