The Town

1

Copper Days.

Gregory remembered the celebration from his childhood, but it had since grown into something entirely unrecognizable. Downtown McGuane was festooned with flags and banners and balloons, and a traffic jam worthy of Los Angeles at its worst clogged the narrow streets. They’d walked into town instead of driving, in an effort to avoid the rush, and the cars they’d passed even a block back had still not caught up with them. He glanced into the driver’s window of the unmoving Saturn next to him and saw an irate bald man swearing at the wife seated beside him.

Julia saw where he was looking, smiled. “Charming.” Adam and Teo were both very excited, but Sasha had wanted to stay home with Babunya, and having been made to come, she registered her protest by walking several steps behind, sullenly accompanying them, not speaking.

From somewhere up ahead came the sound of gunfire from the Wild West Stunt Show.

“Hurry up, Dad!” Adam begged.

“It’ll be on again at noon,” he told his son. “We’ll catch it then.”

On the open lawn in front of the courthouse, booths had been set up by local organizations. There was a fair in the parking lot and the park next to it, complete with Ferris wheel and carnival rides.

“Can we go in the mirror house?” Teo asked.

“Yeah!” Adam chimed in.

“Later.”

Gregory led them up to the highway, and they picked out a spot next to the announcer’s booth and settled in to watch the parade, which was already in progress.

Back in the old days, the parade had been a real community affair, the floats little more than flatbed trucks decorated with crepe paper, but now there were Shriners from Tucson, one of Arizona’s senators in a chauffeured 1940s Cadillac, assorted floats sponsored by some of the state’s major stores, businesses, and corporations. It was more professional and, he had to admit, probably more entertaining to the kids, but it had lost something in the translation, and he missed those innocent raggedly amateur days in which little Sunday school children walked the parade route dressed in prospector garb, pulling their pets in wagons made up to look like mine cars.

The announcer was a deejay from some big country station in Tucson, and his patter, too, seemed far slicker than it should.

After the parade, they followed most of the rest of the crowd and wandered over to the fair. The local tribe had set up a booth out front and were making fry bread, and Gregory bought the whole family Indian tacos. That brought back memories. Fry bread was one of the few types of ethnic food not available in Southern California, and the kids had never had it before. Though the deep-fried dough was perhaps one of the most unhealthy meals in the world, it tasted wonderful, and even sullen Sasha remarked on how much she liked it.

Adam finished his taco, wiped his dirty hands on his pants, looked around. Gregory saw his son’s eyes light up as he spotted something down the makeshift midway.

“A haunted house!” Adam said. He turned toward his father. “Can we go, Dad?”

Gregory followed the boy’s gaze. It was one of those shoddy prefab carnival attractions, all gaudy oversized front with an almost nonexistent ride behind it, but Adam was ecstatic and next to him Teo was frightened, and he could tell this was a big deal to them. He remembered how excited he’d been himself when as a child at the county fair he’d seen a booth advertising the frozen body of the Abominable Snowman. Even his parents had known it was fake, but he had to see it, and although it turned out to be merely a hairy plaster mannequin in a glass box, he would have regretted it for the rest of his life if he hadn’t been able to view the attraction, and he had no intention of denying his own children access to the haunted house.

“I don’t know,” Julia said.

“It’ll be all right,” he told her.

“Are you guys coming too?” Adam looked hopefully up at his parents.

“No,” Gregory said.

“Sasha?”

“Yeah, right.”

Adam turned toward Teo. “What about you? Are you coming? Or are you too scared?”

“I’m not scared!” Teo said defiantly.

“Then you’re coming with me?”

“M-maybe,” Teo said hesitantly.

“You are scared!”

“Am not!”

Gregory smiled. Adam was only goading his sister because he was afraid to go into the haunted house alone. Gregory finished his Indian taco, tossed his napkin and paper plate in a nearby trash barrel, and took out his wallet. “Teo,” he said. “Will you go if Sasha takes you?”

Teo nodded happily.

“All right” Adam said.

Sasha threw away her paper plate. “Gee, thanks, Dad.” He smiled. “You get to go, too.”

“What a thrill.” She took the money he gave her, and after listening to her mother’s warning not to scare her brother or her little sister, led Adam and Teo across the grass toward the haunted house.

“She’ll adjust,” Julia said, putting a hand on his arm.

