The Unmade World

by Steve Yarbrough

  In a moment he and his brother-in-law, who writes fiction and lives it too, will go back inside and join their families for dessert. Mustafa will send over some cognac on the house, and Stefan will pronounce it the best he’s ever tasted. Christmas plans made, they’ll say their good-nights, and when Richard bends to hug his sister-in-law, she’ll balance on her toes and whisper, “I’m sorry I snapped at you. Don’t be angry.” She will kiss him on the mouth, something she’s never done before. It will surprise him, but he’s going to forget it within the hour and will not think of it again for a long time.

  Before any of that can occur, though, while they’re still out there on the balcony, he asks Stefan the obligatory question: “What is it you want but haven’t got?”

  “I don’t know. I have some of it—I just don’t have all of it. And truthfully, Rysiu, if I were to find the missing element, you know what I suspect would happen?”

  Richard takes a deep draft from his cigar, then blows out a cloud of smoke. He watches it disperse, the tiny particles spreading over the hillside, beyond the treetops, growing farther away from each other as they disappear into the night. “What?”

  Stefan brushes a few snowflakes from his hair. “I feel all but certain that it would spell the end of me. With no need to hunt, I’d be a dead duck. One day I might show up on your plate.”

  He’s had a good bit to drink, and his bladder’s sending distress signals. So he asks Julia and Anna to wait in the foyer while he pays a visit to the bathroom.

  To write news the way he does, you need to notice plenty of seemingly random details because life isn’t just the big things, it’s all the little ones too. For instance: a makeshift clock mounted on the wall in the bedroom of a boy killed by a stray bullet in Delano, California, in May of ’93. The clock’s hands were wooden skewers, one longer than the other, both of them glued to the hub of an electric motor that jutted through the spindle hole of a 33-rpm record which served as the clock face. The title of the record: Internal Exile. By the Chicano rock band Los Illegals. Where the boy came across the recording, which by then was more than ten years old, or what it might have meant to him, his grandmother who had raised him couldn’t say, but she knew he’d built the clock for his seventh grade science project. Any good reporter notices a few things like that, but Richard likes to think he notices more than most.

  Retained from his visit to the bathroom tonight: in the urinal there’s a cherry deodorant cake.

  The correct term for these items is “urinal deodorant block.” They’re also known as “piss pucks.” If you look into the question more deeply, you’ll find that in cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, with their large concentrations of Polish immigrants, Polonophobes used to dub them “Polish mints.” The thing is, you seldom see urinal deodorant cakes in Poland. Why this particular receptacle contains one is puzzling, yet there it is, lodged near the trap.

  He finishes, zips up, washes his hands, and goes back to the foyer.

  Julia’s lips have officially pursed themselves, and her eyes somehow seem to have defied the laws of physiology and drawn closer together than they were three or four minutes ago. He calls this her You fucked my sister look, though she has no sister and what he thinks the look really means this evening is You drank too much. Now I have to drive. It will remain in place, he figures, until she pulls up outside their building and switches off the engine.

  He’s right about one thing: she hates driving and isn’t happy to have to do it tonight. She never drove before she met him. He taught her himself, on long, empty stretches of Central Valley farm roads. Her car back home is a Honda Accord that she rarely drives farther than the grocery store. She dislikes the old Mercedes and has only driven it two or three times since they bought it.

  That’s not why she looks troubled, though. When Richard was out there on the balcony with her brother, Monika addressed her in the Russian every schoolchild of their mutual vintage had to learn: “You know what I appreciate about you, Julisia? If you think I’m a fool, you conceal it beautifully.” Richard and Stefan returned before Julia managed to formulate a reply, which is fortunate. She doesn’t know how she might’ve responded. What can you say when another woman, who happens to be your brother’s wife, makes that kind of statement?

