The Unmade World

by Steve Yarbrough

  Marek, on the other hand, experiences the onslaught of terror, laced with no small amount of rage at the injustice. He’s a person, yet he’s been outfoxed by a dog. Before he can be cautioned to remain motionless, he brandishes the crowbar.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Bogdan says.

  As if to express agreement, the shepherd tilts his head to the right, studying Marek with those intelligent eyes.

  “It’s okay, boy,” Bogdan whispers. “He wouldn’t hurt you. He never hurts anyone but us.”

  The dog steps forward.

  Marek yells, “Son of a bitch!” Then he hurls the crowbar at the animal, who drops his head. The crowbar sails right over him, clanging against the wall. Marek turns and runs toward the house, and the dog launches himself, halving the distance between them with a single graceful leap.

  Bogdan is familiar with the concept of collective memory. Krysia, for instance, used to have a recurring dream in which she was pursued by German soldiers. Like him, she was born in ’58, so she’s unencumbered by recollections of life during the Occupation, yet that nightmare disturbed her sleep for years. One of his sisters has told him of a dream in which she’s being force-marched through a frozen landscape, obviously bound for the Gulag. If he’s ever experienced anything like that, he doesn’t recall it. But when the dog bounded after his partner just now, he heard the thud of jackboots.

  A few meters shy of the house, the shepherd takes Marek down. Within seconds he’s on his back, flailing at his attacker, his high-pitched cries a pathetic counterpoint to the animal’s basso profundo.

  Later, usually when he’s alone late at night and the vodka’s all gone, Bogdan will try to convince himself that the instant he stepped through that gate, he lost the capacity to make rational decisions, and in a manner of speaking that’s true. When you run out of good options, you just do what you do. In an altogether different sense, it will be a terrible lie, the worst one he’s ever tried to tell himself, and he won’t believe it for a minute.

  The spotlights are still blazing. In the dark, he might not have found the crowbar. But there it lies against the wall, on top of a frozen drift.

  Blood stains the snow. The dog has already bitten his partner numerous times: mostly on the hands and forearms. His claws have shredded the ski mask and made a mess of Marek’s face. In a minute he’ll go for the throat.

  The big animal doesn’t swerve from the task at hand. He maintains his focus. He must hear Bogdan’s footsteps, the snow crunching beneath his inadequate shoes. But this is a diligent dog. His teeth remain embedded in Marek’s flesh even as the crowbar shatters his skull.

  “Let’s hear your favorite Polish joke.”

  He looks away from the road long enough to see Marek’s chest rise and fall. His eyes are closed, and the seatbelt appears to be the only thing holding him upright. He’s definitely in shock. In the military Bogdan learned it’s important to keep a shock victim conscious until he can receive medical attention; otherwise his brain may get too little oxygen. He knows a doctor he can trust. Anyhow, he hopes he can.

  “Let’s hear one,” he says again. “Come on.”

  His partner groans but doesn’t open his eyes. Both he and the car are covered in blood. “What?”

  “You’ve been to the U.S. Don’t they still tell Polish jokes there?”

  “A few . . . But not to Poles.”

  Bogdan is breathing hard himself, sucking plenty of oxygen. His chest feels like it might burst. He’s starting to wonder if he missed a turn a while back. There seems to be a lot more snow on the road than he remembers, and it doesn’t look like anyone has come this way in the last couple hours.

  “I bet you heard hundreds of them. Just tell me the best one.”

  “Two Poles . . .” Marek begins, then stops. His head lolls against the door post.

  They crest a hill, and on the downslope Bogdan slows to avoid braking. At the bottom, next to a creek, he recognizes an abandoned farmhouse where a friend of his grandmother used to live, so he knows they’re on the right road.

  He picks up speed again, then reaches over and shakes his passenger. “Two Poles are doing what?”

  “Walking.”

  “Walking where?”

  “To California.”

  “And what happens?”

