The Town

1

Gregory walked with his mother to the Molokan church.

She’d been wanting to go since the first day they’d arrived, but everything had been so hectic, they’d been so busy unpacking and rearranging and getting the long-neglected yard into some semblance of order, that he simply hadn’t had the time to take her.

Today, though, she had demanded and he had acquiesced, and now the two of them stood in the dirt parking lot in front of the church, she leaning heavily on his arm. He’d wanted to drive down, but she’d insisted that they walk, like they had in the old days, and although it had taken nearly forty minutes to get here, with frequent rest stops, they’d finally arrived.

Gregory looked around: at the variety store, which began the block of businesses on the other side of the vacant lot to the left of the church, at the wood-frame house on the building’s right flank that had been turned into a nursery. He looked up at the church itself as the two of them approached. He’d expected to have a better memory of the place—after all, his family had spent a lot of time here—but he must have blocked it out, because the church seemed no more familiar to him than the mine office or the town hall or any of the other buildings he’d seen as a child but with which he had had no real involvement. He recognized the church, but it was an impartial, impersonal recognition that contradicted the intimate acquaintance he’d had with the place.

They walked up the three short steps, went in. Like the church in East L.A., it was simple. A wooden structure with one big open room and a small adjoining kitchen. There were benches stacked against one wall, and an old man with a white beard that hung down to his stomach was sweeping the hardwood floor.

“Jim?” his mother said, stopping. She squinted. “Jim Ivanovitch?”

The old man broke into a huge grin. “Agafia?”

The two of them hobbled across the floor toward each other, meeting somewhere around the middle of the room for a big bear hug. Gregory smiled. He didn’t recognize the old man, but his mother did, and she was clearly delighted. He hadn’t seen her this happy since they’d left California.

She turned toward him. “Gregory?” She spoke in Russian. “You may not remember, but this is Jim Petrovin, our old minister.” She laughed a strangely girlish laugh he didn’t recognize. “And my old boyfriend before your father.”

The minister nodded and grinned, the expression on his face impossible to read behind the huge beard. Gregory stared at him, maintaining his own now meaningless smile. He suddenly didn’t know what to say or how to act. It was childish of him, but he felt an instant antipathy toward the old man, a defensive rivalry on his father’s behalf. The minister was ancient, practically on the verge of death, but it seemed somehow disloyal for him to accept the man, to feel anything positive toward him. He thought of his mother’s laugh, that girlish laugh he didn’t recognize, that laugh from an earlier time of her life, before he had been born, and he realized that there were a lot of things about his mother that he didn’t know, whole segments of her life, whole aspects of her personality that were shielded from him and entirely unfamiliar.

He understood for the first time that he did not really know his mother.

“Jim followed my family to McGuane,” she said. “Hoping to win me back.”

The minister nodded. “I did not covet,” he said. “But I hoped.”

Gregory didn’t want to hear this. “You two probably have a lot to talk about.” He was suddenly aware of how rusty his Russian sounded, how long it had been since he’d spoken more than a few words at a time in the language. “I am going to walk around town. I will come back in an hour or so and pick you up.”

His mother nodded. “I will be here.”

She smiled at him and waved, and he walked out of the church, across the dirt, out to the street. He felt like a child again, confused and conflicted, and though he knew it was silly, knew that there was nothing going on—and that even if there was, his mother had a perfect right to resume a romantic life this many years after his father’s death—he felt uncomfortable. The fact that she had known this minister before she had known his father trivialized the life of their family, implied somehow that this man was her one true love and that her husband, his father, had been merely an impediment that had temporarily gotten in the way. It was a dumb thought, immature, but there it was, stuck in his mind, and he had to force himself not to think it, to at least attempt to look at the situation objectively.

He headed downtown to the shopping district. He’d been too busy or too lazy to come down here sooner and, despite occasional trips to the grocery store, he hadn’t seen the area up close since the Copper Days celebration that first weekend.

The throngs of people were gone now, and the side-walks were empty, only parked cars and an occasional pickup or broken-down Jeep clattering up the canyon roads to indicate that McGuane was anything other than a ghost town.

