The Town Read online

  “Shit,” Roberto said finally.

  Adam cleared his throat, starting to say something, then thought better of it.

  “I never said anything against your old man, you know. Even after everything you told me, I always thought he was pretty cool. But, Ad Man, your dad’s an asshole.”

  Adam nodded miserably.

  “Fuck.”

  There was a horn honk behind them. Adam jumped, turning around to see a mustached man in a beat-up Chevy waving them away from the gas pumps. “You’re blocking my way!” he yelled.

  Adam followed Roberto out to the sidewalk. “You can come out and visit,” he said. “You could stay for, like, a week or two. Have your mom and dad pick you up. If it’s all right with them,” he added.

  “Or you could come back here. Stay with us.”

  Adam smiled. “Even better.”

  Roberto shook his head. “Arizona, huh?”

  “Arizona.”

  “It’s gonna be tough, man. You’ll have to go to an all-new school, have to meet new people, make friends. Probably everyone there’s known each other since birth, so you’ll be an outsider. Big ol’ hillbilly kids’ll kick your ass for no reason.”

  Adam hadn’t thought of that.

  “There’ll be nothing to do but watch TV and stare out at the cactus.”

  “I’ll tell ’em I’m a major surfer from California. They’ve probably never even seen an ocean. What do they know? I’ll lie my way to the top of the school.”

  Roberto smiled. “There are some possibilities there.”

  They were both silent as they started to walk back toward the neighborhood. It was going to be as tough for Roberto, Adam knew, as it would be for him. He was Roberto’s best friend, and Roberto would have to find someone new to hang with, too.

  They were both depressed as they headed down the alley.

  Adam looked over at his friend. “You gotta write to me, man. You gotta keep me up on current events, tell me what’s going on in the real world so I don’t turn into some inbred Jed.”

  “I will,” Roberto promised. “I’ll write to you, like, once a week. And I’ll put in a new Spidey card every time.”

  Adam tried to smile. “Yeah. That’s cool.”

  “They probably don’t have ’em out there.”

  “Probably not.”

  But Roberto wasn’t much of a writer, he knew. His friend might send a letter or two the first couple weeks, but that would taper off as he found some new best friend, and probably by the time school started there wouldn’t be any letters at all.

  Once his family moved, he might never see Roberto again.

  He tried to imagine what his friend would be like in ten years, what kind of job he’d have, whether or not he’d go to college. Would Roberto’s life turn out differently because he wasn’t there with him? Would his life turn out differently? They were good influences on each other, Roberto’s mom had always said. Maybe their new friends wouldn’t have as much influence, wouldn’t be as good.

  Roberto cleared his throat, looked away. “You’ll still be my best friend,” he said embarrassedly.

  “Yeah,” Adam said.

  He wiped his eyes, and tried to tell himself that they were only watering because of the smog.

  2

  In her dream, Gregory was a little boy again. He was standing on the steps of the old church in Arizona, staring down at what looked like the dead body of a deformed child. Wind was blowing, a strong wind, kicking up dust, and there were shapes in the dust, vague, dark outlines that resembled the small, twisted body on the steps.

  She herself was a viewer of this scene but not a participant in it, and though she wanted to call out to her son, wanted to yell for Gregory to get away from the body and run into the church, she could only stand there and watch as he bent down and tentatively touched the figure’s face.

  The wind instantly grew stronger, and the deformed child lurched to its feet. She saw unnaturally short legs and unnaturally long arms, a tilted head that was far too large for the supporting neck and was of a disturbingly peculiar shape. Gregory backed up, backed away, but he was already changing, his head enlarging, his arms lengthening, his legs shriveling, and in a few brief seconds, he became the identical twin of the malformed child before him. He screamed, a piercing cry that carried over the howling wind, and then the blowing dust obscured them both, fading them into the vague shapes that were hovering behind the curtain of sand.

  She awoke drenched with sweat.

  She sat up, breathing heavily, a muffled pain in her chest. She did not know what this dream meant, but it did not bode well and it frightened her. Closing her eyes again, she folded her hands, bent her head.

  Prayed.

  Two

  1

  They followed the moving van, making quick stops only for gas and pee breaks. Gregory didn’t trust movers on general principle, and he wasn’t about to let these jokers out of his sight. They looked like men even a carnival wouldn’t hire. The kids had been moaning and complaining since Phoenix, begging to stop at McDonald’s or Taco Bell or some other fast-food place for lunch, but he told them to eat the pretzels and chips they’d brought along.

  They sped through Tucson, headed east toward Wilcox.

  The night before last, they’d had a going-away party with all of their friends and family, a big blowout at Debbie and John’s that had spilled back to their own house, the revelers sitting on packed boxes and the floor, drinking out of paper cups placed on the empty kitchen counter. Julia had ended up crying most of the evening, hugging people and promising to keep in touch, accepting invitations to stay at various homes on the promised frequent Southern California vacations, issuing invitations to all and sundry to visit them in Arizona, but he himself had not teared up at all. He’d been more excited than sad, looking more toward the future than the past, and that forward-looking optimism still held. He felt good driving across the desert, and despite the kids’ complaints and Julia’s sagging spirits, he felt happy. They were getting a new start, their future was bright and wide open, and they had the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted.

