A. is A.

The Kurd is a Muslim, and he kills the goat in the proper way.  He holds its head back and opens its throat with a long knife.  Blood spurts between his fingers and flows down the goat’s white chest.  The knife is so sharp and the Kurd is so fast that the animal doesn’t have time to know it has been cut.  It dies very quiet.

Afterward we hang the goat from a tree and peel off its skin and fat in long sheets.  I help, because I know how it works.  We tie off its intestines and spill the offal onto a plastic tarp.  The Kurd portions the goat with a cleaver and puts it on the grill.  Fat renders, drips onto the coals, and burns up in little flares.

It’s the fourth of July and we’re having a barbeque.

I’ve been in Portland for nearly a year.  This is my first independence day here.

The Kurd’s name is Ahmede and he’s a friend of Serge’s, the guy who invited me to the barbeque in the first place.  I have never met the Kurd before, even though all three of us sometimes work for the same boss, whose name is Leon. I know what me and Serge do for Leon, but I don’t know what Ahmede does.  I have a few not-so-nice ideas.

The Kurd himself is nice, though.  He is small, dark man with large white teeth.  He lives in a vinyl-sided tract home with a yard and a fence around it.  He has a pleasant fat wife and two or three little daughters who run around the yard with a big mutt dog.  A few of Ahmede’s Vietnamese neighbors are at the barbeque and they chatter to each other in a language that flies in one of my ears and out the other.  Everyone scoops goat meat and noodles and potato salad onto paper plates and eats standing up.

I eat the burnt edges of the goat meat and compliment the wife on her home and the potato salad.  She is not really listening to me, but instead staring up at Serge.  People stare at Serge a lot.  He is used to it.

“Huh.  Look at you,” says Ahmede’s wife, “What did they feed you?”

“Potatoes and radiation,” says Serge with a straight face.

“And you?” she says, swinging her head around towards me.  “You look stunted.”

“Chicken fat and second-hand smoke,” I say.

“Huh,” says the woman again.  She puts the base of her palm on her broad hips.  “Okay then.”  She turns to yell at her daughters, who are throwing pebbles at the chain-link fence.

Serge and I head over to Ahmede.  The Kurd is fussing over the grill and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.

“Ahmede,” says Serge.  “This is Rivka.  You’ve probably seen her around Leon’s office before.”

Ahmede looks me up and down.  “Yeah.  I’ve seen you around.”

“I haven’t seen you,” I say.  The Kurd laughs and his broad white teeth shine in his face.

“You’re not supposed to,” he says.

“Well,” I say, “It’s good to meet you now.”  I hold out my hand and the Kurd gives it two hard pumps.

“Where are you from?” he asks me.

Serge wags an enormous finger in the Kurd’s face. “Rivka doesn’t like to talk about things like that.  She’s like you.”  He stops waving his finger and looks into the coals of the grill.  “I don’t understand it.  Maybe it is because I had a happy childhood.”

“Serge, when you were a kid you were nearly killed by nuclear fallout,” I say.

“That doesn’t mean I wasn’t happy,” says Serge.  He fixes me with his pale calm eyes.  “Ahmede is from Turkey, but he doesn’t like to talk about it,” he says like it means something. Ahmede makes a noise in the back of his throat.

“Who cares?” says the Kurd.  “We’re in America now.  You two will stay for the fireworks?”

“Not today,” I say.  “We’re taking a trip to the mountains after lunch.  Serge borrowed a car.”

The Kurd squints at me and spits the end of his cigarette onto the coals of the grill.  “Why for?”

“Some people saw a Bigfoot on Mt. Hood.  After this we are going to look for him,” says Serge.

“You are an atheist but you believe in Bigfoot.  It will be a waste of an afternoon,” says Ahmede.  He flips goat meat on the grill.

“It is a science!  Cryptozoology.”

“You do this too?” asks the Kurd, turning to me.  I shrug.