He walked along the cracked sidewalk, peering into the windows of the shops—some open, some closed—that fronted the street in a series of connected rock and brick buildings. There was a used bookstore, an antique store, a pawnshop, a jewelry store, a shoe repair shop, a pharmacy.

Halfway down the block, between the shoe repair and a western wear shop, he came across a narrow building with no windows and a dark, open doorway.

A bar.

He stopped walking.

The same bar he’d passed with his father all those years ago on the way to church.

He hesitated only a second before stepping inside.

He didn’t know what he expected. Hostile rednecks gathered around the counter? The same men who’d insulted his father all those years ago, now grown old? He wasn’t sure, but his muscles were tensed as he walked through the door.

He needn’t have worried. The interior of the bar was neither threatening nor intimidating. It looked like a typical small-town tavern. Only a few patrons occupied the dimly lit room: a couple in a back booth, two uniformed sheriff’s deputies at a small table.

And Paul.

His old friend was seated at the front counter of the bar, next to an older man, and he called out Gregory’s name and happily waved him over.

“Hey,” Gregory said, walking up. He sat down on an adjacent stool. “Didn’t expect to find you here.”

“I’m here most days.” Paul grinned. “Where everybody knows my name.” He motioned to the bartender. “A beer for my friend here.”

Gregory shook his head. “No. Thanks. It’s a little early for me.”

“It’s ten o’clock!”

Gregory smiled. “Coffee,” he told the bartender.

Paul turned to the old man next to him, nodded in Gregory’s direction. “This is Gregory Tomasov, my best friend from… hell, kindergarten through high school. He just moved back to town.”

The man reached around, held out a weathered hand. “Howdy. I’m Odd Morrison.”

Gregory smiled. “That’s an odd name.”

“Never heard that one before,” the other man said dryly.

Gregory laughed.

“Odd’s my right-hand man. Plumber, carpenter, brick-layer, carpet installer, and all-around fix-it dude.”

“I get it,” Gregory said. “He does odd jobs.”

“You’re a wit,” the old man said. He sipped his beer. “Or at least half a one.”

“He doesn’t take too kindly to people making fun of his name. Especially strangers.”

Gregory reddened. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. I was just…”

Both Paul and Odd burst out laughing.

“Same old Gregory,” Paul said. “Still afraid of hurting anyone’s feelings.” He clapped him on the back. “Insult Odd all you want. He doesn’t give a shit.”

“As long as I can do the same to you.”

The bartender brought over a cup of coffee. Gregory thanked him, and Paul held up a finger, said, “My tab.”

Gregory took a sip. Not bad for bar coffee. “That reminds me,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be working over at your coffeehouse?”

Paul waved his hand dismissively. “What do you think teenagers are for? Besides, the place is dead. The few customers we do have either show up before work or at lunchtime. The joint’s not exactly jumping midmorning.”

“What about nights, evenings?”

Paul shrugged. “So-so.”

Odd raised an eyebrow.

“All right. Business sucks.” He sighed. “You know, I was almost going to open up a health food store—”

“And a juice bar? Those are big in California, too.”

“No, just a health food store. But it was too depressing. I thought of the health stores I’d been in, and I realized that no one in there ever looked healthy. They were always either skinny, ugly weirdos or dying old people looking for last-chance miracle cures. Normal people just weren’t into health food. Healthy people weren’t into health food. So I decided to try the café.” He shook his head. “I just thought it would be cooler than it turned out to be.”

“And more successful,” Odd pointed out.

“And more successful,” Paul agreed. He sipped his beer. “Let’s get off this subject. It depresses the shit out of me.”

“All right,” Gregory said. “What ever happened to Larry Hall?”

“Larry Hall!”

They talked about old times, old friends, what had happened to everyone and where they had gone. Most people had moved away. The few who hadn’t seemed to be walking country music clichés—unhappy underachievers with an extraordinarily high divorce rate. Many of their old schoolyard enemies had turned out to have miserable, unhappy lives, and they both chuckled over that.

