The Town

1

Sunday.

It was the third week in a row that they’d tried to perform a Cleansing for the entire town, one that would exorcise once and for all the unseen beings that had invaded this place. They stood in the empty church, the ten of them, holding hands, praying. All of the other parishioners had gone home, and the pots and pans and dishes and cups and spoons had all been washed and put away, the leftover food placed in the refrigerator. All of the tablecloths and napkins were in Nikolai’s car, ready to be taken to the laundromat and washed.

The dying sun shone orange through the west windows, creating long shadows in the empty room. They continued the ceremonies, but no matter how many words they repeated, no matter how earnestly they wanted this to work, their efforts were in vain. The church remained clean, free of spirits—they had successfully cleared and protected it—but though they once again prayed and sang, performing virtually every Molokan exorcism ritual known, it seemed to have no effect on the rest of the town. There were no accompanying signs of either success or failure as they worked, not even a slight drop in temperature, and if Agafia had not known better, she would have thought that McGuane was clean, that there was nothing here.

But there was.

The pra roak had been right. There were spirits everywhere, demons all around. They could all feel them, could sense their growing presence, and periodically one of their own would be provided with proof:

Vera Afonin. She came home after last Sunday’s services to find that all of the furniture in her house had been rearranged, placed in its opposite location, so that it looked like she was walking into the mirror version of her home.

Peter Potapov. For a full day, all of the taps at his house disgorged urine rather than water.

Alexander Nadelashin. Control of his car was wrested from him, the steering wheel in his hand turning of its own accord, forcing him to bump into and damage six other cars on his way down the street.

The attacks had all been relatively harmless, mischievous even, but outside the church, outside their circle, in the rest of the town, that had not been the case. No one had been killed recently, and there’d been no specific news of anything in the paper, but rumor had it that the man who owned the auto parts store had died of a heart attack after seeing something in his store, something that had subsequently disappeared, leaving behind only a gelatinous puddle in the middle of the floor.

Things were going on that nobody could explain, and no one knew how to defend against such an assault. Agafia and the other Molokans hoped that faith would protect them, that the Lord would keep them safe from harm and put a stop to it all, but so far their prayers had not been answered. It was a distinct possibility that they were being tested, that God was allowing this to occur in order to see their reactions. Which made it doubly important for them to maintain their faith.

That was Nikolai’s position, and Vera’s, but Agafia was not sure she believed it. Not only did she not believe God would be so deliberately cruel and unfeeling, but there was a seriousness in all this that made her think it was more than just a test, that it had a definite purpose and goal. She did not know what that could be, but she did not believe it involved God’s complicity. She was frightened, but she vowed to do everything within her power to put a stop to it and to prevent the catastrophe that the prophet had predicted.

The pra roak.

It is your fault.

She did not believe herself guilty, thought that that part of the prophecy was wrong, but she bought into the rest of it and was willing to take responsibility for fixing the problem. And even the remote possibility of her involvement made her that much more determined to find an answer—and a solution.

They stopped praying, let go of each others’ hands, began singing a hymn, but there was no real enthusiasm for the music, no feeling put into the song. They knew already that this Cleansing had failed too, and their discouragement was audible in their singing.

Afterward, they did not even address the subject, did not even mention it. They were all frustrated and disheartened, and, saying good-bye, they took their leave.

It was Semyon who drove her home, and she was afraid that he would want to talk about the old days, would bring up things she did not want to discuss, but they were mercifully silent with each other on the trip back to the house, and they parted with polite, formal farewells.

That night she dreamed of Jim.

The minister was young, the way he’d looked when she first met him, and he was kneeling before a statue of what looked like Jedushka Di Muvedushka. He was mumbling to himself, praying, but it was not Russian, was not English, was not Spanish, was not any language she could understand. He was wearing a short-sleeve shirt, and his slender arms were unwrinkled, without age spots.

She was young too, and she was overjoyed to see him, but the statue frightened her, and she was afraid to come any closer.

“Jim!” she called. “Jim Ivanovitch!”

He turned, looked over his shoulder at her, and she saw that he had no face. There were no eyes, no nose, no mouth, only blank skin, and he gestured at her, waving his arms, obviously attempting to communicate, but she had no idea what he was trying to say, and behind him the statue started laughing. His gesticulations grew more wild, and the statue’s laughter increased. The rest of its form remained completely stationary, only its mouth opening and closing, and soon it was laughing so hard that tears streamed down its cheeks from its cold stone eyes.

