The Town

1

They were alone at the bar. Paul had just left to pick up his car from Henry’s Automotive, where Henry Travis had charged him an arm and a leg for simply flushing out the cooling system, something Odd told him he would’ve done for free, but Gregory and Odd had decided to stay for an extra round of drinks.

There were no other customers today, and even the bartender was keeping his distance, giving them privacy, pretending to be wiping glasses at the far end of the counter.

Gregory had had three beers already and was feeling pretty good, but when he glanced over at Odd, his mood faltered. The old man was looking into his beer, not drinking, and the expression on his face made Gregory feel uneasy.

“What is it?” he asked.

Odd shook his head.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Something.”

“You don’t want to—”

“Yes, I do,” Gregory told him.

There was a pause. “People are talking,” Odd said finally.

“About what?”

“You. Your family.”

Gregory could feel his face tighten. “What about us?”

“These… deaths didn’t start happening until you all moved into town.”

“That’s ridiculous.” But his heart was pounding.

“I know it is, I know it is. But the timing’s there. And you know how superstitious these yokels are. Someone noticed that Loretta Nelson’s murder over at the realty office happened about the same time you bought your place in town, and it probably spread from there. And Chilton Bodean was the capper. Everyone knows you two weren’t exactly pals and that you threatened to beat the shit out of him.” He lowered his voice. “Hell, the bartender saw it.”

“Come on. I saw him that one time since I moved back. And you were with me.”

“I know.”

“Besides, he stabbed himself.”

“But he stabbed himself because he had another peeder growing outta his belly button. That’s not a normal everyday occurrence.”

“And that’s my fault, too?”

“I’m not saying it is. All I’m saying is that people are talking. They’re saying that even if you didn’t do anything on purpose, maybe you brought this weird shit with you. Part of it’s probably those old anti-Molokan feelings creeping out. But you gotta admit that there’s some strange stuff been happening here lately.”

Gregory’s face felt flushed.

“I debated whether to tell you or not, but I figured you wouldn’t hear it from no one else…”

“Paul’s not—” he began.

“Hell, no!” Odd looked at him. “Your friends are your friends. You can count on that. And this is probably nothing. It’s probably just a few people and it’ll blow over before long.” He took a long drink of beer. “Maybe I shouldn’t’ve even opened my stupid mouth.”

“No,” Gregory told him. “No, I’m glad you did.”

“Just forget about it.”

“So they don’t think me or my family did anything. We didn’t murder anybody. We’re just… the cause of it somehow.”

“I told you they’re superstitious.”

“But why blame us? What about the Megans?”

“There’s talk about that, too. Maybe it’s your house. Maybe you activated it or it activated you or something. Some type of chemical reaction.” He shook his head. “I told you you should’ve gone after Call, gotten a new place instead. Hell, maybe you still can. I’m not sure what the statute of limitations is on something like that, but if he sold you your home under false pretenses—”

“No.”

“Well, just forget about it, then.”

“What do you think?” Gregory asked.

Odd squirmed in his seat. “Don’t matter what I think.”

“Odd…”

The old man sighed. “I seen a lot of things over the years. This ain’t no murderer or serial killer. I know that.”

“But do you think I’m involved? Or my family?”

“Oh, hell, no. I know better’n that. But…” He took a deep breath. “It ain’t inconceivable that your house is somewhere down in the mix.” He downed the rest of his beer in one huge gulp. “McGuane’s a funny place. Not funny ha-ha, but funny strange. I seen things myself over the years, heard about a lot more. But lately it’s sort of… turned nasty. People are getting killed, and that scares me. There’s probably not one reason for it all, no single thing that’s the cause of it, but it’s happening, and I understand why people are looking for easy answers.”

“You don’t think there’s an easy answer.”

“I don’t know if there’s a hard answer. I don’t know if there’s any answer. You know that saying, ‘Shit happens’? That’s kind of how I look at it. Shit happens, and the best thing to do is just stay out of the way.” He took a five-dollar bill from his pocket, placed it on the bar. “That’s why I’d get out of that house if I were you. A lot of people died there, and that can’t be good.”

