Under the iron sky that the bridge is forming, Big Joe is watching Candy, standing right before him. A goddamn porcelain doll in a hurricane. The shroud of the fog clings to her like despair. And for what? For Corey?
Da nu nakhuy, that podonok!
Big Joe knew that he was trouble the second he laid eyes on him. Blah. blah, blah, talking slick chuinyu all the time, but the eyes, flickering, like the tail of a rat that is looking for an escape. He sighs a plume of smoke into the chilly air, and listens to the gears that are grinding in Candy's head.
Disbelief warring with a dawning realization comes over her. He has seen it before, the precise moment when the innocence cracks. As he sighs at her, the breath escapes him in a puff of white that vanishes into the gloom. Lost somewhere behind it, he sees her face again.
She has that look that a ballerina gets when the ice beneath her cracks. The one that screams, "Pizdez! I fucked that one up What a stupid mistake!"
Been there, done that, he thinks, and refuses to go back.
He glances at the direction Corey has disappeared into, and a flicker of regret washes over his face.
He is long gone. Probably halfway to Siberia, where he is piling up debts faster than an old babushka who is hoarding sugar during war. Big Joe should've warned Candy sooner. But some lessons you only learn when frost bites. Maybe she will learn hers now.
She looks at him with her eyes wide open.
Like hungry mishka, a helpless bear cub, he thinks and cannot help the urge to feed her, if only a little bit.
"Don't ask more questions, golubka moya," he says, and even while calling her a little dove, his voice sounds like gravel that is grinding on steel. "Corey's got talent for owing money to bratva, understand? Serious money. Not the kind you settle with promise and smile."
He holds up a hand against the inevitable barrage of questions which he predicts will pour out of her mouth.
"Ladno, drop it now, molyayu tebya! You know saying that goes ´´Curiosity kills cat´?" He waits for her nod, then pulls his shoulders up. "Careful, or you will be cat."
It sounds harsher than he means it. She flinches and looks fragile now, like a delicate flower that is crushed by relentlessly falling snow. All at once he almost regrets that he said anything. Almost. But it was favor to her. Favor that she should be grateful for, because lies are cockroaches, and once they infest, they're impossible to get out.
He was trying to help, but she would resent him even if she believed it to be true. Women around this part of the world do not want to be helped by men anymore, they feel insulted by the mere attempt. But Big Joe cannot help it.
Where he is from, he was taught to treat woman like queen. Taught to respect and protect her. Which, around here, would only be upsetting. He looks back at Candy, and decides that he will have to try.
"Corey said he´ll write story to get money," he grunts. "But fucking story is not going to solve problem."
He sees questions forming within Candy's eyes, and next to them, the desperate hope that what he says is wrong. She hopes that Corey isn't the snake that he considers him, and Big Joe can, in fact, relate to. He knows the yearning to believe in something against all odds and regardless of the world around. He felt it once himself, a long time ago, but when he feels the memory, hot in his throat, he coughs it away, and pulls a newspaper clipping out of his pocket.
"You read," he growls, putting the crumpled piece of paper into Candy's hand. "Don't come crying to me then."
He turns away, as if he cannot watch the hope drain from her eyes. Behind him, he hears her voice. It is trembling like the leaves of a birch tree in a blizzard, and won´t cease to ask him questions that he doesn't want to answer. He keeps on walking off into the fog, and lets her simmer.
Somewhere deep inside, he feels bad for her. A bit.
But life is a plate of kasha, buckwheat porridge, sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter. Everyone gets a spoonful of both.
For him it was mainly bitter. Still is. Candy won't listen, he is sure of it. Nobody ever listens to what he is saying. That they do what he tells them, either way, is only for their fear of him. They have always been afraid.
They see the size of him, his prison ink, and his distinctively foreign features. Then they believe the whispers that they've heard. Not only from their families, friends, and acquaintances, but at the moment even louder from their media and politics. That the Russians are evil. That the Russians have started a war. That the Russians are the enemy, and that they lack a heart. That they will come over them in their sleep, if their countries don't prepare themselves for it, and fight back.
By building millions of weapons, and underground bunkers. By militarizing the streets, mobilizing soldiers and buying warplanes. All of it, with the ever-rising tax that a good citizen pays, and who does their media tell them to blame when they end up broke and homeless, out here, under the train bridge in a time of a crisis? The evil, the enemy, the Russians. Big Joe being one of them.
He never tried to deny where he is from, and even if he had done so, it would have been worth as little as a promise of love that comes out of a hooker's mouth.
Because, as his mother put it, when he was little, "rodina tvoya ostaetsya u tebja v dushe navsegda i budet vo vsem, chto iz nee vytechet. Vo vsem, chem ona perepepolnitsa. V kazhdom chuvstve i slove, kotoryye tebya ostavyat'."
She was right. Where you are from stays forever in your soul, and it will be in everything that is streaming out of it, and in everything it is overflowing with. In every feeling that leaves you, and in every word that you speak.
That is how it was for Big Joe. Whenever he would open his mouth and talk, they would hear his home, and judge him for it, long before his words would make it through to them. They would instantly be convinced that he is exactly who they were told he is. Someone to be afraid of. Someone who breaks limbs for fun, and is going to attack. Them, their worldviews, and their country.
