“What are you talking about?” I protested. “He’s got an AK-47 tattooed on his arm. Shed blood for Mother Russia.”
Krookin bent his head to one side and looked at me, as if he was sorry that I was as dumb as his bodyguards. “Did he have that weapon inked on his arm in the service or after he’d come back home?”
“After I think.”
“Here we go,” he said, grinning. “For the record, most of the guys in our class were drafted, not just your brother, so I happen to have the inside scoop. He didn’t go on no missions, and he’s got no medals. I don’t know why they even took him. He’s blind as a bat. He spent two years in the kitchen.”
“In the kitchen?”
“Yep. Serving soup.”
I must have looked plenty heartbroken because he said, “I’m not saying he didn’t want to bleed for Mother Russia; he just never had a chance.”
“So why don’t you give him a chance?” I said. “Show him some action?”
“Action?” Krookin laughed. “We used to drag him out of the boiler room at school where he was hiding from us. Your brother has never been much for action. He’s not the type. How’s he going to protect me and my valuables?”
I needed a little time to think it over, so I changed the subject. “How come you didn’t go?”
“Go where?”
“To the army.”
“Bad teeth.” He tapped the gold in his mouth. “Dental implants adversely affecting the performance of duty.”
In the end Krookin didn’t offer the job. Instead, he proposed that my brother try out for one. Wasn’t much of a tryout either—no action whatsoever, just some snow shoveling. Due to the record snowfall, Krookin’s handsome pair of Mercedes-Benzes were buried under snow, and my brother was to dig them out and keep them running so that the engines wouldn’t seize up in the cold.
I told my brother about Krookin’s offer, and he made a big show of resisting, making up all kinds of goofy excuses why it was beneath him to try out. When finally he agreed to the tryout, he had to let me know that he was making an enormous sacrifice for my sake. Had I any idea just how eager he actually was, I’d have backed out of this snow-shoveling business before it spun out of control.
In no time I was hurrying after my brother down our crummy stairs (a homey mix of cabbage, stale cigarettes, and urine), dressed for warmth and felt-booted; he, camouflaged head to toe in his army fatigues. I carried under my arm the snow shovel that Krookin had entrusted to me, while my brother’s shovel was slung over his shoulder, like a loaded AK-47.
When we arrived downstairs, he leaped up and kicked at the front door with his boot. The door didn’t budge, but he landed on his back, hard.
I wished Krookin hadn’t told me about my brother serving in the kitchen. A little embarrassed for his phony secret hero routine, I stepped around him and tried the doorknob. “Frozen solid,” I said, “and probably snowed over on the outside, too.”
“About face!” my brother hollered, jumping to his feet and marching back up the steps. I trooped after him to the second-floor landing, where a narrow window led out to the concrete awning above the front door. Our staircase did not have a back exit, so the only way out was through that window and scaling down the brick wall or jumping off the awning if the snowdrifts were deep enough. I didn’t particularly like either option.
Summers, that window was kept open. The jackasses from my school, who also happened to live in our building, would lie atop the awning, waiting to spit on my head when I came out. With time they became sniper-sharp, and I took to wearing a hat folded out of our neighbor’s newspaper.
My brother rattled the handle on the window frame. Nothing doing. The snow-plastered window was stuck. I sat on a step, watching him strain himself, suggesting from time to time better strategies until he snapped the handle clean off the window frame.
He said, “This is funny to you?”
Before I could explain that I wasn’t laughing at him but at those jackasses never again spitting on my head from the awning (nothing broken gets fixed in our buildings, so the window was now shut forever), my brother shouted, “Step back!” and swung his shovel. I spun away, ducking from the flying glass.
At this point I should have headed back home. Were these not clear warnings: (1) Krookin banging me against the wall, and (2) my brother nearly slicing me to pieces with flying shards of glass? Obviously, the worst was yet to come, but did I go home? I did not.
“She wasn’t kidding about the snow,” my brother said when I climbed after him onto the awning.
“Who?”
“The weather lady on TV,” he said. “A snowfall such as our Russian capital hasn’t seen in one hundred and thirty years.”