“Rivka knows that there are things in the world we cannot see.  She once was in love with an invisible man,” says Serge.

“A ghost?” says Ahmade.  He looks at me closely and his eyebrows pull close together.

“No, just invisible,” I say.  “He wore bandages when he went out, as if he had been burned in an accident.  But really he was invisible.”

“How does something like that happen to a man?” asked the Kurd.

I shrugged. again  “I don’t know.  There really was an accident, I think. Bad science.”

“We believe in science,” says Serge.

“That’s the problem with you socialists.  You are without God, so you are always looking for something else.”

“We are not socialists,” says Serge, “We have never been socialists.”

“I was raised on capitalism,” I say.

“Yes, Rivka’s too young.  Besides, she was born in America.”  Serge puts one massive arm across my shoulders.  I feel myself sink a little into the soft ground under the weight.

Ahmade thinks that Serge is my boyfriend and I let him think that.  So far we are just friends and sometime co-workers. Like me, Serge has two jobs.  One is legitimate and the other not so much.  At night he works as a bouncer and during the day he runs errands for Leon.  I paint the insides of houses and sometimes I run errands for Leon, too.  Serge and I run different kinds of errands.

I met Serge because we were running the same errand.

Last November the sky was spitting rain all the time and I was still riding a bike everywhere.  I bought a clear plastic poncho to keep some of the rain off me.  The plastic hood made me feel like I was in a fishbowl.  My boots were made for trenches and they did okay in the rain, but my jeans soaked through and leaked into my socks.

I biked over to Leon’s office and locked my bike in front of the rectangular building.  Leon had a real office.  No elevator, I had to pull myself up three flights of stairs, but it was still a real office.  There were no black letters on the frosted glass of the office door, just dark dots where the old name had been scraped off.  I headed into the front room of the office.  There wasn’t much in the little front room besides a few metal folding chairs.  An enormous man sat in one of the folding chairs, reading a comic book.  He looked up over the top of the bright pages.

“Leon called me,” I said.  The big man nodded.

I walked past him and into Leon’s office.  Leon was sitting behind his broad wooden desk, adding something up on a calculator.  He was wearing a button-down shirt and a soft grey scarf around his neck.  Leon had a shaved head and a face like a hawk.

“You called me,” I said.  My toes squished in my boots.

Leon stood up behind his desk and spread his arms.  “Rivka!  Clever little Rivka!  How are you this fine afternoon?”

I sneezed and water jumped off my plastic coat and fell onto the carpet.  “You’re going to ask me to do something I don’t want to do,” I said.

“Pretty little Rivka,” continued Leon.

“Now you’ve overplayed it.  I know it’s going to be something I don’t want to do.  Don’t drag it out.”

Leon sat back behind his desk and rubbed his palm over his black eyebrows.  He did quite well for himself because there are not many people in Portland with access to a good supply of cocaine.

Leon wrote an address on a sticky note and held it across the desk to me.  “This fellow owes me some money, Rivka.  I want you to go talk to him.”

I looked at the piece of paper.  “I deliver packages, Leon.  And when I do that I don’t even want to know what’s in the packages.  I don’t want to talk to this guy.  You are always trying to promote me when I don’t want to be promoted.”

“Rivka,” said Leon, “I require a woman’s touch in this matter.  You’re smart, you can handle it.”

“I don’t do the kind of talking you’re asking me to do.”

Leon pulled his hand over his face again.  “Rivka, you misunderstand.  I’m a businessman.  I like to do business like a civilized person.  Does the boss car salesman break the little car salesman’s legs when he makes a mistake?  No, he doesn’t.”

“Huh,” I said.

“I send a big guy, everyone gets defensive.  But if I send a sweet little thing like you, I think maybe people will be more talkative”

I made my least sweet face.  I pulled my thin lips back and bared all my crooked teeth.

“Don’t do that,” said Leon.  I stopped.