Ot´yebis! Even before the war started, being Russian - direct, unfiltered, loyal, deep - was hard for Big Joe in a foreign country. In a country like this. Just because, "Im nikogda ne ponyat' russkoy dushi, cherpayushchey svoy prostor i glubinu ot samoy russkoy zemli," his mother used to say, and it had a point. "They will never understand the Russian soul, as wide and deep as the Russian land itself."
Ever since she dragged Big Joe, formerly Serega, and his younger brother Dima across several borders to get away from a husband who beat her, they haven't been seen.
With Candy in his back, Big Joe is hiding in the fog that is hanging heavy now, and tries hard to stop remembering that no one ever saw the kid in him that used to have dreams, fueled by engines. He used to dream of a Lada´s roar that tears down a highway. Of building something solid instead of watching it crumble to pieces as he had to the marriage of his parents, the country he grew up in, and his soul, wide and deep, when it was torn from the land that it had emerged from.
Swallowed by fog, he suddenly remembers his hands when he was younger. Rough, sure, but capable. Once upon a time he used to be able to coax even metal into obeying his will. Welding, grinding, shaping, he knew how to do all of it. Before everything went to fucking chortu…
The chill of the air settles into his soul and shrinks its expanse, when his memory, as if it were a guard who is handling an insurgent, tasers him with the very moment his life all went to hell. Dimka, dumb durak, he thinks, clenching his fists. What a stupid kid his brother was, always in trouble, always whining "Serega, help!"
The pictures before him daze him like a shot of potent samogon in the early morning. Himself, younger and more reckless, as he is standing in some back alley. The on and off of the neon signs is reflecting off the slick pavement. Behind him, his brother Dimitri who cowers in a corner, a broken bottle clutched in his shaking hand.
"Tol'ko chto sluchilos, I didn't mean to, Sereschka!" His whiny voice engulfed Big Joe. "I promise, it was accident, po-nastoyashchemu!"
What he promised was an accident had sent a man into unconsciousness. It would send him to the hospital and into a coma that he wouldn't wake up from. What he promised was an accident would land Serega in prison, and right there he would become him, Big Joe.
Loyalty for a brother was such a Russian thing to have. Protecting who you are close to and taking the fall for them, unasked, such a Russian thing to do, and so hard to come across around here, in the west. But Serega would never be seen for it. He would never tell anyone that the person to blame for the accident wasn't him.
What he would get out of it are six years between concrete walls, and bars of steel. Around him the stink of fear, broken arms, and broken dreams. Constantly he would be watched by prison wards whose cold eyes wouldn't see men anymore, but only numbers. In him they would see just another Russian to be squeezed.
Prison changes you. Makes you harder. Strips away illusions. You gotta be tough to survive. Gotta learn to navigate vorovskoy mir. He navigated it well, the thieve's world, the existence of which he discovered when the cell locked behind him. His size, his accent, and the whispers about the accident… It scared people, and helped him.
He was only called "The Russian" in there, a man who they considered a ruthless gangster. One of the worst there was at the time. It was a lie, but convenient. He just went with it, easier this way, he thought. K chertu, fuck it! Let them think everyone from Russia is natural born killer.
So they did. Not only the wards, and the small-time criminals, who were in for stealing tomatoes in a local supermarket. Alongside them, the bratva did.
They saw something in Serega. Maybe the willingness to do whatever needed to be done. Whatever their reasons were, they offered him protection, gave him power. He took it without asking questions, and Big Joe was born.
Ever since then it has been a name that is whispered with dread and respect, and ever since then Serega has been a man who is known to be capable of making problems go away. Someone he never wanted to become.
With the taste of bitterness in his mouth, he spits on the ground. It wrestles through the fog, then gets trapped in the air, and struggles to fall on. It is a mirror of his soul.
Big Joe is trapped. By his past, by the way he talks. Trapped in rodina, shirokaja dusha, and the prejudice that you get for both. He´s a criminal, the Russian, the enemy. But right here and now he is who can help Candy.
His memories fade. The further they let him go, the further back he turns towards the bridge.
The rain plasters his sand-colored hair to his triangular forehead, and a flicker of tenderness enters his eyes. Candy. He cannot just leave her here to fend for herself. Bratva might fuck her up, and Corey might as well.
She has good heart, he thinks. Doesn't belong in this bardak, not in the mess that Corey created. She deserves better, and he needs to tell her. He needs to keep her safe.
This is Corey´s shit, not hers, and Big Joe knows the kind of trouble that crooks like him, zhulik with silver tongue, would usually attract. But Candy is blinded, and cannot see that the former star journalist who met Big Joe first in jail is becoming a danger to everyone else.
Got to protect her, he senses, regardless of her possible reaction. He has to protect her even if it means being the villain. It will mean protecting her from Corey, maybe against her will, and with grip of konyuch, stable hand. Who might get kicked into the teeth by a young and irrepressible one like she is…
Davay posmotrim, we will see! Decision made, he turns back. Steady and slow, he approaches the bridge, hit by raindrops, like they are coming out of a pissing pissed-off drunk who is off his game and aim.
The fog that he presses through for Candy hangs thicker than a broad's regret, which makes the whole thing razmytyy koshmar, blurry nightmare. He is a shadow against the gray, now almost back to where he left her stewing in her own curiosity. Big mistake, but not her fault that she has good heart. He will save her. From herself.