All the Dead Yale Men

by Craig Nova

  Some leaves were left in the bottom of the cup, and when I put it on the counter, Yana leaned over me so her hair brushed my cheek. That scent of the steppes. The fragments of tea were green and black, like metal flecks from a machine that was coming apart.

  “What do you see in them?” I said.

  She rolled a shoulder, pushed her hair out of her face, pursed her lips. Outside the cars were piled up like statues on Easter Island.

  “You’ve got to recognize a chance when you see it,” she said. One of her fingers touched mine. “Don’t hesitate.”

  “I’ll call you when I have the part,” said Stas. “We’ll fix the krauts. Better yet. Just come back tomorrow.”

  Yana offered her cool hand.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said.

  “Come back tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll have what you need. About this time.” A calendar with Russian script hung on the wall. “Yeah. February 14th. I’ll have it then.”

  “Good-bye,” said Yana.

  Stas spoke Russian to her and she sat down at the Mac and started typing again, her hands long and the fingers pale, too.

  The next day he had the part, and he had a mechanic, too, who was ready to put it in, and so we sat there, in that small office, the woman typing as before, although she turned to listen to what I said. The mechanic hammered and worked with his power tools, which were hooked up to an air compressor that made a repeated effort, like someone straining. Stas told me about Moscow, in the Soviet era, when no one could buy a dog, since that was too bourgeois, but after the regime came unglued you could buy a dog on the Arbat, where people sold them out of baskets. Did I like dogs? He was thinking of getting one for the junkyard to keep “the creeps out.” He spoke to the woman and she said, over her shoulder, “A German shepherd.”

  “That’s an East German for you,” said Stas. “You ask about dogs and she wants a German shepherd. What about a pit bull, for Christ sake? Don’t you think one of them would do the job?”

  “Only half German,” she said. “My mother was Ukrainian. Ukrainians know about fate. They know about hunger.”

  The mechanic came in and said the car was done. It wasn’t too expensive, but it wasn’t too cheap. Just the right amount. I’d saved about a thousand dollars, and somehow, saving that money, when everything else seemed difficult, felt much better than it should have. I wrote the check.

  “So,” he said. “Come around sometime. We’ll have tea. Maybe a pastry. Don’t be a stranger.”

  So, that’s the way it began. In the last two weeks in February, as Alexandra studied in Italy, as my father was away (as the spy he was demanded), Pia went out with Miller, as she missed some classes and stayed in Cambridge and came home at midnight and then one and then two and then three in the morning, wobbling up to the front door, still only drunk, but giving me worries about what was coming next, I went, when I could, in the evening or on a weekend, to that place in Braintree with the razor wire, the warm office, the samovar, and the stainless steel microwave. Sometimes the woman, Yana, was there, and sometimes it was just Stas and me, each having a cup of tea, although sometimes Stas had a bottle of vodka, and he took off the top and threw it away, and we drank, like Russians he said, having a shot.

  “A genie gives three wishes to a Russian. So the Russian wishes for a new pair of shoes, a new roof, and then the genie says, ‘Well, you only have one last wish left.’ And the Russian says, ‘Can you make my neighbor’s cow die?’”

  He had a drink. Poured one for me, too. Sometimes we just sat there in front of the space heater, the vodka in small glasses. He didn’t say anything then, as though just being together was enough. With me he was able to have the feeling that he was in touch with other things aside from the problems he never mentioned, not really, aside from some angry talk in Russian to Yana, and when he spoke to some men, in dark clothes and long coats, who came to the junkyard and said a few words in Russian and then they got into a new Mercedes and drove away. He asked if I knew that there was a problem with women from Eastern Europe being smuggled into the U.S. Had I heard anything about that?

  He told me too that the stolen-car-parts business was expanding. That’s where there was growth, real potential. They were a sort of unofficial consortium for distribution, headquartered in Miami and Atlanta. Of course, he never said he had anything to do with these things directly, and when we discussed them it was as an abstraction, the way an investment banker might talk about a factory in India or a textile factory in Pakistan. Still, the office with the tea and Yana was a place to go, to get away, that was so far from the details of my ordinary life as to seem like a trip to Kurdistan.

  From time to time, Yana put her hand on my shoulder, leaned over so that her hair brushed my face, and said, “It’s always nice to see you.”

  One evening, during those two weeks in February, Pia waited for me in my study. She sat in the chair on the other side of the desk. Her cheeks were a little red from the touch of a heavy beard.

  She looked up, her eyes a little red.

  “Dad,” she said.

  “What?” I said.

  “I don’t know how we got started on this,” she said.

  “Oh, I do,” I said. “There’s something that goes on between fathers and daughters. Each is fighting for a little respect. That’s all. Pretty simple when you get down to it.”

  “I’ve got something to tell you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know, I was just thinking . . . ”

  “About what?” I said.

  She shrugged. She got a drink from the little tray in the corner and gave me one, too. She watched me drink it.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “about this lawyer business . . . ”

  “What lawyer business?” I said.