“Besides,” said Leon, “I’ll send Serge with you.  You’re from the same country, right?  You can talk to each other.”

I didn’t bother to say anything about that.

It turned out that Serge was the guy in the front room.  He was probably the biggest guy that I’d ever seen in real life.  Maybe seven feet tall, no kidding, which put him about two feet over me.  He had a healthy pink Cossack face and one of those short, ex-Soviet Bloc haircuts.  His hair was somewhere in between red and blonde, like a sunny carrot.  He was almost always smiling.

Serge and I stood outside of Leon’s office and looked at my bike.  The bike wasn’t going to work.  If he clung to the back of it I wouldn’t be able to move forward one inch.  Even if he pedaled, the bike was too small for him.  It would probably be crushed.  Neither of us wanted to take the bus.  So we walked.  We spoke in Russian for a few lines, then switched to English.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Around,” I said.

“You speak English like a foreigner, and you speak Russian like a Jew.”

“Well, you speak Russian like a Ukrainian,” I said.

“Aha,” said Serge, “That is because I am a Ukrainian.  But you still do not answer my question.”

“I speak the way I always have,” I said.  “I was born in the states.  I grew up in Brighton Beach.  My parents are from Vilna, in Lithuania.  They are Jews.”

“So you are a Jew,” said Serge.  I was suspicious of him, but he didn’t say it meanly.

“I am a Jew because my mother is a Jew.  I don’t believe in God.”

“So you are nothing,” said Serge.  Again, he said it without bad intent.  He was just commenting.  “It’s okay, I don’t believe in God either.”  He raised his t-shirt and scratched at an itch in his side while we walked.  There were so many muscles there that he looked armor-plated.  “You don’t like talking about where you are from,” he said.

“No,” I said.

“That’s also okay,” said Serge.  “I don’t like where I’m from.  That’s why I’m here.”

We walked quietly for a few blocks.  I had to take two steps for every one of his.  “Do you like cryptozoology?” asked Serge, but we were already at the place.

The place was a rotting wooden house with a big front porch.  We went up the steps and the wood creaked under Serge’s feet.

“You need me, you whistle.  You know how to whistle?” Serge made a bird noise through his teeth.

I tried to imitate him, but instead made a noise like a broken kettle.

Serge scratched at the ginger stubble on his chin.  “Huh.  How about you just shout instead?”

I nodded and went into the house.  The man in the house was a scraggly white American.  He was sitting at a plastic table in a kitchen that didn’t look like it had been used to cook food for a long time.

“Who are you?” asked the man.  “Where’s Leon?”

I sat down across from him.  “Hello,” I said, keeping my voice polite and holding out my hand,  “I’m Rivka Balshemennikov.”

The man didn’t take my hand.  He spat onto the table.  “I’m supposed to meet with Leon.”

I looked at the place on the table where the man had spat.  It was a disgusting thing to do, but it was his table and he could do what he liked with it.  If it had been my table he spat on this would have been a different story.

“Leon sent me,” I continued, “So you can talk to me.  Okay?”

The man glared at me.  While he was grinding his teeth, I reached into the pocket of my coat and pulled out a pack of unfiltered cigarettes.  I lit one and stuck it in the corner of my mouth.  I did this all very coolly, but really I was trying to calm myself down.  The guy was a real jerk.

“You owe Leon some money,” I said.

“Yeah, and I told him that I’d get to him.  I’m just getting it to him in my own damn time.”

“That’s not how this works,” I said.  “You get the money to Leon on Leon’s time.”

The man’s eyes rolled in his head.  He pushed himself back from the table and his chair screeched against the linoleum.  “Listen,” he said, “You go and tell Leon that I didn’t come here to get lectured by some dime store runt.  He’ll get the money when he gets it.”