2

“You look terrible.”

Julia nodded, glanced at her reflection in the window of the antique store. She had not slept well since her visit to Russiantown, her dreams disturbed with images of dwarves and shadows, the sounds of old laughter.

“Is anything wrong?” Deanna asked.

Julia shook her head. “No. I’m just tired.”

She had not said anything to her friend about what had happened up there, though she was not sure why. She’d told Gregory, in bed that night, away from the kids, but he either didn’t believe her or didn’t care—it was hard to tell which. He offered vague, ineffectual reassurances, the kind of bland platitudes they told the children when they had nightmares, and his attitude so infuriated her that she simply shut up, closing down, unwilling to even try and make him understand what she had gone through.

She would have told his mother, talked to her about it, but her mother-in-law was all churched-out these days, spending most of her time with her old Molokan friends rather than the family, and Julia didn’t especially want to drag the entire church into this.

Although sometimes she thought that might be the best thing that could happen.

Deanna would have been the natural person for her to discuss this with, but something kept her from it. She did not know why, but she did not feel comfortable telling her friend what had happened. It could have been her own natural reluctance to believe in anything beyond the material world and the fact that her friends had always shared her opinions on that subject, it could have been that she did not yet feel close enough to Deanna to open up to that extent, to expose herself to possible ridicule, but she had the feeling that it was something else, something… outside, that was dictating her behavior. It wasn’t overt and she had no proof to back it up—her feelings, in fact, felt perfectly natural, as though they were an organic part of her being—but intellectually she sensed a skipped beat, an emotional response on her part that should have been there but wasn’t.

Such a thought almost made her want to confide in Deanna just to prove to herself that she could, that it was her decision, that nothing was keeping her from it.

Almost.

But her reluctance to speak of the events in Russiantown was stronger than her desire to break free of that reluctance, and she kept quiet, not knowing whether it really was her own decision or one that had been imposed upon her.

They stepped into the antique store and spent about twenty minutes looking through everything. Deanna bought a pink dogwood plate and a Homer Laughlin gravy boat from the old lady behind the counter.

The two of them walked up the sidewalk, past Dale’s Heating and Plumbing, and stopped in at the used bookstore, where Deanna bought an old Phillip Emmons novel and Julia picked up a Paul Prudhomme cookbook. By the time they finished, it was almost time for school to get out, and Julia had her friend drive her home so she could be there when Adam and Teo arrived.

“What are your plans for tomorrow?” Deanna asked.

Julia smiled guiltily. “I really should get back to work on my book,” she said.

Deanna laughed. “Too much playing lately, huh? The old work ethic kicking your brain in the butt?”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“Have fun, then. I’ll call you Thursday. Maybe we can go out for lunch.”

Julia nodded. “Sounds good.”

She waved as her friend drove back up the drive, then stepped inside the house.

Gregory’s mother was home, taking a nap in her room. With some quiet time at her disposal, Julia did break out her notebook and spent a good half hour writing a possible ending for her children’s book before Adam and Teo got home.

And she didn’t think of scary things once.

They ate dinner together that night, all of them. It was the first time in a while that the six of them had been seated around the dining table at the same time. Usually Adam and Teo were hungry and Gregory was late, so she fed the kids first and saved their own dinner for later.

Or Sasha was off with her friends, eating at the diner.

Or Adam was over at Scott’s house.

But today they were all here. She wished she could have known ahead of time because all they were having was leftover borscht. She would have made something better, something special, had she known.

She was acutely conscious of how awkward they all seemed with one another, how stilted and uncharacteristically formal, and it occurred to her that their family was breaking up. The democratically even relationships that they’d shared with each other in the past were giving way to fractured, specific, individual relationships within the overall family framework. They were not all equal anymore, and while she had a relationship with everyone here at the table, those relationships were different. It was as though they were diverse and separate people being held together only by force of habit and authority.

It was a disturbing thought, and she wanted it not to be true, but the dynamics of their family had changed and such a judgment seemed inescapable.

Perhaps this happened with all families as the kids grew older and grew up. It was impossible to remain static, to run in place forever. Maybe this was just part of the natural process, the evolution of parent-child-sibling relationships.

Maybe.

But she didn’t recall it happening with her parents when she was growing up. They had never gone through such a stage. Their family had remained intact, their relationships stable and unchanged, up through her father’s and then her mother’s deaths.