  “The going-to-law-school business,” she said. “I thought I’d take a little time off. Like Miller says. See the country. You know, all I’ve ever done is study and do the right thing. Get a job as a waitress or something. Take it easy. Get a van. Drive around.”

  “You mean like Miller’s parents?” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “I’m trying to talk to you,” she said.

  She put her head into her hands and started to cry, and when I came around she let me touch her but she didn’t lean into me the way she used to.

  “I just don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I want to take a chance.”

  In the morning, the Volkswagen made that ominous puttering as she drove back to school.

  “How is Pia these days?” wrote Alexandra.

  “All right, I guess,” I wrote back. “Don’t you see, I am showing her I love her, that I am there for her, that I have dropped any semblance of restraint, that I will do anything for her . . . Don’t you see?”

  “And what’s happening?” Alexandra wrote.

  “I think things are getting worse. How can you win?” I wrote.

  “Maybe you can’t,” wrote Alexandra.

  So, the next day, late in February, I went to Braintree. There, at least, out the window of the auto parts place was the evidence of a thousand people who had made mistakes so large and so long-lasting as to make a sort of pyramid of disaster, those piles of smashed cars and cracked windshields and those air bags that had deployed and then faded like a used condom. Somehow, being in the presence of a disaster that wasn’t mine made me feel less alone. But how can you get control of things at this moment, how can you go on when everything you try to do, either carefully thought about or spontaneously, still leads to that same downward swirl, which feels like being on that silvery water that goes around the drain in the sink?

  Stas came in and sat down, his acne scars prominent in the light that came from the window.

  “Everything is fucked up,” he said. “You can’t trust anyone to do a fucking thing. People owe you money, and what do you have to do? You have to go and knock on the fucking door and scare some dumb shit in front of his wife and kids. You know, the k
ids start crying. See?”

  Then he swallowed and looked down.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything. I got screwed on a load of transmissions. It was easier when I was shipping this stuff to Afghanistan. We used to get a big truck, fill it up with junk in Holland, and drive straight through . . . ”

  He said this while he looked out the window.

  “Tell me,” he said. “What’s with you?”

  “That Miller,” I said. “You remember? The guy who sent me out here?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I remember.” He let me see his eyes again, which were the color of mold.

  “I wish he’d go away,” I said.

  “Would that make you happier?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “If he was just gone.”

  Stas looked across the table, opened a bottle of vodka, threw away the top, poured me one, then one for himself. He drank it in that one quick gulp, like a snake swallowing a small rat. My hands were shaking as I picked up the drink on the table.

  “My daughter’s not going on to law school because of that asshole,” I said. “And it’s not that. My daughter and I were close. Not anymore.”

  Stas stared out the window.

  “You know the best thing about being born in Russia, in the time of the Soviets? You understand small gestures, like the look in your neighbor’s eyes when he’s just made up some lies about you to tell to the KGB to get a better spot on a waiting list for an apartment. You understand the hidden, unseen connections.”

  “I guess that’s right,” I said.

  “There’s no guessing,” said Stas. “I understand you, Frank. Like no one else. Who understands outraged innocence the way a Russian does? Look. You lost a case. It meant something to you, didn’t it? An innocent woman, who just wanted the right thing, and look what happened to her. Some thugs got away with it. And I know you feel that as a sort of darkness that’s behind things, like a gas, that taints everything.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Sure. Maybe. And now that same darkness, the same toxic, hidden thing, like a ghost, but a dark one, like all those things you’ve been trying to pretend didn’t bother you, is now coming right into your house and not only that, it’s coming right between you and your daughter. And you’re telling me I don’t understand.”

  He poured me a drink. I didn’t even feel the warmth as it went down.

  “So, am I right?”

  “The kid is dangerous,” I said.

  “Sure he is,” said Stas. “I understand. I’m sorry you’re having trouble.”

  Outside, in purple lights on the yard, the wrecked cars with their cracked windshields had an icy sheen. Torn metal, a black stain here and there, like a bottle of ink had been broken. The wind made a whistling moan as it blew between the piles.

  That was it. We finished our drinks and we sat there for a while. Stas put a microwave burrito into that stainless steel machine and when it was hot he put it on a paper plate and pushed it over to me.

  I ate the thing with some hot sauce he had on the fiberboard desk next to the Mac. Not bad, when you get down to cases. It was hot and the inside of my mouth was blistered, which seemed worse as I drove along the Charles River, by the Cambridge Rowing Club, where Pia and I had gone in the mornings in June, just nine months earlier, when the water was so perfectly scalloped by the light breeze, when the birds, the gulls, wheeled overhead and the runners jogged on the path that went along the grass. What could possibly have gone wrong? Weren’t we everything that was right, the father in a racing single, staying in shape, performing some service for the community, a daughter who was possibility itself, both of us moving along and leaving a thin, silver wake in those scallops of light?