In my head an image played very fast and disappeared.  In the image, I stood up, picked up my chair, and bashed it over the man’s head.  I did not do this.  “Dear sir,” I said so quietly that the man shut up.  I spoke through my teeth so that he would know I did not think he was dear or a sir.  “You do not understand your situation.  I am trying to help you out here.  You see, I am the one Leon sends first.”  I gestured with my cigarette towards the front porch.

Serge was standing on the porch with his back to us, looking off into the street. His pink fists hung at his sides like Christmas hams.

The man worked his jaw.  Then he opened his coat and counted hundred dollar bills out onto the table.  “Here’s half of it.  I’ll have the other grand by next week.”

“Pleasure doing business with you,” I said and stuffed the bills into my pockets.  I backed out of the room and onto the porch, keeping my eyes on him.

Serge, who had been whistling a tune, looked over at me.  “You want I should go inside?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“No,” I said.  “I got the money.  Let’s go.”

As we walked away from the house I kept looking over my shoulder.  “You’re nervous,” said Serge.

“I wanted to hit him but I thought he might shoot me,” I said.

“You should have bopped him.  Most people, even if they have a gun, they shoot lousy.  They miss.”

I shook my head slowly back and forth.  Serge looked down at me from his great height.  “Or you could have called me in and I would have bopped him for you.”  Serge swung one massive fist through the air.  “Pow!” he said.

“Well, maybe next time,” I said.

We kept walking.  Serge had my bike up over his big shoulders.  I looked down at my boots and dragged the soles against the concrete.  After a few blocks neon flashed from somewhere above my head and Serge stopped.  He put my bike down and jerked his shoulder upward.

“Hey!” said Serge, “Let’s go get a beer.  I will buy you one, even.  You seem like an unhappy girl.”

We went for a beer.  In the bar Serge had told me that he was born in Chernobyl and his real name was Serhiy Georgyevich Klychko.  When he was a kid the power plant blew up and they had to evacuate.  He was about ten when it happened and he had been sure that it was the end of the world.  Since then he has been in a good mood because the world continues to exist.  His family lived in Odessa for a while.  He moved to the states in the nineties because he was bored in the Ukraine and he liked American comic books and American sneakers.

Serge gestured under the table.  His feet were in canvas high-tops the size of boats.

I told Serge why I was an unhappy girl.  I told him that a month ago my boyfriend left me and now my heart was broken and I kept thinking backwards all the time.

Serge put his giant hands on either side of my face.  His fingers were across my ears so I could hardly hear him.  He said something about how love makes everyone think backwards.  He told me that I was pretty young and that I would figure it out.

After that we were friends.

When we are done talking to Ahmede we go and sit in the grass by the tree.  The remains of the goat are hanging in the tree where the dog can’t get it.  It is mostly head and hooves.

Serge has never tried to kiss me, not once.  I would say it is because he thinks I’m ugly, but sometimes he looks at me very carefully in a way that makes me think that isn’t it.  When he lifts weights in his basement apartment, he likes it when I’m there to watch.  He lies on his back and hoists barbells over his head while I read my books.  One late night he came to my house very drunk and wouldn’t say a single word to me.  He sat on my couch and stared and wept a little until he fell asleep.  In the morning I could hear him singing Elvis songs in the shower.

I’m not very sure what I feel about Serge.  I do know I like him.  I think he is very present in the world.  I think that I would be better off if I could be more like him.

Sometimes when Serge can borrow a car we go for long drives out through the tall green trees.  I don’t have a license, but when we get far enough out I practice my driving.  Once there was a turtle in the middle of the road and Serge stopped the car so we could get out and help it cross.  Really, Serge is a gentle man.  He is only violent when he is paid to be so.

I live in one bedroom of a little house off Division St.  My roommate is a medical student and isn’t home very often.  When she passes through the living room she blinks at me like she forgot I live there.  I like my room in the little house, so I’ve been there a while.  I bought a phonogram from a pawnshop and started storing records in plastic milk crates along the edges of my room.  My mattress is on the floor.  I could still leave at any time.