Gregory watched Sasha’s retreat. “We’ll see.”

The two of them started walking slowly toward the midway, stopping at various stalls along the way. Julia looked at the local historical society’s display of photographs and documents from the town’s past and picked up some pamphlets from an Arizona chapter of the Sierra Club. The crowd had swollen, the entire parade audience having now left the highway and merged with the existing throngs of people exploring the booths and exhibits spread across the park and parking lot.

Julia had heard someone mention a Molokan Heritage Club booth, and they were looking for it—Gregory saying that if his mother had known the Molokans were participating she would have come no matter how badly her arthritis was acting up—when a man in front of them said tentatively, “Excuse me.”

Gregory looked up and saw a heavyset middle-aged guy with thick hair and a thin goatee. The man squinted at him. “Gregory?”

The face of the man was familiar, and Gregory ran through the catalog of mug shots in his brain, trying to determine which of his past friends could have grown into the man before him.

“Paul?” he said.

The other man grinned, offering a calloused hand to shake. “Jesus! I thought that was you. How you doing, man?”

“Not bad,” Gregory said, smiling. “Not bad.” He put an arm around Julia, gave her a small squeeze. “This is my wife, Julia. Julia, this is Paul Mathews, my best friend from elementary school.”

“Elementary school? Try elementary, junior high, and high school.”

“My best friend from McGuane,” Gregory said. “How’s that?”

“Better.”

Julia nodded. “Hello.”

“Nice to meet you,” Paul said, smiling. He reached forward, shook Julia’s hand.

“We just moved back here,” Paul said.

“No shit?”

Julia touched Gregory’s cheek, motioned toward the row of booths in front of them, and he nodded. She started walking, smiling a good-bye to Paul.

“I’ll catch up,” Gregory told her.

There was a moment of awkward silence.

“So you’re married, huh?”

“With three kids.”

“Girls? Boys?”

“Two girls, one boy. Sasha’s seventeen. Adam’s almost thirteen. Teodosia’s nine.”

Paul shook his head. “Man. Time flies, doesn’t it?” “Yeah,” Gregory said, “it sure does.” He looked at the man in front of him, saw within that man the boy he had once known.

It was nice to see an old friend, he admitted, but there was also something disconcerting about it. They were both grown men, middle-aged, so the years had obviously passed, but the fact that they were both here, in McGuane, gave him the unnerving feeling that they had both been spinning their wheels, that they’d accomplished nothing in all those years, that their lives were pointless and useless and they were just killing time until they eventually died.

It was completely illogical, an idiotic thing to think, but he thought it nonetheless, and he realized that he’d been feeling adrift ever since he’d won the lottery, ever since he’d quit his job. He’d never considered himself one of those people who were defined by their work, who needed the imposed structure of a job to bring meaning and order to their lives, but perhaps he wasn’t as free and independent as he’d always thought.

“Are you married?” he asked.

Paul nodded.

“Anyone I know?”

“Deanna.”

Gregory was shocked. “Deanna Exley?”

“She lost a lot of weight her last two years of high school,” Paul said defensively.

Gregory laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.” “That’s okay.” Paul grinned wryly. “What’s my life for if not to serve as the butt of jokes for my buddies?”

“Just like old times.” Gregory looked around. “So where is she?”

“Visiting her mom in Phoenix. Me and the old broad don’t exactly get along, so I drop Deanna off, she stays a week or so, then I go back and pick her up. Everyone’s happy.”

“I can’t believe it.” Gregory shook his head. “Deanna.”

“So what brings you back here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Getting back to your roots, huh?”

He smiled. “Yeah. I guess.”

“There aren’t a lot of jobs around,” Paul warned. “It’s gonna be tough finding work.”

“I’m okay.”

The other man’s eyebrows shot up. “Don’t tell me you’re independently wealthy?”

“I won the California lottery.”

“No shit?”

Gregory laughed. “It’s not quite as exciting as it sounds. There were three winners, and it’s paid off over twenty years, so I only get, like, eighty thousand a year.”

“Eighty thousand a year? I’ve never cleared that in my life.”

Gregory felt suddenly embarrassed. “Well, it’s not that much in California. The standard of living’s quite a bit higher there, and…” He trailed off, not sure what to say.

