The two men went on debating the dangers of sharks. The younger one asked if Jaws was a documentary.
Kolya held me in a bear hug; in a lesser brother, it would have conveyed false comfort, but Kolya made it feel like the moral obligation of possession: You will be saved because you belong to me. Daily push-ups and pull-ups had built out his once spindly arms and he wrapped them around me and pressed me in and held me. “Shush, Little Radish,” he whispered. He didn’t shake, he didn’t tremble, not a single spasm of concern. His preternatural mental calm seeped down into his body and hardened into a second skeleton. Everything about him suggested a psychosomatic impenetrability so dense a bullet couldn’t pass through him.
A dozen meters away the overcoat went on waving its sleeves in an agonized semaphore. The two men looked away uncomfortably.
“I saw the open ocean in a movie once,” the older one said. He pulled a handgun from his waistband and passed it to the younger man. With a sickeningly slick cha-chunk, the younger man chambered a round. It sounded too smooth, too glib, an ease and efficiency unsuited to the brutal task before them.
The younger man closed his eyes and pointed the gun at the man lying at his feet. The prisoner turned his head slightly and through the upside-down V of the older man’s legs his eyes met mine.
“He’s looking at me,” I whispered.
“Who is?”
“The guy on the ground.”
Kolya glanced over. The condemned man’s eyes widened. He was furious. Maybe our presence was a greater transgression than his impending murder, or maybe we were one indignity too many, the only one he had any chance of alleviating before he departed. The duct-tape strip swelled with his muted screams.
“He’s trying to warn them,” Kolya muttered disbelievingly. “He’s trying to warn the people about to kill him.”
But neither of the murderers noticed that their prisoner’s anger had been redirected to the clearing a dozen meters away. The younger man tightened his lips, but when he pulled the trigger, nothing sounded but a hollow clack.
“You never make it easy, do you?” the older man asked the clouds. The two of them stared at the gun, clicking the trigger, tapping it on a corroded branch, inspecting its darkly oiled insides. They disassembled the gun and put it back together. I imagined myself buttoned in the overcoat, squirming on the far end of the barrel, lungs laboring to strain air through mucus-clogged sinuses, pleading with buffoons too stupid to pull a trigger in the right direction. I’d never imagined that something as solemn and final as death could be this idiotic. It was the keyhole through which I first glimpsed life’s madness: The institutions we believe in will pervert us, our loved ones will fail us, and death is a falling piano.
“Maybe we should ask him,” the younger man suggested, nodding to the ground. “He’s the one who usually shoots people.”
The older one considered it for a moment and leaned over to tear the duct tape from the condemned man’s lips. The tape uprooted his brown whiskers with the soft plucks of a tiny harp. His eyes never left mine.
“Please,” I mouthed. My vertebrae had tightened to a single, inflexible bone. His eyes drilled into mine. I was certain he would alert them. But he nodded once and silently looked up at his captors. It was a last act of mercy in what I imagined was an unmerciful life. Whatever needless suffering he brought to the world, I forgave him, from all of us, for it all.
With soft-spoken resignation, the condemned man explained how to properly load the clip. “Now turn the gun around so that it’s pointing at your face,” he instructed the younger man. “You want to be looking inside the barrel to see if there’re any obstructions. Then click the trigger a few times to make sure there’s nothing stuck in the chamber.”
The younger man pointed the gun at his face, peering into the blind telescope of the barrel, but before he could pull the trigger the older man grabbed his arm.
“Wait, wait, wait,” the older man said. “He’s trying to get you to shoot yourself.”
The younger man’s shoulders slouched under the weight of the betrayal. “Really?”
The condemned man smiled and closed his eyes. The barrel stared back, unblinking.
Click click. Click click. “Goddamn thing’s still—”
I recoiled into Kolya’s arms. The blast thundered through the forest and fell into silence. There are more ways to remember one person than there are people in the world. No matter what Kolya went on to do, I remember him as the hand on the back of my neck, the shoulder beneath my cheek, the voice in my ear promising safety.
The murderers turned and stepped over the coat sleeves. What had been a skull was now a leaky bowl of borscht. Ruby spatters ran to the thighs of the younger man’s navy track pants. The older man patted his protégé encouragingly. He had a limp chicken neck, downturned lips, shadowy crescents beneath his eyes, all of which seemed to hang a little lower, as if buried in his skull a slackening winch barely held his face together.
Kolya flung me from his arms when he realized the two men would pass us. “Play dead,” he whispered. The cold earth seeped through my bones. We lay paralyzed. Our fingers rooted us to the glassy ground until the footsteps faded. The older of the two men was named Pavel, and he was on his way to becoming a leading figure in Kirovsk’s organized crime. In eight years, my brother would begin working for him.
Kolya helped me to my feet. “You’re going the wrong way,” I called when he stomped toward the body.
The man had died with his legs splayed in his loose trousers, his wrists bound behind his back, his torso torqued so that his left shoulder wedged into the frost and his right jutted up.
“What are you doing?”
“Just waiting till they’re gone.” Kolya nodded toward the ellipses of footprints leading away from the body. He dropped to one knee and rolled the corpse into a more comfortable position. Kolya straightened the man’s legs, uncoiled his wrists, returned his arms, at last, to his coat sleeves. For a man whose head had been shot off by incompetents, he looked surprisingly peaceful.
A patter at the far end of the clearing. Two eyes, the color of windshield-wiper fluid, met mine.
“Kolya,” I called. He had found a dirty sheet and was pulling it over the body. “Kolya,” I repeated.
He turned as the wolf trotted into the clearing. A scar ran the valley between its perked ears. The fur darkened down the length of its snout, the white graying until it dead-ended at the black period of its nose.
“Keep calm.” Kolya backed away from the body. “Don’t run.”
“You keep telling me that,” I snapped. “You keep telling me to keep calm and we keep almost getting killed.”
Drawn by the gunshot or the scent of blood, the wolf beelined for the corpse. Its lips peeled and a yellowed row of incisors sank into the dead man’s neck, making a mess of Kolya’s funerary attempts. We stood a few meters away. Fear had locked our feet to the ground. The wolf lodged its teeth into the overcoat and tore through wool with a terrific twist of its head. It wasn’t very large, as wolves go, more like a Labrador skeleton assembled inside matted wolf’s hide.
When we began taking tentative steps backward, its head swung toward us. Its mollusk-like nose flared rhythmically. I held out my hand in peace, as I would to a dog. Only when it opened its maw and its ruddy tusks shone in the sunlight did I realize I was offering the beast its next meal! Its tongue shot past its black rubbery lips to coat my fingers in gore. I was too afraid to retract my hand. For a moment we stood there as the wolf slathered every centimeter of my hand with the dead man’s masticated remains. When finished, it lifted its hind leg and a yellow stream splattered across my shoes, soaking into my socks. Then it started wagging its tail. Then it barked.