The Town

1

They followed the moving van, making quick stops only for gas and pee breaks. Gregory didn’t trust movers on general principle, and he wasn’t about to let these jokers out of his sight. They looked like men even a carnival wouldn’t hire. The kids had been moaning and complaining since Phoenix, begging to stop at McDonald’s or Taco Bell or some other fast-food place for lunch, but he told them to eat the pretzels and chips they’d brought along.

They sped through Tucson, headed east toward Wilcox.

The night before last, they’d had a going-away party with all of their friends and family, a big blowout at Debbie and John’s that had spilled back to their own house, the revelers sitting on packed boxes and the floor, drinking out of paper cups placed on the empty kitchen counter. Julia had ended up crying most of the evening, hugging people and promising to keep in touch, accepting invitations to stay at various homes on the promised frequent Southern California vacations, issuing invitations to all and sundry to visit them in Arizona, but he himself had not teared up at all. He’d been more excited than sad, looking more toward the future than the past, and that forward-looking optimism still held. He felt good driving across the desert, and despite the kids’ complaints and Julia’s sagging spirits, he felt happy. They were getting a new start, their future was bright and wide open, and they had the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted.

God bless the lottery.

They’d bought a new vehicle for the trip, a Dodge van, and it was nice to experience a smooth ride, air-conditioning that actually worked, and a state-of-the-art radio/cassette/CD player. He’d grown used to the tepid air-conditioning and rough-and-ragged suspension of the old Ford, and the striking contrast between the two vehicles made the van’s pleasures that much more enjoyable.

He glanced in the rearview mirror, saw Sasha reading a Dean Koontz book, Adam and Teo playing Old Maid. Behind them, in the backseat of the van, his mother stared straight ahead. Her eyes met his in the mirror, and she favored him with a slight smile.

He smiled back.

His mother was with them on a trial basis. She’d brought her clothes and Bible and a few other necessities, but she had not even tried to sell her house, her furniture was still safely in place inside the home, and she reserved the right to return at any time. As he’d expected, as he’d known, she was not really enthused about leaving her friends and her church and the rest of her family, but she did seem to recognize that she was not as young as she once had been, and since he was her only son, she’d agreed to come. On some level, she seemed to realize that she was more dependent on him than she was ordinarily willing to admit, and he was encouraged by the fact that her love for her family appeared to be stronger than her ties to the Molokan community.

This was the first time in his life he’d ever gotten that impression.

Like most of the other Molokan women her age, his mother lived for church, and her entire life revolved around the religion and its attendant social functions. She was getting on in years, though, and lately she’d been spending even more time at church than usual, going to funerals. He didn’t like her driving into East L.A. by herself. There was a lot of gang activity in the neighborhood adjacent to the church, but she continued to see the area as it had been years ago, her mind not recognizing the changes that the years had wrought. He expected to hear one day that his mother or one of her friends had been gunned down in a drive-by or mugged on their way to their cars, but so far the Chicano gang members and the strangely garbed Russian churchgoers had managed to peacefully coexist.

He himself had not gone to church for years, not since they’d moved to California. As a child, his parents had taken him to church each Sunday. The service lasted all day, and though he liked eating the food when they broke for lunch—the cucumbers and tomatoes, the freshly baked bread and the freshly cooked lopsha—he had been frightened of the service itself, of the old men and women and the way they acted when the Holy Spirit entered them. These were his relatives and his parents’ friends, people he knew and saw on a daily basis, but they seemed somehow different in church, like strangers, and he held tightly to his parents’ hands as, one after the other, the churchgoers were possessed by the Holy Spirit and began leaping up from their benches, lurching spasmodically across the open room, stomping loudly on the hardwood floor, and crying out in Russian. It was disturbing to see, this sudden abandonment of ordinary behavior and individual personality, terrifying even to a little boy who had been raised in the religion. There was one old, old man who had to be in his eighties, a man he didn’t know and saw only at church, who scared him even more than the others, who jumped up in the air with his eyes closed, screaming and lashing out with his hands. Once, he’d even had a vivid nightmare about the old man, a dream he’d never forgotten, and in which the possessed man, eyes closed, screaming, had attacked him, leaping on him, hitting him, taking him down.

Gregory himself had never felt the intrusion of the Holy Spirit into his body, and as a child that had worried him. He felt guilty, unworthy, because God did not see fit to possess him. Even his parents were periodically invaded by the Holy Spirit, his father weaving back and forth in place, his mother crying and humming psalms as she danced, and though no one ever said anything to him, Gregory always assumed that the other Molokans viewed him as not being sufficiently good or righteous, not deserving enough to be touched by God.

It was one of the many reasons that, try as he might, he attended church as an outsider, as an observer, rather than a participant.

