The Town

1

It was the first time he’d been alone in the house.

And Adam was scared.

He didn’t know why, but he was. He sat there watching TV, and after a while he had to go to the bathroom and realized that he was afraid to do so—afraid to go upstairs to his parents’ bathroom, afraid to go to the bathroom by Teo’s room, afraid to leave the living room, period.

He crossed his legs, held it in.

The house was dark. Even in the daytime it was dark, and after all this time he still did not feel comfortable in it. Part of it was no doubt due to what Scott had told him about it being haunted, but the truth was that he’d felt this way even before he’d known anything about that. It was an instinctive reaction, a response to the place that had nothing to do with stories or rumors or third-hand accounts, and now that he was here alone, he found that he was not quite as nonchalant about it all as he had been with his friend.

He thought about the banya.

He tried not to think about the banya.

Babunya was doing Molokan things, and his parents and Teo were out shopping, buying groceries and picking out videotapes: a Russian film for his grandmother and a Disney movie for Teo. Sasha was over at one of her friends’ houses. Although his parents had invited him to come along with them, he had declined, explaining that he had some math homework to catch up on, and they’d left him here alone.

He’d been waiting for just such an opportunity to sneak into Sasha’s room and do a little exploring, but now he was afraid to go upstairs at all, and his sick impulse would have to remain unacted upon until some other time, until he became braver.

Jesus. What the hell was wrong with him? Something sure had happened since they’d moved to Arizona. He’d turned into a complete wuss, for one thing. Jumping at every little sound, afraid of his own shadow. And he’d become some sort of pervert, stalking his own sister and trying to peek up her skirts, trying to catch her naked, wanting to examine the contents of her room in hopes of finding… what? A diary?

Yes. A diary.

In his sickest and most elaborate fantasy, he found her diary and discovered that she had intentionally flashed him on his birthday, had purposely allowed him to look between her legs and see her underwear as part of his birthday present. She had been waiting ever since for him to make a move and had put down all of her sexual thoughts about him in her diary.

It was ridiculous, of course, but he grew hard just thinking about it, and for a brief moment he forgot that he was alone in the house and afraid.

Then he heard what sounded like something heavy being dropped on the floor upstairs, and he jumped, spilling the sack of potato chips on his lap. He moved the potato chip bag aside, listening carefully, ready to run out of the house if he heard any other sounds, but all was quiet save for the lame jokes and canned laughter of the rerun on the television. He waited a few more minutes, but there was nothing else, and he put it down to the settling of the house—his father’s all-purpose excuse for unexplained noises—then reached for the remote and turned up the television volume.

He and Scott had stopped by Dan Runninghorse’s house on the way home from school yesterday. Dan lived at the edge of the reservation, and his dad was the chief, but even though the other Indian kids were always kissing his ass, they didn’t much like him, and the feeling was reciprocal. They were nice to him, but only because of who he was and what he could do for them, and Dan resented that. He and Scott, though, had been pals since kindergarten, natural outcasts who had banded together, and they shared a relaxed, easy camaraderie that reminded Adam of himself and Roberto and made him feel a sharp pang of homesickness.

Adam, too, liked Dan and found the Indian boy easy to get along with. There was a calm sort of confidence about him, and an emotional and intellectual openness more common to metropolitan Southern California than small-town Arizona. Both Scott and Dan were different from most of the other kids here, more like himself, and he was grateful that he had found them.

He didn’t know what he’d expected to see at Dan’s place. Not a tepee, certainly, but also not the rather mainstream-looking house with its potted palms and wicker patio furniture. They’d gotten Dr Peppers out of the refrigerator and sat around in Dan’s bedroom, talking a bit about scary stuff—haunted houses and mysterious deaths and cactus births and eerie occurrences. Dan said it was the mine that had drawn evil to McGuane. Adam assumed he meant that the town was built on a sacred site and that the gods or spirits or whatever had cursed the place, but Dan said no, not exactly.