  So, Pia came home the next weekend, just like always, and waited for Miller. Why didn’t he call? He usually called every day when she was in New Haven, but she hadn’t heard from him. Pia stayed in her room, stretched out on her bed, and on the computer she had some old rock and roll, which was like the music that she must have heard at some retro club she and Miller went to. She had her cell phone on the nightstand, and as she waited in her room, her ear turned toward the distant sound of traffic on Brattle Street, she seemed to be somehow shrinking, getting more pale, more withdrawn. I asked her if she wanted to row, since it was so warm for early March, but she just looked at me and shook her head. The only thing we could do was cook, and I looked up new recipes. In the kitchen we made shrimp with fresh ginger, red snapper with brown butter and capers, with a dry white wine. She looked, for a moment, like herself as she peered over a small skillet, watching the lemon pulp dissolve, but when her phone rang, she took it out and flipped it open, like someone with switchblade. Then she closed it again, disappointed, and turned back, with a sort of resignation, to the pan where the butter had almost burned.

  Pia and I went to the movies and sat in the dark. There, at a silly romantic comedy, the tears made shiny rills on her cheeks, the silver quality of them all the more obvious because of the light that came from the screen. Then she pulled herself together, blew her nose, and bucked up. We drove home and then sat in my study, where she had a drink and said, “How could anyone do that? You know, just disappear? Not even a good-bye.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Is that what Miller did?”

  She looked at me. Then she took down a copy of Thucydides and flipped through it, going from one year of the war to the next, and sometimes she stopped and read a little something out loud, dwelling on those occasions when someone on the Peloponnese or someone in Athens had someone assassinated, as though this was an indictment of some kind. One of these men, who had been killed, stabbed outside a temple, was described as “pestilent.” Then she closed the book and went upstairs, where at night she got up and walked the halls, making the old boards creak. It was like a sound of regret, one perfectly modulated by time.

  The next weekend, Pia went to the house where Miller had a room but his things had been moved out. The landlady had been threatening him with eviction for a month, and when he stopped coming around, she moved his clothes, old sweaters, and blue jeans with holes in them, a couple of Bose radios that didn’t work, a TV with no knobs on the front into the cellar with the dust and rats. The landlady said she’d keep them until Miller paid what he owed. She was even going to paint the room, she said, and get a nice young woman to move in. In the evening, Pia ate the food I made her, and then she went upstairs to listen to her music and sit with her cell phone.

  In Braintree, Stas wore a new black shirt with his black jacket, and his skin condition had improved.

  Yana typed at the Mac. The lists of car parts scrolled by on the screen, and next to them there were pictures of brake shoes, carburetors, fuel pumps, hydraulic pumps, air bags. The air was heavy with that scent she wore, which seemed so much like the steppes.

  Yana scrolled down the lists of auto parts.

  “So,” said Stas to me. “How are things?”

  “All right,” I said.

  “How’s your daughter?” he said.

  “Better in some ways. Worse in others,” I said.

  “That’s always the way. You just can’t win. But,” he said, “what about that guy she was hanging around, that lowlife from Harvard Square? Is he still in the picture?”

  “No,” I said.

  “See,” he said, “everything comes to the patient guy. It all works out. You want a burrito?”

  The driveway of my house was quiet. A light was on downstairs in my study and one was on upstairs, too, in Pia’s room. Otherwise the place was dark. It had always seemed, when Pia was growing up, that the place was warm, that even in the dark it still glowed with domestic certainty, like a rock that had been in the sun all day and was still hot hours after twilight. It didn’t look that way: just dark and a little cold. Now, in March, the fog came in some nights and the house seemed to be suspended in shreds of mist.

  Pia came downstairs when I was in my study. She wore an old b
athrobe of mine, and she had her hair in a ponytail. No slippers, and she tucked her long feet under herself as she sat in a leather chair on the other side of the desk.

  “I want to ask you something,” she said.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  I looked away, though. She went right on staring.

  “I want the truth,” she said.

  “From me?” I said. “When have you ever gotten anything but the truth?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Not anymore.”

  The poison, like the presence of dry ice, was working through the house: doubt and suspicion. I bit my lip, if only because while the poison was spreading, I still had plenty to resist it. After all, if I looked into my heart there was plenty there: goodwill, love, the desire to be honest, and yet it all seemed to be wrapped up in that cold fog, that stinky mist from the river. How to get clear of it, to get back to what we had had before?

  “You want something to eat?” I said.

  “No,” she said.

  “How about some shrimp and garlic, sautéed in butter with a little french bread to dip in it? Some sliced tomatoes. Maybe a little lemon sorbet for dessert?”

  “No,” she said.

  We sat there. The house ticked. Outside, in the distance, a car went by on Brattle Street with a long, shrill honking; I guess a drunk had been in the street or an old man or old woman, lost in the fog.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “You,” she said.

  “What about me?”

  She shrugged.

  “I want the truth,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. “If I can give it.”

  “Did you have anything to do with Aurlon?” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “With his disappearing?” she said.

  “Me?”

  “Did you have one of your cop friends scare him?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No?” she said. “They didn’t take him downstairs someplace and let him have it with a phone book? Isn’t that the usual thing? Wouldn’t that get him on the first bus out of town? Or do you have something more high-tech than phone books?”