The Town Read online

  That was the one that intrigued him the most. He’d learned most of the bones of the body in school last year, and that particular bone had jumped out at him the first time he saw it. It looked just like a femur bone, a small femur, and whenever he came into the bathhouse he always stopped to look at it.

  He did the same thing this time, crouching down before it, once again trying to imagine where it had come from, how it had gotten here, feeling a delicious tingle of fear pass through him as he examined the yellowing object.

  But the bone was only an appetizer.

  He stood, turned.

  At the back of the structure was the thing that really scared him, the thing that had sent him running back out into Babunya’s arms that first day and had haunted his nightmares ever since. The thing that had made him break his promise to his grandmother never to go into the banya alone.

  The shadow.

  It hovered on the adobe wall above the broken benches, bigger than life. The profile of a man. A Russian man with a fat stomach and a full, chest-length beard.

  It was not a stain or discoloration, was not imprinted onto the wall, but was an honest-to-God shadow, and there was about it the insubstantiality of something that was only a shaded copy of an actual object.

  Only there was no object. There was no source within the banya or within the sight line out the doorway, no comparable shape that it was thrown by. The shadow existed in seeming defiance of the laws of science, and he’d thought about it and thought about it, tried to attribute its form to everything from the weeds outside to the wooden beams of the ceiling inside, but nothing worked. For one thing, the shadow was always there, clear sky or cloudy, its contours immutable and unchanging. For another, it was not an accidental resemblance. It was not a coincidental configuration of images that happened to form the semblance of a man but was a specific, definite figure that could not under any circumstances be interpreted as anything else.

  There was something foreboding about the shape itself, about the man being portrayed, something stern and commanding about his thick body and the way his head was held so unnaturally straight, something intimidating about the figure that, combined with the shadow’s unknown origin, lent to the entire banya an aura of dread.

  Adam gathered his strength, looked up. He saw the silhouetted profile, the strong brow and thick beard, and he had to force himself not to turn away. His heart was pounding, and the air inside the bathhouse suddenly felt cold. The shadow seemed to deepen as he stared at it, the entire interior of the banya growing darker around it, and for a fraction of a second it appeared to have three-dimensional depth.

  He thought he heard a sigh, a whisper, and, his pulse rate shifting into high gear, he bolted out of the banya and back into the sunlight, running as fast as he could, not stopping until he had reached the line of paloverdes.

  It was the longest he had ever stayed in the banya, and he was proud of himself for that. He was getting braver. Always before, he had been out the door immediately after setting eyes on the shadow, but this time he’d been able to look at it for a moment before having to run.

  He shivered, thinking of that sigh, that whisper, and quickly started back down the path toward the house.

  Next time, he would borrow Sasha’s watch and time himself, see if he couldn’t stay in there a little longer each visit.

  He slowed down and turned to look behind him, but the banya was already hidden behind boulders and trees. He stood there for a moment, catching his breath, then continued on.

  It was hard for him to believe that the bathhouse had ever really been used. Even if it hadn’t been scary, he couldn’t imagine himself going in there, getting naked, and sitting around with other guys while they whipped themselves with tree branches. Part of him felt embarrassed even to be related to people who did that.

  But of course, that was not really anything new.

  He’d often been embarrassed about his background.

  Last year, they’d had an “ethnic pride” day at school, and it had been pure hell. They were all supposed to share the foods, clothes, language, and traditions of their families’ cultures with the other members of the class, and he’d brought in some borscht his mom had made. Mrs. Anders had insisted on pronouncing “borscht” the way it was spelled, sounding out the silent “t,” and no matter how often he said it correctly, she refused to vary her pronunciation. He had the feeling she was trying to correct him, as though she was hinting to him that he said the word wrong, and that made him feel even more embarrassed. It was as if she was making fun of him, something she did not do with Ve Phan or George Saatjian or any of the other kids in class.

  He’d passed out the wooden spoons and small sample bowls of the Russian soup and had been expected to talk about the history of the Molokans as the class ate, to describe how they acted and what they believed in, and he’d said most of what he’d planned to say, but he’d been too embarrassed to bring up the pacifism. It was at the core of the Molokan religion, was what Babunya had drilled into his head since he was little, but it shamed him to admit to it. He honestly believed in those principles, deep down, but at the same time he didn’t really want to. Babunya had always told him that it was in man’s nature to kill, that Cain, the first truly human being in the Bible, the first made from the union of man and woman rather than by God, had killed his brother. It was an evil act, but after he had murdered his brother, he had been marked by God, protected from all human justice, and she said that this not only showed God’s mercy and forgiveness but indicated that God did not want humans to judge other humans, that He forbade revenge, that only He could mete out punishment. It was a prohibition against violence, against war, against the death penalty, and Molokans took their pacifism very seriously. They had left their mother country for it, and they had refused to fight in any of America’s wars because of it.