The earth was their mother, he explained, not just their home. It was the source of all life. It was also a living entity, made up of dirt and rock, plant and water, and the mine was like a big open sore on its body. It hurt here, and it sent out the equivalent of antibodies to fight the disease—ghosts and spirits, demons and monsters.

“It is trying to protect itself,” Dan said. “That’s why this place is haunted.”

The day was warm, but Adam shivered. There was a logic to Dan’s argument that made it seem not only believable but likely, and he imagined increasingly powerful supernatural entities being sent to McGuane until the town was entirely overrun. The other boy seemed totally serious, it was clear that he was not goofing around or playing with them, and there was something about the gravity of his bearing that lent weight to his words.

Adam was acutely conscious of the fact that he was on a reservation, in the house of a chief, and it was a strangely disorienting experience. He felt suddenly as though he was in a foreign country, a place that was geographically part of America but where American laws and beliefs did not apply.

He’d lived with, gone to school with, been friends with, people from a lot of different minority groups back in Downey. There were Russians, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Mexicans, Armenians, India Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese. But Native Americans had not really been represented in the multicultural melting pot of Southern California, and their ways were unfamiliar to him, what little knowledge he had having been filtered through the distorting prism of movies and television. They were exotic but indigenous, and their ghost stories, their folklore, their superstitions, seemed scarier to him than others because they’d been here for so long. They were an old people, the first residents of this land, and he found that spooky. It gave their beliefs greater credence in his eyes, and he had no trouble buying Dan’s theory.

“You don’t really believe that,” Scott said.

“Of course I do,” Dan replied. “It’s common knowledge. At least among my people. And it explains why all of that weird stuff happens here. Besides, do you have a better theory?”

Scott shrugged.

Adam looked at Dan. He was impressed by how comfortable the other boy was with his heritage, with his religion. Dan wasn’t embarrassed by it, didn’t try to apologize for it or explain it away, and that made Adam feel a little better about his own background. He suddenly didn’t feel so ashamed about being a Molokan, and for the first time he experienced a sense of… not pride but… acceptance.

He cleared his throat. “I know a place that’s haunted. A really spooky place.”

“Where?” Scott said, interested.

“It’s on our property—”

“I knew it! After all those murders…”

“It’s not the house. It’s not even near the house. It’s on the opposite end of our property. It’s a… a banya.” He felt good as he said the Russian word. “A bathhouse.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a place where they cleanse themselves,” Dan said, and Adam was reminded of the fact that Indians had banyas too. Or their version of it. “It’s like a steam bath, right?”

“Yeah,” Adam said.

“And it’s haunted?” Scott asked.

He nodded. He described the bones and the shadow, told them of his grandmother’s refusal to go in the building. They both wanted to see it immediately.

They’d walked over to his house, and he’d taken them out to the banya and shown them first the bone he believed to be the femur of a child and then the shadow of the Russian man.

The shadow.

They’d both seen it. Scott found it cool and exciting and thought they should call the Enquirer to take a picture of it, or at the very least charge admission to see it, but Dan’s response was more serious and subdued. He would not speak while inside the banya, and when he was once again outside he told Adam that he agreed with his grandmother, and he suggested that Adam stay as far away from the banya as possible.

Adam had half thought that coming here with a group of people would dissipate the oppressiveness of the atmosphere, would lessen the dread he felt, but it did not. He was just as scared being here with Scott and Dan as he had been when he’d come by himself. More scared, perhaps, because he now had verification that the shadow of the man was real, was a concrete apparition and not some misinterpreted wall stain or trick of light.

And Dan’s warning sent chills down his spine.

They’d left quickly after that, and on the way back his friends asked him if there was anything creepy about the rest of the property or the house itself, and he had told them no.

But that wasn’t true, and he wished they were here now to confirm what he was feeling as he concentrated on the television and tried not to hear any other noises. The air in the house felt as heavy as the air in the banya, and there was that same sense of apprehension, that feeling that something bad was about to happen.

There was another thump from upstairs, and on the wall above the steps he thought he saw the quick dart of a wild shadow.

He ran out of the house.