“You know,” Paul said seriously, “friends come and go, but family’s always there.”

“You’ve sure changed your tune.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Come on. Back in high school, when you couldn’t get a date to save your life, you used to tell me that girls come and go, but friends are forever.”

“I did not.”

“Did too. You’d been watching too many buddy movies or something. War movies. And you had this asshole idea that even if you eventually got married, your friends would be more important than your wife.”

“You a fag?” Odd asked, squinting up at him.

Gregory laughed.

“Very funny.”

“All that male bonding crap is just Hollywood bullshit,” Odd said. “I’ve had a million friends, but I’ve only had one wife, and if I ever had a choice to make between the two, it would be a damn easy one. I may like my friends, but I love my wife.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Paul said.

Gregory grinned, shaking his head. “I can’t believe it. You finally grew up.”

“Blow me.”

Gregory chuckled, sipped his coffee. He felt good. He and Paul hadn’t hung out since high school, but there was none of the awkwardness between them that he would have expected. It was as though they’d picked up exactly where they’d left off all those years ago. They’d fallen into the old rhythms, the old patterns. They were comfortable with each other, perfectly at ease, and there was something nice about that.

“So how is Deanna?” Gregory asked.

“Still at her mom’s. I pick her up Thursday. I called and told her you were back, but to tell you the truth, she didn’t seem all that fired up to see you.”

“Tell her I’ve changed, too.”

“Yeah. Right.”

They laughed.

Gregory motioned to the bartender for a refill. He glanced around the bar, saw neon beer signs, a few old mining photographs half hidden in the gloom, a dead jukebox and a Pac Man video game. In his mind, this place had always been demonized, the home of hate, an evil spot, and it was liberating to see that it was merely a typical small-town business, to recognize on an emotional level that his dread had been all self-induced and that none of the attributes he had ascribed to it existed anywhere outside of his mind. He finally understood what people meant when they talked about “a sense of closure.” The phrase had always smacked of pop psychology to him, and he’d dismissed the word “closure” as yet another trendy, meaningless buzzword, but it was apt in this instance. It felt as though an open wound had been healed, and it made him think you could go home again.

The bartender poured him another cup of coffee, and Gregory smiled his thanks. “You know,” he said to Paul, “I was thinking. You need some help at your café? I’d do it for free,” he added quickly. “You wouldn’t have to pay me a dime.”

Paul frowned. “You won the lottery and gave up your high-paying job to become… a waiter in McGuane? Are you drunk or are you just insane?”

“I don’t want to be a waiter. You have the only café in town, and I thought about all the ones back in California, and I figured I could help you out. You know, spruce it up, bring it up to California standards.”

“How?”

“Do you have entertainment? Performers?”

Paul shook his head.

“There you go. That’d help draw people. I could help you book local singers. Or cowboy poets. Or, hell, maybe even some club acts that usually don’t even hit this part of the state.”

“Why?” Paul asked.

Gregory shrugged. “Call it an investment.” He smiled.

“Or the whim of a bored rich guy. Well, rich-for-McGuane guy.”

Paul nodded, looked over at Odd. “We could have entertainment. We could move back those chairs and tables on the east wall and you could put up a little stage…”

“I’d pay for the materials,” Gregory said. He nodded toward Odd. “And your time. We could get a decent lighting setup, a mike and a speaker system.”

The old man nodded. “It’s doable.”

“This has potential,” Paul admitted, and Gregory thought he detected a hint of excitement in his voice. “No place else in town has live entertainment.”

“Even if we just booked local talent, you’d get their friends and family coming in to watch. At the very least. Charge a two-item minimum, and voilà!”

“This could work. I might be saved from bankruptcy yet.” He grinned, held his hand out to Gregory, shook. “Deal!”

Gregory wanted to go immediately over to the café, but both Paul and Odd had beers in front of them, and neither one was in a hurry to leave. They talked excitedly of the specifics of renovation, the mechanics of outfitting the café with a performance area, and Odd borrowed a pen from the bartender and started writing figures down on a napkin.