  That was all well and good, and when he was in his bed in his pajamas and Babunya was telling him Bible stories, it was nice to hear, and he believed in it. But at school those ideas seemed not only irrelevant but embarrassing. It was impossible not to want to hurt people who hurt you, and more than once he had wished Jason Aguilar or Gauvin Jefferson or Teech Sayles dead. Hell, if he’d still said his prayers, he probably would have prayed for God to strike them down. But he had stopped praying several years back. He was not really sure why that was, but at some point he had just felt foolish clasping his hands together and asking God for favors.

  It was not something he would ever admit to Babunya, though.

  The truth was, he was not sure if he even was a Molokan. His family didn’t go to church anymore, and even when they had gone, when he was little, they’d gone to a Presbyterian church in Norwalk.

  His parents also hadn’t taught him Russian, and he knew that was one thing Babunya was not happy about. He knew a few words here and there—popolk, belly button; zhopa, butt; babunya, grandma; dushiska, sweetie—but he couldn’t even remember the short Russian prayer his grandmother had made him say each Thanksgiving when he was younger. Even Babunya herself spoke less Russian than she used to. When he was little, his parents and his grandmother used to talk in Russian all the time, especially when it was something they didn’t want him to hear. When his dad used to talk to Babunya on the phone, his end of the conversation was often entirely in Russian. But that had changed over the years and now they almost always spoke English.

  He walked past the cottonwood around to the front of the house. His mom, dad, and Babunya were now sitting on the front porch, his dad reading the newspaper, his mom reading a magazine, Babunya crocheting. Teo was playing with her Barbies on the steps. The sound of rap music blasting from one of the upper side windows told him that Sasha, as usual, was in her room.

  He’d been planning to explore the front yard and see if he could find any more snakeskins, but the whole idea of all of them sitting around, doing family things together, made him gag, and he knew that he had to get away. His dad might be trying to get into
all that small-town family-values crap, but on the off chance that a potential or future friend walked past on the road and saw them acting like rejects from the 700 Club, he needed to disassociate himself. He didn’t want to be humiliated.

  There was nothing more uncool than hanging with your parents.

  He walked up to the porch steps, grabbed the railing and looked up at his dad. “Can I walk down to the store?” he asked.

  “Which store?”

  “Does it matter? They’re both practically right next to each other.”

  “Why?” his mom asked.

  “Jeez! Am I going to get the third degree every time I want to leave the yard? You let me and Roberto go almost everywhere. And that was in California. Now I can’t even walk a couple of blocks in this crummy little town?”

  His dad smiled. “Go ahead.” He looked at his mother. “What’s he going to do?”

  “Be back in forty-five minutes,” she said.

  He nodded and took off running before Teo could say that she wanted to go too.

  At the store he made a friend.

  It was purely by accident. He was standing by himself, next to the comic books rack, glancing through the new Spiderman, when a kid about his own age came into the small market, causing the bell over the door to jingle. Adam looked up, saw a boy with longish hair, wearing torn jeans and a Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt, and then went back to his comic book without giving the kid a second thought.

  The boy said something to the clerk, then walked over to where Adam was standing. Adam stepped back a pace, and the boy twirled the rack. “Where’s Superman ?” he said, turning back toward the front of the store. “I’m here to pick up the September Superman.”

  “Sorry,” the clerk said, “we’re all out.”

  “You said you’d tell me when they came in.”

  “Sorry. We’ve been busy.”

  “Shit.”

  “I have that one,” Adam offered.

  The boy looked at him for the first time. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I just moved here,” he said. “My name’s Adam.”

  The boy thought for a moment. “You like comics?”

  “No. I’m just looking at these for my health.”

  The kid smiled. “Superman fan?”

  “Spiderman mostly. But I like ’em both.”

  “Me too.” The kid nodded in greeting. “I’m Scott.”

  They were shy with each other at first. It was no longer as easy for Adam to make friends as it had been when he was younger, when every time he’d go to the park or go to the beach he’d make a new friend for the day, someone he’d never see again but who, for those few hours at least, was his best buddy in the world. Scott, too, seemed to be hesitant, unsure of how to proceed, how to tentatively approach the boundary of friendship without coming off like an asshole.

  That was another thing they had in common.

  But by the time they made their way around to the shelf of trading cards next to the candy, they were talking: Adam describing life in the big city, Scott explaining what a hellhole McGuane was for anyone who wasn’t what he termed a “goat roper.”

  Like himself, Scott was going to be in seventh grade, and after they left the store, Scott took him by the school to check the place out. It was bigger than he’d expected and more modern than most of the other buildings in town. The two of them walked up to a drinking fountain on a wall adjoining the tennis court, and Adam got a drink while Scott took out a pen and began writing on the brown stucco above the fountain. He looked up as he wiped off his mouth and saw the word “Pussy” written on the wall—with an arrow pointing down to where he’d been drinking.

  Scott burst out laughing.

  They walked around the empty school, wondering where their classes were going to be, wondering where it would be safe for them to hang out so the eighth- and ninth-graders didn’t beat them up. They took a shortcut across the field to Turquoise Avenue, and Adam invited his new friend to come over, thinking he could show him the banya, but Scott said he was supposed to have been home an hour ago and he’d better get back before his mom threw a fit.