  God bless the lottery.

  They’d bought a new vehicle for the trip, a Dodge van, and it was nice to experience a smooth ride, air-conditioning that actually worked, and a state-of-the-art radio/cassette/CD player. He’d grown used to the tepid air-conditioning and rough-and-ragged suspension of the old Ford, and the striking contrast between the two vehicles made the van’s pleasures that much more enjoyable.

  He glanced in the rearview mirror, saw Sasha reading a Dean Koontz book, Adam and Teo playing Old Maid. Behind them, in the backseat of the van, his mother stared straight ahead. Her eyes met his in the mirror, and she favored him with a slight smile.

  He smiled back.

  His mother was with them on a trial basis. She’d brought her clothes and Bible and a few other necessities, but she had not even tried to sell her house, her furniture was still safely in place inside the home, and she reserved the right to return at any time. As he’d expected, as he’d known, she was not really enthused about leaving her friends and her church and the rest of her family, but she did seem to recognize that she was not as young as she once had been, and since he was her only son, she’d agreed to come. On some level, she seemed to realize that she was more dependent on him than she was ordinarily willing to admit, and he was encouraged by the fact that her love for her family appeared to be stronger than her ties to the Molokan community.

  This was the first time in his life he’d ever gotten that impression.

  Like most of the other Molokan women her age, his mother lived for church, and her entire life revolved around the religion and its attendant social functions. She was getting on in years, though, and lately she’d been spending even more time at church than usual, going to funerals. He didn’t like her driving into East L.A. by herself. There was a lot of gang activity in the neighborhood adjacent to the church, but she continued to se
e the area as it had been years ago, her mind not recognizing the changes that the years had wrought. He expected to hear one day that his mother or one of her friends had been gunned down in a drive-by or mugged on their way to their cars, but so far the Chicano gang members and the strangely garbed Russian churchgoers had managed to peacefully coexist.

  He himself had not gone to church for years, not since they’d moved to California. As a child, his parents had taken him to church each Sunday. The service lasted all day, and though he liked eating the food when they broke for lunch—the cucumbers and tomatoes, the freshly baked bread and the freshly cooked lopsha—he had been frightened of the service itself, of the old men and women and the way they acted when the Holy Spirit entered them. These were his relatives and his parents’ friends, people he knew and saw on a daily basis, but they seemed somehow different in church, like strangers, and he held tightly to his parents’ hands as, one after the other, the churchgoers were possessed by the Holy Spirit and began leaping up from their benches, lurching spasmodically across the open room, stomping loudly on the hardwood floor, and crying out in Russian. It was disturbing to see, this sudden abandonment of ordinary behavior and individual personality, terrifying even to a little boy who had been raised in the religion. There was one old, old man who had to be in his eighties, a man he didn’t know and saw only at church, who scared him even more than the others, who jumped up in the air with his eyes closed, screaming and lashing out with his hands. Once, he’d even had a vivid nightmare about the old man, a dream he’d never forgotten, and in which the possessed man, eyes closed, screaming, had attacked him, leaping on him, hitting him, taking him down.

  Gregory himself had never felt the intrusion of the Holy Spirit into his body, and as a child that had worried him. He felt guilty, unworthy, because God did not see fit to possess him. Even his parents were periodically invaded by the Holy Spirit, his father weaving back and forth in place, his mother crying and humming psalms as she danced, and though no one ever said anything to him, Gregory always assumed that the other Molokans viewed him as not being sufficiently good or righteous, not deserving enough to be touched by God.

  It was one of the many reasons that, try as he might, he attended church as an outsider, as an observer, rather than a participant.

  The Molokan religion was indeed a strange one, but although he had not felt a part of it, he’d always felt protective of it. In McGuane, they’d been the object of ridicule, the town joke, harassed by hard-drinking cowboys and teetotaling Mormons alike. Molokans were foreign, they spoke with Russian accents, they were clannish, and in small-town America that made them suspect.

  He remembered one Sunday morning in particular, when some cowboy-hatted rednecks outside the bar on the way to the church made fun of their clothes, derisively referring to his father as a “milk drinker.” That was exactly what the word “Molokan” meant, but it sounded mocking and disdainful coming from their mouths. He and his parents had ignored the men, who’d hooted and hollered as they passed by, and Gregory had felt ashamed of both his father and his religion. It was at that moment that he’d decided he would not go to church when he grew up.

  He also decided that he would come back and kick those rednecks’ asses.

  Those same feelings had once again emerged within him in the mid-eighties, during the witch-hunting McMartin days in Los Angeles, when the public seemed to see child-molesting satanists behind every tree. Someone had reported spotting a group of devil worshipers in a cemetery, and the LAPD had ended up disrupting a Molokan burial service. It was understandable. The anonymous tipster had reported a group of robed figures, all dressed in white, walking through a graveyard at night, chanting, and the police had been obliged to investigate. But the Molokans, also understandably, were not only deeply offended but angry.