  “In Arizona they get tired . . . so they buy . . .”

  “They buy what, Marek?”

  “A camel.”

  “And then?”

  “I can’t . . . I don’t know.”

  He drives on. Before long, the road dead-ends at Route 780. They’re no more than twenty kilometers from Krakow, and as he prepares to make a left, he thinks of calling the doctor to alert him that they’re coming. The problem with that, though, is that he’d ask why they’re coming.

  He turns onto the highway. It’s past eleven, the snow has quit falling, the road’s in much better condition here, and as far as he can see, it’s empty. So he lays his foot down on the accelerator. He’s always wanted to drive a car like this one, and if he weren’t terrified, he might be reveling in the BMW’s response. He’s never had such power at his disposal.

  “You know what?” he says. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Marek. But together, we’ve got the IQ of a hedgehog. That’s why we believed we needed to rob somebody smart. Just cut out the thinking part and get what he’s got. The problem is, one of the things he had was that poor German shepherd.”

  They top a slight rise. Ahead he sees the taillights of an old Mercedes.

  “Compared to us, Marek, that dog was fucking Einstein. Are you with me?”

  “Aah.”

  “Or maybe a better comparison would be to Rommel. Because the dog staged a flanking movement and took us from behind.”

  The Mercedes must be a diesel. It’s belching soot from its tailpipe, needing a ring job as badly as any car he’s ever seen. The oncoming lane is clear, so he darts into it. As they pass, he glances toward Marek and catches a glimpse of the other driver, a woman bending over the steering wheel, peering through the windshield as if she either can’t see well or doesn’t know the way.

  He shoots back into the right lane. And that’s when he hits the patch of ice.

  He doesn’t know that the BMW’s iControl system has already sensed the skid and taken corrective action. So he reacts as he would have if driving his old Polish Fiat, slamming on the brakes.

  In the rearview mirror, he sees the Mercedes swerve to avoid hitting them. It does a full three sixty, then disappears.

  The roadbed is elevated a good three meters above the surrounding countryside. It’s the kind of physical detail you can’t fully appreciate just by driving through. Back when his grandmother was still alive, he traveled this stretch countless times, and if he ever noticed the raised roadbed, he doesn’t recall it. His attention was never on the road itself but on the sights outside the window. Green fields and pastures, languid cows. The children of peasants frolicking barefoot, country dogs lapping at their heels. After he started school, he began to understand that terrible things had happened here. The Germans had used the road during their hasty retreat, the Red Army in its relentless pursuit. Plenty of people had suffered violent deaths in this bucolic setting. But for him, the highway represented escape from the tiny flat his family occupied in a Communist high-rise.

  On the embankment, he loses his footing, falls, and slides to the bottom. He jumps up, pulls the flashlight from his pocket, and turns it on. The Mercedes is several meters away, its engine no longer running. It must have rolled over at least once. The roof has compressed like an accordion.

  He runs to the driver’s side. The glass is shattered, only fragments remaining in the frame. The woman’s eyes, when he sees them, make him gasp. They’re looking right at him—brown eyes, a little too convex, but they’re pretty, those eyes, and completely unfocused. They don’t see a thing.

  He crosses himself, then touches her neck to check for a pulse. Immediately, his hand recoils
. He shines his light into the rear seat, and after seeing the blonde hair and the arterial blood gushing onto the white coat, he bends over and retches into the snow.

  Before clawing his way up the embankment, where he will climb into the BMW, put it in gear, and drive back to Krakow as fast as he dares, he stumbles around the front of the car to the passenger door and takes a look.

  A few shards of glass have embedded themselves in Richard’s cheeks and forehead. His mouth is full of salty fluid. His right arm and shoulder, though still attached to his body, don’t respond when he tries to move them. He wants to push the light away, it’s blinding him and he can’t find Julia or Anna. As if the man with the flashlight understands that, he turns it off, and Richard gets a look at his face.

