The Town (12 page)

“I’ve had enough for a month.”

They both laughed and sat there for a few moments longer, breathing heavily, not saying anything but remaining unmoving, looking back down the canyon floor to make sure no one was coming, until their breaths grew more shallow and finally faded into normal silence.

“What time is it?” Adam asked. “You got a watch?”

“No. Why? What time do you have to be home?”

“Now, probably.” Adam stood. “Come on, let’s head back.”

Scott got up off the ground, brushed the sand off his pants, and the two of them started up the curving road toward the tiered rows of houses above.

“You heard about what happened to Mrs. Daniels, didn’t you?” Scott asked as they reached the first home.

Adam shook his head. “Never even head of her.”

“She was pregnant and she went into labor, and she was supposed to have a little girl.” His voice lowered ominously. “But it wasn’t a girl.”

“What was it? A boy?”

“It wasn’t even a baby.” He pointed toward the next house up, a small wood-frame home with darkened windows. “It was right there, man. Right in that house.”

“You’re crazy.”

“It was a cactus. She gave birth to a cactus.”

“No way!” Adam said.

“That’s what happened. They’re trying to keep it secret and not let anyone know, but she had a saguaro instead of a baby. A little saguaro cactus with a baby’s face.”

“How do you know?”

“My dad’s friend is a paramedic, and I heard them talking about it. He said it was the freakiest thing he’d ever seen.”

“Was it . . . alive?”

“I guess not. But she was all cut up, and it came out of her, and it had, like, little feet and hands and a face.”

“Jesus.”

They were silent for a moment as they walked past the house.

“This whole fucking town’s haunted,” Scott said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

There was a pause.

“Your house is haunted.”

“No way.”

“Way.”

“Really?”

Scott nodded. “No one’s been able to stay there more than a few months. The people who lived there before, the original people, were all murdered. The dad offed the rest of the family while they were sleeping and then wasted himself. Ever since then, people only last a little while. They get scared off.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

Scott shrugged. “Didn’t think you could take it.”

“So they, like, see things and hear things? Like ghosts and stuff?”

Scott nodded. “You ever see anything?”

Adam thought about mentioning the
banya,
but he didn’t feel like talking about it right now and decided to save it for another time. He shook his head. “Not yet.”

“You will. Take my word for it. Your house is haunted.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not lying.”

Adam looked at him, and the corners of his mouth slowly turned up in a smile. “Cool,” he said.

“S
hit,” Paul said softly.

The stage lights had fallen during the night, the troupers they’d spent all yesterday rigging. Not only had they fallen, but they’d broken—every last damn one of them.

They stood looking at the damage, the dented casings and shattered glass, the overturned tables and cushion-ripped chairs. Gregory bent down, picked up a bent bracket, examined it.

“You must’ve put them in wrong,” Paul said.

Odd shook his head. “We installed those according to spec and added a few new specs of our own. There’s no way this could’ve happened.”

“Well, it did happen, obviously.”

“Someone musta broken in.”

“No one broke in.” Paul kicked at the broken glass with his boot. “Jesus, it looks like a damn earthquake hit this place.”

“A couple of these bolts sheared off,” Gregory said. He held up the bracket and two bolt heads. “This might not have been the cause of it, but even if this bracket bent on its own, the bolts should’ve been able to handle the extra pressure. They’re supposed to be designed for these things.”

Paul sighed. “I don’t need this crap.”

Gregory forced himself to smile. “No problem. We’ll just replace them. I’ll drive over to Tucson and—”

Paul shook his head. “I can’t let you do that. You’ve already wasted enough money on this. It’s my place and my responsibility. I’m thinking we’d be better off to bag the whole project.”

“Bullshit. You didn’t let me finish. I’ll drive to Tucson, explain what happened, show them what we have, and if they won’t replace everything,
then
I’ll buy new lights. The way I see it, this whole thing is the fault of poor workmanship on their part. We installed a faulty product. I’m going to emphasize that people could’ve been killed, tell ’em I’m going to report them to the Better Business Bureau and whatever other agency I can think of. I think they’ll fork over a new set.”

“But do we want a new set?” Odd asked. “You’re right. I think this here’s a faulty product. I think we should try to get our money back and buy something else.”

“We could,” Gregory agreed. “But the point is, we shouldn’t overreact. This is only a temporary setback. It isn’t the end of the world, and we shouldn’t let it derail our plans.”

Odd nodded. “Exactly.”

“Of course
you
guys say that, but I’m the owner,” Paul said gloomily. “I’m the one who pays the insurance bills, and it’s my ass if someone gets hurt because of this.”

“No one’s going to get hurt,” Gregory told him.

“By the time we’re through,” Odd promised, “kids’ll be able to use this thing for a jungle gym and it won’t even sway.”

Gregory took a deep breath. “I could chip in for insurance if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Paul waved him away. “I’m not looking for a co-owner.”

“And I don’t want to be one.”

Paul picked up one of the broken spotlight casings. “Look, let’s get this cleaned up, call the lighting company, and see where we go from there.”

“All right,” Gregory said. He went with Odd to get broom, shovel, and dustpan from the maintenance closet between the men’s and women’s rest rooms, and after taking Polaroids of the overall damage and close-ups of the broken bolts and bent brackets, the three of them spent the better part of the morning cleaning up. The outside tables and those closest to the counter and register weren’t affected, and Paul cordoned off the area of damage with yellow rope so that the morning’s customers would not be inconvenienced.

The place had potential, Gregory thought. The café’s space was easily big enough to accommodate forty or fifty people, and Odd had done a great job of building the small stage against the wall to the left of the counter. Despite Paul’s worries and reservations, they’d gone too far to turn back now, and he knew that his friend would not pull the plug on the project at this point.