  Anna, in contrast to her mother, could not possibly appear more radiant. Her golden hair brushes the shoulders of the white faux fur they bought her a few days ago at Macy’s, and her face is flushed with excitement. She raises one hand and points at the ceiling. “It’s her,” she tells him. “It’s like she’s following us everywhere we go.”

  At first he doesn’t have the slightest idea what she’s talking about. Then he hears that unmistakable voice wafting from the restaurant sound system. “Well,” he says, “there are worse folks to be followed by than Miss Ella Fitzgerald.” He puts one arm around her shoulders and the other around her mother’s. Then he steers his family out the door.

  When Bogdan climbs out of the car, more snow seeps into his shoes. Earlier, on their initial foray through the woods, his feet got soaked, and now his toes are numb. He has poor circulation anyway. “Let’s hear the sequence again,” he says.

  Marek studies him across the roof. “Sure you wouldn’t like a drink?” he asks, holding up the bottle. “Just to steady your jangling nerves?”

  The bottle is small, and in the dark it looks almost empty. Earlier, when his partner first produced it, Bogdan came close to punching him, his fist rising as though it had a mind of its own. All evening he’s been feeling like one of those drones the Americans are supposedly using. It seems as if some strange force has seized control of his body. “Give me the sequence,” he repeats. “If you don’t, you can count me out.”

  “I already told you four times.”

  “So tell me five.”

  Marek screws the cap off and takes another sip. “Four . . . two . . . one . . . six. Satisfied?”

  “Not really. I won’t be satisfied until I’m home in bed.” Saying even that much represents wishful thinking. He’ll never be satisfied again, whether they pull this off or not. Some places you can’t come back from, and he’s in one of them now.

  “Time to do it.” Marek crams the bottle into his coat pocket, grabs a crowbar from the backseat, and slips on his mask. It’s black like Bogdan’s, except above the eye slits there’s an oddly shaped orange letter C and, next to that, the head of an orange bear.

  Bogdan pulls on the balaclava and immediately begins to itch. His partner steps into the woods, and for the second time tonight he sets off behind him.

  Marek made the proposal a couple of weeks ago, the day after their produce supplier notified them that their account would soon be suspended. He would have suggested it earlier, he said, but he wanted to wait until his cousin had been in Ireland a while, to keep suspicion from falling on him.

  When he recovered from the shock, Bogdan said, “You think this guy’s smart enough to get rich but too fucking stupid to change the gate code after your cousin leaves to work in Ireland?”

  “If somebody’s in Ireland, why worry? He can’t rob you from Dublin.”

  “No, but he can tell somebody the code, and they can rob you.”

  “He trusted my cousin.”

  “Well, that’s an argument for his stupidity, I’ll grant you. But he was still smart enough to install a burglar alarm—and smart enough not to give your cousin the code for that.”

  They were having this conversation in the meat locker, surrounded by carcasses suspended from hooks. Marek wore a bloodstained apron and was holding a cleaver. They’d had to let their butcher go last summer. “When the alarm’s triggered,” he said, “it sends a signal to the police station in Alwernia. We’re talking about a town with a population of less than four thousand. On a typical Friday night, there are two cops on duty, and it’s a safe bet at least one of them’s drunk. Anyhow, it’s nine kilometers away, on the other side of a mountain.”

  “What about the neig
hbors?”

  “There aren’t any. This guy bought everything nearby to guarantee his privacy.”

  “And the safe? How much does it weigh?”

  “It’s small, probably no more than forty kilos. You’re telling me two healthy guys can’t carry the damn thing a couple hundred meters?”

  “I’m not healthy. I’ve got high blood pressure, and you’ve made it spike. Besides, you seem to be overlooking the guard dog.”

  “It’s apparently pretty vicious,” Marek admitted, “but we’ll drug it. And you don’t need to worry that it’ll freeze to death, because it’s got a fully heated doghouse. That animal lives better than we do.”