He did not turn off the television, did not even close the door behind him. He simply dashed outside and kept running until he was halfway up the drive.

His heart was pounding, and he had a difficult time catching his breath, but that heavy dread was gone, and he turned around to look at the house. What was it? he wondered. What was in there? One of Dan’s earth-sent spirits? Or the ghosts of the murdered family Scott had told him about? He didn’t know, but either way he was scared, and he wished Babunya was here. She seemed to know how to handle this kind of stuff.

The front door of the house was wide open, and he knew flies were getting inside, but he wasn’t about to go back and shut the door. He thought of leaving, walking over to Scott’s or something, but he was supposed to stay home, and his parents would be ticked if he left. He’d probably be grounded for a week. So he sat down on a large rock, facing the house so he could watch it, prepared to haul ass at the slightest hint of anything strange.

He still desperately had to take a leak, and after a few minutes passed and there was no sign of movement, he stood, glanced around to make sure there was no one coming, and moved behind a paloverde tree to relieve himself.

He’d just zipped up when he heard the sound of an engine on the road behind him. He turned as a car pulled into the drive. A dusty old Plymouth rattled down the gravel trail, and he saw Babunya in the passenger seat and another old lady driving. The car braked to a stop next to him, and Babunya got out. She closed the car door, waved to the other woman, said something in Russian, and the old lady said something in reply before backing up.

Babunya’s smile disappeared as soon as the car hit the road. “Why you outside?” she asked, and something in the set of her face told him that she suspected what was wrong.

He told her.

He described his strange feeling, the fear he’d felt being alone in the house, the sounds he’d heard, the shadow he thought he’d seen.

She nodded, seemingly unsurprised.

“What are we going to do?” Adam asked. He looked back toward the house, shivered as he saw the open door. “Should we wait for Mom and Dad?”

“No,” she said firmly. “Don’t tell parents. Better they not know for now.”

“But they have to know!”

She shook her head. “I take care of it.”

She grabbed his hand, and he was grateful for her strength, reassured by both her attitude and her apparent conviction.

“I already bless house,” she said. “No evil spirit here. This only minor thing.”

They walked up to the house, and Babunya continued to hold his hand as she stood in the open doorway, bowed her head, and said a quick Russian prayer.

He didn’t know if it was the prayer that did it or if whatever had been in the house had already left, but he felt no trepidation as he looked into the house now. For the first time since his parents had left to go shopping, he was able to breathe easy.

“It gone,” Babunya told him. She smiled at him as she squeezed his hand. “Close door,” she said. “We go inside.”

2

Gregory sorted through the screws and bolts in the metal bin at the rear of the hardware store, feeling better than he had in weeks. He’d just dropped his mother off at Onya Rogoff’s, and while she wasn’t quite her old hardheaded, judgmental, opinionated self, at least she had finally snapped out of her funk and was resuming some semblance of her normal life. She had not yet gone back to church, but she was meeting once again with other Molokan women, planning times to get together to make bread and borscht, and Gregory was grateful that the rather frightening apathy into which she had fallen had somewhat dissipated.

Somewhat.

She was still far more listless and uninvolved than usual.

He wondered what the Molokans were planning to do about Jim Ivanovitch’s murder. His mother had not mentioned the minister since the funeral, but his death had been an unspoken subtext in her words and attitude ever since, and he knew that those old women were discussing a lot more than food preparation when they got together. It was clear that they believed some sort of demon or evil spirit had killed the minister and that his mother, at least, was staying away from the church for that reason. She was not avoiding the building because she did not want to be reminded of Jim—she thought that the building was cursed or haunted, and she would not set foot in it until it was cleansed and she was sure it was free from evil influences.

He was not able to be as sarcastic and skeptical about that as he wished.

Nikolai Michikoff had apparently taken over the reins of the ministry—he had both wanted to do so and Vera Afonin had had a dream that he should, which cemented it—but Gregory was not even sure that he had returned to the church since the funeral. Every time he walked or drove past it, the building looked empty, deserted, and he had to admit that the church looked a little creepy even to him.