Maybe she and Gregory just weren’t good parents. Or, more likely, they were setting the tone for everyone else. God knows, they weren’t exactly behaving like June and Ward Cleaver these days. They were barely speaking, and when they did talk, it usually ended up in an argument. The reasons always seemed specific, unique to each conversation, but the pattern was definitely there, and she thought that maybe they should be making more of an effort to get along. Family relationships didn’t just happen, they needed to be nurtured and worked at, and they’d all been taking each other a little too much for granted, allowing things to get out of control and not setting them straight or correcting their course.

It was up to her to make the first move, and so she smiled at Gregory as she passed around the wooden Russian spoons. “How was your day?” she asked.

He looked up at her, and though it had been meant sincerely, though she’d been trying to indicate concerned interest, under the circumstances it came off sounding snide and sarcastic, and the expression on his face was one of annoyance. He frowned at her, didn’t answer.

That annoyed her, and she spent the rest of the meal talking to the kids, ignoring Gregory completely.

3

There were noises outside in the middle of the night, but Gregory didn’t think much about them. He heard some bumps and scratches and muffled thumps when he got up after midnight to take a leak, but he assumed they were animals or put them down to the wind, crawled back into bed, and once again fell asleep.

In the morning, however, when he walked outside to get his weekly copy of the Monitor, he saw that the noises had not been animals, had not been wind.

He stopped walking, stared at the house.

There was graffiti spray-painted on the walls to either side of the door: MOLOKAN on the left side, MURDERERS on the right.

MOLOKAN MURDERERS.

Gregory felt both angry and impotent as he stared at the epithet, filled with a rage that made him want to tear down the entire wall in order to remove the words. He felt violated. He’d been planning to repaint the house anyway, but the fact that he had been forced into it, that some punk kids or asshole adult had defaced his home, infuriated him. They had been on his property. They had sneaked into his sanctuary in the middle of the night and defaced it, defiled it. It was an invasion of his privacy, an invasion of his home, an attack on his family. No one had been hurt, but the potential was there, and as he looked at the words—

MOLOKAN MURDERERS.

—he knew it was only a matter of time.

A gun. A shotgun. That’s what he needed. Julia and his mother might go crazy, but goddamn it, they needed to be able to protect themselves. Even if he just filled it up with salt and pepper, or pellets, instead of buckshot, at least he’d be able to fend off any intruders. Next time it might not be just graffiti. Next time someone might try to hurt one of them. Nationally, hate crimes had been on the increase for years, and it usually took only a small incident to bring out old resentments, to allow hatred and prejudice to bubble to the surface.

And a series of murders in a small town?

People were going to be looking for scapegoats.

And that would be them.

With a gun, he would be able to protect himself. Himself and his family. Anyone who tried to harass them? He’d shoot the bastard’s legs out from underneath him.

He felt guilty at the thought—he was the only Molokan he knew who had ever even considered buying a gun—but it was a pleasurable sort of guilt, and he imagined those self-righteous old fucks at the church shaking their palsied hands and wetting their pants when they learned that he’d armed himself.

He stared at the spray-painted vandalism. What would his father have done?

Nothing, a small, mean part of him said.

Turned his other cheek like a Christian, Gregory supposed—like a pussy

—and not overreacted, not gone off half-cocked, not automatically planned how he could permanently injure and physically incapacitate the culprits. His father was a calm man, a peaceful man; there was no way he would ever have stooped to buying or using a weapon.

But those were different times and these were different people and, most important, he was not his father. He was not religious, not pious, and he did not believe it was wrong to fight fire with fire. There were times when a man had to stand up and be counted. He would not, for example, have allowed those losers outside the bar to insult and ridicule him in front of his family. He would have done something about it. He would have fought back. He might have been outnumbered, but he would have made the effort. He would not have allowed his wife and children to witness his weakness.

Weakness?

His father, he knew, would have considered it weakness to give in to the base desires for revenge and retribution. Those were privileges reserved only for God, and it was a sign of man’s transcendent potential that he could recognize this, that he could rise above the level of the animal and abide by God’s laws and wishes.

Gregory knew this, and he understood that his father had shown strength in that encounter, not weakness, that he had tried to set an example.

But he’d wanted him to do something different.

Gregory walked into the house, immediately called the police. Two officers arrived ten minutes later, and the rest of the morning was wasted answering questions, watching as photos were taken of the “crime scene” and an exhaustive search was conducted on and around the drive.