For now I live cheaply and quietly.  I ride my bike and go to work.  I take long walks around town with people I know and sometimes I go out for drinks.  I make big pots of lentils on the stove while Jello Biafra yells from my stereo about how he’s looking forward to death.  Serge lies on my couch with his eyes closed and his feet hanging over the armrests.  He listens very hard.

At the barbeque, we stand up to leave.  There is a flap in the tree above us and I raise my chin to look.  A crow scrabbles at the goat’s pink skull.  It picks out a staring eye with its beak and gulps the jelly down.

I elbow Serge.  My elbow is on level with his hip.  “Look at that,” I say.

Serge squints his blue eyes at the goat carcass.  “There’s a crow,” he says.

“Do you think that’s a good omen, or a bad one?” I say.

Serge thinks.  “A good one” he says.  “The crow’s happy, isn’t it?”  He puts his arm around my waist and slips two fingers down the waistband of my jeans.  He rubs my hipbone like it’s good luck.

———-

Were you expecting another Rivka Balshemennikov story?  You weren’t?  Too bad, you already read it.

This is very much a draft and will probably be entirely restructured in the future.  It might need to get split into two different stories.  There’s too much dialogue, not enough happenings.   I was trying to do a lot of things with this story.  People seemed to be very fond of the Rivka narrator, and many readers expressed that they’d like to see more of her.  Especially more of her “at work”.  So this story is a bit of a response to that.  I also wanted to try evolving her voice a little.  She’s still not very self-reflective, but she’s a little more aware and able to “think backwards” on things she has done.  It made the voice less restrictive to write in, but I’m worried it’s no longer as distinctive.  When I edit this, a lot of what I’ll be doing is reading through the story out loud, line by line, and altering vocabulary and phrasing that doesn’t sound right.

Serge was fun to write.  I tend to write about clever, barely-there men with soft hands and anguished souls.  So I thought I’d try working with a character who’s largely defined by his overbearing physicality.  When I was thinking about the way Rivka and Serge would interact in the physical world, I kept thinking about Colossus and Wolverine.  And the Fastball Special.  A little angry thing and big, serene statue working together.  In my mind Serge looks a little like a cross between Peter Stormare and a cartoon character.  Of course he reads comics.  Of course he makes jokes about radiation.  Serge is a Marvel boy.  This is the song he sings in the shower.

There was no attempt to make the little crimes in this story realistic.  The Wire, this is not.  (Though the very unfunny running joke about all ex Soviet Bloc people being mistaken for Russians is a reference to that series.  That, and the fact I decided to call my Ukrainian Serge, despite the fact that the Ukrainian version of the name is usually Serhiy.)  I think the style I’m going for in this collection is a kind of unrealism.  Not quite fantastic or surreal, but slightly pulpy, slightly off in a way that gives the reader the impression that anything might happen.  I was reading Isaac Babel’s Red Calvary while I wrote this story, and I think it shows.  Right now I’m dissatisfied with the scene in which Rivka acts as Leon’s go-between.  It feels too smooth and too easy.  I think I’ll have to rough it up a bit.

I talked a little about influences with someone I know last night.  He has to be careful what music he listens to, because otherwise he’ll absorb it so thoroughly that everything he composes will sound like someone else.  I’m not sure if I consider that a problem with my fiction.  I carry my influences on my sleeve, but at the same time I feel like I arrange elements in my stories in a way that’s distinct to me and my strange interests and aesthetics.  Nonetheless, I tend to immerse myself in a shifting media sea while I’m writing.  Fiction, music, television, history, comic books.  I try to throw a bunch of things at myself at once so that nothing really sticks.  Instead, I’m just left with a general impression.  It’s like I have a hazy memory of the story I have yet to write, and I just need to piece it together.

I’ve got a draft, and now I’ve got to arrange the pieces so that they make a picture.