Kingdoms in the Air by Bob Shacochis

Author:Bob Shacochis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2016-05-04T15:10:55+00:00

Huevos Fritos

This is a small story, inhumanly cruel, and it ends with a terrible howl.

It takes place in a dark forest on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East, a place where parents in St. Petersburg threaten to send children if they misbehave, an inhospitable place known for exploding volcanoes, mosquitoes that swarm like hornets, and, most fearsomely, its bears. The story itself contains a cosmonaut, more grizzlies than anywhere else on earth, a criminally amused wife, and the unimaginable horror that befell its narrator, a hapless, pitiable soul named Poor me.

So. Let’s get it over with.

I would make two long trips to Kamchatka to connect with the Russian mafia, who had, in their ever-inspiring entrepreneurial spirit, begun stealing entire rivers, netting runs of wild salmon, shipping tons of illegal caviar back to their associates in Moscow. Anyway, I took my wife along on the first trip though not the second. She was obsessed with catching one of Kamchatka’s legendary monster rainbow trouts, something in the twenty-two-pound range. Which she did, a bona fide Grade Two worst-case scenario, which is why she was forbidden to go along with me on the second trip. Too much bragging.

She and I and Rinat, our local fixer, had an idle day before our expedition launched into the distant wild, so we decided to pile into Rinat’s pickup truck for a day trip about an hour’s ride north of Petropavlovsk, the capital city, to a national park at the base of the Mount Fuji–like volcano that towered above the city. We had read about this park in a government-produced tourist brochure I had been given at the airport.

The road ended at a small cluster of clapboard dachas along the banks of a frothing river. The park headquarters, clearly marked on the brochure’s map, did not exist, and the park itself, on the far side of the river, was what it had always been—a vast, dense spruce and birch forest, accessed by a shabby cable-and-plank footbridge or a shallow crossing for four-wheel-drive vehicles. Across the river we could see a few mushroom hunters prowling among the trees.

“Let’s cross over and go for a hike,” I suggested and my wife said sure and Rinat said absolutely not.

“We will absolutely be eaten by bears,” Rinat declared, and settled into the truck to await the eventual recovery of our chewed-upon corpses.

Because this story also contains a six-ounce can of pepper spray stuffed into the left-front pocket of my jeans, I felt it was not irrational to be respectfully nonchalant about the bears.

My wife and I clambered across the rickety bridge and followed a path past a group of picnickers until we came to a primitive road leading deep into the sun-dappled forest. We hiked ahead, alone in the woods, enjoying the pristine solitude, until suddenly a rusty blue Soviet-era van appeared on the track behind us and stopped as it came alongside. The driver, a lean, blond-haired man, wagged his head at us, frowning, and said something in Russian that had the tone of an admonition.

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