“Well, it’s quite a bit back here. You’re going to be one of our most important and respectable citizens.”

“I’d rather not broadcast it,” Gregory said.

“Wise decision.” Paul whistled. “The lottery. Eighty thousand a year.”

Gregory cleared his throat. “So, what are you doing these days?”

“I own Mocha Joe’s.” He pointed up the street to a small café sandwiched between a beauty parlor and a pharmacy in a block of connected buildings. “We serve bagels, cappuccino, that kind of thing.”

Gregory shook his head, smiling. “A coffeehouse? I thought I’d left all that back in California.” He looked quickly at his old friend. “No offense.”

Paul chuckled. “None taken.” He smiled ruefully. “There’s a lot of them out there, huh?”

“On every damn corner.”

“I’m the only one in McGuane, and I still can’t make a living.”

Gregory looked up the street, toward the restaurant. All of the sidewalk tables were filled, and there was a line of people standing outside the door. “Looks like you’re doing all right.”

“Yeah. This weekend. But I can’t live for a whole year off the profits of three days. The rest of the year this place is dead. McGuane is not exactly a mocha java town, if you know what I mean.”

Gregory laughed. “I do know what you mean.”

They talked for a few minutes more, then Gregory said he’d better catch up to his wife.

“I’m in the phone book,” Paul said. “Call me.”

“I will,” Gregory promised. “Nice to see you again.”

Adam and Teo came running up. Sasha following them slowly and coolly, and Gregory introduced them to his old friend.

Adam gave Paul a cursory nod hello before turning back toward Gregory. “It wasn’t even scary!” he said. “It sucked!”

“It was a little scary,” Teo amended, although Gregory could tell she’d thought it was much more than that.

“The stunt show’s going to start in twenty minutes,” Adam announced. “We have to go now if we’re going to get a good seat.”

“Let’s find Mom first.” Gregory waved good-bye to Paul and led the kids through the crowd. They found Julia at the Molokan booth, and here were even more faces that he recognized, but he did not feel like talking to anybody, and he used Adam’s Wild West Show as an excuse to drag Julia away from the Molokans and across the park to the grandstands.

2

Finished, Julia turned off the vacuum cleaner, started wrapping up the cord. They’d been here for more than two weeks, almost unpacked for the past three days, and by now they were pretty familiar with the house, with its boundaries and dimensions and idiosyncrasies, but it seemed… different now than it had been when she and Gregory had gone through it with the real estate agent. Less hospitable. It was always dark, and while no one else appeared to notice that fact, she almost certainly did. She knew the reason: the house lay at the bottom of a steep outcropping of hill, which protected it from the morning sun, and there were two few windows facing west, making it gloomy even in the afternoon. She even understood why the house had been built this way: it was old, constructed before the advent of air-conditioning, and its owners had attempted to shield it from the desert sun as much as possible. But the end result was that their new home seemed odd and uncomfortable to her.

Spooky.

Spooky. It was a child’s word, and she didn’t know why she’d thought of it, but it described perfectly the atmosphere of this house. She had not been alone much the past couple of weeks, but the few times she had, she’d found herself listening for noises, peeking carefully around corners, being startled by shadows. There was an air of unease about their new home that seemed almost tangible to her, although it was apparently imperceptible to everyone else.

She wheeled the vacuum cleaner back to the hall closet. Of course, it was probably nothing, probably just stress. It was a shock to her system, moving from metropolitan Southern California to rural Arizona, and she was having a difficult time adjusting and this was just the way it was coming out.

But she was already wondering if they’d made a big mistake coming here—and that was not a good way to start a new life.

Julia went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of sun tea from the pitcher in the refrigerator. With the vacuum off, the house was silent, and she popped a Rippingtons tape into the cassette player on the counter just to hear some noise. Sasha was upstairs in her room, brooding as usual, feeling sorry for herself, and Gregory’s mother was in her room, taking a short nap. Gregory had taken Adam and Teo to check out the video store and see if they could find something to watch tonight. Their cable was still not hooked up, and antenna reception here was little more than wishful thinking. She’d always been one of those parents who decried the evils of television, but the fact was, now that they were deprived of TV, the kids weren’t spending their time any more wisely. If anything, they were engaged in even more frivolous pursuits: Teo dressing and undressing and redressing her Barbie dolls; Adam reading superhero comic books; Sasha lying on her bed listening to the same bad rap songs over and over again. None of their children, she realized, ever read the newspaper, and with no television, what little exposure to current events they had was cut off.

