Memoir of a Russian Punk

19

After taking only a couple of steps, however, Cat stops and looks hard in the direction of the trolley stop.

"Hey, guys," he announces, "there's a trash coming! This way!"

"Let the fucker come," Sanya says calmly. "We don't owe him anything. There's no more vodka left anyway. He's wasting his time."

His heavy boots thumping and his greatcoat unbuttoned, the militia officer comes running up to the benches. Eddie-baby knows him, as do the others. The trash Stepan Dubnyak, a man of nearly fifty, naturally cannot be a good person, but on the other hand, however tricky he may be, he's still not a complete shit. If he ever puts any of the kids in for fifteen days, he always brings them a bottle in his pocket, even though drinking in jail is of course prohibited. Several times Stepan has managed to avoid taking Saltovka kids in when he ought to have arrested them, and so on. Stepan wants to live in peace with the local punks. Now that Sanya has moved from the Horse Market to the new food store on Materialist Street – the same one that Eddie-baby and Vovka the Boxer broke into once – Stepan's wife buys her meat from him. He puts aside some nice pieces for her. Or at least that's what he tells her. Sanya likes to have fun at his customers' expense. One day on a bet, in Eddie-baby's presence, he pulled out the thick red lining from somebody's galoshes, hacked it up with a cleaver on his butcher block, smeared it with blood, and then sold it as a makeweight on somebody else's order. The whole thing.

"What's the matter, Styopa?" Sanya asks in a falsely sympathetic tone. "The dogs chasing you or something?"

"Give me a hand, boys!" Stepan blurts out, gasping for breath. "Some blackasses in the Twelfth Construction Battalion have mutinied. They got high on hashish, and now they're coming up Materialist Street toward the Stakhanovite Club. They're beating up everybody in their path, they've already raped a girl,… and now they're coming here! They beat my partner Nikolai senseless – I had to leave him at the club…"

Judging by Stepan's face, the business is serious. He looks scared, and he doesn't scare easily.

"How many?" Cat asks. "The whole battalion?"

"There were about twenty," Stepan says, breathing heavily, "but now there are ten or twelve. All Uzbeks. The ringleader's a Russian, a sergeant. Apparently their relatives brought the hashish from Uzbekistan for the holiday. They've gone completely berserk, foaming at the mouth…"

"Why the fuck should we stick our necks out just to help the trashes?" Lyova growls. "I've served time, thanks to you, so count me out."

"Are they armed?" Sanya asks Stepan, ignoring Lyova's grumbling.

"No, thank God. They've taken their belts off and are swinging the buckles around. They're beating up everybody regardless, even women and children. Help me out, boys. I'll never forget it! There's nobody at the station except the duty officers, and by the time they get help from the other precincts, who knows how many people those blackassed hoodlums will mutilate."

"What about it?" Sanya asks, speaking mainly to Cat. "Shall we help the forces of the militia, the party, and the government in their struggle against the blackassed hoodlums?"

Looking at Sanya, Eddie-baby realizes that he needs to take out the rage he feels against Dora the hairdresser on somebody.

"What the hell have the party and the government got to do with it! They're bashing your own girls. They just gang-raped a girl in the park!" Stepan shouts.

"If they catch mine, she'll be glad," Sanya laughs.

"Come on," Cat agrees. "Let's go!" He doesn't ask Lyova, knowing he'll come with them anyway.

They all run after Stepan across the trolley tracks and into the darkness – Stepan, and then Sanya, well built for all his twenty-two years, and then the powerful Cat, as heavy as the barbells he lifts, and then Lyova and Eddie-baby, although nobody asked him to come and he's a bit scared.

At the poorly lit Stakhanovite Club (closed for the day), two frightened old doormen inform Stepan that the drugged, mutinous soldiers did not, as it turns out, head for the Stakhanovite Club as Stepan had expected, but have for some reason run on toward the practically deserted and uninhabited area over by Saburov's Dacha. That area is bounded on one side by the fence that surrounds the Hammer and Sickle Factory and extends for several kilometers there, and on the other side by the Piston Factory, while through it and parallel to the factories on either side runs the trolley line that takes people to and from Saltovka.

Eddie-baby thinks it's very possible that the soldiers have just gotten lost, since there is absolutely nothing for those nomads crazed by some Asiatic narcotic to do in that area. Beyond those two kilometers of wasteland, marshy in places and overgrown with several years of weeds, there are only more residential blocks, and beyond them the city. Perhaps that's where the soldiers want to go?

"Where are your fucking auxiliaries today?" Sanya shouts to Stepan as they run along, their elbows working furiously, in pursuit of the savage nomads in the direction indicated by the doormen.

"They're no goddamn use!" Stepan shouts back in despair. "None of them want to go out on patrol on a holiday."

Breathing heavily, they all pound away for a while in silence along one of the fences flanking the open rectangle. Its numbered steel sections flash by – 2, 3, 5, 7,… 20, and more, as Eddie-baby counts them off to himself.