  “Where do you live?” Scott asked.

  “Twenty-one Ore Road.”

  “What’s it look like? Your house?”

  Adam shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s white. Wooden. Two stories. Set back from the road. There’s like a hill behind it and off to the right, and I guess we own that, too.”

  Scott’s eyes widened. “The old Megan place?”

  “I think I heard my dad say something about that.”

  “Cool. I’ll cruise over there tomorrow. What time’re you guys up and about?”

  “Me? Early.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “Everyone should be up and everything by nine or so.”

  “I’ll be there.” Scott started down the street, waved. “And have that Superman ready!”

  “You got it!” Adam called back.

  He started home, feeling good. He’d made his first friend, and that was a big worry off his shoulders. He’d been dreading going to school cold, knowing no one, being “the new guy,” and he was grateful that he’d found a pal.

  And Scott seemed pretty cool.

  Maybe McGuane wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  It was getting late, and he could tell by the angle of the sun and the shadows in the canyon that he’d been gone more than forty-five minutes. He knew his mom would be mad, and he didn’t want to end up being grounded, so he broke into a jog. They’d wound their way around from the store to the school, and though he didn’t know the layout of the town that well, it looked to him like he could cut across a few streets and take a shortcut around the hill behind their house and get home quite a bit faster than he would if he went back the same way he’d come.

  He jogged down unfamiliar streets, following the landmarks of cliffs and hills, and did indeed find a small dirt trail that looked like it led around to their property.

  The banya.

  He’d known he would pass it returning this roundabout way, known he would have to see it in this dying afternoon light, but he hadn’t allowed himself to think about it, had concentrated instead on getting home.

  Now, as he ran between outstretched ocotillo arms and irregularly shaped boulders, he could not help thinking about it.

  And, suddenly, there it was.

  He approached the bathhouse from the back, from a direction he had never come before, seeing it from an angle he had never seen. As expected, the banya stood in shadow, past the ruined foundation of the old house, while the tops of the trees behind it were still in sunlight.

  Inside the bathhouse, he thought, it was probably like night.

  The adobe wall in front of him was the one opposite the door, the one on which the shadow was projected, and he increased his speed, trying not to look at it as he ran by, feeling cold.

  He looked at it anyway, though.

  The banya stood there, door open onto blackness.

  Waiting.

  Shivering, he dashed past it and ran through the rest of the huge yard into the house. Babunya was in the kitchen chopping vegetables, and they exchanged a glance as he came in the back door. She’d seen him through the window, knew the direction from which he had come, and though he saw the look of disapproval on her face, she said nothing. He knew she felt guilty because she had not blessed the banya before walking into it, had made no effort to cleanse it of evil spirits, and she considered herself partially responsible for the banya being the way it was. He didn’t believe any of that, he told himself, not really. But she did, and that spooked him. It gave everything a bit more credibility and made his runs to and from the bathhouse seem less of a game, seem much more ominous.

  “I didn’t go there,” he said in response to her look. “I just came home that way. It was a shortcut.”

  She said nothing, just continued chopping vegetables.

  He
walked out to the living room, where Teo was lying on the floor, watching TV, an open storybook on the carpet in front of her. Neither of his parents was around, and for that he was grateful. They hadn’t seen him come in, and that had probably saved him from a grounding.

  He plopped on the floor next to Teo, poked her in the side. She yelled and hit him.

  He glanced over at her book. Shirley Temple’s Fairy Tales. It had been his mom’s originally, but it had been passed down to Sasha, then to him, then to Teo. In the center of the book, he recalled, was a two-page picture of Rumpelstiltskin, a cavorting dwarf with a sly, evil face, and he thought that that was what Jedushka Di Muvedushka must look like.

  He dreamed that night of Rumpelstiltskin. It was the first nightmare he’d had in their new house, and in his dream the dwarf was naked in the banya, sitting in steam, the shadow wavering above him, hitting himself with leaves, grinning.

  Four

  1

  Gregory walked with his mother to the Molokan church.

  She’d been wanting to go since the first day they’d arrived, but everything had been so hectic, they’d been so busy unpacking and rearranging and getting the long-neglected yard into some semblance of order, that he simply hadn’t had the time to take her.

  Today, though, she had demanded and he had acquiesced, and now the two of them stood in the dirt parking lot in front of the church, she leaning heavily on his arm. He’d wanted to drive down, but she’d insisted that they walk, like they had in the old days, and although it had taken nearly forty minutes to get here, with frequent rest stops, they’d finally arrived.

  Gregory looked around: at the variety store, which began the block of businesses on the other side of the vacant lot to the left of the church, at the wood-frame house on the building’s right flank that had been turned into a nursery. He looked up at the church itself as the two of them approached. He’d expected to have a better memory of the place—after all, his family had spent a lot of time here—but he must have blocked it out, because the church seemed no more familiar to him than the mine office or the town hall or any of the other buildings he’d seen as a child but with which he had had no real involvement. He recognized the church, but it was an impartial, impersonal recognition that contradicted the intimate acquaintance he’d had with the place.