She’d be glad when the cable was connected.

She walked back out to the living room. Her mother-in-law’s crocheting project—a granny-square afghan—was lying over an arm of the couch, trailing onto the floor. Several skeins of yarn were piled on the coffee table.

As much as she hated to admit it, Gregory’s mother was starting to get on her nerves. The old woman had already chided Julia for shopping at the Copper City Market when the Fresh Buy grocery store had a Russian butcher, and she’d insisted that Gregory buy gas for the van at Mohov’s—even though it was five cents higher there than anywhere else—because the station was owned by a Russian.

“The Molokan Mafia,” Gregory called it, and while Julia had always thought the idea rather humorous, she understood now why Gregory had never laughed. It was a particularly annoying form of cultural myopia, a prejudice that actually affected day-to-day life rather than merely an abstract belief with no real-world applications. Her own parents had been Molokan, but they hadn’t been quite as strict, hadn’t tried to so thoroughly purge all American influences from their lives, hadn’t so circumscribed the borders of their existence that they lived in a completely Russian world.

But her parents had been born and raised in L.A. Gregory’s family came from a more insular community, and their fear of the outside culture was greater. There was also a certain element of racism, a sense of superiority. Russians were better than Outsiders, and somehow businessmen and merchants who were of the same religion were regarded as more trustworthy.

Gregory had tried to explain to his mother that gasoline was not more holy because it was dispensed by a Molokan, and that the free-market principles that applied to every other aspect of life still applied here. “I buy gas wherever it’s cheapest,” he said. “If Mohov is cheapest, I’ll buy from him.”

His mother hadn’t liked that, and her face had registered her harsh disapproval. She’d been uncooperative ever since, polite but obviously angry, and the atmosphere at home had been tense.

Julia sighed. She and Gregory had made a conscious decision to try and get along with his mother, to give in if need be during arguments, to put aside disagreements and differences with her in order to maintain harmony in the household, and Julia had not expected there to be a problem. She had always gotten along fine with her mother-in-law, and she’d actually looked forward to having another female voice of authority in the house. But seeing someone on weekends and talking occasionally on the phone, she discovered, was quite a bit different than living together twenty-four hours a day.

Of course, some problems were to be expected. They were all feeling their way, trying to determine the parameters of their new lifestyle and subsequently changed relationships, and it would be a while before all the kinks were worked out.

She herself felt somewhat lost, at loose ends, and while she had originally told Gregory after quitting her job at the Downey Public Library that she would like to write a children’s book, she seemed to be completely unable to translate that dream into reality, to take the concrete steps necessary to accomplish the goal. At this point she was not even sure if that really was what she wanted to do.

This was all turning out to be a lot harder than she’d thought it would be.

Maybe she should volunteer at the McGuane library. Or at the elementary school, once summer ended.

The phone rang, and she answered it immediately. It was Debbie, and Julia found herself smiling as she heard her friend’s familiar voice. “Jules!”

She was so grateful to have someone from the real world to talk to and Julia suddenly realized how much she regretted moving to Arizona.

Debbie was going to see a sneak preview of a new Steven Spielberg movie that night. She’d been walking through Lakewood Mall on Saturday, had answered a few questions from a canvasser, had obviously fit the desired demographic profile, and had been given two free tickets to an unnamed sneak. When she’d called the phone number to confirm, she’d been told that it was Spielberg’s new film.

“I wish you were here,” she said. “I don’t have anyone to go with. John refuses to come with me. I’m going to have to forfeit the other ticket.”

“I wish I was there, too,” Julia said.

They talked for another fifteen or twenty minutes before Debbie said she had to go and pick up Therese from kindergarten.

Julia hung up reluctantly. The house seemed even darker after she finished talking to her friend, and though both Gregory’s mother and Sasha were in their bedrooms, the house felt deserted. A lone shaft of faded sunlight fell on the half-finished afghan, and for some reason the sight made the skin prickle on her arms.

Spooky.

Outside, she thought she saw a small shadow dart past the front window. Teo, probably. Gregory and the kids must be home. Grateful that the others had returned, she walked to the window and looked out, but the drive was still empty and there was no sign of the van out on the street.