The other woman who had been killed last week bothered him as well. The barmaid. Her murder seemed to bother a lot of other people, too, and the concern now was that there was a serial killer in McGuane. The prospect had everyone nervous. In a town where the crime rate was perpetually low and most arrests were for disorderly conduct and drunk driving, violent crime and the potential for repeat violence set everyone on edge.

He just hoped that it was a killer.

Killers could be caught.

But the things his mother worried about…

Gregory pushed the thought out of his mind.

He finally found the size of bolt that he was looking for, put six of them into one of the tiny paper bags provided, and walked up to the front counter to pay for his purchase.

3

Teo sat in the banya and cried.

Today, once again, she’d been pushed down by Mary Kay and Kim at morning recess and this time she’d had to go to the nurse’s office and get a Band-Aid for her scraped elbow. Later, as usual, she’d had to eat lunch all by herself because no one would sit with her. She hadn’t even gone to afternoon recess but had asked Mrs. Collins if she could stay in the classroom and read, and her teacher had let her.

Another typical school day.

She hadn’t said anything to Adam or Sasha about any of this—and definitely not to her parents—but she’d considered talking to Babunya about her troubles. She needed to talk to someone.

She was miserable.

She hated school. All of the kids were dumb and mean, and none of them liked her. She knew her parents wouldn’t understand, though. They would pat her on the head, tell her everything was going to be all right, and suggest that she make an effort to talk to other kids and make friends. Adam and Sasha would just make fun of her.

She wasn’t like the rest of them, though. She didn’t know how to make friends, and no matter what she did, the kids in her class would continue to make fun of her.

Babunya might understand, but Babunya had been acting weird lately, and Teo figured it would be better just to wait and talk to her later.

She rubbed her eyes with a finger, wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve. She’d been forbidden to go to the banya by herself, but she felt like being alone today and the bathhouse was the only place she could be sure of not being bothered. So she told her mom that she was going to play in the backyard and immediately headed over to the far side of their property, to the banya.

Now she sat on one of the broken bench boards and looked up at the stick ceiling. She liked the bathhouse; she enjoyed coming here for some reason. Babunya, she knew, didn’t like it at all, but she felt relaxed in the banya, at home. It was cool inside, and there was an aura of peace and tranquillity that made her feel cozy and comfortable despite the run-down condition of the place.

She wiped away one last tear. She could cry in here and no one would hear, she could talk to herself and no one would know. The banya was a place where she could escape from the problems of the world outside and just be by herself. It was nice to be alone sometimes, and this was the perfect place to do it. No parents around, no brother, no sister, no other kids, no other adults.

Just her.

She looked around the bathhouse—at the rubble strewn all over the floor, at the picture of the Molokan man on the far wall. If this place was fixed up, it could be like a little fort or a playhouse. If she had friends, she could bring them here and they could pretend this was a home or a castle or a secret hideout or… anything. They could clean up this junk and bring in some toys and make this place decent.

If she had friends.

That was the problem.

“Teo.”

She heard the voice, a whisper, coming from somewhere within the bathhouse. The sun was going down, and the room was filled with more shadows than light, but it was still too small to hide another person, even a child, and she was getting ready to dismiss the voice, to assume she’d imagined it, when it came again.

“Teo.”

The shadows shifted, moved. Nothing passed in front of the door, nothing moved outside, but the darkness within the bathhouse flowed clockwise, like a scene in a film using time-lapse photography, and shadows swirled slowly over the rubble in the center of the room before dispersing and once again flattening out on the walls and ceiling.

There seemed something different about the picture of the Molokan man on the far wall, but Teo couldn’t quite figure out what it was. She knew she should probably be scared, but for some reason she wasn’t, and she adjusted her butt on the board but did not stand up. This was weird, but it was not frightening, and the banya still felt friendly to her.

“Teo.”

It was the bathhouse itself that was talking to her, she realized now, and, hesitantly, tentatively, she said,

“Yes?”

“I’m hungry,” the banya whispered.

