Badger Games (2 page)

“Should we do something about that?” she said, with a sly smile.

He sketched the smile. It was perfect. “Do you think that would be a good idea?”

“Too late,” she said, rising to her feet abruptly. She nodded toward the bridge, not so very distant. A tractor could be heard approaching. “What did I tell you?” She sighed and stooped to gather her clothes. Before she stepped into the shelter of the trees to dress, she looked over her shoulder and said, “How's the butt? Too big?”

He stood and stared after her, unable to think of a suitable reply. Should he go into the woods with her? Was this an invitation? But no, she was dressing rapidly.

“Ciao,” she said, and disappeared just as the tractor issued out of the copse of willows and started onto the bridge.

Franko glared at the tractor with real loathing. The man on it did not see him. He was turned on the seat, his back to Franko, to make sure that the old and decrepit wagon that dragged behind, loaded with fire logs, tracked properly. He was quickly over the bridge and out of sight.

Franko looked back into the woods, hopefully. The woman was gone, of course.

I
t had become a habit of Franko's to take his morning coffee in the yard, literally the barnyard of his landlord, Vornuto Daliljaj. This was not as unappetizing as it might seem. It had been
a long time since the barnyard had been used by animals, although a faint and not unpleasant aroma was still detectable. It was a large, open ground nominally enclosed with a dilapidated wooden fence as well as the battered walls of some sheds, the old barn, and the cottage. It was a staging area for farm implements, but it had an aspect of privacy. One might almost describe it as a kind of bucolic plaza, populated by a few strolling, garrulous chickens and the silent, prowling cat.

The east wall of the old stone cottage Franko occupied also served as part of the enclosure. In fact, if one looked closely one could see where an overlarge doorway or opening in this wall had been reduced with later stonework, not quite in the style of the original, less crude and using a finer mortar. A conventional door was mounted in the newer opening.

Franko figured that animals used to be housed in the stone cottage. He wondered if it had been the bullpen, in fact, where a cow was introduced to the sire of her calves. Probably the entry had been reduced at the same time the wooden floor was installed, to create housing for farmhands, or another family. There was a definite air of the byre about the cottage. It also had a front door, which gave onto the area outside the barnyard.

Franko had found a weathered wooden bench that he set next to the barnyard door. The crude, unfaced stone wall behind the bench had been plastered with stucco in some long ago past, so that now it had a pleasant tawniness that took the morning sun very well, warm but not glaring. It was nice to sit on this bench and lean one's back against the warm stucco, particularly now, in this good fall weather when there was a hint of frost in the morning air.

From this bench Franko could look past the barn, the tackle shed now used to store tractor parts, a dilapidated jakes, and down the sectioned fields to the east, down the mountainside to where a minaret poked up above the treetops. Then one's eye rose to distant
ridges, other farms half-hidden among the trees. There was often a wisp of mist rising out of the trees, mingling with smoke from chimneys, and generally, as one's eye approached the horizon, the air thickened and blurred into a grayish blue.

“Look away, look away … Dixieland” were the words that came to his mind when he saw this. But it was hardly a southern landscape—almost exactly the same northern latitude as his native Montana, six or seven thousand miles to the west.

Franko sometimes brought out his notebook and sketched the view. He thought moments like these were made for smoking a pipe. But he had never taken up smoking. So he just gazed and thought, allowing himself to come fully awake.

Montana was also mountain country, but it was not much like this. These mountains were not as large as the mountains around Butte, not as clearly a part of a huge, distinct range. But maybe it only seemed so, he thought, because these valleys were smaller, not so grand and sweeping. The mountains here were rugged and precipitous, but somehow not such massive structures. And then, he thought, it could be that it was just lower here, with the Adriatic not more than eighty miles away, as the raven flew, beyond another mountain range at his back.

These thoughts were pleasantly dislodged by the appearance of the daughter of Daliljaj, very pretty and dark-eyed Fedima, who was only eighteen and looked remarkably elegant to Franko's mind in her head scarf, blue jeans, heavy sweater, and rubber Wellington boots. She was the crown of his morning pleasure.