The Molokan religion was indeed a strange one, but although he had not felt a part of it, he’d always felt protective of it. In McGuane, they’d been the object of ridicule, the town joke, harassed by hard-drinking cowboys and teetotaling Mormons alike. Molokans were foreign, they spoke with Russian accents, they were clannish, and in small-town America that made them suspect.

He remembered one Sunday morning in particular, when some cowboy-hatted rednecks outside the bar on the way to the church made fun of their clothes, derisively referring to his father as a “milk drinker.” That was exactly what the word “Molokan” meant, but it sounded mocking and disdainful coming from their mouths. He and his parents had ignored the men, who’d hooted and hollered as they passed by, and Gregory had felt ashamed of both his father and his religion. It was at that moment that he’d decided he would not go to church when he grew up.

He also decided that he would come back and kick those rednecks’ asses.

Those same feelings had once again emerged within him in the mid-eighties, during the witch-hunting McMartin days in Los Angeles, when the public seemed to see child-molesting satanists behind every tree. Someone had reported spotting a group of devil worshipers in a cemetery, and the LAPD had ended up disrupting a Molokan burial service. It was understandable. The anonymous tipster had reported a group of robed figures, all dressed in white, walking through a graveyard at night, chanting, and the police had been obliged to investigate. But the Molokans, also understandably, were not only deeply offended but angry.

Despite America’s guarantee of religious freedom, they had never had an easy time of it, and what the Constitution promised and how citizens actually acted were two different things. The Molokans had left Russia, fleeing religious persecution from the czar and the Russian Orthodox Church. They were pacifists, living strictly by the laws of the Bible, and the fact that they recognized both Christian holidays and Jewish celebrations such as Passover led to as much misunderstanding in the United States as it had in Russia. Even more offensive to Americans was the fact that Molokans were conscientious objectors, opposed on religious grounds to participation in the military. That had led to discrimination against them in the United States as well, particularly during World War II, and far too often that prejudice had been validated and reinforced by civic authority.

The police had not been the problem here, however. It was the media. The cops had merely investigated, apologized, and moved on, but the local news stations, in their insane quest for ratings, had milked the “satanist” angle for all it was worth. Million-dollar anchors had joked about smog and marine layers with their comical weathermen, then expertly shifted their smiles into expressions of grim seriousness and solemnly reported that perpetrators of the satanic rituals described by molested preschool children had been spotted desecrating a cemetery in East L.A.

Even though it was not true.

Even though the police had already rejected and discounted any connection between the Molokan burial service, satanism, and child molestation.

He’d been embarrassed by the Molokans when they’d made the news for those two days, but he’d also been angry at their accusers and had fired off a series of letters to the local television stations and the Los Angeles Times, taking them to task for their inaccurate and inflammatory reporting.

Embarrassment and defensiveness.

It was the constant duality of his life.

Teo and Adam finally tired of their Old Maid game, and Teo asked him for the hundredth time to describe their new home to her. Adam and Sasha both groaned loudly, but Gregory launched into a by-now-pat spiel, recounting how he and their mother had found the house and instantly fallen in love with it, painting a picture of the huge lot on which the house sat and the hill that abutted the back of the property, and describing the location of each of their bedrooms and how they were going to fix them up.

He caught his mother’s gaze in the rearview mirror once again.

He’d saved the best news for last, and it was time to reveal it.

“There’s also a banya,” he said.

His mother’s eyes widened. There was a tinge of excitement in her voice. “Banya?”

He smiled. “Remember the Shubins? They used to live right next to our new house—”

“The Megan place?”

“Yes!” he laughed. “The Megan place. It’s our place now. And the Shubins’ burned down quite a while ago, so the people who bought the Megan place bought their property as well, and now it’s all ours. Both lots. There’s nothing left of the Shubins’ house at all, but the banya’s still there.”

“Completely untouched,” Julia said.

“What’s a banya?” Teo asked.

“It’s a bathhouse,” Julia explained. “In the old days, houses didn’t have water or indoor bathrooms. You had to get water from a well, and you had to go to the bathroom in an outhouse. And instead of taking a bath or a shower, people used banyas.”

“Not all people,” Gregory amended.

“Russians,” Julia said. “Americans filled up tubs with water or took sponge baths, but Russians used the banya. The women and girls would all go in at once, and the men and boys would all go in later.”

“They were all naked?” Teo giggled.

Julia smiled. “Yes. They sat around on benches and heated rocks in a fire and put them in the middle of the floor and poured water over them to make steam. The steam cleaned the skin, and they used eucalyptus branches to lightly slap their back and chest and legs.”

“Why?”

“Because it smelled good. And they thought it helped open the pores and get them even cleaner. Afterward, they’d go down to a stream or a river and rinse off with cold water.”

