which was more than his father had when he’d been trapped in the coal mine in Tomsk.
As a young boy, Dragomir used to enjoy watching his father and the other miners ride backward in the mantrip, descending hundreds of meters into the depths. Dragomir was forever asking to ride too, but his father always refused.
Each night his father came home caked in black dust so thick you could see only his eyes. His coughing kept Dragomir up many a night. He spat black and left the sputum floating in the toilet bowl.
Coal mining, he told once told Dragomir, was the only job where you had to dig your own grave.
Dragomir listened, rapt, to his father’s grim tales. How he’d seen a roof bolter come down on a friend of his and crush his face. Or watched a guy cut in half by the coal car. Someone was once caught between the drums of the coal crusher and smashed into pieces between its teeth.
His mother, Dusya, raged at his father for filling a young boy’s head with such frightening stories. But Dragomir always wanted to hear more.
The bedtime stories stopped when Dragomir was almost ten.
A knock at the door to their communal apartment in the middle of the night. His mother’s high thin scream.
She brought him to the mine to join the crowds gathered there, pleading for any sort of news, even bad news.
He was fascinated. He wanted to know what had happened, but no one would tell him. He overheard only fragments. Something about how the miners had accidentally dug into an abandoned, flooded shaft. How the water rushed in and trapped them like rats.
But Dragomir wanted to know more. His thirst was unslakable. He wanted details.
He imagined his father and the other men, dozens or even hundreds of them, struggling to keep their heads above the rising black water, fighting over a few inches of air space that dwindled by the minute. He imagined them grappling in the black water, pushing each other’s heads down into the water, old friends and even brothers, trying to survive a few minutes longer, all the while knowing that none of them would ever come out.
He wanted to know what it felt like to realize with absolute certainty that you were about to die and to be powerless to do anything about it. His mind returned to this again and again, the way a child fingers a wound. He was fascinated by the unknown, lured to what repelled others, because it allowed him to draw close to his father, to know what his father knew in those last moments of his life.
He’d always felt cheated somehow not to have witnessed the last seconds of his father’s life.
All he had was his imagination.
* * *
THE DAMNED dog would not stop barking. Now he could hear it pawing at the screen door out back. He looked out a window and saw a dirt-covered mongrel, leaping and snarling at the screen. Feral, maybe, though it was hard to tell for sure.
He opened the wooden door, his Wasp gas injection knife at the ready, his new toy. Just the screen between him and the cur.
Startled, the dog backed away, bared its teeth, gave a low snarl.
He called to it softly in Russian, “Here, pooch,” and opened the screen door. The dog lunged at him, and he plunged the blade into the beast’s abdomen.
With his thumb he slid the button to shoot out a frozen basketball of compressed air.
The explosion was instantaneous and satisfying, but he realized at once he’d done it wrong. He was spattered by the animal’s viscera, red and glistening, slimy scraps of skin and fur, a rainburst of offal.
Once in a while he did make mistakes. Next time he would make sure to plunge the knife in to the hilt before flicking the gas release.
It took him half an hour to sweep the ruined carcass into a trash bag and haul it into the woods to be buried later, and then hose down the blood-slick porch and screen door.
He took a shower in the small pre-fab fiberglass stall on the second floor and got into clean jeans and a flannel shirt, and then he heard the doorbell ring. He looked out the bedroom window, saw a Lexus SUV parked in the dirt road out front. He put on a baseball cap, backward, to conceal the tattoo, and casually came down the stairs and opened the front door.