Grandpa Cuckoo

Vaska Solovyov, nicknamed “Cuckoo” because he stuttered whenever he said “coo-coo-could…,” was puzzled. And the puzzle was how to come up with the money he needed to throw a shindig. Which, for those who don’t know, has nothing to do with what’s below the knee or what you need a shovel for: it’s a big spread put on to celebrate something, and it has to have wine and vodka. This shindig would be to see Vaska’s grandson Sashka off to St. Petersburg. Sashka had worked the last nerve of everybody in the village. Who knows how much gas he’d siphoned from people’s cars and trucks, how many bicycles, spare parts, and other good stuff (hidden well away by a summer visitor from the city) he’d swiped? Sure, he’d been given a good beatdown right there on the spot any number of times, but that just toughened him up. Tough enough for the Army, he was. But they didn’t take the likes of him – no fools, they.

“He’s a %&*#, and that’s all,” the chief Army recruiter said. “He’d demolish all of the armed forces, and they’ve yet to come up with a war we could hustle that little brat off to without fearing for the enemy. No need to drop a bomb – he’d wreak havoc on their army single-handed. And he couldn’t be issued a weapon, either, let alone a tank. He’d sneak off to a dance in it, or worse.”

So Vaska had a word with Lenka, Sashka’s mother, and decided that the boy needed to go to the place they all called “Piter.” Country folk had been setting themselves up in Piter for forever and a day, and with good jobs too – some running excavators, some operating bulldozers – and every one of them was making great money. Besides, they were straight arrows, family men, so they wouldn’t put up with anybody’s nonsense, and there was nothing to steal. The kid wouldn’t bother them, not one bit. At least, that’s how Cuckoo figured it.

“I’d like to send him to the moon, that moocher,” Lenka said after giving it some thought. “Except he’d mess their rocket up and sell it off. Right there in space.”

“They could make a satellite out of him, couldn’t they?” Cuckoo wondered to himself. “The state would get some use out of that, and it’d be nice to be down here in the village and see him flying across the starry sky, all twinkling colors.”

They made the rounds of the kinfolk and scared up the money for a one-way train ticket to Piter. The kinfolk were eager to give and didn’t even want anything back. They couldn’t believe their luck. Barns burned, Hawberry the horse stolen, live chickens plucked bare, and rabbits sold straight out of their cages – all this made the kinfolk generous.

“Pops, you need to loosen the purse strings too,” Lenka hinted. She’d been out of a job for the past seven years.

“Your purse strings are already good and loose,” Cuckoo replied. He did get a pension, but in the new-fangled way, on a gaudy plastic rectangle. Nasty it was, so humiliating. Cuckoo had even forbidden himself to think about it. He’d go for some wine, and grouchy old Afonikha, a heifer if ever he’d seen one, would mark it down in her notebook as an IOU. Vaska suspected that she was padding his account too, because the money he gave her should have been enough to keep him so hammered he’d be seeing pink elephants by now. If he handed his plastic pension card to Lenka, he’d lose the lot of it, that he knew for sure, and he didn’t care to be bouncing around in the cold innards of a bus for the whole fifty miles to town.

So Vaska decided to set some pike traps. He put on his snug felt boots with overshoes from a chemical hazmat suit and high-tailed it to the lake. And then, after bartering the pike he’d caught for bread, wine, a big hunk of lard, and a fresh but wrinkly cucumber, Cuckoo sent out the invitations.

Everybody in the village came. They set up tables in the big room, but then they had to put some in the kitchen and the overflow even snaked into the corridor. And still some people were standing as they drank. (Somebody had brought some very decent moonshine.) The womenfolk sang about Chapayev, the menfolk talked about the fish not biting right then and how there’d be no war. Lenka was sobbing into the curtain, but she didn’t really mean it. They reminisced about Sashka’s shenanigans. After a swig of wine from a tea cup with mauve flowers on it, Lenka suddenly remembered Sashka helping one of the old gals chop firewood and how well he did it, even though the ax was as big as him. Then everyone started getting dewy-eyed. Granny Dunia remembered how Sashka stole a full bag of mandarin oranges that she’d bought for the children’s Christmas party at school, and he wouldn’t own up to it. And then he’d broken out in spots, and everybody was onto him right away, but he was scratching and crying so hard, they didn’t beat him bad, just locked him up for a bit. Auntie Valya, the neighbor, went rummaging through her memory too and, blowing her nose on her caftan sleeve, told how Sashka had helped her stack firewood. But why was that a big deal? asked Auntie Valya, beaming a toothless smile. Because he only took a hundred rubles for it.

Cuckoo stood up from the table but not all the way “Well, that son of a gun!” he said. “They were supposed to be doing good turns for free, like the Pioneers used to. He even got a certificate from school for it.”

“Oh, give it a rest!” Auntie Valya brandished her glass and fished a sprat from its can. “Now Piter can go ahead and pay him for stacking their wood.”

From firewood they went on to prices, then they had a little scuffle, and by midnight the party had broken up. They all shook Cuckoo’s hand as they left, so long and hard his shoulder started aching. The womenfolk kissed Lenka, smearing their lipstick all over her cheeks.

Grandpa Cuckoo got up the next morning still a tad tipsy but light of soul, because they’d finally got rid of the grandkid. The cuckoo had foisted its fledgling off onto another bird. Let them raise him; grandpa had had enough. Now it was Piter’s turn to shiver and shake. “He’ll give all them cop shows of theirs a run for their money,” grandpa thought gleefully to himself. But he was so busy whooping it up, he’d missed just one thing – that nobody had actually spotted young Sashka at the seeing-off party…

In the dense darkness before dawn, young Sashka was using his grandpa’s hacksaw to cut through a puny Chinese padlock that a skittish summer visitor had hung on his boat shed. The hacksaw was going good, but the buyers from a republic down south were already smoking out there by the road, elbows resting on an eggplant-colored Zhiguli station wagon with a trailer…

Sashka was bending the shackle back. “They want Piter, they can have Piter” he thought. “Or forget Piter – they can kiss my butt.”

The money he was going to pocket, plus the price of the tickets that the kinfolk had shelled out for, would be plenty to finance another month of fun and games, and ma and Grandpa Cuckoo could like it or lump it.