After ten minutes of increasingly grandiose plans that made Gregory mention the fact that they should have a budget, a limit, Paul excused himself and headed off toward the bathroom at the rear of the bar.

Gregory and Odd sat for a moment in silence, sipping their respective drinks.

“You’ve lived here for a while, haven’t you?” Gregory asked.

“All my life.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know whatever became of the Megans, would you? The ones who used to own our place?”

Odd frowned.

“Did they move or—?”

“They’re dead,” the old man said.

Gregory stared at him and blinked.

“Bill Megan shot his family. Killed ’em all, then turned the gun on himself.”

Odd answered his next question before he even asked it. “In their bedrooms,” he said. “Murdered ’em while they slept.”

He needed alcohol after that.

He ordered one beer, then another, and finally finished off a third before stopping.

“You’re living in the old Megan place?” Paul said after he returned from the bathroom and Odd told him. He whistled. “Brave.”

“I didn’t know I was being brave. I didn’t know anything had happened.”

Odd looked disgusted. “Who sold you that house?” he asked. “No, let me guess. Call. Call Cartright.”

Gregory nodded.

“It’s against Arizona law to sell a place without informing the buyer that there’s been a murder there, but Call’d sell his own sister to cannibals if there was a penny to be had, so it don’t surprise me none.” He squinted up at Gregory. “You could sue his ass, you know. Get out of the contract. You don’t want that house, you can—”

“No, we want it, all right.”

Paul frowned. “Why, in God’s name?”

“Well, for one thing, we’re all moved in, we just got settled. I don’t want to have to look around for another house, move again, and go through all that stress. Besides, I don’t believe in ghosts—”

“Who does?” Paul said. “But it’s just the thought that all that shit happened where your kids are sleeping, where your wife takes a bath, where you eat breakfast. Hell, I’d be thinking about it all the time. I’m not superstitious or anything, but that doesn’t mean I want to buy Jeffrey Dahmer’s refrigerator and store my milk in it. It’s sick.”

Odd nodded. “Besides, that’s why the last people moved out. They heard things.”

“Things?”>

“I don’t know if it was their imagination or what, but the people said there were knocking sounds in the middle of the night. And voices. I don’t know whether it was real ghosts or just their own minds playing tricks on them, but whatever the cause, they couldn’t stay there.” He paused. “Sometimes the demons in your head are worse than anything outside.”

“We haven’t heard anything,” Gregory said.

“Yet.”

He smiled. “Yet.”

“Just the same…”

“I’ll admit it’s not something I really wanted to hear. And I would’ve been much happier if no one had told me. But I’m not going to panic and pull up stakes and disrupt my entire life because of it. Hell, someone’s probably died in almost every old house.”

“Just the same…” Paul said.

“Well, keep it to yourself,” Odd suggested. “Don’t tell your family. That’s my advice. What they don’t know can’t hurt ’em.”

Gregory nodded and thought of his mother blessing the house before they could go in, cleansing it of evil spirits. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.”

2

The Molokan church hosted a welcoming get-together, an end-of-the-summer barbecue with steak and shashlik. Gregory was mingling and talking with people he hadn’t seen in years—mostly the parents of childhood church friends, who seemed to be the only Russians who had not moved away. His mother was in heaven, the center of attention, laughing happily and talking loudly, more animated than Julia had ever seen her.

Julia herself felt slightly out of it. She smiled and chatted and pretended to be enjoying herself, but the truth was that she had never liked these sorts of functions, and the unwritten Molokan mandate that every shower, wedding, funeral, or party put on by or for a church member must be attended by everyone in the congregation had been one of the many things she had rebelled against. Even as a child, even in L.A., she had not enjoyed Molokan mixers, had always done her best to avoid them, and here in the boonies of Arizona, with people she didn’t know and with whom she had no intention of socializing, the chore as even less pleasant.

The kids were not having a great time, either. There were no other children or teenagers, and Sasha, Adam and Teo stuck together, hovering on the edge of the small churchyard, eating from paper plates, talking among themselves and gazing longingly out toward the freedom of the street. In addition to being old, everyone here was speaking in Russian, and Julia knew her son and daughters were bored and desperate to leave. Especially Sasha.