  He said absolutely not, hell no. Then he went home and found Krysia sitting at the kitchen table, and though her eyes were dry, he could see she’d been crying. The stove had just quit. She didn’t complain or level any accusations, didn’t tell him he was a loser or a fool, but the weight of their collapsed hopes was more than he could bear.

  So now here he is, tromping through snowy woods right before Christmas. An hour or so ago, as they’d approached the back gate, the German shepherd had let out a growl that sounded like it was being amplified over a stadium PA and hurled himself at the gate so hard Bogdan thought it might rock off its hinges. The dog began to bark and snarl, and the noise continued even after Marek flung the medicated kielbasa over the wall. By the time they got back to the car, the barking had stopped. “Enjoy your dinner, you fucking Nazi,” Marek muttered. Out came the vodka.

  Bogdan stumbles over a fallen limb and staggers into a tree, banging his shoulder. “Shit,” he groans.

  “Quiet!”

  “Quiet? You want me to be quiet?” He’s almost shouting. “It’d be smarter to make as much racket as we can. Because if that dog’s not out cold and we go through that gate, he may eat us for dessert.”

  “Don’t be so goddamn dramatic.”

  “Don’t you be so goddamn nonchalant.”

  At the edge of the woods, they pause. The clouds have parted, and they can see the house better than before. The wall is blocking their view of the grounds and the bottom floor, but you can tell the place is huge. It’s got a couple of towers that make it look like something from the late Middle Ages or the Italian Renaissance, Bogdan isn’t sure which.

  There’s plenty he doesn’t know. He used to read a good bit, mostly popular history, books about the Second World War, the settling of the American West, polar exploration, the lives of various kings, queens, kaisers, and czars. But these last few years he hasn’t read anything. He’s worked ten-, twelve-, fourteen-hour days, and there’s nothing to show for it except unpaid bills, unrealized dreams.

  Inside that house, if Marek’s cousin can be believed, stands a safe that always contains a couple hundred thousand zlotys. It supposedly rests in a concealed crevice on one side of the rock fireplace, behind a stack of logs. All they’ve got to do is bust in and, while the alarm is blaring and sending a signal to a police station, hurl the firewood aside, grab the safe, and carry it out the back door, across the lawn, through the woods, and to the car. When they return to Krakow, Marek will take it to his sister’s empty house and go to work on it with a blowtorch. Bogdan will open the store tomorrow morning, and before they close the doors again their problems will be solved. The guy will miss the money. But he won’t miss it.

  “You know what bothers me?” he asks now.

  Marek sighs. Most things bother Bogdan. But the main thing bothering him, his partner suspects, is that he hasn’t gotten laid in the twenty-first century. If so, it must constitute excruciating torture, because his wife still has the kind of body that made God invent the fig tree. Marek has fantasized about her for years. “What bothers you?” he says to humor Bogdan and keep him moving in the proper direction.

  “Somebody that builds swimming pools for a living must know everything there is to know about cement. Would you agree?”

  “So what?”

  “So when he’s designing a secret compartment to hide his safe, why wouldn’t he use cement to anchor it in place? Did you ever wonder about that?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he didn’t. And that’s all that matters.”

  “You know what else bothers me?”

  “What?”

  “Why didn’t your cousin rob the guy himself?”

  “If he wanted that hotel job, he had to be in Dublin on a specific date. Besides . . .”

  “Besides what?”

  Marek pulls the bottle out and finishes it off, then drops it on the ground.

  “He got bitten when he was little. He’s terrified of dogs. Big or small, it doesn’t matter.”

  The cousin clearly is not desperate enough to attempt anything this dangerous. Like most people, he probably just goes to work, gets paid, and accepts his lot. Whereas they convinced themselves they were destined to be tycoons.

  Bogdan bends, picks up the bottle, and sticks it in his own pocket.

  “Why’d you do that?” his partner asks.

  “Because I’d bet that when you bought it, you weren’t wearing gloves. Were you?”

  Marek chucks him on the shoulder. “Good old Bogdan. We’ll make a thief of you yet.”

