The Town (31 page)

He walked directly to the van without looking back, placed the grocery sack on the passenger seat next to him, and made a U-turn in the middle of the street.

He drove.

He knew there was cold milk that he needed to get into the refrigerator, but instead of going straight home he headed up to the Molokan cemetery. He had not consciously intended that to be his destination and was not even fully cognizant of the fact that that was where he was heading until he was on the narrow road winding up the ridge.

Gregory parked in front of the gates and got out of the van, not bothering to lock it. Although he could not see the huge, gaping pit of the mine from this far back on the cliff, he could see, beyond it, part of the town—buildings and houses snaking up the opposite canyons in paths determined by the roads.

He walked slowly through the gates into the cemetery.

MOLOKAN MURDERERS.

Did people really believe that he and his family were responsible for what was happening in McGuane? It didn’t seem possible, but he was reminded of books and movies in which innocent newcomers were blamed by superstitious townsfolk for bad things that occurred and were attacked and lynched or beaten as their homes were burned to the ground.

Such a thing was not going to happen here.

He would make sure of that.

He walked over the rocky ground, around and between old headstones, until he was standing before his father’s grave. He looked down at the weathered stone and the slightly sunken gravesite. He didn’t know why he had come here. He was not one of those people who talked to the dead, who remained next to a grave attempting to communicate with someone who had passed on. He stood there silently, staring, thinking not of his father’s death but his life, not of where he might be or what might have happened to him after dying but of what had happened to him while he was alive.

He thought about the rednecks outside the bar.

He felt sorry for his father, he realized, and somehow pity seemed a sadder thing to feel than anger. He felt unaccountably depressed, and he wished he could believe that his father would hear him if he talked, but the truth was that he thought that sort of one-sided conversation was for the living, not the dead. It made the survivors feel better. The dead were dead, and whether they went on to Nirvana or heaven, or whether their brains simply stopped and they rotted into nothing, they were not here, they could not understand, they did not care.

He stared at the headstone, wiped a tear from his eye. The engraving was so faded that if he had not already known what it said, he would never have been able to read it.

He took a deep breath, walked past a series of newer tombstones, and stopped in front of Jim Petrovin’s grave. He stared at it for a moment, then looked around. The milk was getting warm and he needed to get home, but he scanned the ridge for signs of anyone else.

There was no one here, and he hesitated only a second before unbuckling his belt, unbuttoning his Levi’s, taking out his pecker, and pissing on the minister’s grave.

A
dam lay on his bed, listening to tunes while he read through the new
Spiderman
. His parents’ friends Paul and Deanna Mathews were over tonight, and after dinner he and Teo had been sent off to their rooms so the grown-ups could talk. Sasha, as usual, was out with her friends somewhere—

—and she probably wouldn’t be back until . . . well, whenever.

Teo had tried to hang with him, but he’d kicked her out of his room, closed and locked the door, and put on his Walkman headphones so he couldn’t hear her whining.

He wished he had a television in here. Even a black-and-white one. They’d won the lottery, they were supposed to be rich, but his parents didn’t seem to be doing anything with the money except spending it on themselves. He still didn’t have a decent stereo or a computer . . . or a television.

The television was a necessity. Especially for nights like this. Hell, Scott had his own TV. Even Roberto had had one. But his mom had some bee up her butt about limiting the amount of time kids watched television. She’d made him read an article about some group that was sponsoring an “Unplugged” week, a week where everyone was supposed to turn off their TVs and do something else. The woman who was president of the organization said that since giving up television viewing, she’d had more time for knitting and reading and playing Scrabble.

He’d thought that meant that their TV viewing was going to be curtailed, but luckily for him and Teo, their dad had weighed in on their side, laughing at the woman in the article and saying that she could learn a lot more watching PBS than she could sitting in a silent house and knitting.

“Her ‘reading’ must consist of romance novels,” he said.

Their parents had gotten into an argument after that, and the upshot of it was that their father had granted them unlimited viewing privileges rather than the two hours a night they’d previously been allotted.

But, meanwhile, he still didn’t have a TV in his room.

He finished
Spiderman
, picked up a
Hulk
that Scott had lent him, but then he finished that comic book and the tape in his Walkman ended.

He was thirsty and bored, and he tossed the comics aside, took off his headphones, and walked over to the door, opening it slowly. He hadn’t exactly been exiled from downstairs or banned from going out to the kitchen, but it was more exciting to think he had, and so he planned a route that would enable him to sneak out and snag a can of Coke without his parents or their friends seeing him.

Adam looked up and down the hall, made sure there was no sign of Teo, then walked to the edge of the stairs. He could hear the mumbled buzz of adult conversation but could see no sign of anyone, and he crept down the steps. They were all in the living room—he could see the side of his mom’s head at the close end of the couch—and he considered trying to sneak into the kitchen that way, but he would have to pass through a corner of the living room and then through the dining room, and detection was almost certain. Even crouching down and scuttling behind furniture, there wasn’t enough cover.

So he settled for the easy route, going into the kitchen from the hall doorway.

He could tell from their voices that the adults had had a little too much to drink, and he made it successfully across the kitchen to the other side, moving past the open entryway of the dining room without being seen. A plate of leftover tortilla chips and an empty salsa bowl were on the breakfast table, and he popped a couple of chips into his mouth, sucking on them instead of biting so that they wouldn’t crunch, not wanting to give himself away.

He opened the refrigerator, took out a can of Coke, and started back the way he’d come, grabbing a few extra chips for the return trip. He paused for a moment at the edge of the dining room, listening to the conversation, hoping to hear something about himself or his sisters.