She understood how they felt—she felt it herself—but this afternoon was not for them, it was for Gregory’s mother, and the least they could do was be polite and put up with it. It would all be over in a few hours.

A huge copper samovar stood on the lonely picnic table in the middle of the yard, and she walked over to get herself some chai. She remembered as a child using sugar cubes to build a bridge across her cup, placing them in a row and wedging them in, pouring the tea over the bridge to dissolve it. It was an almost universal rite for Russian children, and she had taught her own children how to do it, though none of them had ever been big tea drinkers and the novelty had worn off fairly quickly.

Gregory sidled up next to her, nudged her with his shoulder. He poured himself some chai. “Having a good time?”

“Oh, wonderful,” she said.

He laughed. “We’ll bail as soon as other people start leaving.”

She shook her head. “It’s okay. Let your mother have her fun.”

“You sure?”

“I’m willing to stay to the bitter end. Anything for the sake of family unity.”

“Thanks.” He gave her a quick kiss. “I owe you one.”

She smiled. “You can pay me back tonight.”

He grinned, gave her a quick squeeze. “Happy to.”

Gregory downed his tea, poured himself another cup, then asked her to come and meet Semyon Konyov, the man who had been his father’s best friend. She accompanied him across the yard to a spot under the cottonwood tree where a group of old men stood around eating shashlik. Introductions were made, polite questions were asked, then the conversation turned to church matters, and she excused herself and walked back to the samovar. She didn’t really want anything more to drink, but the picnic table was in a centralized location and offered her a perfect vantage point from which to observe almost everything that was going on. She saw three old women huddled together near the back fence, holding their hands over their mouths as they talked, gossiping. She saw one old man with a gray beard down to his waist, obviously drunk, loudly denouncing both the Russian and the American governments for perceived slights to himself and his family. She saw a group of men gathered around the barbecue, arguing vigorously over something she could not make out.

In the doorway of the church, Gregory’s mother was emerging from the building, followed closely by Jim Petrovin. The two of them walked down the steps, over to the barbecue, and Julia watched the minister hover around her mother-in-law. Although she’d told Gregory that he was just being paranoid and overprotective, she found herself revising that analysis. He was right, she thought. The minister was after his mother and was making a concerted effort to rekindle the relationship that had ended all those years ago.

Julia understood how Gregory felt, but she had to admit that it was kind of cute, these two old people taking another stab at romance this late in the game. It was also kind of sad. It was clear that there had been no one else in Jim Petrovin’s life all this time and that her mother-in-law’s return was the fulfillment of a lifelong fantasy.

Gregory’s mother happened to glance over just at that moment, their eyes met, and they both looked instantly away, embarrassed.

Finally the party began to wind down. Couples started leaving, drunks were ushered into vehicles and driven home, leftover food was taken into the church.

Julia and Gregory stood with their kids, saying good-bye, thanking everyone for welcoming them to McGuane. They were polite and everyone was polite to them, but there was a reserved formality to the way in which they were addressed, a definite distance between themselves and everyone else. She’d noticed it earlier, and at first she’d put it down to her own aversion to such events as this, but the truth was that the McGuane Molokans were acting somewhat… secretive.

That was it exactly. They were acting as though there were some sort of knowledge or plot that they were all in on but had been forbidden to let her or her family know anything about. Molokans were naturally secretive, she knew. It was an understandable by-product of being an oppressed minority. Her own family had always been suspicious and evasive when asked about their religion or ethnic background. But this was something different. There was an added dimension here, something specific to these people and this place, and although it was probably nothing, probably harmless, it nevertheless made her uneasy.

Gregory went to get his mother. She was making arrangements to get together with several other old women to make bread and lopsha noodles, and for that Julia was grateful. Maybe that would finally stop her from moping around the house all day. At the very least, it would do her good to get outside and see some of her old friends.

Julia tried to look at it from that perspective, tried to keep her mind on that aspect of the afternoon, but those other thoughts kept returning, and she was silent as they walked up the canyon road toward home.

