The Dogs of Winter (11 page)

I beat my fists on my legs. “I am just a pathetic, motherless boy,” I wailed. One of the tables crawled with flames. The wooden ribs joining the glass panes together smoked and sizzled. One rib fell away, crashing to the ground. Glass shattered.

“Mother,” I whimpered. I looked around the Glass House.

And then my eyes came to rest on the wheelbarrow. I ran to the end where we slept and ate and nested together. I
grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow. Flames licked at my back.

I dug the toes of my boots into the frozen earth. “One, two —” and I shot down the length of the Glass House and rammed the wheelbarrow against the door. A sliver of night shone through the tiny bit the door opened. But it was not enough. None of us could squeeze through.

The house grew hotter. Smoke stung my eyes and burned my chest. The burlap bags fed the flames.

I ran with the wheelbarrow back down to the other end of the Glass House. A spark came to rest on my cheek. I smelled burning hair.

Once again, I dug my toes into the earth — softer now from the heat — and prayed. I prayed to my mother wherever she was and I prayed to Babushka Ina and the saints with their wooden faces and I prayed to God and the angels and hoped they were not asleep on this cold and fiery night.

The table we slept under collapsed in a heap of sparks. I pushed off and ran as fast as any boy who is five years old without Famous Basketball Player shoes has ever run. I hit the wooden door so hard I flew over the handlebars of the wheelbarrow, crashed against the door, and landed on my back in the snow. I looked up with wonder at the star-filled sky. Sparks spiraled and floated like tiny red and orange eyes above us, looking down in wonder. “The angels are not sleeping this night,” I said to the eyes. “They are watching us.”

A cold, wet nose pressed into my cheek. A tongue licked the other side of my face. Teeth pulled on my arm.

I sat up and counted: Smoke, Lucky, Rip, Grandmother, Little Mother, and the two puppies. I felt underneath my sweater. The pages from my book of fairy tales were right where I'd put them.

We sat together in the snow and watched our home burn bright, like a firebird in the night sky.

“Well, Smoke,” I said to the dog sitting beside me. “Where do we go now? Our house is gone. The bread woman and the man with the sausages is gone, and so is Anya.”

For the first time since I had met him, Smoke's eyes were sorrowful and his ears were pinned against his sleek silver head in apology.

I pulled from my memory the place the woman in the train station gave me. I said the words aloud to the light of the fire: Sisters of Mercy.

I stroked the top of Smoke's head and cradled the puppies in my lap.

“I'll take care of us.”

And so it was, the dogs and I left The City center and the great plaza and Anya on a bitter January morning. We rode the train past one stop, then another. The dogs followed me past the sleeping children on the floor and on the benches. I looked for the faces of Pasha, Tanya, and Yula. I did not see them. I saw only dirty faces troubled in sleep, hands outstretched and begging.

I shifted the heavy weight of the puppies in my cloth sack as we went up and up and up the gleaming moving stairs. “Sisters of Mercy,” I whispered.

I touched the sleeve of a man sweeping the street. “Please, sir, can you tell me where Petrovsky Boulevard is?”

He squinted at my face and shrugged before turning away.

“Petrovsky Boulevard,” I said to the dogs. “We must find Petrovsky Boulevard.”

I tried to stop the people coming and going from the train station. “Excuse me, sir,” “Pardon me, madam,” but they all pushed past me. Finally, an old woman in a gray headscarf stopped long enough to wave her hand and snap, “Three blocks that way,” before she disappeared below ground.

So off the dogs and I went, the puppies whimpering in their bag. We trotted past heaps of snow-covered garbage in the gutters and grown-up
bomzhi
sleeping in doorways. We wound our way around sleeping dogs and empty bottles on the sidewalk. “This is not as nice a place as the great plaza,” I said as we waited for Grandmother to catch up.

Finally, we found the street named Petrovsky and a low, gray building with the faded words
SISTERS OF MERCY
on a sign in front. Peeling painted wings spread across the door.

No light shone from the two small windows. I pushed on the door. It did not open. “Perhaps they are sleeping,” I said to Lucky. I knocked on the wings. The door rested in silence. I pounded on it with my fists. Still, it did not open.

I slid down to my knees and leaned my head against the door. “
Pozhalsta
— please,” I said to the outstretched wings.

“They're not there today. It's Christmas.”

On the sidewalk stood a bundle of rags with a boy inside.

“Today is Christmas?”