My shabby coat and threadbare scarf were no match for the record weather. It was bitter cold, and the snow was coming down thick and steady. The wind thrashed the snowflakes about, and when they huddled into snowdrifts, the wind churned them up into tornadoes. Because of that crazy wind, it looked as if the snow was coming down from above as well as rising from below. It was one white swirling hell.
“I’d rather be watching this on TV,” my brother said.
“No kidding,” I agreed. “How are we going to get down?”
My brother turned, squinting merrily at me behind his eyeglasses that were already touched with hoarfrost, smiled, and pushed me off the awning.
The problem with having an older brother is that it gives you a false sense of safety. In my mind he was to defend me against the jackasses—not be a jackass himself. I had only volunteered to help so I could keep an eye on him while he was pushing snow around. I didn’t volunteer to be pushed around myself. Besides, he should’ve looked before he pushed me. The front door was snowed over, so I guess he figured there’d be snowdrifts below the awning. And there were except for one hard patch of icy dirt on which I crash-landed on my rear.
I heard him plow into a snowdrift a little way off, and in a moment, his face leaned over mine. He didn’t have his glasses.
“You’re not hurt, bro?” he said.
“Oh, no,” I said (ironically). “Thanks for giving me a hand.”
In our building, Krookin was the only owner of four-wheeled vehicles, so even in this nasty blur it was no trouble finding his Benzes. Two large snowdrifts shaped like puffy cartoon cars sat side by side in front of the building.
“Bayonets!” my brother shouted. “Lunge!” And he thrust the blade of his shovel into the first snowdrift. I didn’t know he had it in him, but he took to shoveling as murderously as if it were close combat. I never really got to try my hand at it—too busy ducking huge chunks of snow flying off his shovel. Soon my mouth, my nose, and behind my collar—all the way down to my long johns—were packed with snow. But he didn’t seem to need my help. In no time, high-gloss sheet metal began to gleam through the patches of snow, a tinted windshield appeared, then seventeen-inch hubcaps, all-season tires. Presto, the first of the two Benzes stood before us like a black cutout in the snow.
“Guard!” my brother shouted. “Arms!” And he stood at attention, smartly holding the shovel at his side.
“Wow” was all I could say.
He smiled at me. “Why don’t you start on the other vehicle, bro, while I finish up here?”
I said, “Sure,” slung the shovel over my shoulder, and, stepping away from my brother, was instantly lost. The Benzes must’ve been parked not ten feet away from each other, but the snow was coming down so thick and fast you couldn’t see through the blur. My hands went numb. My cheeks stung. The wind plucked me out of the snow and began tossing me about like a plastic bag. I called for my brother, but the wind snagged the words out of my mouth and drove them away. Just don’t go to sleep, I said to myself. If you fall asleep in the snow, you’ll freeze to death. Only I wasn’t sleepy at all. I was scared.
Then something big lurched at me, or I lurched at it, I wasn’t sure. So panicked, I couldn’t tell at first. It turned out to be the second Benz buri
ed beneath the snow. By then, I’d lost my shovel and my gloves. I thrust my bare hands into the snow where I figured the driver’s door would be. I groped for the handle, found it, and pulled the door open. A massive lump of snow fell on my head from the roof of the car.
I collapsed into the driver’s seat and shut the door. The dome light came on. A snowman in the rearview mirror spooked me, but it was only me looking at myself. My eyebrows and eyelashes were frosted, and under my carrot-colored nose, long strands of snot hung in yellow icicles. I dug the car key out of my snow-packed pocket and turned the vehicle on. The Benz purred like a tiger. I cranked up the heat and began melting. At once, the door came open.
“Are we allowed to do this?” my brother said. “You’re dripping all over the interior.”
“Get in,” I said. “Thaw.”
I could tell he didn’t think it was a good idea, but he was cold and probably tired, so he told me to move over, slid into the driver’s seat, and shut the door.