Odd got off his stool, patted Gregory’s shoulder. “I gotta go,” he said. “Lurlene’ll kill me if I’m late. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

Gregory nodded, watched the old man walk out of the bar. He picked up Odd’s five, then took out some bills of his own and walked down to the end of the counter to pay the tab. He handed the money to the bartender, but he didn’t like the look on the other man’s face. It reminded him of the nearly identical expressions on the faces of the men who had berated his father outside this very building—

Milk drinker

—and he considered taking back the tip he’d included, but he knew he was probably reading meanings into things that weren’t there because of his conversation with Odd, and so he just smiled, nodded, and left.

He walked back to the café, where his van was parked.

When he got home, Gregory headed straight into the kitchen, found the bottle of aspirin in the cupboard next to Julia’s vitamins, and popped two tablets. He had one big bastard of a headache, and he closed his eyes against the pain, willing the aspirin to work faster. It seemed like he had a headache every time he walked into this damn house lately, and he wondered if he wasn’t allergic to something in here. Maybe there was something wrong with the insulation, or the cleanser or furniture spray they used was affecting him. Maybe it was one of Julia’s new drought-resistant plants. He didn’t know, but the headaches were starting to become a pattern, and that was a pattern he wanted to break.

The stress from what Odd had told him could not have helped, and maybe that was why the headache today was so much stronger than usual.

He walked into the living room, flipped on the TV, lay down on the couch, and closed his eyes.

The headaches made him irritable, and he realized that he’d been a little hard on Julia and his mother and the kids lately. He didn’t mean to take anything out on them, and he vowed that tonight he would be cheerful. He wouldn’t let any headache or allergy get the best of him, would not get angry with anyone for anything.

But later that evening Teo started fighting with Adam, playing with the remote control and speeding through television channels, running back and forth between the living room and the kitchen, and he ended up yelling at her and sending her to her room. Julia thought he overreacted, but she didn’t say anything until they were in bed, and then they wound up getting into a fight. They’d been having a lot of fights lately, and he was getting tired of it, and then they started fighting about that.

Julia finally refused to respond to his increasingly angry arguments, and she pulled the blanket up around her neck and turned away from him, facing the other direction.

He was sorely tempted to go downstairs and sleep on the couch. That would teach her a lesson. They’d never slept apart in all the years they’d been married, had made a pact after their first fight that they would always try to resolve their differences before bedtime and never sleep separately, but tonight he would have moved down to the couch had his mother and the kids not been here. It would be too difficult to explain to them, though, and he pulled up his own side of the blanket, turned away from her, and closed his eyes until he finally fell asleep.

2

Julia wandered through the ruins of Russiantown.

She did not know what had compelled her to come here, why she had walked all this way to look at a bunch of abandoned shacks, but ever since Paul and Deanna had led them on the walk through McGuane she hadn’t stopped thinking about this place.

She peeked into the open doorway of a one-room house with no roof, saw a collection of rusted tin cans lined up in what remained of an open cabinet, saw clumps of dead dried weeds poking through missing sections of floor. There was no furniture in the tiny shack, just as there’d been no furniture in most of the abandoned houses she’d looked through, and she chose to believe that families had taken their belongings with them when they’d moved to better homes.

Several of the buildings were no longer standing, were nothing but cement foundations and stumps of charred beam, and she could not help wondering when the fires had occurred. She’d asked Gregory’s mother about Russiantown, but the old woman had not wanted to talk about the subject. There was an element of denial or cover-up in her refusal to speak, even after all these years, that made Julia think that something bad had happened here.

What was it that Paul had said? There’d been problems in the past? That was vague enough to cover a multitude of sins.

She was surprised that Gregory wasn’t more conversant with the specifics of Molokan history in McGuane, but she knew how secretive her own parents had always been about their past, and she understood how it could happen. She’d had a friend in college, Janet Yoshizumi, whose parents had been interned at Manzanar during World War II, and she recalled how Janet had said that they never discussed their internment, that they refused to talk about it and chose to pretend that it hadn’t happened.

Was that what had happened here? Something so bad that no one wanted to talk about it?

She was probably romanticizing what was no doubt a very ordinary, very prosaic chapter in local history, but unanswered questions invited that sort of speculation.

She could go to the library, she thought, see if she could find some information about Russiantown.

No. She’d rather not know than have to see Marge and her pals again.

She stepped over a small prickly pear and walked over to the next empty house.