She tramped across the old, rough, but well-flattened and sunbaked yard carrying his coffee in a little brass pot. She had ground the beans herself, he knew, in a tubular brass device with a handle on the top, and had poured the hot water over it to steep. It was very strong, but Franko had learned to like it. It was also too sweet, but he tolerated that as well.

It always happened, he noticed, that within a few moments of Fedima's appearance around the stone side of the old granary, another person could usually be seen—remote but not too far off, not so close as to require even a casual wave, ostensibly uninterested in the conjunction of Fedima and Franko. Often this person was old Daliljaj himself, though frequently it was his wife, or even one of Fedima's brothers. But there would be someone, just a black image on the perimeter of Franko's vision, a crow or raven, as it might be, attending to some useful but not evidently pressing business.

Today, it was old Daliljaj, repairing part of the fence that formed the other part of the entry. He was winding a length of baling twine from an old fence post to the gatepost. And at that moment, the world changed forever.

A large, brutal-looking man in a paramilitary uniform walked up to Daliljaj and kicked the gate free of his hands.

“That your fucking tractor out on the road,
balija
?” the fellow demanded loudly.

The old man gaped. Nobody, not even a Serbian cop, talked to the old man like that. The term
balija
was derisive and contemptuous, and hadn't been heard in these parts until quite recently. Certainly not up in this mountain village, where the Daliljajs had been farming for generations.

The cop didn't even have a real uniform, just some foolish camo outfit. Was he even an officer? What was his rank? Something about the oaf's grinning face made the farmer hesitate.

“What is the problem?” he said, careful not to address the policeman with disrespect but also not to honor him with a title like sergeant or lieutenant, which might not properly apply.

“The problem is that it's parked in the road,” the cop said. He looked about the compound in a way that suggested he was taking inventory. He raised an eyebrow at the figure of Daliljaj's daughter,
Fedima. Like a good Muslim woman, she immediately vanished into Franko's house, leaving behind the coffeepot sitting on the bench next to Franko. A moment later she exited from the other door and presumably went to the farmhouse, via a route shielded from the eyes of the men in the yard.

“Who are you?” the cop said to Franko, who stood up and approached the gate.

Franko was cautious. He'd heard about this fellow from Captain Dedorica, the police chief in Tsamet. He was called Bazok, and he was the informal leader of a handful of such men, sent down from Belgrade to “assist” the local police chief. Captain Dedorica's information had been sketchy. Franko had meant to press Dedorica about it, but he'd forgotten.

“I live here,” he said.

Bazok nodded. “Oh yeah,” he said. “You the one they call Franko? I want to talk to you.” He turned to Daliljaj. “Move the tractor. You can't leave it on the road.”

“Nobody ever complained before,” Daliljaj said. “There is no traffic—it's not in the way.”

“Move the fucking tractor,
balija,
” Bazok snarled, the smile icy now. When Daliljaj went off, he turned to Franko and said, “Where's your place?”

Franko shrugged and led him back through the gate and across the barnyard. He stopped and pointed to the old stone cottage with a new metal roof. Suddenly seeing it through a stranger's eyes, Franko thought it didn't look like much—a miserable hovel. The stone had been laid in a style that he had known at home as “pudding stone”; that is, a crude frame of wood was erected, and stones were simply dropped into a thick pudding of cheap, sandy mortar. These old walls had a tendency to fall down after fifty or sixty years, but someone had kept this one repaired. Of course, if it had been a bull pen that would account for the extra-thick walls.

Bazok gestured for Franko to go ahead and took a step toward the house himself, but stopped when Franko did not move.

“We can talk here,” Franko said. He wasn't sure how receptive he should be to this fellow. Was he actually a cop, or some kind of unwarranted deputy? In Montana a man didn't just walk onto another man's land in the way that Bazok had, unless he was armed and visibly authorized with a badge and a uniform, to say nothing of an official, legal paper. This guy looked to be about twenty-two or twenty-three, big and beefy but with a few complexion problems still and not too handy with a razor. Even so, one was not in Montana. It wouldn't hurt to play along, tentatively.