“Well,” his father was saying, “my first wife, Andrea, absolutely loved the idea of living in a small town. She wanted to move to Oregon or Washington—”

Adam felt as though he’d been punched in the stomach.

His father’s
first
wife?

His parents’ friends were talking now, but Adam had no idea what they were saying. The conversation had become background noise to his thoughts, which were coming fast and furious, tumbling over each other in his head. The overwhelming feeling was one of betrayal, and the idea that kept repeating in his brain was that this man, his father, was a stranger to him, was not the person he’d thought he was, was not the person he knew.

Adam practically jumped out of his skin when his mother passed by, walking into the kitchen.

She saw him before he had fully recognized her, and she smiled at him. “Thirsty, huh?” She motioned toward the table. “Want some chips?”

He shook his head dumbly, though he still had quite a few tortilla chips in his hand.

“Well, you’d better go back to your room and get ready for bed. It’s getting late and tomorrow’s a school day.”

He nodded, walked out the way he’d come in, but instead of going back upstairs, he made his way down the short hall to Teo’s room. Her door was closed, but it wasn’t locked, and he let himself in, shutting the door behind him. Teo frowned and was about to yell at him to get out, but he put a finger over his lips, indicating that she should be quiet, and her annoyance disappeared instantly, replaced by curiosity.

He crossed the room noiselessly, sitting down on the bed next to his sister. He looked at her, came straight to the point. “Dad was married before.”

“What?”

He held up his Coke can. “I came down to get something to drink, and I heard them talking. Dad said he was married before. To someone else.”

“Nuh-uh!”

“Uh-huh. Mom’s his second wife.”

There was silence as he let the revelation sink in. Teo looked like a ghost. All of the color had drained out of her face, and she blinked rapidly, her lids and lashes the only movement on her otherwise still features. She looked like she was about to cry. He felt a little like crying himself.

“He said her name was Andrea.”

“He was married to someone named Andrea before he married Mom?”

“I guess.”

Teo still looked like she was about to cry, and for the first time since she’d been a baby, Adam felt like reaching over and giving her a big hug.

“Does Sasha know?”

Adam shrugged. “Maybe. You think she’d tell us if she did?”

“But how come . . . ?” She looked up at him. “Does Mom know?”

“Of course. She was there too, and she wasn’t surprised about it or anything.”

“How come no one ever told us?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

He stayed in Teo’s room for over half an hour, the two of them talking, analyzing what had happened, going over and over the few sentences he’d heard, until their mother came in, intending to make sure Teo was in bed, and found him there. She was surprised to see him, but she did not overreact. She simply told him to go upstairs, it was time for both of them to go to sleep.

He half expected Teo to bring it up, to ask their mother about it, and he purposely lingered, wanting to hear what was said, but Teo kept it to herself, and he and his mother left the room at the same time.

“Now go to bed,” she told him sternly. “You have school tomorrow.”

He nodded, went upstairs.

Teo was obviously very upset. Normally, it was impossible for her to keep her mouth shut, especially when something was bothering her, and the fact that she was not willing to ask their mom about this indicated that its magnitude was off the scale.

He was pretty shaken up himself, and he wished he hadn’t been so stupid, wished he’d listened in on more of the conversation, but he told himself that they were probably talking about something else anyway and the subject of his father’s first wife had come up only in passing.

It was an idea he still could not seem to get his mind around.

He did not even check to see if Sasha’s door was unlocked but went immediately into his own room, slamming the door behind him and plopping onto the bed. He tossed the Walkman and the comics on the floor.

His father had been married before.

It devalued everything, he thought. Mom was not his first choice for a wife. They were not his first choice for a family. They were the runners-up, the ones he’d had to settle for.

It occurred to him for the first time that Babunya knew all about this. She’d been someone else’s mother-in-law before his mom’s. She could have been someone else’s grandmother.

Was
she someone else’s grandmother?

No, they would have known about that, they would have heard of it before.

But which wife did she like better? he wondered. Had she liked the first wife more? Had she wanted his dad to stay married to her?

He felt betrayed by Babunya too, although the feeling wasn’t quite as strong.

What if his mother had been married before?

He stared up at the ceiling, ashamed of his next thought: what if Sasha was her daughter from the first marriage and was not really his full sister? It wouldn’t exactly be incest, then.

He shouldn’t even be thinking about that. He’d just found out that his mother was not his father’s first wife, and he was horned out over his sister? What kind of sicko loser was he?

But what if she
wasn’t
his sister?

He reached under the bed and pulled out Sasha’s panties. He knew it was wrong, knew it was especially inappropriate now, but just thinking about Sasha had turned him on, and without any preamble, he did what he always did: unbuttoned, unzipped, and pulled down his pants, stretching out.

He grasped his penis firmly and began stroking it.

He closed his eyes. His door was unlocked, and in his fantasy Sasha came home early and walked in on him just as he was reaching his climax.

That moment was already getting close, and he used his left hand to pick up her panties. At the last second, he wrapped them around his erection, poking the head of his penis against the cotton panel where he knew her vagina had been.

He looked down and watched the explosion of white wetness burst against the confines of the cotton crotch as he came.

Afterward, he lay there for a few moments, breathing heavily, before tossing the panties back under the bed.

He pulled up his pants, went over and locked the door, lay back down on the bed, and began to cry.

There was nothing for him to do.

Gregory awoke late, the sun shining through slatted slits in the window shades, and realized that he had nowhere to go.