  A pair of soft jaws that taper into a weak chin. A receding hairline, graying eyebrows, thin lips, a chipped tooth. Smallish eyes. To the left of an unremarkable nose, a large mole cleft in the middle, as if two separate growths have tried and failed to merge. It’s a face destined to be forgotten by everyone who ever sees it, except the man who’s seeing it right now.

  ILL WINDS - 2009

  If you walked across the yard this morning and peeked through the bay window, you might think you were seeing a man who’s been banished from his matrimonial bed. Otherwise, why would he be balled up on the living room sofa, his long legs drawn toward his chest? It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that he came home late last night with lipstick on his collar, reeking of sex and perfume, or that at the very least, he stayed out with his buddies and drank too much. Or maybe he simply sat there by himself and got shitfaced, though there’s no bottle nearby, or a glass either. And since there’s only one car in the driveway, odds are he’s nobody’s guest.

  You’d all but have to believe he’d done something wrong to put himself where he is, this middle-aged man sleeping alone on the sofa in a three-bedroom house on a quiet California street.

  The day will begin and end with phone calls.

  When the first one comes, he’s still asleep. It’s the landline, which he usually unplugs on his way to the bedroom, but it turns out he’s not in the bedroom. At first, he doesn’t know what he’s doing on the couch. Then he remembers watching the Red Sox square off against the A’s. At least this time he turned off the TV before curling up.

  The closest phone is on the wall in the kitchen. When he lifts the receiver, he hears Monika clearing her throat. She does this at the beginning of every call. A couple of times he’s thought about asking if she’s aware of it.

  “Richard?” she says, as if anyone else could possibly be answering the phone at his house.

  “Hi, Monika.”

  “I know it’s still early there, and I’m sorry if I woke you.”

  “That’s okay. I needed to get up anyway.”

  “I’m by myself right now, and I just wanted to mention a couple of last-minute things.”

  He’s standing in the breakfast alcove, where he seldom eats breakfast anymore. On the other side of the driveway, in the almost identical Tudor that belongs to Bob and Sue Lyons, he sees their daughter, Sandy, sitting at the kitchen table, staring at her laptop while she eats from a bowl of cereal. In the fall she’ll be a senior. The other day her dad told him that while she’s planning to apply to Berkeley and UCLA and a few other state schools, she’ll choose Stanford if she gets in. He turns away from the window, steps over to the counter, and punches a button on the coffee maker. This time he’s the one who needs to clear his throat. “Sure,” he says, “go ahead.”

  She tells him that last week, Franek disappeared for more than twenty-four hours, during which he sent both her and Stefan numerous text messages, first begging them to let him remain in Krakow, then threatening not to come home unless they gave in. “Fortunately,” she says, “Stefan’s friend at the police department agreed to put a trace on his mobile, and they were able to locate him.”

  “Where was he?”

  She’s silent for a moment. “He was over at your place,” she says. “I keep the keys on a peg in the pantry, and I didn’t realize they were gone. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” he says, though it isn’t quite.

  “We went over everything with him again, and I think he finally understands that he’s not being punished, that we’re acting in his best interests, or at least trying to. But because he’s always liked and trusted you, he may bring up the episode. So I wanted to let you know ahead of time.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I appreciate it. If it does come up, I think I can handle it.”

  “The other thing is to just remind you to be careful with your computer. Banking, credit cards, and things like that. Because . . . well, you know what happened.”

  What happened is that Franek stole his parents’ Bank Polski password and transferred several hundred zlotys to his weed source on a day when his mother happened to log in to one of their savings accounts and notice the debit. This led to the discovery of six previous transfers that had gone undetected because when you have as much money as they do, a few hundred here and there don’t necessarily attract your attention. They’re sending him a fifteen-year-old delinquent, hoping that a change in environment will help straighten him out. Richard’s first inclination when they broached the possibility was to say no. It was swiftly superseded by the awareness that both Julia and Anna would have wanted him to say yes.