In the kitchen, the Rippingtons tape was playing, but the house still seemed far too quiet, and she considered going upstairs and waking Sasha to tell her that she had to help with some of the housework, had to help clean up.

She didn’t want to be alone.

Stupid. She was being stupid again. The unease she felt had nothing to do with the house itself; it was just a by-product of culture shock, a perfectly ordinary psychological response. There was nothing scary here, nothing frightening, nothing out of the ordinary.

But she could not assuage her fears with logic. They were feelings more than thoughts, not subject to the arguments of rationality, and she wished that her mother-in-law would wake up or that Sasha would come downstairs.

She thought of that small shadow passing by the window.

Jedushka Di Muvedushka.

As embarrassed as she was to admit it, her mother-in-law’s consternation over not inviting the Owner of the House had also affected her. It was ignorant, Julia knew, and she shouldn’t let herself get sucked back up into that sort of superstitious claptrap, but as logical and modern and freethinking as she tried to be, somewhere deep within her she still retained a seed of belief. She wasn’t that familiar with this particular legend, but she knew that Jedushka Di Muvedushka was supposed to protect them. He was the guardian of the family against whatever supernatural entities might want to infiltrate and interfere with their lives.

Gregory’s mother had been visibly upset ever since she’d discovered they had not invited the Owner of the House, and that might also account for some of her irritability. Ever since they’d come to McGuane, she’d been praying and discussing God even more than usual, and while she no doubt found such talk reassuring, to Julia it was annoying and slightly disconcerting. All this emphasis on the unseen world, on the supernatural, the religious, made her uncomfortable. It also kept such thoughts in the forefront of her mind, and, as ludicrous as it might be, she had to admit that she would be feeling better if they had invited the Owner of the House, if they had some built-in protection against ghosts and demons and… whatever was out there.

There was a crash from the kitchen, the sound of dishes shattering, and Julia jumped, her heart lurching in her chest. Catching her breath, she hurried to the doorway, expecting, hoping to see that her mother-in-law had knocked over one of the boxes of dishes that had not yet been unpacked.

There was an overturned box on the floor. And the linoleum was covered with broken china and broken glass.

But there was no one else around.

A chill passed through her. She scanned the shadowy kitchen, eyed the closed, dead-bolted door that led outside, saw nothing out of the ordinary.

“Julia!” Gregory’s mother called from her bedroom. “Everything is all right?”

“It’s fine!” she called back, grateful to hear another voice.

She walked into the kitchen, bent down, and righted the box. Quite a few dishes were still inside, and many of them, thankfully, appeared to be intact. She must’ve put the box on the counter next to the refrigerator and it had just fallen off.

No. She distinctly remembered setting it on the table in the breakfast nook—on the other side of the room.

That was impossible.

She opened the cupboard under the sink, took out a plastic garbage sack and began picking up the broken pieces of china. She looked up at the counter. Obviously, she’d moved the box to the counter and simply forgotten that she’d done so. And she’d placed it too close to the edge and it had eventually fallen.

She tried to gauge the angle of descent.

Yes, she told herself. That must have been what happened.

But she could not make herself believe it.

3

Babunya didn’t like the banya, and Adam didn’t either. There was something about the small adobe building that made him uneasy. It was what attracted him to the structure as well, though, and over the past few weeks he found himself returning to the abandoned bathhouse again and again.

Looking up from the shed snakeskin he’d been examining, he glanced toward the house, making sure that Teo had gone back inside, then took off, dashing around the carport and past the overhanging cottonwood tree. His sister had been hanging around him way too much lately, and while he didn’t really mind, since neither of them had met any other kids or made any friends yet, it did get annoying after a while. Sometimes he just wanted to be by himself.

Besides, he liked to go to the banya alone.

He ducked under a tree branch and started down the path that led through the high, dry weeds. Their yard was massive, and the banya was not even within sight of the house. It stood alone on the other side of the property, almost around the curve of the hill, past a small copse of paloverde trees and a jumble of oversized boulders. Beyond the banya, the cement foundation of an old house emerged from the weeds, bits of blackened board dissecting the empty space between low irregular walls.