“Of course, stupid. It's January seventh.” The boy cocked his head to one side. “Don't you even know what day it is?”

I shook my head. I had not known what day it was for a long, long time.

“Will they be back tomorrow?” I asked.

The boy shrugged and picked at a scab on his face. “Who knows? Maybe yes, maybe no.”

Every bone in my body ached under the weight of disappointment. I could not remember the last time I'd eaten or
gotten food for the dogs. I could not remember the last time I'd been warm.

“What's that in your bag?” the boy in rags asked.

I hugged the puppies closer to me. “Nothing,” I said. “Just stuff.”

The female puppy poked her head out of the top of the bag and whimpered.

“Puppies!” the boy yipped. He hurried over to the doorway where I sat with the puppies in my lap. “Can I see?”

Little Mother and Grandmother closed around me, eyeing the boy warily. The boy reached out to touch the puppy's head. Little Mother growled.

“This is Little Mother,” I said. “She doesn't know you well enough to let you touch her puppies.”

The boy pulled his hand back and nodded. “She's a good mother to protect her babies.”

The puppies squirmed and mewled with hunger. “How many are there?” asked the boy.

“Two,” I said. “There were three but one died.”

The boy nodded again. “My friend Janina died too.”

I reached into the bag and stroked the puppies, feeling their ribs against my fingers. “They're hungry,” I said. “I need to find food for us.”

The boy jammed his thumb against his chest. “I'm the best there is at getting food,” he said. “Come on.”

And so the dogs and I followed this skinny bundle of rags away from the Sisters of Mercy. By the middle of the
day, we'd collected enough food from the garbage cans behind the shops to feed us all.

The boy stretched his legs across the heat grate. “I'm Vadim,” he said. “Who are you?”

I stroked Grandmother's head resting on my leg. “Sobachonok,” I said.

Vadim laughed. “Your mother named you ‘Dog Boy'?”

I shrugged. “Not my mother,” I said.

Vadim took a deep breath. He closed his eyes and let loose the loudest, longest belch I had ever heard. I laughed.

“Try it,” he said. “Take a real deep breath and swallow lots of air.”

I closed my eyes and did just like he said.

“Now, let it rip.” And I did.

We laughed and laughed as people hurried by.

“I am King of the Burps!” Vadim cried.

“No, I am King of the Burps!” said I.

Vadim socked me in the arm. I socked him back. I had seen boys play like this on the playground at Anya's school.

“You stink,” Vadim said, grinning.

“I am the King of Stink,” I said.

“We are the Kings of Burps and Stink,” we crowed together.

The sky turned the color of dirty sheets. Snow began to fall.

“Let's go,” Vadim said. And because the Sisters of Mercy were celebrating Christmas and the dogs and I had nowhere
else to go, we followed the boy deep underground to the huge steam pipes in the belly of The City.

Children filled this world beneath The City — children all sizes and ages. Some were from The City, but many had ridden trains from far away.

“In my village, all we had to eat was chicken feed,” a boy perched atop one of the pipes bragged.

“In my village, all we had to eat was dust,” said a girl in a pink shirt with a big, grinning mouse on the front.

“Oh yeah, well in
my
village all we ever ate was snow,” said a tall, dark-eyed boy breathing in and out, in and out of a brown sack. He reminded me of Pasha.

Two small boys wrestled each other amid the trash on the ground. Another boy ran a tiny toy car along a pipe. Someone passed a bottle to me. Without thinking, I drank.

“Agh,” I cried and spat the foul liquid in the dirt. Everyone laughed.

“He's a street baby,” someone said.

“I am not a baby,” I said. “I am five years old, but in the spring, I will be six.”

“Not that kind of baby,” Vadim said. “
Street
baby. That means you're new to the streets.”

“No, I'm not,” I said. To me, it seemed I had lived this way a very long time.

“How long?” a tall boy with no hair tossed out. “How long have you been on the streets?”

I shrugged. “There was no snow when
he
brought me to The City. The days were still warm sometimes and it was light all day. I would have gone to school soon.”

“Pah,” said the tall boy, lighting a cigarette. “Only months. I've been here years.”

“Me too,” a girl chimed in.

“I've been here two years,” said another boy.

A very small boy — smaller than me — curled into a pile of dirty blankets and cried.

Candles flickered on top of the pipes, throwing shadows against the walls. The play-wrestling between the two boys turned into a fight.

“Why did you have to hit me in the head like that?” one screamed.

“I didn't mean to,” the other said.

“I hate you!” the hurt one cried.