“Not much of a tryout, huh?” he said. “Shoveling snow?” He leaned over the steering wheel, squinting at the dashboard controls. “One sixty.” He whistled respectfully and sat back, smiling. “Yep. I can live with that.” He glanced at me quickly and, switching to his lazy voice, went on, “Of course, I’m used to fast driving. Drove a T-90 tank in the army. Once, they parachuted our machines smack in the middle of the enemy. I tell you, bro—that was something to behold. I was spinning in my tower, firing three sixty, bam, bam, bam! After, we chased what was left of ’em down the minefield.” He made a sound of explosion and then grinned. “Yeah, me and my buddies, we’ve had our share of action.”
I wondered for a moment if I was underestimating my school’s jackasses. Would they really stop bullying me when they got a look at my brother? Could they not tell that underneath his army getup he was a phony warrior with a phony tattoo? True, he was good at shoveling snow, smashing windows, and tossing eleven-year-olds off high places, but was that enough to impress them?
The answer came unexpectedly in the form of a sharp knock on the driver’s-side window. My brother jumped. “What was that?”
We craned our necks at the window, but there was nothing there, just darkness and snowflakes.
“That was weird,” he said.
Just then, the snow covering the windshield began to crack. A black glove burst through the snow, sweeping it aside. In the gap, a man in a knit black ski mask leaned close to the glass. The mask covered his entire head, with only two small round holes through which he peered at us for one creepy moment.
“What the—” my brother began, but the sight of the masked man darting toward the other Benz stopped him cold. The man climbed into the driver’s seat, shut the door, and the Benz took off, churning up snow with its rear tires.
“Oh, no,” I whispered. “He’s stealing Krookin’s car.”
I looked at my brother slumped behind the steering wheel, squinting, lower jaw hanging loose in astonishment. I looked back through the windshield at the brake lights of the stolen vehicle flaring and disappearing behind the falling snow. I looked back at my brother.
“Hey,” I said. “Do something.”
When he didn’t stir, I knew it was all over. Not only did he fail his tryout, but Krookin would probably kill him. With him dead, there’d be no one to defend me, so the jackasses at school would keep dragging me out of the boiler room and beating the daylights out of me until they killed me, too. I felt like weeping for our mother.
I turned away from my brother and began rocking my door back and forth to loosen the snow.
“What are you doing?” he whispered behind me.
“Go tell Krookin, what else?” I pushed at the door. “It’s his car. Let him deal with it. You’ve had your share of action, right?”
I forced the door wide enough to get out, but just as I got a perch on the snowbank, a terrible roar sounded, and the Benz leaped forward. The door swung in reverse and knocked me back inside. I slid across the leather like a hockey puck, whacking my head on the edge of the console.
“Seat belt on!” my brother shouted. “Sit tight!”
I snatched at the seat belt, pulled it across my chest, and almost fit it into the lock when the Benz rocketed onto the street, shooting giant gobs of snow in all directions. The seat belt slipped from my hand and snapped me on the chin.
I guess my brother didn’t have time to consider that the street in front of our building might be slippery. The Benz fishtailed, sliding on ice. He threw himself at the steering wheel, struggling to turn it or to keep it in place, I couldn’t tell. My head was spinning. White smoke began billowing from under the wheels of our car, blocking whatever little I could see through the windshield. A sick feeling came over me, like it’d be a good idea to puke. I held it in until the white smoke cleared outside the windshield. It wasn’t my head spinning at all. It was our car. We were going around and around in the middle of the intersection. The snowdrifts over the curbs, the corner bus stop, and a flashing traffic light kept whooshing by at even intervals. I puked on Krookin’s leather armrest.
Too bad I’d missed seeing how my brother pulled us off that merry-go-round. Reality, such as it was, went dark for a little while. When I sat up, wiping bits of the scrambled eggs I’d had for breakfast off my chin, I saw Krookin’s stolen Benz zipping along ahead of us.
“What are you going to do if you catch up with him?” I said. “He might be armed.”
I could tell that my brother had no idea what he would do, but he said in his lazy voice, “Relax, bro—leave it all to me.”