Into her mind popped the image of a dead animal. A small dead animal, a rat or a hamster. She didn’t know what made her think of such a thing, but she knew with a certainty she could not explain that that was what the bathhouse craved. It was hungry, and it had not been fed in a long time, and it had somehow recognized in her a kindred spirit. It wanted to be her friend.

“Friend,” the banya whispered, agreeing.

And again: “I’m hungry.”

There was the slightest hint of desperation in the voice, and Teo thought for a moment. She’d seen a dead rat somewhere recently. Somewhere nearby.

No. A bird. It was a bird she’d seen, on the side of the path on her way over here, and she stood up and hurried out of the bathhouse and back down the path the way she’d come. Sure enough, there it was, lying in a small tuft of dried brown weeds, several dead cottonwood leaves having blown against its unmoving form, one covering its feet like a blanket, one next to its head like a pulled-over pillow.

She crouched down next to the weeds and examined the bird. It looked like a baby. It was small, and there was something innocent and delicate about its little body. Usually, things like this grossed her out. Adam was always pushing dead bugs on her, holding up worms and dried beetles in front of her face, forcing her to look at flattened frogs in the road. And she supposed that was why she had passed it by on her way to the banya.

But it did not gross her out now, and while she felt sorry for the little birdie, she realized that it still had a function to perform, that even though it was dead it was still useful. Everything had more than one purpose, and it made the birdie’s death seem not so sad when she understood that it could help maintain the life of the banya.

She wished she had a shovel, but it was getting late and even if she ran all the way back to the house to get one, it would be too dark for her to find this spot again. Already the light was fading and the bird’s body had started to blend in with the weeds and leaves on the ground. She reached out and picked up the bird, scooping it up using both hands. The lifeless body felt surprisingly stiff and cold, and instinctively she curled her hands around it, trying to warm it up. It was not disgusting to her at all, and she wondered why she had once been afraid of things like this. Death was perfectly natural, and there was nothing scary about it. After creatures lived, they died. That was the way it was supposed to be.

She carried the dead bird back to the banya and placed its body on the pile of small bones in the center of the room. Immediately, she felt the play of cool wind on her face, light, soft breezes that came in from all directions, caressing her skin with a feathery touch and then disappearing into the dark. It was like nothing she had ever experienced before, the most sublime form of thank-you she had ever known.

There was a pause. A hush.

She sensed that the banya was grateful, that it was anxious to satisfy its hunger. But it did not want her here while it ate—she sensed that as well—and so she retreated, walking back outside.

She turned, once she was through the doorway, but the body of the bird was already gone, swallowed by shadows.

From inside the building came the whisper of air against her face: “Thank you.”

She smiled back into the darkness. “You’re welcome.”

4

Julia and Deanna sat at the small table on Deanna’s back porch, sipping iced tea.

“I love what you’ve done here,” Julia said.

Her friend smiled. “Thank you.”

Julia really was impressed. The yard looked like something out of Country Living or one of those kinds of magazines. A rustic birdhouse emerged from an overgrown patch of pink Mexican primrose, and a narrow dirt path wound between purple-blooming sage and a host of wildly growing desert plants. She and Gregory hadn’t had time to get their yard in shape—they’d cleaned it up a bit, but they hadn’t started planting—and looking at Deanna’s backyard gave her quite a few ideas, making her eager to start working on her own garden. Maybe this weekend, they’d go over to the nursery and buy some seedlings.

“Paul told me that Gregory had a run-in with our old pal Marge.”

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it a run-in. He went in the library to use their computer and she put on a big fake smile and told him that they all missed me.”

“Kind of creepy, isn’t it? I stayed away from that place the first couple of months after I quit because I didn’t want to face Marge or her gang, but then I thought that was stupid. This is my town, too, and I’m not about to go around being afraid to do something or go somewhere because of them.

“So I started going to the library once a week. At first I was militant about it. I’d just go in there and grin at her as she checked out my books for me, but gradually things simmered down, and now I’m just like a regular patron. We sort of peacefully coexist.”

Julia shook her head. “Strange.”