  Despite America’s guarantee of religious freedom, they had never had an easy time of it, and what the Constitution promised and how citizens actually acted were two different things. The Molokans had left Russia, fleeing religious persecution from the czar and the Russian Orthodox Church. They were pacifists, living strictly by the laws of the Bible, and the fact that they recognized both Christian holidays and Jewish celebrations such as Passover led to as much misunderstanding in the United States as it had in Russia. Even more offensive to Americans was the fact that Molokans were conscientious objectors, opposed on religious grounds to participation in the military. That had led to discrimination against them in the United States as well, particularly during World War II, and far too often that prejudice had been validated and reinforced by civic authority.

  The police had not been the problem here, however. It was the media. The cops had merely investigated, apologized, and moved on, but the local news stations, in their insane quest for ratings, had milked the “satanist” angle for all it was worth. Million-dollar anchors had joked about smog and marine layers with their comical weathermen, then expertly shifted their smiles into expressions of grim seriousness and solemnly reported that perpetrators of the satanic rituals described by molested preschool children had been spotted desecrating a cemetery in East L.A.

  Even though it was not true.

  Even though the police had already rejected and discounted any connection between the Molokan burial service, satanism, and child molestation.

  He’d been embarrassed by the Molokans when they’d made the news for those two days, but he’d also been angry at their accusers and had fired off a series of letters to the local television stations and the Los Angeles Times, taking them to task for their inaccurate and inflammatory reporting.

  Embarrassment and defensiveness.

  It was the constant duality of his life.

  Teo and Adam finally tired of their Old Maid game, and Teo asked him for the hundredth time to describe their new home to her. Adam and Sasha both groaned loudly, but Gregory launched into a by-now-pat spiel, recounting how he and their mother had found the house and instantly fallen in love with it, painting a picture of the huge lot on which the house sat and the hill that abutted the back of the property, and describing the location of each of their bedrooms and how they were going to fix them up.

  He caught his mother’s gaze in the rearview mirror once again.

  He’d saved the best news for last, and it was time to reveal it.

  “There’s also a banya,” he said.

  His mother’s eyes widened. There was a tinge of excitement in her voice. “Banya?”

  He smiled. “Remember the Shubins? They used to live right next to our new house—”

  “The Megan place?”

  “Yes!” he laughed. “The Megan place. It’s our place now. And the Shubins’ burned down quite a while ago, so the people who bought the Megan place bought their property as well, and now it’s all ours. Both lots. There’s nothing left of the Shubins’ house at all, but the banya’s still there.”

  “Completely untouched,” Julia said.

  “What’s a banya?” Teo asked.

  “It’s a bathhouse,” Julia explained. “In the old days, houses didn’t have water or indoor bathrooms. You had to get water from a well, and you had to go to the bathroom in an outhouse. And instead of taking a bath or a shower, people used banyas.”

  “Not all people,” Gregory amended.

  “Russians,” Julia said. “Americans filled up tubs with water or took sponge baths, but Russians used the banya. The women and girls would all go in at once, and the men and boys would all go in later.”

  “They were all naked?” Teo giggled.

  Julia smiled. “Yes. They sat around on benches and heated rocks in a fire and put them in the middle of the floor and poured water over them to make steam. The steam cleaned the skin, and they used eucalyptus branches to lightly slap their back and chest and legs.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it smelled good. And they thought it helped open the pores and get them even cleaner. Afterward, they’d go down to a stream or a river and rinse off w
ith cold water.”

  “So it’s just like a steam bath,” Sasha said.

  “Yes,” Julia agreed. “Like a steam bath.”

  “And we have one?” Adam grinned. “That’s cool.”

  “Dork,” Sasha said, hitting him with her elbow.

  “I used to do it myself,” Gregory said.

  Sasha grimaced. “That’s gross. I don’t even want to think about it.”

  Gregory and Julia laughed, and they followed the moving truck off the interstate and onto the highway that led to McGuane.

  It was an hour or so later when his mother suddenly let out a Russian oath. There was a hint of panic or fear in her voice, and Gregory quickly turned around to make sure she was okay, that nothing was wrong.

  A stricken look had come over her face. “Jedushka Di Muvedushka,” she said.

  Oh, no, he thought.

  He fixed her with a glare and shook his head, indicating the kids, before turning back around to face the road.

  She paid no attention to his hints. “You don’t ask him to come, do you?”

  He sighed, not knowing whether to argue with her or humor her. “I forgot,” he said.

  “Jedooshka Dee—what?” Adam asked.

  “Muvedushka. Moo-VEH-doosh-ka.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s the Owner of the House.” His mother’s voice sounded pinched and strained.

  “It’s a Russian”—Superstition, he’d been about to say—“tradition,” he said instead. He’d never been able to make his mother understand that he and Julia did not hold the same beliefs she did, that they had purposely kept their children from many of them, and he shot Julia a glance of apology.

  She nodded, understanding.

  “Is my fault,” his mother said in the back. “I should have told you. Should have remind you.”

  “It’s okay,” Gregory said.

  “It’s okay,” Julia repeated.

  “I should have known. I should have ask him to come myself.”