The Fixer Read Online Free Page A

clouds, grown dark and heavy, cracked open on their undersides and poured snow upon the world. Would the horse make it? He pictured the snow falling thickly, in a few minutes turning the road and fields white so you couldn’t see where one ended and the other began, the wagon filling up with snow. The nag would stop. Yakov might switch him till his bones gleamed through the blood but the animal was the type that would quietly lie down in the snow to spite him. “Brother, I’m tired. If you want to go on in this storm, go in good health. But not me. I’ll take sleep and if it’s sleep forever, so much the better. At least the snow is warm.” The fixer saw himself wandering in drifts until he perished.
      But the horse said nothing, and it didn’t look like snow—or rain either. It was a brisk day beginning to be windy—it raised the nag’s mane—and though the horse moved leisurely it moved steadily. Yet as they went through a grove of black-branched trees, the leafless twigs darkly intertwined high above Yakov’s head, the small wood grew gloomy, and the fixer still searching for a change in the weather became actively nervous again. Shading his eyes in the queer light, he peered ahead—a winding road, absolutely snowless. Enough of this, he thought, I’d better eat. As though it had read his mind the nag came to a stop before he pulled the reins. Yakov got down off the seat, and taking hold of the bridle, drew the horse to the side of the road. The horse spread its hind legs and spattered a yellow stream on the road. Yakov urinated on some brown ferns. Feeling better, he tore up several handfuls of dry tussocky grass, and since he could locate no feedbag in the wagon, fed it in fistfuls to the nag. The horse, its sides heaving, chewed with its eroded yellow teeth until the grass foamed. The fixer’s stomach rumbled. He sat under a sunlit tree, raised his sheepskin collar, and opened the food parcel. He ate part of a cold boiled potato, chewing slowly, then half a cucumber sprinkled with coarse salt, with a piece of sour black bread. Ah, for some tea, he thought, or if not that, some sweetened hot water. Yakov fell asleep with his back to the tree, awoke in a hurry, and climbed up on the wagon.
      “It’s late, goddamit, come on, move.”
      The nag wouldn’t budge. The fixer reached for the switch. On second thought he climbed down, unhitched the rusty bucket and went looking for water. When he found a little stream the pail leaked, but he offered it, half full, to the horse, who wouldn’t drink.
      “Games I don’t play.” Yakov poured out the water, hitched the bucket on the hook under the wagon, and stepped up to the seat. He waved the switch till it whistled. The nag, lowering his ears, moved forward, if one could call it movement. At least it wasn’t where it had been before. The fixer again whistled the air with the switch, and the horse, after an indecisive minute, began to trot. The wagon rattled on.
      They had gone on a while when the wagon caught up with an old woman, a pilgrim walking slowly in the road, leaning on her long staff, a heavy peasant in black, wearing men’s shoes and carrying a knapsack, a thick shawl wrapped around her head.
      He drew over to the side to pass her but as he did Yakov called out, “A ride, granny?”
      “May Jesus bless you.” She had three gray teeth.
      Jesus he didn’t need. Bad luck, he thought. Yakov helped pull her up to the wagon seat and touched the nag with the birch whip. To his surprise the horse took up his trot. Then as the road turned, the right wheel struck a rock and broke with a crunch. The wagon teetered and sagged at the rear, the left wheel tilted inward.
      The old woman crossed herself, slowly climbed down to the road, and walked on with her heavy stick. She did not look back.
      Yakov cursed Shmuel for wishing the wagon on him. Jumping to the ground he examined the broken wheel. Its worn metal ring had come off.