“There’s something to be said for the anonymity of a big city. There, if you have a problem like this, you just go somewhere else. You pick another library.”

“Or talk to that person’s supervisor.”

“Exactly. But here, you’re bound to see that person again. You have to deal with her. It’s tough.”

“I take it McGuane has a lot of… ‘militia sympathizers, ’ for want of a better word.”

“You’re right about that,” Deanna said.

“Why do you think that is?”

Deanna shrugged. “Who knows? My theory is that these people are basically dissatisfied with their own lives, unhappy with their marriages or their jobs or whatever, and they need someone to hate. For some reason, hating someone else makes them feel better about themselves. And with the Soviet Union gone, they have no real enemy anymore. No organized enemy, that is. No one they can blame all their conspiracies on.”

“So now they hate our government.”

“Pretty much. I mean, these are the same people who were so pro-American back in the eighties that they wanted to bomb Libya and bomb Iran and bomb Iraq and bomb Russia. Now they want to bomb abortion clinics and government offices.”

Julia smiled. “Maybe they just like to bomb things.”

“Maybe. But it seems to me that if everyone would just live their own lives, would just concentrate on themselves and not worry about what everyone else is doing, we’d all be a lot better off. Happy people don’t march in protests or spend their weekends playing soldier. These guys are losers, and if they’d just try to fix their own lives rather than dictate to everyone else how they should think and what they should do, we’d all be a lot better off.”

“I agree.” Julia looked out at the garden and sighed.

“The frightening thing is not just how paranoid and cynical these people are, but how stupid. They don’t trust the government. Fine. But they don’t trust anything else, either. Except their own loony little network of people. Researched, verified stories from newspapers they don’t buy, but some anonymous posting on the Internet they accept as gospel. Some disgruntled janitor from Kentucky comes home after work, eats his Hamburger Helper and starts ranting on the computer, and they believe him more than they do the trained journalists who work for legitimate news-gathering services. It’s scary.”

Deanna laughed. “I knew I liked you.”

“You know, Gregory wanted to move back to McGuane because he thought it would be a better place to raise the kids. Southern California’s so full of drugs and gang violence and everything that it didn’t seem like a great environment for Adam and Teo to grow up in. He wanted to come back here because he thought a small-town atmosphere might be better. I thought so, too. Originally.”

“And now?”

“I don’t know.”

Deanna smiled.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing…”

“What?”

“It’s just that it’s still hard for me to think of Gregory Tomasov as someone’s dad, as a middle-aged guy worried about where to raise his kids. In my mind, he’s still that obnoxious teenager who tried to sneak into the girls’ locker room.”

“Gregory?”

“Him and a couple of his friends. The coach caught them and gave them the choice of being suspended or joining the track team. At the time, McGuane High didn’t have enough boys to even have a track team. Gregory, Tony, and Mike pushed them just above the minimum limit.”

Julia laughed. “So tell me about Gregory back then. I can’t even see him trying to sneak into a girls’ locker room.”

“Oh, he did more than that, let me tell you. A lot of those Molokan boys were hell-raisers. I don’t know if they were trying to rebel against their background or what, but they were holy terrors back then.”

“Same thing in L.A.,” Julia said. “I even dated some of those boys.”

“Then you know what I’m talking about. And Gregory was one of them. He was smarter than most of the other kids, more… I don’t know… modern, I would say, but outside the classroom he was just as bad.” She grew thoughtful. “Although he seemed to change quite a bit after his dad died. He wasn’t here that long afterward—he and his mom moved to California—but there was a big difference in the way he acted. It was like he suddenly turned into an adult or something. He was quiet, serious, seemed to have lost his sense of humor.” She met Julia’s eyes. “I guess I can imagine him as a middle-aged man. I’d almost forgotten about that Gregory.”

“Every time I ask his mother about what he was like as a boy, she tells me what a perfect and well-behaved child he was.”

Deanna laughed.

“I always suspected she was whitewashing the truth.”

“Or she didn’t know the truth.” Deanna leaned forward. “Let me tell you what he was really like…”

“I talked to Deanna today.”