3

Jolene started screaming at midnight.

Harlan was yanked out of sleep by the sound and bolted upright in bed next to her. “Is it time?” he asked, instantly awake. “Is it time?”

She could not even answer him. She continued to scream—a high-pitched, nonstop, animal sound unlike anything he had ever heard—and there was no break in the noise, no rhythm to the cry. Something was wrong, he knew. Labor was not supposed to be this painful, and it was supposed to come in bursts, to ebb and flow, not remain constant, not be so relentless.

She was thrashing around on the bed, her body twisting and contorting with agony, the corded muscles of her neck visibly straining, and he reached out to her, tried to touch her, tried to feel her forehead, but her wild movements completely rebuffed him. He reached down and pulled off the twining, bunching covers, and saw what he was praying he would not.

Blood.

He was up like a shot, out of the bedroom and into the hallway. Grabbing the wall phone, he called 911, screamed his address and said that he needed an ambulance. He slammed down the phone, then immediately picked it up again and dialed Lynda. How in the hell had Jolene gotten the wacky idea into her head that a midwife was better than a doctor, that so-called “natural” childbirth was better than modern medicine? And why had he been stupid enough to go along with it? Women used to die during natural childbirth. For a lot of mothers, giving birth had been a fatal experience.

Lynda was already pounding on their front door by the time his call was on the second ring. She’d obviously heard Jolene’s screams and had rushed over on her own, and Harlan dropped the phone and ran over to unlock the dead bolt.

The midwife did not even look at him as she ran inside, racing straight through the living room down the hall to the bedroom.

The sheet was covered with red. Jolene’s legs were spread, and her genitals were obscured by the copiously flowing blood. From someplace far away, Harlan thought he heard the faint sound of a siren.

“Get me some towels and hot water!” Lynda ordered. “Now!”

He ran into the bathroom, turned on the tub’s hot water, grabbed the flattened pink plastic bucket that his wife used to handwash her underwear. He filled up the container, yanked two towels from the rack, and hurried back to the bedroom.

Lynda grabbed a towel, dunked it in the water, and started wiping off Jolene’s pubic area. Harlan thought he saw, amid the flowing blood, a rounded object pushing out from her vagina.

“It’s the baby,” Jolene confirmed.

She shifted position, blocked his view. It was just as well. His palms hurt from digging his fingernails into them, and he did not really want to see any more than he already had. His heart was pounding, and the thoughts racing through his head were all worst-case scenarios.

Jolene was still screaming, had not stopped screaming the entire time, and as Lynda reached between her legs and started working, the screams intensified. He had not thought her cries could get any worse, but he’d been wrong, and it wrenched his heart and terrified him to the depths of his soul to hear the undiluted agony in her voice, the inhuman suffering to which her body was being subjected.

“Oh, my God,” Lynda said, and though she spoke quietly, though her exclamation was little more than a gasp, he had no trouble hearing her over the sound of the screams.

“What is it?” he demanded.

She grabbed both towels, quickly wrapped them around her hands, then reached between Jolene’s legs and pulled.

It was alive for only a second, but in that second he saw it squirm, heard a partial cry.

Lynda backed away, her face white, and dropped the baby.

He stared down at the bed. Lying on the bloody sheet was a small saguaro cactus, bits of vaginal flesh clinging to its oversized spines, green plant skin visible beneath the wet layer of red. The cactus had a face, and the face was frozen in a hideous, distorted grimace.

Lynda ran out of the room.

Outside, the sirens had arrived. Red light pulsed around the edges of the bedroom drapes, and he could hear the crackle of two-way radios, the voices of paramedics shouting orders.

Jolene had stopped screaming and she was propped on her elbows, cackling crazily. She was still bleeding profusely, and the red tide was covering the unmoving body of the cactus baby. “It’s your son!” she said. “It’s your son!” Her laughter spiraled upward in tone and volume and became as nonstop and persistent as her screams had been.

He slapped her once, hard across the face, then ran into the bathroom to throw up.