He and Babunya had been the first ones into the banya, the second day they were here, and both had had immediate reactions to the place. The moment that she stepped over the threshold, Babunya had staggered as if struck, grabbing the wall for support. She’d instantly turned around and exited the bathhouse, breathing heavily, but when he followed her out, asking what was wrong, she waved him away and said everything was fine.

Everything was not fine, though. He, too, had felt the oppressiveness of the atmosphere as he’d walked through the door, a sensation entirely unrelated to the darkness of the small building and the natural scent of mold and must. It was a creepy feeling completely divorced from anything physical.

It scared him, but he liked being scared, and as soon as Babunya had told him that she was all right, he went back in to explore.

He had been back several times since.

Now Adam passed under the thin green branches of a paloverde and headed up the slight incline to the bathhouse, feeling the familiar foreboding in the pit of his stomach.

The banya had obviously been abandoned for many years; the weeds that grew around it were almost as tall as the doorway. But inside, there were no spiderwebs as he’d first expected. The place was not crawling with bugs, and although it was not something that would have ordinarily occurred to him, he thought there seemed something ominous about the lack of pests. It was as if even insects were afraid of this place, and in his mind that only added to its exoticism and allure.

He had been in the banya many times now, but he had never touched anything, never moved or removed a single object, and all was exactly the same as it had been that first day. He stopped for a second in the doorway, peering in. There were bones on the rough wooden floor. Not skeletons but individual bones, although the impact was the same. They were clearly not chicken or beef but were from other animals—coyote or javelina, rodents or rabbits or pets or pigs—and there was one that looked like a femur from a human child.

That was the one that intrigued him the most. He’d learned most of the bones of the body in school last year, and that particular bone had jumped out at him the first time he saw it. It looked just like a femur bone, a small femur, and whenever he came into the bathhouse he always stopped to look at it.

He did the same thing this time, crouching down before it, once again trying to imagine where it had come from, how it had gotten here, feeling a delicious tingle of fear pass through him as he examined the yellowing object.

But the bone was only an appetizer.

He stood, turned.

At the back of the structure was the thing that really scared him, the thing that had sent him running back out into Babunya’s arms that first day and had haunted his nightmares ever since. The thing that had made him break his promise to his grandmother never to go into the banya alone.

The shadow.

It hovered on the adobe wall above the broken benches, bigger than life. The profile of a man. A Russian man with a fat stomach and a full, chest-length beard.

It was not a stain or discoloration, was not imprinted onto the wall, but was an honest-to-God shadow, and there was about it the insubstantiality of something that was only a shaded copy of an actual object.

Only there was no object. There was no source within the banya or within the sight line out the doorway, no comparable shape that it was thrown by. The shadow existed in seeming defiance of the laws of science, and he’d thought about it and thought about it, tried to attribute its form to everything from the weeds outside to the wooden beams of the ceiling inside, but nothing worked. For one thing, the shadow was always there, clear sky or cloudy, its contours immutable and unchanging. For another, it was not an accidental resemblance. It was not a coincidental configuration of images that happened to form the semblance of a man but was a specific, definite figure that could not under any circumstances be interpreted as anything else.

There was something foreboding about the shape itself, about the man being portrayed, something stern and commanding about his thick body and the way his head was held so unnaturally straight, something intimidating about the figure that, combined with the shadow’s unknown origin, lent to the entire banya an aura of dread.

Adam gathered his strength, looked up. He saw the silhouetted profile, the strong brow and thick beard, and he had to force himself not to turn away. His heart was pounding, and the air inside the bathhouse suddenly felt cold. The shadow seemed to deepen as he stared at it, the entire interior of the banya growing darker around it, and for a fraction of a second it appeared to have three-dimensional depth.

He thought he heard a sigh, a whisper, and, his pulse rate shifting into high gear, he bolted out of the banya and back into the sunlight, running as fast as he could, not stopping until he had reached the line of paloverdes.

It was the longest he had ever stayed in the banya, and he was proud of himself for that. He was getting braver. Always before, he had been out the door immediately after setting eyes on the shadow, but this time he’d been able to look at it for a moment before having to run.

He shivered, thinking of that sigh, that whisper, and quickly started back down the path toward the house.

Next time, he would borrow Sasha’s watch and time himself, see if he couldn’t stay in there a little longer each visit.

He slowed down and turned to look behind him, but the banya was already hidden behind boulders and trees. He stood there for a moment, catching his breath, then continued on.