I looked at him leaning far over the steering wheel and squinting through the windshield.
“Glasses!” I screamed. “Where are your glasses?”
He glanced at me for just an instant, but long enough to plow into a snowdrift at the curb. The snowdrift exploded like a bomb. He spun the wheel wildly, and we were back on the road.
“Lost my specs,” he said, “when we jumped off the awning.”
“You jumped. I was pushed.”
“That’s how you parachute out of a chopper,” he said. “They push you, ready or not.”
“We were not in a chopper, okay?”
He turned to me, grinning, and opened his mouth to argue.
“Eyes on the road!” I shrieked.
He shrugged and went back to squinting through the windshield. How he could see anything at all, I didn’t even want to know. On the windshield a terrible battle between the snow and the wipers was in progress. One pair of wipers fought an army of snowflakes diving into the glass like kamikaze pilots. The wipers were losing. Through the blur, the stolen vehicle’s rear lights swam in and out of focus. No one, let alone a blind person like my brother, would dare drive in this weather. The streets were empty. We flew past the brightly lit storefronts, the neon signs, and under the red flashing traffic signals. Moscow looked like it did during New Year’s—festive but a little sad, too. Like maybe it wanted to cheer up two wayward brothers before they’d soon perish in a fatal crash.
Then the thief swerved sharply and vanished into the dark. My brother’s head popped up. “Where did he go?”
“The tunnel!” I shouted, wagging my finger at his window. “You missed it!”
He hit the brakes. I lurched forward, punching the dashboard with my forehead. The radio came on, and a hip-hop number exploded from the speakers. The bass, cranked up to the max, sledgehammered through my chest. My brother floored the gas in reverse, hit a divider, looped into a screeching U-turn, and we roared into the tunnel.
“This was my unit’s battle song!” my brother shouted, nodding his head to the music. He knew the words, too. Stupid words about someone inked, armed, and dangerous, but it didn’t stop him from bellowing them out. I glanced at the speedometer. He was doing about one-fifty. I thought of giving the seat belt another try, but there was no need. The speed squashed me deep into the baby-soft leather of my seat.
All in all, it wasn’t too bad driving
through the tunnel. There was no snow, the asphalt was dry, and it was super-bright. Soon we were right on the stolen Benz’s tail. Instead of numbers, its license plate said “KALASH.”
“What’s a kalash?” I shouted.
“Kalashnikov!” My brother nodded to his arm, where his tattoo was hidden below the army-issued layers. “AK-47!”
An AK-47 was an assault rifle—cheap to make, easy to use, and quick to fire. A fully automatic is able to unload about a hundred 39-millimeter rounds a minute. I remembered all this from kindergarten. Once, our kindergarten teacher invited a war veteran for an educational visit. He brought all kinds of guns for us to play with (not loaded). It made our teacher smile. I almost smiled too now, remembering. Back then, my brother was still halfway decent to me. When Mom was busy working, he used to walk me home from kindergarten.
“Hey,” I shouted. “Remember how once you picked me up from kindergarten and bought me an ice cream cone?”
“What?” he shouted.
“Vanilla! Wasn’t even my favorite, but that cone was the sweetest ever.”
He turned and squinted at me. Our Benz felt my brother’s lack of attention and swerved into the wall, crunching the side-view mirror. The driver’s side went grinding against the concrete, scraping the high-gloss finish. Sparks flew. He spun the wheel to the right. The Benz shot diagonally across the road and smashed into the opposite wall. The right headlamp exploded.
Something walloped me on top of the head and slid heavily into my lap. I leaped back in panic, and the thing plunked into the puke on the floor and stood upright, leaning against my thigh. It was a Kalash. An AK-47. The gun was just as I’d remembered it from kindergarten, only this one was fancier. The stock and the guard were of shellacked wood, but all the metal parts were plated in gold, like Krookin’s teeth. I looked up at a long narrow slot built into the roof of the car, just above the rearview mirror. The lid that had kept the gun from view was open now, swaying off its hinges. Three Velcro straps, ripped, hung loosely out of the slot.