Besides, Gregory had already been to the printer and arranged for a whole bunch of flyers to be made up. He was planning to slap them up around town—on the bulletin boards in both markets, in the office windows of the gas stations, in the windows of the bookstore and the hardware store and as many of the other shops as he could. He would put one up on the Community Calendar board in the post office and tack up the rest on various telephone poles around town. That
should
get the word out. If it didn’t, he was prepared to buy a full-page ad in the newsless mixture of Chamber of Commerce PR, high school sports photos, and garage sale announcements known as the
McGuane Monitor.

He had faith that people would come, though. They were going to start with a Talent Night, an open-mike evening in which anybody who wanted to could come up onstage and do anything he or she wanted. Singers. Guitarists. Storytellers. Bands. Comedians. From there, they’d offer slots to the better performers.

It was a seeding of the grass roots, an outlet for local talent previously denied an opportunity to perform in public, and it was precisely that alternative ethos that appealed to him. They were giving people a chance. Providing a potentially receptive audience for garage bands who until now had only annoyed neighbors with their noise and offering exposure to sensitive singer-songwriters who’d been practicing in front of mirrors in their bedrooms.

The café might be dead now, but he would turn that around. He’d build a clientele for this place, build an audience for these performers. This was an exciting opportunity, and he was determined to make the most of it. He had never really pondered what it would be like to have a “career” before. He’d always just had a “job.” But he could see himself as a latter-day Bill Graham—booking name acts, performers on the way up or on the way down, discovering talent, managing careers. Eventually, the café might even have to expand into the hair salon next door. They would need some type of dressing room or backstage area if they were to lure professionals to their venue.

They finished righting the tables and sweeping the floor and taking the debris to the stockroom in the back.

Odd picked up a hanging socket. “I still say that someone did this. Vandals. There’s no way these lights could’ve fallen on their own. Not after the way we set them up.”

“I don’t understand it either,” Gregory admitted.

From behind them came the sound of footsteps, a clearing throat. They turned. Paul stood in the doorway, looking around at the tangled jumble of lights and cords and cables. He took a deep breath. “You think you can rig new lights that won’t collapse and kill people?”

Odd answered, “Of course.”

“By Saturday?”

“No problem.”

Paul nodded. “All right,” he said, turning away. “All right.”

Odd looked over at Gregory. He grinned. “I guess we’re back in business.”

Julia stood in front of the library, not sure if she wanted to go in. She’d finally decided to volunteer, to assist in shelving or checking in books or whatever the library needed done, but she was having second thoughts. There was no rational reason, just a vague feeling of apprehension within her, but if a vague feeling was enough to scare her in her own home, there was no reason one couldn’t just as legitimately steer her away from this.

No. She was neurotic enough as it was. She needed to set her mind to something and do it, follow through with the promises she made to herself and not just flit from one failed intention to another.

She grasped the handle, pulled open the glass door, and stepped inside.

The McGuane Public Library was big enough to be serviceable but small enough to be picturesque. In place of the impersonal bank of computer screens that had supplanted the card catalog in most Southern California libraries, there was an oak filing cabinet set against the far wall, between two open windows. Four reading tables adjoined the two racks of magazines and a glass display case filled with old photographs and mining tools. Fully stocked bookshelves took up the middle two-thirds of the well-lighted room, and a wooden bookcase marked BESTSELLERS AND NEW RELEASES was located just to the right of the checkout counter, where a friendly looking overweight woman was sorting through what looked like a stack of overdue notices.

There were two other women in the library. Patrons. A blond woman approximately her own age standing next to the best-seller rack and reading the dust flap of a new Stephen King book, and a gray-haired old lady sitting at a table with a stack of sewing magazines in front of her.

The library smelled deliciously of old books, the deep, resonant fragrance that had all but disappeared from the climate-controlled environments of most modern libraries. Breathing the familiar, half-forgotten scent took her back to her childhood.

This would be a good place to work.

She was glad she’d come, and she vowed to see it through. She
needed
to see it through. As much as she hated to admit it, she had not been prepared to win the lottery, and she understood now that she was one of those people who required imposed structure in her life, for whom adversity and necessity were motivators. Coming into money was the worst thing that could have happened to her.

She walked up to the front desk, and the overweight woman smiled up at her. “May I help you?”

Julia nodded. “I’d like to volunteer. I don’t know if you need anyone to work here—”

“Honey,” the woman said, “we always need volunteers.” She stood up with some difficulty. “What’s your name?”

“Julia. Julia Tomasov.”

“Molokan, huh?”

Julia nodded, not sure if there was disapproval in the woman’s voice or just simple recognition.

“I don’t remember seeing you before.”

“We just moved back to town. Or rather my husband moved back. He’s from here. I was born in L.A.”

The woman nodded. “I’m Marge Lindsey. The librarian. I have no paid assistants or aides, so everyone else here is strictly volunteer. You ever work at a library before?”

Julia almost gave the librarian her true résumé, but at the last minute she simply nodded and said, “Yes.” She didn’t want to appear to be competing or engaging in any sort of one-upmanship, and she had the feeling that in a place like McGuane, any prior experience would be seen as a threat. This was the woman for whom she would be working, and she was determined to remain on the librarian’s good side.

“Good. We can use all the help we can get. As I said, I’m the only paid staff member here. The library’s county-funded, and in addition to the money for my salary, we receive only a small stipend for purchases each year, so anything beyond that is strictly volunteer. Most of our acquisitions are from donations, and our volunteers are the ones who sort and catalog and index and repair the books. They also shelve, and sometimes check in and check out.” Her eyes swept Julia’s face to gauge her reaction, and Julia smiled pleasantly.