The Dogs of Winter (2 page)

The cold of the pantry floor pushed its way up through my pile of blankets. I shivered and watched the plume of my breath in the air. I was a dragon. I was a firebird. I was not a man who smelled and shouted and blew cigarette smoke through the two holes in his nose.

I pulled my black radio from beneath the blankets and raised the shiny silver antenna to attention.

“… thousands unemployed, homeless, and starving. Alcoholism ripping the fabric of our great society …”

“But I am not homeless or starving,” I said to the voice in the radio. “I have my mother, my blankets, soup with cabbage.” True, we no longer had bread and sausage with our
shchi
, our cabbage soup. And it had been weeks since my mother had worked. But she still smiled (although less often now) and called me her little bear.

I turned off my radio. I folded first one blanket and then the other just so. I pulled on the Famous Basketball Player shoes my mother and Babushka Ina gave me last Christmas. My toes pushed against the ends of the shoes. I could no longer wiggle my toes.

I stood in the doorway of the pantry, listened, and sniffed.
Was my mother cooking kasha or was she crying? Was he yelling, calling her a stupid, lazy cow, or was he gone? Sometimes after a big fight like last night, he would leave. And for a short time, everything would be as it should: kasha for breakfast, my mother smiling just a little. “Come keep me company in the breadline,” she'd say. Or “Let's practice your reading,” or “Tell me a story, little bear.”

I heard angry voices shouting from the television. I smelled cigarettes. I peered into the sitting room.

“So,” his voice said. “The little cockroach finally crawls out of his hole.”

He lay sprawled across the couch, his ugly feet bare, a glass resting on his fat belly.

“Where is my mother?” I asked. My eyes darted from the sitting room to the bedroom and back to his face.

He did not take his eyes from the snowy screen of the television. “Gone,” he said. “She is gone.”

My heart thumped and thumped against my chest. “When will she be back?” I whispered.

He turned from the television, and eyed me for a long moment, like a cat eyeing a mouse. “Never,” he said.

I waited and listened and watched for my beautiful mother.

I listened for the click of her heels coming down the hall. I watched for the bright flash of her red coat.

When he left at night, I searched the apartment for clues. If she took this, it meant she would be back in a week. If she took that, it meant she would be back any day.

Everything was where it had always been, except my mother and her red coat. She was gone. Her coat was gone. She must have gone farther to find potatoes and cabbage for the soup. Or she looked for a new place for us to live, far away from him.

Something winked from behind the trash can in the bedroom. I got down on my hands and knees, stretched my fingers around the paper wrappers and past empty bottles on the floor. My fingers curled around something hard and smooth. I opened my hand. A button from her coat. I held the button up to the light, ran my thumb across its black, shiny surface. And next to the button was a smear of red. Not the beautiful red of her coat but a dark, sickly red. I touched it with my finger. It pulsed like a heartbeat. It whispered my name.

“Why are you grubbing around on the floor, cockroach?”

I tore my eyes away from the whispering, pulsing red and looked up at him.

He kicked at me with the toe of his boot.

I held up the button. “It is from her coat, her red coat.”

“Bah,” he said. “So what? Who cares?”

“She loved her coat,” I said, following him into the kitchen. “She loved the buttons. She would not let the coat be without a button,” I pointed out.

He grabbed a hunk of cheese from the refrigerator. He slammed the door shut. My stomach grumbled. My mouth watered. I clutched the button in my hand.

He looked down at me, his mouth full of rotten teeth and cheese. He cocked his head to one side. “Where do you think that mother of yours is?” he asked.

I shook my head.

He smacked his lips and belched. I laughed. My mother never allowed me to belch.

“I think,” he said, “she went to the city.”

I frowned. “Why would she leave without me?”

He unscrewed the top of a bottle. “Who knows why women do what they do. You're a useless little cockroach and she's a lazy, stupid cow.”

I drew myself up tall. I squeezed the shiny black button until it bit into my hand. “She is not lazy and stupid! You are!”

My head slammed into the kitchen floor and a million stars filled the sky.

The next morning, he said, “Get your coat and hat. We're going.”

“Going where?” I asked. “Are you taking me to my mother?” I picked at the dried blood on my ear.

He grunted and flicked his cigarette into the kitchen sink. “We're going into the city.”

“But my mother —”

He raised his hand. I jumped back, knocking over a chair.

“Enough about your mother,” he said. “Just get your coat and let's go.”

I followed him to the train station, one step, then two steps behind. Women stood in the breadlines, bundled in coats and scarves and shawls.

My eyes searched hungrily for the red coat. She would see me stumbling behind this bad, bad man. She would run to me, sweep me away. I would show her the missing button. She would hug me to her. “My good Mishka. My brave boy.” We would not let him through our door ever again.

A hand grabbed the back of my neck. “Keep up, boy,” he growled.

My legs told me to run, to run as far and fast as I could from him. His hand tightened on the back of my neck. He shoved me through the train station doors.

“You know where my mother is in The City?” I asked.

“Sure, sure,” he said.

A large, bright eye winked at the end of the train track — the eye of a large beast racing, snaking toward us, hissing and screeching. I grabbed his hand.