I crept into a far corner with Little Mother, the puppies, Grandmother, and Rip. Smoke and Lucky would not follow us beneath the earth. Little Mother watched the children nervously as she fed her hungry puppies.

The candlelight made the children look big and wild, their eyes and faces hollow.

“We'll go back to the Sisters of Mercy tomorrow,” I promised the dogs. “At least for now, we're warm and we're not as hungry.”

Vadim stole. He stole from shops, he stole from passersby, and he stole from other beggars and bums. He stole to feed himself and us, yes, but he also stole because he could.

“You have to steal,” Vadim said to me on a day the cold held us in a vise.

“I can't steal,” I said.

“I'll teach you to steal,” Vadim said. “I am the King of Thieves in all of Russia!” And just to prove his point, he slipped behind a woman waiting for the bus, and eased something from the bag at her feet.

He tossed a book to me. “Here,” he said. “It's yours now.”

I thumbed through the small paperback book. There were no pictures and far too many words I could not read. It was of no use to me.

I made myself small as a mouse and crept over to the woman. Just as I slipped the book back into her bag, the bus rattled to a stop. The woman bent to pick up her bag — her bag with her book and my hand still clutching the book.

Her eyes widened.

I froze.

“Thief!” she cried. “Dirty little thief!” Her great arm swung in an arc high over her head. Her black, shiny purse hovered in the air above my head. I cowered on the sidewalk, waiting for the sky to fall.

A hand grabbed the back of my neck and yanked me to my feet. “Run!” Vadim commanded.

And we did. We ran and ran and ran, slipping and sliding on the ice-rutted sidewalks. Rip and Lucky ran behind us. We ran until our feet could run no more. We collapsed in a laughing, panting pile of boys and dogs.

“You are a crazy boy,” Vadim said, laughing. “She could have killed you with that purse.”

My eyes streamed from the cold and the laughing and the words “dirty thief.” I wiped at my eyes. “She would have knocked my head off,” I said. “If you hadn't saved me.”

“And your head would have rolled down the street, saying, ‘Help me! I seem to have lost something!'”

A door creaked open. A voice called, “Boys! You boys, there. What —”

Vadim was up and running before the voice finished.

As for me, something held me. I clutched Lucky's neck and squinted at the person standing next to a door with faded, outstretched angel wings.

“Are you a Sister of Mercy?” I asked.

“I am,” she said. “I am the only one left. And you look like you're in need of some mercy.”

I shuffled my boots in the snow and held tighter to Lucky.

“Well come on in, boy. I don't have all day.”

The inside of the House of the Sisters of Mercy was dark and cold and clenched. The dogs pressed close to my legs and whimpered.

The Sister grabbed me, her fingers digging in like claws. She turned me this way and that and felt my arms, my legs. “There's nothing to him,” she muttered to herself. “Nothing at all.

“How old are you, child?”

“I am five years old,” I said.

“Lord help us,” she said, “they get younger and younger.” She sighed. “I suppose there's no use asking if you have parents and where they are,” she said.

I shook my head.

“I didn't think so,” she said with a sigh. “There never is.” She coughed. The cough rattled like rusty chains. “
Chto delat?
What should be done?” she said to herself.

“Well, first things first,” she said, and dragged me by the arm to the back of the House of the Sisters of Mercy. A large metal tub squatted in the corner with a faucet above. “Take everything off,” she said as she turned the knobs of the faucet.

A bath. I could barely remember the last time I'd had a bath.

I stripped off my sweater, my shirt, and my pants. The old newspapers I'd used to keep the cold out dropped like
leaves to the floor. The pages from the book of fairy tales fluttered to the floor too. I pulled off the glorious boots Anya had given me and pulled out the wet newspapers stuffed in the toes.

The woman turned from the steaming tub. She snatched the hat from my head. “Give me that lice nest,” she said, and tossed it into the garbage. Then she looked me over from my toes up to my bare head. “A filthy little bag of bones,” she said. She pointed to the tub. “In.” She handed me a brush and a hard bar of soap. “Scrub,” she said.

I scrubbed.

“Pah, not like that.” She snatched the brush and soap from my hands and scrubbed. She scrubbed like she was trying to remove my skin, my muscles, my bones, and all the dirt from the streets of The City.

“Ow!” I cried. The dogs whimpered from the doorway.

“Hold still, child,” she said. The water turned black. The Sister poked and prodded in my ears. “There's enough dirt in there to grow potatoes,” she grumbled. When she turned to grab the soap bar that had slipped from her hand, I poked a finger in my ear. Potatoes?