It was hard for him to believe that the bathhouse had ever really been used. Even if it hadn’t been scary, he couldn’t imagine himself going in there, getting naked, and sitting around with other guys while they whipped themselves with tree branches. Part of him felt embarrassed even to be related to people who did that.

But of course, that was not really anything new.

He’d often been embarrassed about his background.

Last year, they’d had an “ethnic pride” day at school, and it had been pure hell. They were all supposed to share the foods, clothes, language, and traditions of their families’ cultures with the other members of the class, and he’d brought in some borscht his mom had made. Mrs. Anders had insisted on pronouncing “borscht” the way it was spelled, sounding out the silent “t,” and no matter how often he said it correctly, she refused to vary her pronunciation. He had the feeling she was trying to correct him, as though she was hinting to him that he said the word wrong, and that made him feel even more embarrassed. It was as if she was making fun of him, something she did not do with Ve Phan or George Saatjian or any of the other kids in class.

He’d passed out the wooden spoons and small sample bowls of the Russian soup and had been expected to talk about the history of the Molokans as the class ate, to describe how they acted and what they believed in, and he’d said most of what he’d planned to say, but he’d been too embarrassed to bring up the pacifism. It was at the core of the Molokan religion, was what Babunya had drilled into his head since he was little, but it shamed him to admit to it. He honestly believed in those principles, deep down, but at the same time he didn’t really want to. Babunya had always told him that it was in man’s nature to kill, that Cain, the first truly human being in the Bible, the first made from the union of man and woman rather than by God, had killed his brother. It was an evil act, but after he had murdered his brother, he had been marked by God, protected from all human justice, and she said that this not only showed God’s mercy and forgiveness but indicated that God did not want humans to judge other humans, that He forbade revenge, that only He could mete out punishment. It was a prohibition against violence, against war, against the death penalty, and Molokans took their pacifism very seriously. They had left their mother country for it, and they had refused to fight in any of America’s wars because of it.

That was all well and good, and when he was in his bed in his pajamas and Babunya was telling him Bible stories, it was nice to hear, and he believed in it. But at school those ideas seemed not only irrelevant but embarrassing. It was impossible not to want to hurt people who hurt you, and more than once he had wished Jason Aguilar or Gauvin Jefferson or Teech Sayles dead. Hell, if he’d still said his prayers, he probably would have prayed for God to strike them down. But he had stopped praying several years back. He was not really sure why that was, but at some point he had just felt foolish clasping his hands together and asking God for favors.

It was not something he would ever admit to Babunya, though.

The truth was, he was not sure if he even was a Molokan. His family didn’t go to church anymore, and even when they had gone, when he was little, they’d gone to a Presbyterian church in Norwalk.

His parents also hadn’t taught him Russian, and he knew that was one thing Babunya was not happy about. He knew a few words here and there—popolk, belly button; zhopa, butt; babunya, grandma; dushiska, sweetie—but he couldn’t even remember the short Russian prayer his grandmother had made him say each Thanksgiving when he was younger. Even Babunya herself spoke less Russian than she used to. When he was little, his parents and his grandmother used to talk in Russian all the time, especially when it was something they didn’t want him to hear. When his dad used to talk to Babunya on the phone, his end of the conversation was often entirely in Russian. But that had changed over the years and now they almost always spoke English.

He walked past the cottonwood around to the front of the house. His mom, dad, and Babunya were now sitting on the front porch, his dad reading the newspaper, his mom reading a magazine, Babunya crocheting. Teo was playing with her Barbies on the steps. The sound of rap music blasting from one of the upper side windows told him that Sasha, as usual, was in her room.

He’d been planning to explore the front yard and see if he could find any more snakeskins, but the whole idea of all of them sitting around, doing family things together, made him gag, and he knew that he had to get away. His dad might be trying to get into all that small-town family-values crap, but on the off chance that a potential or future friend walked past on the road and saw them acting like rejects from the 700 Club, he needed to disassociate himself. He didn’t want to be humiliated.

There was nothing more uncool than hanging with your parents.

He walked up to the porch steps, grabbed the railing and looked up at his dad. “Can I walk down to the store?” he asked.

“Which store?”

“Does it matter? They’re both practically right next to each other.”

“Why?” his mom asked.

“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.