The Taste of Penny Read Free

on my knee holds out his hand, this time to shake. “Andre Andrevich,” he says. “Let me guess: Fritz?”
    â€œAmerican,” I say.
    â€œEven better,” he says, scooting over to give me more room. “Share some beer with us.” He takes a warm bottle from his duffle bag and hands it to me. “The danger in playing Submarine is in the doors. Russian doors are the problem, but, well, let’s say you don’t have to worry about them when you have a responsible Captain. Our Captain was also interested in drinking. And one of the rules of Submarine—strictly enforced
by players—is that you cannot look out the window and you cannot know the time, and as a consequence you never know how long you’ve been playing.”
    â€œYou don’t get light through the crevices?” I ask.
    â€œYou get, which is why you tape the curtains to the wall with electrical tape.”
    The other soldier knocks on the window to get Choika’s attention. She is like a statue, a perfect flesh statue with a birth control patch on her hip. The other soldier hunkers down in his seat to try and see up her skirt.
    â€œYou should be in Submarine for two days, but sometimes time goes slow and sometimes fast. We think it was the sixth day when we realized, perhaps time was going too slow.”
    â€œIt seems impossible to me, to mistake six days for two,” I say.
    â€œLuckily, we had good amounts of vodka, and pickled garlic.”
    He replaces my beer and takes the empty. He puts the empties on the floor and says, “Watch this.” He points at his watch. The babushkas set these newspaper hats full of sunflower seeds on the seat and pick up the empties. They drop them in plastic sacks and go back to eating their seeds. “Five seconds,” he says, “a new record.”
    â€œYou’re throwing away money,” one of the babushkas says. “You could use a manicure, but you are not accurate.”
    â€œYou cannot hear through Russian doors,” Andre says. “We were shouting. We thought we would die there. We were pounding on the doors, but this is like a mouse running on a pipe. We were on the top floor, Vadim screaming for help out the windows. Everyone thought we were just drunk.”

    â€œWe were fucking drunk,” Vadim, the other soldier, says.
    â€œWhen the Captain finally arrived he tried to tell us that it had only been two days. I told him, ‘Prepare to suffer’ and he admitted that he had forgotten us, and he confessed—you will never believe this: He had been off playing Submarine himself. He was a player in two other games of Submarine before he remembered about us. Since he didn’t shower, he didn’t find the key in his pocket. He also lost our cell phones.”
    I tell Andre my story about “barber” and “baba,” which he laughs at once I explain that in English a “barber” is someone who cuts hair. He elbows Vadim and tells him my story. He and Vadim crack up.
    â€œLet me tell you,” Andre says, “ all women are whores.”
    â€œWatch your mouth,” one of the babushkas says.
    â€œI’ve written an essay about this phenomenon,” I say to Andre. “It was awarded a very prestigious collegiate prize in the US.”
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    Choika sits like a statue. Her bag in her lap, her legs crossed official-like. She hardly jostles. I am more and more disappointed that she has not blown us all up. I contemplate peeing into an empty beer bottle. Instead I set the bottle on the floor and one of the babushkas snatches it.
    The cops pull over our bus and the driver calls another bathroom break to deal with them. I am happy for the bathroom break, the first one off the bus. I whiz behind the wheel and climb back aboard before everyone else is even off. The cops and the driver are talking near the front of the bus, and I see the driver hand them some money.
    Choika steps off