It was strange how interested she’d become in not just Russiantown but all things Molokan since they’d moved here. She’d never understood the fascination some people seemed to have for their roots, their ethnic background, and she’d always dismissed as trendy and self-absorbed those women who tried to track down distant relatives in distant lands or who spent money on classes to learn the languages and cultures of the nations their ancestors had left behind. But she was beginning to understand that connection to the past. She herself had been feeling more Russian since they’d moved here. She was not sure if it was because Gregory’s mother was living with them, or because everything was so personalized and community-conscious in a small town compared to the anonymous individuality of life in a metropolitan area, but it was as if her American veneer was cracking, gradually revealing the Russian beneath.

Maybe the fact that she wasn’t feeling as close to Gregory as before had something to do with it, the fact that their relationship was no longer there to support her against the influences of the outside world.

She couldn’t sustain her lifelong rebellion against Molokan culture knowing she did not have him to lean on.

They’d been fighting a lot lately, and sometimes it felt as though they were two strangers living in the same house rather than a couple who had been together for eighteen years. She’d never believed those dire warnings that money could ruin a person’s life, attributing their origin to the rich who wanted to keep the poor content with their lot by pretending that it was better not to have money, that poverty was somehow morally superior to wealth.

And, truth be told, it wasn’t money that had changed their lives.

It was moving to McGuane.

Although they’d been able to move to McGuane only because they’d won the lottery.

She peeked in a back window of a big house, saw the rusted skeleton of an old bed, the rotted wood of what had probably been a vanity. On one remaining wall hung the top three sides of an empty frame, glittering shattered glass visible in the pile of dirt and dust beneath it.

Deep down, she wished they’d never left California. Or at least that they’d moved somewhere else. New England, perhaps. Or the Pacific Northwest.

Anywhere but Arizona.

She did not like this house, and rather than peek in one of the other windows or walk inside, she headed up a rocky path behind it, past the crumbling walls of a banya, to a building that looked like it had once been a store or a place of business. She stood for a moment with her hands on her hips, sizing it up. It was definitely not a house, and though there were cracks and rock holes in the dust-covered windows, the glass was still there for the most part, and she cupped her hands on the sides of her eyes and peered inside. She saw a leaning desk, an overturned chair, what looked like a broken safe.

She was in the approximate center of Russiantown right now, and she took the opportunity to look around at the empty shacks, the burnt and crumbling buildings.

There were ghosts here.

The thought came unbidden. She tried to tell herself that she was thinking of ghosts in the most mainstream, literary sense—as a synonym for memories or history—but that was not true and she knew it. She was thinking of literal ghosts, real ghosts, and even though it was broad daylight and she could hear the sounds of children playing at the grammar school, could see down the canyon the roofs and top stories of the business district, she felt isolated enough that the thought frightened her.

Ghosts.

She looked around, aware all of a sudden how many rooms there were in the empty structures surrounding her, how many places there were to hide, how many left-behind relics of lives remained in the abandoned husks of these buildings.

Was that why she was here?

Had she been lured?

She thought of the noises at night, the box that had fallen in the kitchen. Ghosts had been in the back of her mind ever since that first week. She was surprised that she had not thought about this earlier, when she’d first arrived. After all, this was a ghost town. Wasn’t it logical for ghosts to be here?

There was nothing logical about ghosts, and for all her vaunted rationalism and intelligence, she found herself spooked, no pun intended. The fact that she’d been thinking about Russiantown, that she’d felt herself drawn here, was more than a little disturbing, and, as much as she hated to do so, she started to see a pattern in what before had seemed to her merely a series of random coincidences.

She was reminded of the tag line for a movie.

Out here, she thought, no one could hear her scream.

Of course, that was not strictly true. She could hear the voices of children from the school, and she could probably be heard down there as well, but she knew that even her loudest scream would be only a muffled chirp to anyone downtown.

If, that is, they were listening.

She could die here and no one would know.

Julia shivered. She was no longer quite so interested in exploring the empty buildings of Russiantown, and she turned and started back down the path the way she’d come.

There was movement to her right, and her attention was drawn in that direction, but whatever it was had already disappeared behind a banya. She told herself it was a cat or a dog, hoped it was a cat or a dog, but she knew that the figure she’d caught in her peripheral vision was bigger than that.

Movement again. This time ahead and to the right.