He slapped me away. “Stop acting like a frightened little girl.”

I almost laughed. It was, after all, just the train.

He yanked me through the train's doors and onto a hard plastic seat.

Once, I had been on a train with my Babushka Ina. She had held me up on her lap so I could see the lights of our little village tick, tick past.

He lit a cigarette and snapped open the newspaper. I knelt down and watched our village grow smaller and smaller.

“Wake up.” A hand shook me. “Come on, kid. I don't have time for this.” He pulled me to my feet and out the door of the train. I followed behind him across the platform, past carts of food — roasted hazelnuts, sausages, whole potatoes wrapped in newspaper — my stomach grumbling, my mouth
watering. “Wait!” I called to the back of his tattered coat. But he did not.

Everywhere inside the station were people. They hurried to the trains, they hurried away from the trains. They carried bundles and bags and satchels. They did not look left, they did not look right. They did not look at me as I called again, “Wait!”

Finally, he stopped.

“Is this where my mother is?” I asked.

He laughed.

It was as I had thought. She had moved to The City. She had a good job and a warm place for us to live with lots of food and sweet sticky buns. When we walked up the steps to our fine apartment, she would throw open the door, pull me into her arms.

And she would close the door in his face, for good this time.

He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me up the steps. I stumbled on one stair, then another, scraping my knee. I didn't care. I would soon be with my mother and all would be as it should be.

We broke into the sunlight, the cold fall air. Snowflakes wheeled overhead, settling on his shoulders and on the toes of his brown boots. He looked up the street one way and down another. “Where the hell is she?” he growled.

I looked up at him and smiled. He had brought me to her.
Perhaps he was not such a bad man after all.
“Spasibo,”
I said.
Thank you.

We stood in the falling snow and waited. He smoked a cigarette, then another. I watched for the red coat and rubbed the black button in my pocket over and over with my thumb.

A very dirty boy with no coat or hat or shoes walked over to us. My mother would never let me get so dirty. She would certainly not let me outside without a coat or hat, and especially not without shoes.

The boy tugged on the man's coat sleeve. He held out a filthy hand. “Please, sir,” he said.

Before I could wonder what the boy wanted from him, the man cuffed the boy on the side of the head. “Beat it, you filthy little beggar. Go bother someone else.”

The dirty boy glared at me, then spat at my Famous Basketball Player shoes.

“Finally.” The man flicked his cigarette to the ground and wrapped his scarf around his neck. He grabbed my arm. “Come on, let's go.”

I trotted beside him, looking and looking for the red coat. For my mother's smiling face, her chestnut hair, her outspread arms that would enfold me like angel wings. “Where?” I asked, trotting to keep up. “Where is she?”

“There,” he said.

I stopped dead in my tracks. This woman coming toward us was not my mother. She wore a black coat. A brown scarf
covered most of her gray hair. Her arms were folded across her big chest. She did not smile as she looked down at me and said, “So is this the boy?”

I looked from the unsmiling woman to the man. Perhaps she was my mother's friend. “Are you taking me to my mother?” I asked.

The woman frowned. “I thought you said he has no parents,” she snapped. Her eyes were small and hard like the eyes of the witch, Baba Yaga, in my fairy tale book.

“He's just a kid,” he said. “He doesn't know anything.”

The unsmiling woman sighed. “Most of the children in the orphanage don't know anything either. At least about their parents.”

Orphanage.
The word dropped like a cold stone in my stomach. Once on the television news I saw a story about orphanages in The City. None of the children in those places smiled or had mothers. Mostly they cried. They were almost as dirty as that beggar boy, but not quite.

“I cannot go to an orphanage,” I explained to them. “My mother won't find me there.”

“Your mother isn't looking for you,” he said.

“She is!” I said.

The woman in the coat that was black, not red, grabbed my shoulder. “Come on, boy. It's time to go.”

“No!” I jerked away from her hand, a hand more like a claw, a witch's claw.

I heard my mother's voice say,
Run, Mishka! Run!

I spun away from them, looking and looking for the red coat. I saw green coats and blue coats and gray coats, and many, many black coats.

He grabbed me, twisting my arm. “Come on, you brat.”

And then I saw it: a flash of bright red. I tore away from his grasp, ripping my coat from my body.
Run, Mishka! Run!

I did. I ran as fast as I have ever run toward that flash of red as it descended down the steps to the railway station. I dashed this way and that through the train station, looking in the crowds of hurrying people for the red coat. Finally, I saw it, standing in a line like a beacon, waiting to board the train.

Gripping the button in my pocket, I pushed through the sea of brown, black, and gray, desperate to keep sight of my mother. The wave of brown and black and gray swept me onto the train.

I spotted a small figure in a red coat and chestnut hair beneath a blue scarf sitting in the front. I wound through a forest of legs, touched the red sleeve, held out the button, and smiled.

The train lurched. I staggered back against brown and black and gray. “Watch it,” someone said, pushing me upright.

I looked at the face of the woman in the blue scarf. Her hair was black, not chestnut. She did not smile. The coat was not even red.

She was not my mother.