  Without another word, they step out of the woods. Both of them served the military stint that used to be required of physically capable young Polish males, and they stride forward now in good order, as if a band that only they can hear has struck up “Dabrowski’s Mazurka.” Cross the Vistula and the Warta, and Poles again we shall be. We’ve been shown by Bonaparte the way to victory. He feels like he’s marching to his own execution.

  Without casualty they reach the wall. It’s at least two meters tall. Trying to find out if the dog is ambulatory, Bogdan kicks the gate. This time Marek doesn’t protest. His vodka-fueled bravado seems to have waned during their advance over open ground.

  Nothing happens. He kicks it again. Still nothing.

  “Well,” he says, “if we’re going to do it, now’s the time.” Operational command, he understands, has passed to him. He pulls a small flashlight from his pocket and shines it on the gate.

  Above the steel handle there’s a digital keypad. He suspects it allows a limited number of chances to enter the correct numerical sequence. He wonders if it might not also somehow be linked to the alarm, so that the final failure will set it off. A part of him would be relieved if that happened, because then they could turn and run before actually breaking the law. The other part knows how badly they need money. “Give me the code,” he says.

  Marek hesitates. “Four . . . four . . .”

  “That’s not what you’ve been saying all night. You’ve consistently said four two one six.”

  “Four two one six. That’s right.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes . . . Bogdan?”

  “What?”

  “You’re feeling pretty good about the dog?”

  “No,” he says, bending and pressing the four key, “I don’t feel good about the dog at all. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is how the dog might be feeling about us.” He punches the two key, then the one, then the six. Hearing a faint droning sound, he takes a deep breath, grasps the handle, turns it, and pushes the gate.

  It budges but doesn’t open wide enough for him to enter. “Too much snow’s piled behind it,” he says. Together they lean against it and finally manage to create barely enough space to step through. He goes first, and Marek follows.

  No sound from the dog, and no sign of him either. About twenty meters ahead, on their left, is a small outbuilding that gives off an eerie blue light. Most likely the electrified doghouse. Bogdan hopes the animal got back inside before passing out, because if not he’ll have to drag him in before they leave. Otherwise, he could easily freeze to death.

  The big house itself is dark, not a light on anywhere as far as he can tell. He’s thinking how strange that is when he takes another step and the night is
suddenly ablaze.

  Powerful spotlights are mounted on the roof and at various points along the security wall. For an instant, both of them are blinded. When he regains his vision, the first thing he notices is the kielbasa. It lies about two meters away, embedded in the snow, completely untouched.

  A moment passes before the full import registers. “Oh, my,” he says.

  Marek, who to the best of Bogdan’s knowledge has never attended mass in his life, crosses himself.

  Simultaneously, they turn toward the gate. The dog stands before it, blocking their exit.

  He’s an impressive animal: his body is longer than it is tall, with powerful shoulders, straight forelegs, and a gently sloping back. He displays the classic wedge-shaped muzzle, oval eyes, and erect ears, and his nose is perfectly black. A showstopper for sure—and the show he’s stopped tonight has two actors, each of whom will react to the threat in his own definitive manner.

  For Bogdan, the event is simply the latest in a string of failures that started several years ago. Until then, he thought life was about addition: you worked hard for somebody else and saved a certain sum of money. Eventually you started your own business, and then you bought a place of your own. You and your wife had your own bedroom, with a bed that didn’t have a crevice in the middle so it could be turned back into a couch the next morning. You had a new TV, a nice computer. Then one day, with little or no warning, you found yourself in the subtractive phase. Something went wrong, and that led to something else. You lost this, you lost that. And the next thing you know, you’re standing in the snow, in the middle of the night, with a wall and a German shepherd separating you from your tomorrows. Only modest hopes remain. Maybe if they embrace their fates, conceding the dog’s right to take a chunk out of their butts and make up for the kielbasa he’s too smart to eat, they can get on with the business of living their shitty lives.