Then she attacked my hair and my head. “Just like I thought,” she snapped. “Lice.” She poured a bottle of foul-smelling something all over my head and scrubbed it into my hair with her claws.

“Ow!” I cried again. Lucky growled from the doorway.

“Stop being a baby,” she said.

Finally, she grabbed a threadbare towel. “Out,” she commanded.

I stood wet, shivering, and naked in the freezing room on the cold cement floor.

“Dry off,” she said. “I'll find some clothes for you, although Lord knows if I have anything small enough.”

Rip and Lucky inched over and sniffed my legs and hands. “It is me,” I said to them, scratching their heads. Lucky's brown eyes were doubtful; Rip licked the water dripping down my legs. I laughed and scooted away from him. Rip snatched the corner of the towel and pulled, shaking his shaggy head back and forth. We played tug of war, with Rip pulling and me sliding across the wet, cold floor and Lucky barking.

“Here now, what's this nonsense?” the Sister snapped.

I froze. Rip dropped the corner of the towel. Lucky cowered under the woman's steel-gray eyes. “I didn't just break my back over that bathtub to have you get all filthy again from those flea-bitten mongrels.”

“I'm sorry,” I whispered.

“Here.” The Sister thrust an armful of clothes at me. “They're too big, but it's the best I could do.”

The clothes were indeed too big, but they were clean and all the holes were patched. “
Spasibo
, Sister,” I said.

“You're welcome,” she said. “And I have a proper hat, coat, and gloves for you. I'm afraid, though,” she said with a wheezy sigh, “I have no shoes that will fit you.”

“That's okay,” I said. “Anya gave me those boots. They are glorious boots for a pathetic little boy.”

The woman frowned. “Who's Anya? I thought you said you have no family.”

“My friend,” I said. “Anya is my friend. And she gave me the boots.”

The Sister pulled a pair of shiny scissors from her big apron pocket. She pointed them at a stool. “Sit.”

I sat.

She ran a comb none too gently through my hair. “What a mess,” she muttered. I felt the cold metal of the scissors press against my neck.
Snip snip
. Hair fell around my shoulders and onto the floor like ashes.
Comb comb, snip snip
.

Finally she stopped. She tilted her head to one side. “Well, at least you don't look like a walking bundle of sticks and rags now.”

I ran my hand over the stubble and sores and bumps of my head.

She tilted her head to the other side and laughed. “Actually, boy, you look a bit like a plucked chicken, but I don't suppose they'll care.”

I hopped off the stool and ran my hand over Rip's wiry fur. “No, the dogs don't care,” I said.

“Put your boots on and let's find you a coat and hat before they come,” she said.

A coat. Oh, the luxury of a coat! “You don't have to give me a hat,” I said. “I have a hat.”

“Pah,” the Sister said, coughing. “What you
had
was a vermin-infested rat's nest.”

The Sister pawed through a box of clothes. “Too big,” she'd say. Or, “I wouldn't give this to a
bomzhi
.”

My stomach rumbled. “Do you have any food?” I asked.

She stood and rubbed the small of her back. “Perhaps a biscuit or two.” She shuffled over to a tin on a shelf. She handed it to me. “My old fingers can't open this lid.” I pried open the tin lid. Inside, resting on a napkin, lay two dusty biscuits. I popped one in my mouth and divided the other between Rip and Lucky.

“What are you doing?” the Sister said, snatching the tin from my hands. “Giving perfectly good food to dogs?”

The stale biscuit stuck in my throat. “Sorry,” I said. “They are hungry too.”

She tossed a coat and hat to me. “Try those on,” she said.

The coat came well below my knees and the sleeves flapped at the end of my arms like useless wings. But still, it was a coat and it was wonderful in its coatness. I stuffed the pages from my fairy tale book into the big pockets.

I smiled up at the Sister. She sighed and coughed. “It's the best I can do.”

I heard a sharp bark outside, beyond the door — Smoke's bark. My heart leapt. I hadn't seen Smoke for two days. Lucky yipped and pawed at the door. Rip danced in frantic circles.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Wait,” the Sister commanded. “They'll be here any minute.”

“But they
are
here,” I said. “Smoke is waiting for us.”

I threw open the door with the faded feather wings. On the other side stood the raised Fist of God. The Fist was attached to a long gray coat and an even grayer woman.

“What took you so long?” the Sister snapped.