The Town (20 page)

“Kind of creepy, isn’t it? I stayed away from that place the first couple of months after I quit because I didn’t want to face Marge or her gang, but then I thought that was stupid. This is my town, too, and I’m not about to go around being afraid to do something or go somewhere because of them.

“So I started going to the library once a week. At first I was militant about it. I’d just go in there and grin at her as she checked out my books for me, but gradually things simmered down, and now I’m just like a regular patron. We sort of peacefully coexist.”

Julia shook her head. “Strange.”

“There’s something to be said for the anonymity of a big city. There, if you have a problem like this, you just go somewhere else. You pick another library.”

“Or talk to that person’s supervisor.”

“Exactly. But here, you’re bound to see that person again. You have to deal with her. It’s tough.”

“I take it McGuane has a lot of . . . ‘militia sympathizers, ’ for want of a better word.”

“You’re right about that,” Deanna said.

“Why do you think that is?”

Deanna shrugged. “Who knows? My theory is that these people are basically dissatisfied with their own lives, unhappy with their marriages or their jobs or whatever, and they need someone to hate. For some reason, hating someone else makes them feel better about themselves. And with the Soviet Union gone, they have no real enemy anymore. No organized enemy, that is. No one they can blame all their conspiracies on.”

“So now they hate
our
government.”

“Pretty much. I mean, these are the same people who were so pro-American back in the eighties that they wanted to bomb Libya and bomb Iran and bomb Iraq and bomb Russia. Now they want to bomb abortion clinics and government offices.”

Julia smiled. “Maybe they just like to bomb things.”

“Maybe. But it seems to me that if everyone would just live their own lives, would just concentrate on themselves and not worry about what everyone else is doing, we’d all be a lot better off. Happy people don’t march in protests or spend their weekends playing soldier. These guys are losers, and if they’d just try to fix their own lives rather than dictate to everyone else how they should think and what they should do, we’d all be a lot better off.”

“I agree.” Julia looked out at the garden and sighed.

“The frightening thing is not just how paranoid and cynical these people are, but how stupid. They don’t trust the government. Fine. But they don’t trust anything else, either. Except their own loony little network of people. Researched, verified stories from newspapers they don’t buy, but some anonymous posting on the Internet they accept as gospel. Some disgruntled janitor from Kentucky comes home after work, eats his Hamburger Helper and starts ranting on the computer, and they believe him more than they do the trained journalists who work for legitimate news-gathering services. It’s scary.”

Deanna laughed. “I knew I liked you.”

“You know, Gregory wanted to move back to McGuane because he thought it would be a better place to raise the kids. Southern California’s so full of drugs and gang violence and everything that it didn’t seem like a great environment for Adam and Teo to grow up in. He wanted to come back here because he thought a small-town atmosphere might be better. I thought so, too. Originally.”

“And now?”

“I don’t know.”

Deanna smiled.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing . . .”

“What?”

“It’s just that it’s still hard for me to think of Gregory Tomasov as someone’s dad, as a middle-aged guy worried about where to raise his kids. In my mind, he’s still that obnoxious teenager who tried to sneak into the girls’ locker room.”

“Gregory?”

“Him and a couple of his friends. The coach caught them and gave them the choice of being suspended or joining the track team. At the time, McGuane High didn’t have enough boys to even
have
a track team. Gregory, Tony, and Mike pushed them just above the minimum limit.”

Julia laughed. “So tell me about Gregory back then. I can’t even
see
him trying to sneak into a girls’ locker room.”

“Oh, he did more than that, let me tell you. A lot of those Molokan boys were hell-raisers. I don’t know if they were trying to rebel against their background or what, but they were holy terrors back then.”

“Same thing in L.A.,” Julia said. “I even dated some of those boys.”

“Then you know what I’m talking about. And Gregory was one of them. He was smarter than most of the other kids, more . . . I don’t know . . . modern, I would say, but outside the classroom he was just as bad.” She grew thoughtful. “Although he seemed to change quite a bit after his dad died. He wasn’t here that long afterward—he and his mom moved to California—but there was a big difference in the way he acted. It was like he suddenly turned into an adult or something. He was quiet, serious, seemed to have lost his sense of humor.” She met Julia’s eyes. “I guess I
can
imagine him as a middle-aged man. I’d almost forgotten about that Gregory.”

“Every time I ask his mother about what he was like as a boy, she tells me what a perfect and well-behaved child he was.”

Deanna laughed.

“I always suspected she was whitewashing the truth.”

“Or she didn’t know the truth.” Deanna leaned forward. “Let me tell you what he was
really
like . . .”

 

“I talked to Deanna today.”

Gregory shifted his pillow against the headboard, opened his
Time
. “Yeah?”

“About you.”

He laughed. “I’ll bet she had some stories to tell.”

“And tell them she did.” Julia pushed down his magazine. “Did you really put red dye in the school swimming pool and then claim it was from girls who were having their period?”

“I didn’t put the dye in.”

“But you were there.”

“I plead the Fifth.”

“And you told the gym teachers that it was from girls’ periods?”

He grinned. “Yeah. I guess I did.”

She hit his shoulder. “You were a brat!”

“I probably was,” he admitted, laughing.

“That’s it!” she said. “That’s it!” She started tickling him, and he dropped his magazine to defend himself. She got in a few good underarm shots before he grabbed hold of both her hands.

She gave him a quick kiss even as she struggled to escape. “So what was Deanna like?”

He shrugged. “Stuck-up bitch.”

She stopped struggling. It had been clear from what Deanna said that she and Gregory had not gotten along as kids, but there hadn’t been any maliciousness in her descriptions, any resentment in her retelling of old stories. These were things that had happened long ago, and she obviously viewed them as simply humorous anecdotes from childhood.

