The Cowboy and the Cossack (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries) by Clair Huffaker Read Free Book Online Page B

been nailed up by carpenters who had failing eyesight. Once inside the town, you got the feeling there wasn’t a straight line left in the world. But still and all the houses must have been built securely, because once in a while high winds would come shrieking in off the ocean that would have knocked anything flat that wasn’t pretty sturdy.
    About our only greeting was from some occasional unfriendly dogs, who barked from a distance and slunk away growling if we passed by up close.
    And then we saw a few lights from windows in a small building down closer to the water. There were three sleepy little horses that looked like undersized mustangs tied up outside, and there was a small hand-painted sign hanging over the door.
    “What’s it say?” Shiny asked Keats, staring at the strange, meaningless lettering.
    “Hell,” Keats muttered, “could be Chinese for all I know. But I think it’s a bar.”
    We tied the mules to the hitching rail near the horses and went into the small building.
    Old Keats looked around and said hesitantly, “I guess this is one a’ those bars without a bar.”
    We were in a plain, poorly lighted room with nothing more than six or eight wobbly tables and some rickety chairs in it. Sitting at a table near the corner were three men in flea-bitten fur hats and thick brown homespun coats that came down to their ankles. They were all dressed enough alike to maybe be insome sort of uniform. They were drinking something that looked like water, and all three of them stared up at us with just barely controlled shock, paying particular attention to Shiny and his jet-black skin.
    Then a fat man came out of a back door and we saw our first familiar sight in Russia because he was wearing a filthy grease-stained apron that had probably been white some years back.
    “Thank God,” Keats murmured. “A bartender.”
    Seeing us, he stopped short. Then overcoming his surprise, he started slowly toward us, asking some kind of a question in a deep, rasping voice. Like the others, he seemed particularly fascinated by Shiny.
    Keats said just one word, so I remember it all right. The way things turned out later I’d sure as hell have remembered it anyway. He said, “ Vautkee. ” Then he added to us, “That’s their name for whiskey.”
    The bartender waved us to a table and went back out the rear door. As we were sitting down he came back quickly with a bottle full of colorless liquid like the Russians in the corner were drinking and four glasses. He put it on the table and Shad poured a glassful. “Hope this stuff ain’t as weak as it looks.” There was a silence in the room as he lifted the glass, looked at it, sniffed it, and then shrugged. “Sure don’t smell like much.” The bartender and the three men in the corner were frowning at him with close, curious interest.
    “Well,” Keats said, “try it.”
    Shad raised the glass to his lips and downed it in two, or maybe three, gulps. I couldn’t tell exactly because at one point his throat seemed to become briefly paralyzed. He finished it all and put the glass down without a word. I could tell by his dead-set face he was either awful thoughtful or suffering something fierce. As Shiny pointed out later, Shad “looked like an iron man who’d just swallowed a large cannon ball.”
    “I think,” Shad said finally, in an unusually husky voice, “this may serve our purpose.”
    “How ’bout us tryin’ it?” I asked.
    Shad just nodded, and I poured for Keats, Shiny and myself.
    “Well, here’s how,” I said to them, raising my glass.
    But the way I did it wasn’t how at all.
    I took one gulp and thought I’d die right there on the spot for sure. Pure, burning fire started scorching and searing down my throat at the same time that a massive flood of salty tears surged up around my eyes.
    Gagging as slightly as possible and forcing the nearly blinding tears back with fast, hard blinks, I put the drink down. Shiny was putting his nearly full