She saw a child dash from one shack to another, heard it laugh… but the laugh was that of an old man, not a young kid, and the juxtaposition was shocking.

Heard it laugh?

Yes. For she’d sensed even in that moment, even with just that brief glimpse, that it was not a boy, not a girl, but… something else.

Her skin was covered with goose bumps, her pulse was racing. She was afraid to go forward, afraid to return down the same path on which she’d come. She decided to take a detour, an alternate route back to the road, glancing frantically about all the while to make sure that the child—or whatever it was—did not pop out at her.

She passed a shack with a detached and dilapidated front porch, heard a strange scuttling noise from inside.

Her heart lurched in her chest.

A little face peered out at her from a broken, dirt-smeared window.

She screamed, and the face faded, disappearing into the darkness of the shack.

There was the laughter again, the old-man laughter, and she backed quickly but carefully away, keeping her eyes on the window. The face did not reappear, but the sight stayed with her. The features had been unclear behind the dirty glass, but she had the impression that the eyes, nose, and mouth were scrunched too close together, that there was something horrid and aberrant about the small figure.

Again, she was acutely conscious of how far away from the occupied part of McGuane Russiantown was.

It was playing with her, she thought, whatever it was, it was after her. She took off running, no longer looking for the figure, no longer trying to hide from it, but prepared to knock it over or run around it or even jump over it if it popped out at her. She would do whatever she had to in order to avoid it, but she was determined to get out of Russiantown as fast as possible, as quickly as her legs would carry her.

She thought she saw the figure again, in a hole in the adobe wall of a banya, but the face looked older, and she did not stop to think about or acknowledge it but simply kept running, finally reaching the dirt road and jumping over the small ditch, running toward downtown McGuane.

Behind her, again, the laughter.

Her chest hurt and she could not seem to suck in enough air to fill her lungs, but she forced her legs to keep pumping and did not slow down until she reached an occupied neighborhood, where an old woman watering her roses outside, smiled at her and told her to slow down before she had a heart attack.

3

She sat in the banya with the body of the cat on her lap.

“Teo.”

She felt warm and tingly as she heard the banya’s voice. It seemed to echo through her, the words being absorbed into her body, into her bones.

“Teo.”

“I brought you a present,” Teo said. She looked down at the tabby’s matted fur. She had killed it herself. She’d found it wandering through their yard yesterday and had picked it up. She’d petted it, talked to it, carried it down the path—and then thrown it down as hard as she could onto a boulder, smashing its head.

She’d poured dirt into the wounds to stop the blood and had hidden the cat under some leaves so it could dry.

She’d come back today and picked it up.

It was the biggest thing she’d ever brought here, and she knew that the banya would be grateful. The banya had devoured everything she had brought so far—the bird, the mice, the chipmunk—and it had grown stronger as a result. There was a new energy in here now, and even though the building still looked abandoned, it had started to clean itself up. The benches were fixed and set up against the wall the way they should be. The bones were mostly gone.

She had always liked coming here, but she enjoyed it even more now. She felt at home in this room. Accepted, wanted, appreciated.

The banya was her friend.

The banya was her only friend, and she did not know what she would do without it. She could let out all her frustrations in here, describe all of her problems, scream, cry, throw a tantrum, and it was always there for her. It never told her what to do, never made judgments, never bossed her around.

It listened.

And understood.

Teo took the cat off her lap, set the stiff body down in the dirt. “Here you go,” she said.

She watched the cat’s body with anticipation. She no longer had to leave while the banya ate. It let her watch now, let her see it devour food, and she felt a thrill of excitement pass through her as the shadow came down from the far wall, as it broke up into long, swirling segments and the familiar cold-yet-pleasurable wind began to blow. The body of the cat lifted almost imperceptibly off the floor, swathed in shadow, and then it began to disappear. In pieces. The left ear was gone. The right rear paw. The tail. A section of stomach. The head.

There was no noise—it was like being in a place where sound could not penetrate—but there was a lot of movement, and as the shadows touched her skin, her arm, her cheeks, she laughed. It tickled.

In less than a minute, the cat was gone.

“Good,” the banya said. “So good.”

She smiled, feeling pleased.