“So it’s just like a steam bath,” Sasha said.

“Yes,” Julia agreed. “Like a steam bath.”

“And we have one?” Adam grinned. “That’s cool.”

“Dork,” Sasha said, hitting him with her elbow.

“I used to do it myself,” Gregory said.

Sasha grimaced. “That’s gross. I don’t even want to think about it.”

Gregory and Julia laughed, and they followed the moving truck off the interstate and onto the highway that led to McGuane.

It was an hour or so later when his mother suddenly let out a Russian oath. There was a hint of panic or fear in her voice, and Gregory quickly turned around to make sure she was okay, that nothing was wrong.

A stricken look had come over her face. “Jedushka Di Muvedushka,” she said.

Oh, no, he thought.

He fixed her with a glare and shook his head, indicating the kids, before turning back around to face the road.

She paid no attention to his hints. “You don’t ask him to come, do you?”

He sighed, not knowing whether to argue with her or humor her. “I forgot,” he said.

“Jedooshka Dee—what?” Adam asked.

“Muvedushka. Moo-VEH-doosh-ka.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s the Owner of the House.” His mother’s voice sounded pinched and strained.

“It’s a Russian”—Superstition, he’d been about to say—“tradition,” he said instead. He’d never been able to make his mother understand that he and Julia did not hold the same beliefs she did, that they had purposely kept their children from many of them, and he shot Julia a glance of apology.

She nodded, understanding.

“Is my fault,” his mother said in the back. “I should have told you. Should have remind you.”

“It’s okay,” Gregory said.

“It’s okay,” Julia repeated.

“I should have known. I should have ask him to come myself.”

“Why?” Adam said.

“He’s the Owner of the House. He protect you. He make sure everyone in the house is safe and healthy, that nothing happen to you. You ask him to come with you so he protect you in new house.”

“You mean he’s been living with us all the time?”

She nodded. “That is why nothing bad ever happen.”

“What’s he look like?”

“A little man with the beard.”

“Where does he live? In the attic? Or under the house?”

“He live where you cannot see him.”

“I’m scared!” Teo announced.

“If he came with us, would he ride in the van or would he ride on the roof? Is he invisible?”

“I’m sacred!”

“Mother,” Gregory said sternly.

She put an arm around Teo. “No. Not scary. Good. He there to protect you, keep you safe.” She smiled. “My father saw him one time. We live in Mexico, on the farm, and Father went to feed the horses. At night. Little man was standing there giving hay to the horses. And Father watch and he came and told Mother, ‘Jedushka Di Muvedushka feeding the horses.’ He don’t get scared, nothing. In the morning we go look, the horses’ hair all braided. So beautiful! All their hair braided.” She shot Gregory a defiant look. “So there is such a thing.”

“You weren’t scared?” Teo asked.

“No. Not scary. But the braids, you cannot even undo them. Jedushka Di Muvedushka help Father by feeding the horses and just want to show us that he… that he’s watching us, taking care of us. But Jedushka Di Muvedushka not scary. He’s the Owner of the House. He don’t do nothing bad.”

Gregory remained silent, waiting for the subject to go away. Teo was already frightened, and being in a new house after hearing this story, she was bound to have nightmares. Adam wasn’t entirely immune either. Moving was tough enough without having to put up with scary folktales, and he hoped his mother knew how upset he was, how angry he was with her. They were going to have a long talk later, and he was going to have to set down some rules of the house, rules she would have to follow if she lived with them.

He glared at her, but she looked neither embarrassed nor apologetic. Her face was set and grim, and when he met her gaze in the rearview mirror, it held his own, reproachfully.

“I should have invite him myself.”

2

Julia stared out the window as they drove. The scenery was amazing, like something out of a movie. Endless vistas, blue sky, clouds that appeared to be the size of continents. They could see hundreds of miles worth of weather patterns: a rainstorm far off to their right, gathering thunderheads to their left, clear skies straight ahead. A series of dark mesas and jagged blue mountains on the horizon before them seemed to remain perpetually the same size, serving only to reinforce the vastness of this land and the awe it inspired.

She looked out at the late-summer wildflowers that lined both sides of the highway. Blooming ocotillo, deep-green saguaros and lighter-green paloverde trees filled in the landscape and belied the common conception of the desert as a dead, arid place devoid of life. Indeed, she’d been surprised herself by the beauty and lushness of the land when they’d first driven out here to look for a house. She’d been hesitant at first about Gregory’s sudden brainstorm, his plan to just pull up stakes and move. As she’d told him, she had always lived in Southern California, and despite her chronic complaints, she had never really been able to imagine herself living anywhere else.

