The Town (7 page)

“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.

G
regory 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.

They walked up the three short steps, went in. Like the church in East L.A., it was simple. A wooden structure with one big open room and a small adjoining kitchen. There were benches stacked against one wall, and an old man with a white beard that hung down to his stomach was sweeping the hardwood floor.

“Jim?” his mother said, stopping. She squinted. “Jim Ivanovitch?”

The old man broke into a huge grin. “Agafia?”

The two of them hobbled across the floor toward each other, meeting somewhere around the middle of the room for a big bear hug. Gregory smiled. He didn’t recognize the old man, but his mother did, and she was clearly delighted. He hadn’t seen her this happy since they’d left California.

She turned toward him. “Gregory?” She spoke in Russian. “You may not remember, but this is Jim Petrovin, our old minister.” She laughed a strangely girlish laugh he didn’t recognize. “And my old boyfriend before your father.”

The minister nodded and grinned, the expression on his face impossible to read behind the huge beard. Gregory stared at him, maintaining his own now meaningless smile. He suddenly didn’t know what to say or how to act. It was childish of him, but he felt an instant antipathy toward the old man, a defensive rivalry on his father’s behalf. The minister was ancient, practically on the verge of death, but it seemed somehow disloyal for him to accept the man, to feel anything positive toward him. He thought of his mother’s laugh, that girlish laugh he didn’t recognize, that laugh from an earlier time of her life, before he had been born, and he realized that there were a lot of things about his mother that he didn’t know, whole segments of her life, whole aspects of her personality that were shielded from him and entirely unfamiliar.

He understood for the first time that he did not really know his mother.

“Jim followed my family to McGuane,” she said. “Hoping to win me back.”

The minister nodded. “I did not covet,” he said. “But I hoped.”

Gregory didn’t want to hear this. “You two probably have a lot to talk about.” He was suddenly aware of how rusty his Russian sounded, how long it had been since he’d spoken more than a few words at a time in the language. “I am going to walk around town. I will come back in an hour or so and pick you up.”

His mother nodded. “I will be here.”

She smiled at him and waved, and he walked out of the church, across the dirt, out to the street. He felt like a child again, confused and conflicted, and though he knew it was silly, knew that there was nothing going on—and that even if there
was,
his mother had a perfect right to resume a romantic life this many years after his father’s death—he felt uncomfortable. The fact that she had known this minister before she had known his father trivialized the life of their family, implied somehow that this man was her one true love and that her husband, his father, had been merely an impediment that had temporarily gotten in the way. It was a dumb thought, immature, but there it was, stuck in his mind, and he had to force himself not to think it, to at least attempt to look at the situation objectively.

He headed downtown to the shopping district. He’d been too busy or too lazy to come down here sooner and, despite occasional trips to the grocery store, he hadn’t seen the area up close since the Copper Days celebration that first weekend.

The throngs of people were gone now, and the side-walks were empty, only parked cars and an occasional pickup or broken-down Jeep clattering up the canyon roads to indicate that McGuane was anything other than a ghost town.

He walked along the cracked sidewalk, peering into the windows of the shops—some open, some closed—that fronted the street in a series of connected rock and brick buildings. There was a used bookstore, an antique store, a pawnshop, a jewelry store, a shoe repair shop, a pharmacy.

Halfway down the block, between the shoe repair and a western wear shop, he came across a narrow building with no windows and a dark, open doorway.

A bar.

He stopped walking.

The same bar he’d passed with his father all those years ago on the way to church.