After the police left, he took his own photos for reference, then put on his crappiest clothes and walked back outside. Paint and brushes were in the storage shed, and while he didn’t have time to redo the whole house today, he painted over the words, leveling off the repainted segment just above the door so it would at least be slightly symmetrical.

Tomorrow, he would borrow a ladder and a paint gun from Odd and try to finish the rest of the house. If he started at dawn and worked until dusk, he might just be able to get one coat on.

If he was lucky, Odd would offer to help.

He took a shower, scraped the paint off his skin with a soapy fingernail, then put on clean clothes.

“We need some milk and sugar!” Julia called when he opened the bathroom door to let out some steam. “Do you want to go to the store?”

No, he didn’t want to go to the store, but he ran a comb through his hair and yelled, “Yeah, I’ll go!”

He walked out of the bathroom, grabbed his wallet and keys from the dresser. He met Teo in the hall. “Can I come too?” she asked.

“No,” he said. He rubbed the top of her head. “You stay here and be a good girl.”

He realized how patronizing he sounded, how dismissive, but he wanted to be alone, wanted some time to think, and he felt guilty for only the briefest second as he walked out to the kitchen, double-checked what he was supposed to buy, and left.

At the Fresh Buy he recognized several faces, but he made no effort to be friendly and simply picked up the groceries he’d come for. The other people seemed to be ignoring him anyway, giving him the cold shoulder, and he pretended he didn’t notice and didn’t care.

People are talking.

All of that changed at the counter.

Both checkstands were open today, but he picked the left one because the girl working the register was attractive and friendly and had already smiled at him when he caught her eye. He’d seen her before, at the café, and he seemed to recall that she’d made an effort even then to meet him. He was pretty sure that she’d told him her name, but he’d met a lot of new people lately, and he could not remember what it was.

“Kat,” the name tag informed him when he finally got close enough to see.

He placed the plastic milk carton and the sack of sugar on the checkstand’s conveyor belt.

She was a trainee, he noticed. Which was probably why he hadn’t seen her here before.

The checker smiled at him shyly. “Hello, Mr. Tomsaov.”

“Gregory,” he told her.

She tallied up his items on the register. “I just love what you’ve done to the coffeehouse. This place was so dead before you got here. You’ve really made a difference.”

That was exactly what he’d wanted to do, make a difference, and he smiled at her gratefully. “Thanks.”

“No, I really mean it. There was nothing to do in this town except rent videos or watch TV at night. Now we finally have some real entertainment.”

He nodded. “Glad you like it.”

“That’ll be four-twelve.”

He turned around and looked at her after leaving the market, and he reddened and walked quickly away after she caught him and smiled back. How old was she? Sasha’s age? She had to be. Or a little older, maybe. It was wrong for him even to look at her, much less allow the sort of fantasies that were starting to creep into his mind.

He’d had to park a few doors up the street, and he started toward the van but saw that one of the store-fronts he’d passed on his way into the market was a gun shop.

He stopped in front of the store, looked in the window. There were handguns and rifles, even what looked like a crossbow displayed behind the barred glass. It couldn’t hurt to take a peek, he thought, to check on prices.

MOLOKAN MURDERERS.

His heart pounded as he walked inside. His entrance rang a bell somewhere in the back of the shop. He felt like a child, a child doing something wrong, something of which his parents would not approve, but there was an illicit thrill in the feeling, and when an overweight man wearing military fatigues emerged from the darkened room behind the back counter, Gregory smiled at him.

The man looked at him suspiciously. “Anything I can do you for?”

Gregory wanted to browse, and he had a lot of questions, but the milk was getting warm, and he had to get going.

“You sell shotguns here?” he asked.

The shopkeeper gestured around. “All kinds of guns. You want ’em, I got ’em.”

“What are your hours?”

He pointed toward the window. “Like the sign says, eight to six, every day except Sunday.”

Gregory smiled, nodded. “Thanks.” He backed out of the store, aware that the suspicious expression had never left the man’s face.

Did the shopowner know who he was? Was the man involved in the vandalism of his house or did he know something about it? This was the type of closed-minded guy who probably went in for things like that, and Gregory no longer felt like he had done something slightly naughty. Instead he felt as though he had inadvertently crossed an invisible line and attempted to enter a world in which he did not belong, in which the inhabitants hated him and were out for his blood.

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.

“Milk drinker.”

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.