Bazok looked at him, sizing him up. Franko was not a big man, not within six inches of his own height or fifty pounds of his weight, but a sturdily built man in his late thirties. Like most of the men in these villages, he had black hair, dark eyes, a thick black mustache. Bazok was not impressed.

“Come,” Bazok said. “I have to discuss private things.”

Franko realized then that Bazok was not a Serb. He spoke the language all right, but there was something unnatural about his usage, as if he was not quite comfortable with it. It occurred to him that the man was an American. In English, he said, “What's the big deal?”

Bazok broke into a genuine grin. “All right,” he said, in good American. He grabbed Franko's right hand with his own and clapped him on the shoulder. “They didn't tell me you were from the States. Where you from, dude?”

Franko managed a faint smile but wrenched his hand free and stepped back from Bazok's near embrace. Without glancing around he gauged whether there were any Kosovars anywhere near. He didn't think so; none of Daliljaj's sons or cousins would be in the compound at this time, and he was pretty sure that Fedima had gone to the house. Still, it wouldn't do to appear too chummy with this clown.

“I'm from out West,” Franko said. “Butte.”

“No shit,” Bazok said. “I been there. I rode a freight through Butte once. Burlington Northern, eh? Friendly people in Butte, they don't hassle you. So what're ya doin' here, hangin' out with these hankyheads? You don't look like no Taliban—you ain't a fuckin' terrorist, are you?” He laughed and prodded Franko's stomach playfully.

Franko frowned. “You must have heard about me, from Captain Dedorica,” he said.

“Oh, sure,” Bazok nodded. “You're the friendly neighborhood dope peddler. That's why I stopped by.”

Franko suppressed a sigh of depression. So that was it. This oaf wanted to be cut in on Dedorica's “business tax.” He considered it. He supposed he had no choice. If Dedorica had seen fit to inform this guy, then it probably meant amending the agreement. The question was how much, and whether this meant that Dedorica now got correspondingly less for not keeping his mouth shut. But…. He had a second thought: who was this guy, really? Why an American? Something was amiss.

He nodded at the door, a slight motion. “If you insist,” he said in Serb. As he'd hoped, the cop caught on. He pushed Franko forward, his huge hand on his back. Even if no one seemed to be around, there were always eyes. Franko was more comfortable with an appearance of being coerced. He could not afford any suspicion from the Kosovars.

Like any such house of its type and vintage, Franko's croft was not well lit. There were few windows, and the electrical wiring was a single exposed conduit. It ran an old battered refrigerator, and there was an outlet from which extension cords served a radio, a reading light by the so-called easy chair, and another reading lamp clamped to the bed frame. A single light bulb dangled from the center of the ceiling.

The interior was essentially one room, perhaps four paces wide and twice as many long. The kitchen area took up one end, with a sink and a counter for preparing food. A narrow window looked out onto the path that led around the granary toward the main house. There was no running water, no drain system, and certainly no toilet. A bucket stood on the rough wooden floor near the sink. Another bucket under the sink caught the waste. Around an old, scarred wooden table covered with an oilcloth stood some mismatched wooden chairs.

At the other end of the room stood the metal frame bed with a single mattress, some rumpled blankets. In between was a ratty old overstuffed chair with a table next to it, on which were stacked a few books—a Serbian dictionary, a mystery novel with a black cover and a French title. A reading lamp stood nearby. It had a battered paper shade. Clothes were scattered on the floor, more hung from a rod affixed in a corner.

“Pretty cozy,” Bazok said, with no apparent sarcasm, peering about with interest. Suddenly, he thrust out his hand. “Hey, the name is Boz.” He pronounced it “Bozh.” “Back in the States, they call me ‘Badger.' But over here, it's Bozi Bazok.”

“Badger?” Franko said. “Is that what that animal is?” He gestured toward the ferocious, snarling beast on the patch that decorated Bazok's baseball cap.

“Yah,” Bazok said, proudly. “But I got the name from this.” He lifted his cap to reveal thick black hair that was cut in a stiff brush. In the center of the brush was a tuft of white hair. “I had that since I was a kid,” he said, “so in Georgia, they called me Badger. Mark of the beast, my old lady used to say. It fits.” He grinned, displaying a lot of white teeth.