Gregory shifted his pillow against the headboard, opened his Time. “Yeah?”

“About you.”

He laughed. “I’ll bet she had some stories to tell.”

“And tell them she did.” Julia pushed down his magazine. “Did you really put red dye in the school swimming pool and then claim it was from girls who were having their period?”

“I didn’t put the dye in.”

“But you were there.”

“I plead the Fifth.”

“And you told the gym teachers that it was from girls’ periods?”

He grinned. “Yeah. I guess I did.”

She hit his shoulder. “You were a brat!”

“I probably was,” he admitted, laughing.

“That’s it!” she said. “That’s it!” She started tickling him, and he dropped his magazine to defend himself. She got in a few good underarm shots before he grabbed hold of both her hands.

She gave him a quick kiss even as she struggled to escape. “So what was Deanna like?”

He shrugged. “Stuck-up bitch.”

She stopped struggling. It had been clear from what Deanna said that she and Gregory had not gotten along as kids, but there hadn’t been any maliciousness in her descriptions, any resentment in her retelling of old stories. These were things that had happened long ago, and she obviously viewed them as simply humorous anecdotes from childhood.

There hadn’t been this pettiness in her voice, this flat meanness.

Julia pulled her arms free. “What did you say?”

“I said she was a stuck-up little bitch.”

“That’s what I thought you said.”

“And she was.”

“She’s not now.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

She moved away from him. “I don’t believe this.”

“I know you’re friends and all, and I’m glad you’ve met someone you like, but that doesn’t mean I have to like them.”

He reached for her, but she pushed him back. The mood was shattered, and though she’d wanted to make love tonight, she rebuffed his advances and turned away, pulling the covers over her, as he picked up his Time and resumed reading.

5

Jesse Tallfeather dropped the empty Mountain Dew can on the ground at his feet and kicked it into the pile next to the kiln. He walked slowly through the statuary.

Business sucked.

If things didn’t improve—and fast—he was going to have to declare bankruptcy. He wished he could get out from underneath this, but he’d looked at it from every angle possible, and he just didn’t see a way. He sure as shit wouldn’t be able to sell the business. No one on the reservation had the cash. Hell, no one in McGuane had the cash. Most of the other shop and store owners were barely hanging on themselves. Unless he could somehow convince that Molokan who won the lottery to either purchase the place or come in as a partner—and the chances of that were pretty damn slim—he was going to go down with the ship.

The ironic thing was that he hadn’t even wanted to get involved with the statuary in the first place. His father had started the business, and his brother Bill had been set up to follow in his footsteps, but then Bill had up and run off with Hank Wilson’s teenage daughter, hightailing it out of town, and Jesse had sort of ended up with the statuary by default.

In his father’s day, things had been good. The family had made a decent, comfortable living. But times had changed, and there wasn’t much call for statues any more. No one put them on gravesites these days, and even decorative driveway figures and lawn ornaments were not much in demand. He still sold some small stuff—an occasional fountain or birdbath or those little cement quails and ducks that old ladies liked to put in their gardens—but he’d been barely making a living for the past several years, and, unless there was a miracle, it looked like he was soon going to have to shut down completely.

He sighed. If McGuane had a casino he wouldn’t have any of these problems. He’d wished many times that their tribe would jump on the casino bandwagon. Up north, the Navajos had nixed the idea, but a lot of other tribes throughout the Southwest had gotten rich off gambling, and there were no casinos at all in Rio Verde County. It was virgin territory, and since theirs was the only reservation in this particular corner of the state, they would have a virtual monopoly.

It was an enticing idea but, so far, not one that had caught on.

Although reservation casinos were almost universally successful, he was consistently surprised by the hostility they generated among politicians and the media. The idea that Indians were actually making money and succeeding on their own seemed to really tick them off. Even the so-called activists who were always raising money for reservation doctors and social services were unhappy about casinos.