She was glad she could do something for the banya—because the banya had done so much for her. It had promised to help her, and help her it had. She still had no friends, the other kids still refused to talk to her, but no one was making fun of her anymore. The banya had given her… something, and the other kids in her class seemed to sense it. They stayed away, afraid of her, and that was good. She no longer had to spend her recesses in the classroom with the teacher, hiding. She strode bravely and proudly through the playground, doing whatever she wanted, and though she had to do it by herself, she didn’t really mind. Just knowing that she was not alone, just knowing that she had the banya, gave her the confidence to be herself, allowed her to shrug off criticism and not worry about what other kids said or thought or did.

Of course, Mary Kay and Kim hated her more than ever. They did not trip her or push her down like they used to, but she sensed the hatred and resentment building in them, and she thought that eventually they would probably try to get back at her somehow, do something to her.

If only she could get them first. If only she could beat them to the punch.

The banya seemed to know what she was thinking, because it gave her a comforting breath of warm, sweet-smelling air.

She smiled.

“It is time,” the banya said.

She blinked. “What?”

She thought she heard the sounds of a playground, thought she heard Mary Kay’s voice singing, “I see England, I see France, I see Teo’s underpants!”

“It is time,” the banya repeated.

And she understood.

Going out to morning recess, Teo was bumped by Kim, but when she said, “Watch it!” Kim just kept running, pretending it was an accident.

She stared after the other girl. Apparently whatever immunity her newfound confidence had given her had worn off and she was once again in for some teasing and torture.

She walked out to the playground. That’s okay, she thought. The banya would show them.

But how? she wondered. Was she supposed to lure the girls over to the bathhouse, trick them into going inside?

The thought came to her, unbidden, that she was supposed to present the girls to the banya the way she had the bird, the mice, the chipmunk, the cat. As an offering.

Was she supposed to kill them?

The idea stopped her cold. There was no way she would do that, no way she could do that, and for the first time, it occurred to her that maybe the banya wasn’t really her friend, that there was something wrong with it. It was trying to make her do things she shouldn’t do, things she didn’t want to do, and in a burst of clarity, she understood that it was not normal, not right, for her to sit in a bathhouse and talk to it, to bring it dead animals.

She thought about what had happened. She had not just picked up the bodies of dead animals and fed them to the banya. She’d actually killed a cat herself, had murdered a little kitty, and tears welled up in her eyes as she realized what she’d done. It was as if she’d been hypnotized or something and had suddenly awakened, and she looked back at what had happened and was horrified.

Now the banya expected her to bring girls home and kill them?

She heard its voice, faintly, as if carried over a distance.

“No,” it said smoothly. “No, Teo.”

The voice made her stop, pushed all those negative thoughts out of her head. She stood there listening to the faint words of the banya, and her doubts fled, her faith was restored. The banya was her friend, she realized, and it told her that it was going to punish the girls who had tormented her, that it was going to make them pay.

But they would simply be taught a lesson, the bathhouse told her. No one would be seriously hurt.

And then the birds came.

They swooped down from previously clear skies, a living black cloud. They were the same type of bird that she’d fed to the banya, and they buzzed the heads of the kids on the playground. Boys jumped out of swings and off slides, girls fled hopscotch and tetherball courts. The birds were shrieking, and it was like a scene out of that old movie. The teachers monitoring the playground were simultaneously trying to scare off the birds and yelling for the children to head for cover.

The birds were followed by mice and chipmunks.

The birds were still there, above, but on the ground chipmunks and mice raced out from the field, swarming beneath the playground equipment, dashing between the feet of the panicking students and the screaming staff.

Teo looked around, searching out faces she knew. Kids were crying, running, not just heading back to the classrooms but darting about in all directions, trying to avoid the birds and get away from the rodents on the ground. She finally found Mary Kay, and a thrill of vindication coursed through her as the bratty girl stumbled and fell, sobbing while other kids tripped over her and fell on top of her. She also picked out Kim and two of Kim’s friends and was gratified to see them stranded atop the monkey bars, swatting their own heads as they tried to keep the birds away.

A tabby cat walked through the melee, oblivious. It ignored the mice, making a beeline for her. Teo looked down at the animal, and the cat looked back at her. It meowed softly, rubbed against her legs.

She picked the cat up, petted it.

Standing alone, next to the drinking fountains, untouched by everything, Teo smiled.