I didn’t. Did you get your stuff?”
Marek pats his coat pocket. “Right here.”
“I hope you’ve got the dose right.”
“I guarantee you I do.”
“I don’t know how you can guarantee that when you’ve never laid eyes on the creature.”
“The average weight of a German shepherd is thirty to forty kilos, and my cousin says this one’s just regular-sized. To be on the safe side, I’m estimating forty.”
“The safe side for who? Us or the dog?”
“We’re people. It’s a member of the animal kingdom. Besides, if it gets a little extra juice, all it’ll do is sleep a bit longer.”
Bogdan loves dogs. He’s always loved them. As a boy, he wanted one more than anything, but his father said no. He and Krysia had to put down their chocolate Lab three years ago, and they’ve never gotten another one because they can’t afford to take care of it. He’d rather starve to death than harm a dog. “You’re sure about that?” he asks.
“Totally.”
“How do you know?”
“I asked the vet.”
“What vet?”
“The one who sold it to me.”
This is not a good sign. “You said you were getting it from a farmer.”
“I had to say that to keep you from backing out. See? You’re scared now.”
“Of course I’m scared. We’re driving around in a snowstorm, in a stolen BMW, on our way to commit a crime. And you’re telling me you bought a controlled substance from a vet . . . and asked his advice about how to tranquilize a guard dog? Stop this car right now. Let me out.”
“Relax. The vet’s in Rabka.”
“In the mountains? What were you doing down there?”
“Going to see the vet.”
“And telling him what?”
When you know Marek Ficowski as well as he does, you can tell when inspiration pays him one of its not infrequent visits. His face, young beyond its years, becomes even more boyish. In the greenish dashboard glow, the corners of his mouth have advanced with wide delight. He looks as happy as he did in fifth grade when they slipped away at recess with a bottle of vodka they’d stolen and drank it behind the wall of the Jewish cemetery. Bogdan got sick that day, and he’s feeling sick right now. This night could end badly. It will end badly. He can all but guarantee it.
“The vet wasn’t really a he,” Marek announces. “It was a she.”
“I don’t care if it was a plow horse. What did you tell him, her, or it?”
“Funny you should mention a plow horse. Because the day I went to see this vet, her foot was in a cast. She’d been trying to vaccinate a horse the night before, and it stepped on her and crushed her instep. I told her I needed to knock my dog out for several hours because we were having our kitchen painted and a couple of years ago he’d bitten a plumber. This poor young woman was in terrific pain, and she just gave me what I needed, no questions asked. She was drugged herself and probably didn’t remember the encounter an hour later. I felt pretty bad for her. I hugged her before I left, and the way she pressed herself against me . . . well, I’ll be honest. If she’d offered to give me a rabies shot, I would’ve seized the chance to drop my drawers. You’ve got to take that first step somehow.”
He probably walked into the closest veterinary office, greased the palm of some assistant with access to the medicine cabinet, and walked out with a syringe and a vial of liquid. Bogdan will just have to hope that he didn’t say enough to become memorable. Because the truth is that if they don’t come up with somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty thousand zlotys in the next few days, their last store will go the way of all the others. And then what?
He’s forty-eight years old, with thinning hair and a potbelly. Sometimes in the morning, while they move around the kitchen making their separate breakfasts, he catches Krysia staring at him. She’s quick to look away, but there’s no mistaking her expression. It’s not distaste, it’s not disappointment, it isn’t even pity. It’s astonishment. How can someone who used to do so many things so well suddenly become incapable of doing even one thing right? When they were young, had almost nothing, and were still sleeping on the folding sofa in her parents’ small flat, all he needed to do was lay his hand anywhere on her body—even someplace supposedly nonerogenous like her kneecap—to make her quiver. Now, if he touches her, she stiffens. He can’t even recall the last time they kissed.
Marek turns off the highway, and they soon start to ascend, the road snaking past the occasional brightly lit villa that looks like it must’ve been transported here from Disneyland. When Bogdan was young, his grandmother lived out in this direction, in a two-room farmhouse that she’d once shared with his long-dead grandfather. Though there was always plenty to eat when he visited, Bogdan never quite understood where the food came from. For a while she owned a cow that she milked twice a day, had several chickens, and apparently sold eggs in a nearby village, though that was never talked about. At some point in the early ’50s, as a result of remarks she’d made about the local collective farm, she’d been sent away for “reeducation.” After that she kept her business to herself. She got by. That was all that mattered.
“You ever wonder who lives in these new houses?” he asks.
Marek shrugs. “Folks like our pool builder. He gets tired of the cold, so he and his young wife fly off to spend Christmas in Fiji. He has imagination. We’ve got imagination too, but so far we haven’t tapped into it. When we get past this next little hurdle, we’re going to have to innovate. Either innovate or deteriorate—that’ll be our new slogan.”
The snow falls harder, and they climb higher, finally cresting a big hill and then beginning their descent into a valley. You can see several clusters of lights down there, each one distant from the others, all of them gauzy, as if viewed through a layer of cheesecloth.
Leaning back, Stefan Mirecki pats his stomach. With his wild shock of salt-and-pepper hair and matching beard, he looks strikingly like Jerry Garcia and is, appropriately, a devotee of the Grateful Dead. “I just ate a meal,” he announces, “worthy of a German field marshal. By the way, did you know one of them died upstairs, Rysiu? In ’45, right before our liberators arrived.”
Richard is still working on his duck. Roast duck with apples is his go-to dish in Polish restaurants, even one offering the potential for exotic fare. Stefan thinks that since his mother was a Polish immigrant, this must have been his favorite meal growing up and that he orders it in homage. Richard knows this is what his brother-in-law believes because he’s read all his novels. In the most recent, a minor character clearly based on Richard appeared in a couple of scenes. When he ordered his duck, he was assigned a point of view for all of two paragraphs, solely so the reader could learn just how mawkishly sentimental a certain type of Polish American could be. The reality, at least in Richard’s opinion, is more revealing than the fiction. His mother never cooked Polish food. His father, north-of-Boston Irish, doesn’t like much of anything except roast beef, fried cod, lamb stew, and boiled potatoes. Richard never got to eat roast duck until he came here back in ’89, and the first time he had it, he was with Julia. And now she won’t