Of course, he knew, they were supposed to be all noble and natural because they were what white America now called “Native Americans.” That meant that their job was to live in hogans and tepees and look picturesque for the tourists driving by in their BMWs. They were not supposed to want anything better or more modern for themselves. They weren’t supposed to run casinos but were supposed to squat in the dirt in native attire grinding corn in metates. They were supposed to live up to their media image, to be one with the land or some such bullshit and if they were to succumb to commercialization, it was preferred that the method be crouching on blankets by the side of the road and selling turquoise jewelry.

That whole aspect of contemporary American culture made him sick. The obsession with appearances. It was okay to build roads through sacred land but not to drop a McDonald’s wrapper on the road. Hell, give him a whole sandstorm’s worth of windblown trash in the desert rather than new development. Did people really believe that a beer bottle left on the ground by a camper was more harmful to the environment than a new subdivision?

It was this focus on neatness and cleanliness and a false antiseptic order that bothered him so. Nature was not clean, nature was not orderly. It was not like a suburban lawn, with everything carefully arranged and perfectly placed, and if these well-meaning people were really interested in nature they would abandon their cosmetic attempts to prettify its appearance and concern themselves with substantive issues.

He himself didn’t even like nature.

Give him a nice new casino any day.

He imagined himself walking through an air-conditioned lobby, dressed in a suit and tie, nodding familiarly to the high rollers. Around him were video slots, computerized blackjack, wall-to-wall carpeting, and piped-in music. It was a new world, a different world, and one that he would be more than happy to join.

But for now, this was home.

Jesse looked around the yard at the statues. Winged Victory, sandwiched between two anonymous Roman-style pedestal busts, stared back at him from a slightly raised section of ground to the left of the kilns. A trio of Michelangelo’s Davids looked coyly toward a pair of Venus de Milos. He started walking slowly through the yard. He stretched out his hands, let his fingers slide over the smooth figures as he passed by. The statuary reminded him of a junkyard. There were the same crowded narrow aisles, only the objects flanking the dirt paths were new cement and plaster rather than wrecked metal.

He liked the cool feel of the statues against his skin, liked the feel of the hot sun on his face. He had walked this walk so many times that he could do it blindfolded. He knew where everything was, and he remembered that last year when he’d actually sold a major piece to one of the Copper Days tourists it had thrown him off for a while. The yard had not seemed the same, and he’d found that he missed the sold statue.

Missed it?

Yes, he had, and he realized for the first time that, despite his initial resistance, he would miss this entire place if he had to give it up. He would honestly regret losing the statuary, would be sad having to say good-bye to all this. It had grown on him, incrementally, become a part of him over the years and, as much as he hated to admit it, it was now his home.

He reached the chain-link fence and turned around.

At the far end of the aisle, Winged Victory was staring at him.

He frowned. That wasn’t possible. The large statue had always faced the sales office. Hell, he’d just walked past it and it had been facing the opposite direction.

But now it was facing him.

He looked around, scanned some of the nearby figures. Hadn’t that one’s head been facing another direction? Hadn’t that one’s arm been positioned differently?

Chills spread over his skin, down his body. He turned to his right and saw that several of the statues appeared to have moved. The sun was still hot, but he felt suddenly cold.

There was something going on here.

Na-ta-whay, he thought.

Uninvited guests.

The idea frightened him. They were indeed living on desecrated land, and though he didn’t like to think about that kind of stuff, he believed it, and he knew in his heart of hearts that there had been and would continue to be things going on in this area that were unexplainable, that were part of the Other World, not this world.

Why was he being picked on, though?

He didn’t know, but it was clear both to him and to a lot of other people that things were escalating, that things were out of balance, that something had happened to change the status of coexistence in McGuane. He didn’t know what it was or where it was going, but he knew that it now involved him, and he didn’t like that at all.

It frightened him.

He thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, and he whirled left to see what it was, but all was still. He could not remember if the statue he was staring at had been posed differently or had always been this way.

Na-ta-whay.

He looked down that long, long aisle toward the sales office, thought for a moment, then climbed the chain-link fence, hopped over, and walked around the outside of the yard and back to the front.