  “I’ll be careful,” he tells her. “When I need to pay a bill, I usually just write a check. I’m fairly low-tech.”

  “Yes, I know, but he’s not. By the way, I’m sure he looks at pornography too.”

  “Does that concern you?”

  She laughs drily. “Not as long as he doesn’t look at the wrong kind. How have you been, Richard?”

  Over the past two and a half years, she’s called him every few weeks to pose some version of that question. Sometimes Stefan talks to him too, sometimes not. Either way, hers is the voice he looks forward to. It has a soothing quality he was previously unaware of. “I’m hanging in there,” he tells her.

  Though he would not suspect it, she’s standing in Franek’s bedroom. Her son is at a café, having a going-away chat with his father. His bags are packed, and they’re full of those things you can get with money: the latest MacBook Pro, the newest iPod, noise-canceling headphones that cost what some people earn in a month, numerous pairs of slacks and designer jeans, tailored shirts, a cashmere dressing gown that Stefan picked up for him in Copenhagen, as if it will ever be cold enough in California for Franek to put it on.

  She sits down on his bed, which is twice the size of the one she used to share with her sister. Everything is bigger now, and there’s so much more of it, so many different ways to anesthetize yourself. “Hanging in there is all any of us can do, isn’t it?” she says.

  “I guess so. Monika?”

  She knows what he’s about to ask her. The question is always the same, and so is her answer.

  “Did you have a chance to drop by Rakowicki?”

  “Yes, I did. Early last week. I left fresh roses in both vases.”

  There’s a moment of transatlantic silence. Then he asks, “Was Stefan able to talk to Malinowski, see if he’s turned up anything new?”

  “To be honest, Richard, he hasn’t. I reminded him of it, but he went to Denmark for the book release, and then Franek disappeared and he had to call Malinowski to help find him. But I will bring it up with him again soon. Now I need to get ready for this evening’s performance. Please ring me the moment Franek comes off the plane. Will you do that for me?”

  “Of course I will,” he promises, then tells her not to worry.

  After they’ve said good-bye, he finishes the first cup of coffee, then pours himself another and goes outside, where he sits on the steps for nearly an hour, staring at his lone sequoia.

  He puts on a pair of shorts, a tee shirt, and his Nikes and leaves the house on foot, walking up Maroa toward the gym. It’s not yet nine o’clock, but already th
e temperature is close to 100, that dry, baking Valley heat that has never quite come to seem normal.

  He spends forty-five minutes on the treadmill, working the speed up to six miles per hour, the fastest he can go without breaking into a jog. He’s not supposed to run anymore. Twice over the last couple of years, his knees got so badly inflamed that he was forced to spend three or four days slugging back ibuprofen. On the treadmill he drives himself relentlessly, and as a result he’s down to 185 pounds. It’s not the weight loss he’s after. It’s the adrenaline.

  When he’s finished, he walks back home, takes a cool shower, gets dressed, and climbs into the car.

  He drives out to a farm just east of Kingsburg, between Route 99 and the Sierra foothills. It’s owned by a man named Jim Swenson. Eighteen years ago one of his three children, an eleven-year-old boy, died of cancer. Back then, Swenson was raising table grapes, using plenty of chemicals like almost everybody else. But after his son’s death, he became a pioneer in clean farming. On the side, he’s a landscape painter whose work has been exhibited in galleries and museums all over the state and even beyond. Richard wrote an article about him in ’93, and for a while after that they kept in touch. He’s going to talk to him today because last week he learned that the farm is being auctioned.

  Swenson answers the door. He looks exactly as Richard remembers, a short, compact man whose smooth face is unusually pale, given how much time he spends outside. “Hi,” he says. “Can I help you?”

  This happens all the time. People he used to know no longer recognize him. “I’m Richard,” he says, offering his hand.