There hadn’t been this pettiness in her voice, this flat meanness.

Julia pulled her arms free. “What did you say?”

“I said she was a stuck-up little bitch.”

“That’s what I thought you said.”

“And she was.”

“She’s not now.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

She moved away from him. “I don’t believe this.”

“I know you’re friends and all, and I’m glad you’ve met someone you like, but that doesn’t mean I have to like them.”

He reached for her, but she pushed him back. The mood was shattered, and though she’d wanted to make love tonight, she rebuffed his advances and turned away, pulling the covers over her, as he picked up his
Time
and resumed reading.

Jesse Tallfeather dropped the empty Mountain Dew can on the ground at his feet and kicked it into the pile next to the kiln. He walked slowly through the statuary.

Business sucked.

If things didn’t improve—and fast—he was going to have to declare bankruptcy. He wished he could get out from underneath this, but he’d looked at it from every angle possible, and he just didn’t see a way. He sure as shit wouldn’t be able to sell the business. No one on the reservation had the cash. Hell, no one in McGuane had the cash. Most of the other shop and store owners were barely hanging on themselves. Unless he could somehow convince that Molokan who won the lottery to either purchase the place or come in as a partner—and the chances of that were pretty damn slim—he was going to go down with the ship.

The ironic thing was that he hadn’t even wanted to get involved with the statuary in the first place. His father had started the business, and his brother Bill had been set up to follow in his footsteps, but then Bill had up and run off with Hank Wilson’s teenage daughter, hightailing it out of town, and Jesse had sort of ended up with the statuary by default.

In his father’s day, things had been good. The family had made a decent, comfortable living. But times had changed, and there wasn’t much call for statues any more. No one put them on gravesites these days, and even decorative driveway figures and lawn ornaments were not much in demand. He still sold some small stuff—an occasional fountain or birdbath or those little cement quails and ducks that old ladies liked to put in their gardens—but he’d been barely making a living for the past several years, and, unless there was a miracle, it looked like he was soon going to have to shut down completely.

He sighed. If McGuane had a casino he wouldn’t have any of these problems. He’d wished many times that their tribe would jump on the casino bandwagon. Up north, the Navajos had nixed the idea, but a lot of other tribes throughout the Southwest had gotten rich off gambling, and there were no casinos at all in Rio Verde County. It was virgin territory, and since theirs was the only reservation in this particular corner of the state, they would have a virtual monopoly.

It was an enticing idea but, so far, not one that had caught on.

Although reservation casinos were almost universally successful, he was consistently surprised by the hostility they generated among politicians and the media. The idea that Indians were actually making money and succeeding on their own seemed to really tick them off. Even the so-called activists who were always raising money for reservation doctors and social services were unhappy about casinos.

Of course, he knew, they were supposed to be all noble and natural because they were what white America now called “Native Americans.” That meant that their job was to live in hogans and tepees and look picturesque for the tourists driving by in their BMWs. They were
not
supposed to want anything better or more modern for themselves. They weren’t supposed to run casinos but were supposed to squat in the dirt in native attire grinding corn in metates. They were supposed to live up to their media image, to be one with the land or some such bullshit and if they
were
to succumb to commercialization, it was preferred that the method be crouching on blankets by the side of the road and selling turquoise jewelry.

That whole aspect of contemporary American culture made him sick. The obsession with appearances. It was okay to build roads through sacred land but not to drop a McDonald’s wrapper on the road. Hell, give him a whole sandstorm’s worth of windblown trash in the desert rather than new development. Did people really believe that a beer bottle left on the ground by a camper was more harmful to the environment than a new subdivision?

It was this focus on neatness and cleanliness and a false antiseptic order that bothered him so. Nature was not clean, nature was not orderly. It was not like a suburban lawn, with everything carefully arranged and perfectly placed, and if these well-meaning people were really interested in nature they would abandon their cosmetic attempts to prettify its appearance and concern themselves with substantive issues.

He himself didn’t even like nature.

Give him a nice new casino any day.

He imagined himself walking through an air-conditioned lobby, dressed in a suit and tie, nodding familiarly to the high rollers. Around him were video slots, computerized blackjack, wall-to-wall carpeting, and piped-in music. It was a new world, a different world, and one that he would be more than happy to join.

But for now, this was home.

Jesse looked around the yard at the statues.
Winged Victory
, sandwiched between two anonymous Roman-style pedestal busts, stared back at him from a slightly raised section of ground to the left of the kilns. A trio of Michelangelo’s
David
s looked coyly toward a pair of
Venus de Milo
s. He started walking slowly through the yard. He stretched out his hands, let his fingers slide over the smooth figures as he passed by. The statuary reminded him of a junkyard. There were the same crowded narrow aisles, only the objects flanking the dirt paths were new cement and plaster rather than wrecked metal.

He liked the cool feel of the statues against his skin, liked the feel of the hot sun on his face. He had walked this walk so many times that he could do it blindfolded. He knew where everything was, and he remembered that last year when he’d actually sold a major piece to one of the Copper Days tourists it had thrown him off for a while. The yard had not seemed the same, and he’d found that he missed the sold statue.

Missed it?

Yes, he had, and he realized for the first time that, despite his initial resistance, he would miss this entire place if he had to give it up. He would honestly regret losing the statuary, would be sad having to say good-bye to all this. It had grown on him, incrementally, become a part of him over the years and, as much as he hated to admit it, it was now his home.

He reached the chain-link fence and turned around.

At the far end of the aisle,
Winged Victory
was staring at him.

He frowned. That wasn’t possible. The large statue had always faced the sales office. Hell, he’d just walked past it and it had been facing the opposite direction.