But traveling through the open country, Liz Story on the stereo, she’d actually been able to see herself living in a small town, a town where everybody knew everybody else, where neighbors helped each other and cared about each other and were willing to work together for the good of the community. It was a comforting thought, a welcome thought, and her belief and conviction in Gregory’s plan had grown stronger the further they traveled from California.

Even the kids were quiet as the road dipped through dry washes, wound around low hills, and finally began snaking through the canyons of a rugged desert mountain range. McGuane was in these mountains, and once again Julia found herself captivated by the rough beauty of this wild countryside. To their right, cliffs with the same multicolored striations as the Grand Canyon towered above them. Huge cottonwoods grew on the canyon floor, the trees providing umbrellas of shade to barely visible corrals and occasional ranch houses.

“Almost there,” Gregory said. He pointed ahead. The road passed through a tunnel carved through the rock, the zigzagging remnants of an old dirt trail still visible on the cliff above. “McGuane’s just on the other side.”

“Cool!” Teo said.

And then they were there.

According to Gregory, the town was almost exactly the way it had been when he’d left. There were no chain stores, no corporate gas stations, not even one of the name-brand fast-food joints that had taken over most of small-town America. There was no Wal-Mart or The Store, no Texaco or Shell, no McDonald’s, Burger King, or Jack-in-the-Box. McGuane had retained its local individual character rather than succumbing to the increased homogenization that was sweeping through the land, and from the first that had impressed her. Emerging from the tunnel was like coming out of a time machine, and she felt as though she’d been transported back thirty years and had entered the world of Gregory’s childhood.

They passed a small diner, saw a pickup truck and several bicycles parked in front of it, five or six teenagers clustered around a picnic table to the side. They looked up, waved as the van drove by. In Southern California, she thought, they would have yelled something or flipped off the vehicle. Across the road, two boys jumped down from a tree house into the dirt, laughing.

It was a refreshing change, and she understood what Gregory had meant when he’d said that McGuane would be a good place to raise kids. It was a Huck Finn world, a children’s paradise, a place where boys and girls could climb rocks, explore canyons, build forts and clubhouses instead of simply sitting inside the house and watching TV or playing Nintendo.

The highway came into town from the west, ending at the tan-brick courthouse, where it split into two narrow streets that wound through the diverging halves of the community.

The geography of the town was determined by the geology of the land. At McGuane’s south end was the mine, an ugly open pit long since closed down and fenced off from the highway by rusted chain-link. The old mining office was now the realty, where they’d bought their new home, and it sat dwarfed at the edge of the massive hole, a matchbox next to a drained swimming pool. The rest of the town snaked northward from the mine up two branching canyons to a sagebrush plateau. At its peak, according to Gregory, McGuane had had a population of thirty thousand, but that had been down to ten thousand when he’d lived there, and he was not sure what it was now.

“Are we almost there?” Adam whined.

Gregory looked over at Julia and smiled.

“Almost,” Julia said.

There was not enough room to back in, so the moving truck parked on the street rather than in the drive, its wide bulk blocking both lanes of the narrow road. Gregory pulled the van into the dirt driveway and stopped just in front of the carport next to the house. The movers had not even gotten out of the cab, much less opened the rear door of the truck and started unloading, so he sorted through his keys in order to open up the house before hurrying back to oversee their work.

“Hurry up,” Sasha said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Wait!”

He’d unlocked and opened the front door and was about to walk inside, when his mother stretched a bony arm across the doorway. She looked up at him. “We have to bless the house.”

Gregory nodded, motioning the kids back and shooting Julia a look of apology as his mother recited a prayer in Russian. She told them to remain outside, then walked in, going through each room, ordering out all evil spirits and repeating the same Russian prayer.

Adam’s eyes widened. “Are there really evil spirits in there?”

Great, Julia thought. Now Teo would never get to sleep.

“No,” Gregory said.

“Then why’s Babunya—”

“It’s a tradition.”

She emerged from the front door a few minutes later, nodded that it was safe to go in, and Sasha hurried past her, heading for the bathroom.

Julia hoped the utilities company had not forgotten to turn on the water.

“Are there evil sprits in our house?” Teo asked.

Gregory looked at his mother. She smiled, patted her granddaughter’s head. “If any there, they gone now.”

Teo and Adam ran inside, yelling and laughing, rushing excitedly from room to room.

“Adam!” Julia yelled, stepping over the threshold into the entryway. “Teo! You stop running right now!”

From behind them, up the drive, came the sound of the truck’s cab doors slamming shut. Gregory looked over at his mother.

“You should have invite him,” she said. “Jedushka Di Muvedushka.”

“I know,” he told her. “I’m sorry.”

She patted his back, sighed, and followed the rest of the family inside.