The Town

by Bentley Little

  Besides, who was she to say? Maybe there were angels. A completely separate race of beings existing on some other, higher plane. It was something that a lot of people seemed to believe in. But would angels take such an interest in specific individuals that they would monitor a person’s every move? It didn’t make any kind of logical sense, but perhaps angels sat around and discussed the impact of things upon people just the way people sat around and discussed animals and the environment. To a race of beings that advanced, humans would be like pets, like lower life-forms, and perhaps their intervention in human affairs would be the equivalent of saving redwoods or protecting the denizens of natural wetlands.

  Sasha walked downstairs, poured herself a glass of orange juice, and quickly downed it. “I’m off,” she announced.

  Her grandmother frowned. “You need good breakfast. You eat breakfast.”

  “No time!” She was out the kitchen door and into the living room. “See you this afternoon!”

  Gregory pushed his chair back and stood. “Come on,” he told Adam and Teo. “Better get ready.”

  “How come you have to drive us?” Adam said. “How come I can’t walk to school like Sasha?”

  “Because she’s in high school. Go brush your teeth and get ready.”

  “No good,” his mother said, shaking her head. “Breakfast important.”

  “I don’t want to brush my teeth!” Teo announced.

  Julia pulled back her daughter’s chair, lifted the girl out and set her on the floor. “You brush them anyway. Hurry up, you don’t want to be late for school.”

  Ten minutes later, both children were in the car, and Julia waved to them as Gregory pulled out of the drive. She turned and walked back into the house, where Gregory’s mother was already clearing the breakfast table and preparing to wash dishes.

  Julia picked up her cup and sipped the still-warm coffee, sitting down at the table and glancing through first the Food, then the front-page sections of the Los Angeles Times that they’d received yesterday in the mail. They’d fallen into a pattern: she made breakfast and Gregory’s mother did the dishes afterward. She and her mother-in-law took turns cooking dinner, and Gregory and the kids alternated with the washing. Which meant that she was only really stuck with cleaning the lunch dishes.

  It was the one part of their new domestic arrangement that was an improvement on the way things had been before.

  From out on the road, there was the sound of a rattly pickup truck passing by. Julia glanced up from her paper and over at her mother-in-law. They were alone, the old woman had just been talking about angels, and this was a perfect opportunity to bring up what she’d been thinking about. She sat there for a moment, finished off her coffee, then took her cup over to the sink. She placed the cup in the sudsy water and cleared her throat. “Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked.

  Gregory’s mother looked at her, but did not answer immediately. She rinsed the plate she’d been washing and placed it on the rack. “Why you ask?” she said finally.

  This was her chance. She could come clean, tell her mother-in-law what she’d been thinking, what she’d been feeling, but her American attitude was too firmly ingrained for her to drop the facade, and she was disgusted with herself as she said, “I was just curious.”

  The old woman nodded, as if this was what she had been expecting. She looked at Julia. “There are things,” she said earnestly. She paused, thought. “Father, before he die, he saw brother George. He die long time ago, when he was ten years old. Poor ragged clothes. Father in bed, and brother George came to the room and he gave Father a key and disappear. Father dying and he told Mother, said, ‘He give me the key, the door’s open. I’m going to die.’ And he did. He said brother George look exactly the same, same ragged clothes. So those things happen.”

  Julia felt a chill pass through her, though she could tell that her mother-in-law had meant the tale to be reassuring, not frightening.

  Those things happen.

  She thought about the uncomfortable darkness of the house and the uneasiness she’d felt here ever since they’d arrived, about the box of dishes that had fallen from a place where it had not been put, in a room that had no one in it.

  There was the sudden sound of their van crunching gravel in the driveway, and Julia jumped, startled. Gregory’s mother looked at her, and there was a knowing expression on her face, a look that said she knew what Julia had been thinking and why she had really asked about ghosts.

  Julia turned away in embarrassment.

  “Hey,” Gregory said, walking into the kitchen and dropping his keys on the counter. “What’re you guys talking about?”

  “Ghosts, the afterlife, the usual stuff.” Again, Julia was disgusted to hear the flippant tone of her own voice.

  “I tell her about Father. How he see brother George before he die.”

  Gregory poured himself the last of the coffee. “What about Aunt Masha’s husband? He died when she was really young, didn’t he?”

  A cloud passed over his mother’s face. “That was no good.”

  “Still, it happened. Tell Julia. It’s interesting.” He smiled at Julia, and she suddenly hated that smug, superior look on his face, the same exact look she knew was all too often found on her own. For the first time, she saw things from the perspective of their parents, and she thought that Gregory’s mother had been uncommonly patient with them and their intellectually snobbish attitude, far more patient than she herself could ever be.

  She gently took her mother-in-law’s arm. “Tell me about it,” she said.

  The old woman sighed, nodded. She wiped her hands on a dishtowel, then followed Julia back to the table, where the three of them sat individually, like the points of a triangle, facing each other.

  “Masha’s husband, Bill, see, he die. At thirty. She took it too hard. She cried every single day. Was losing her mind, she cry so much. Then she said she hear so much noise from the back room. Always noise. But nobody was there. Then she call Father and say she saw Bill in a black suit. When she told Father, Father said, ‘We have to have prayer’ ”—she clapped her hands together firmly—“ ‘That’s it.’ They have a prayer, and she never saw him, never dream, never notice him again. Gone.”

  “He was a ghost?” Julia asked.

  “No. No ghost. No such thing as ghost.”

  Gregory sipped his coffee. “Father told me, ‘If I can come back and let you know, I will.’ ”

  His mother’s expression was determined. “He’s not going to come back.”

  “So there are no ghosts?” Julia said. “Dead people can’t come back?”

  “Sometimes they come . . . but in the form of angel. Then you know it’s not a devil.”

  “So when dead people come back, those are evil spirits?”

  The old woman nodded. “Yes. See, when somebody dying, they always see someone. Like my father see brother George. And when my grandmother’s father dying, he said, ‘There’s your mother, standing by my feet.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Right there.’ ” She leaned forward intently. “He saw. Nobody else saw, but she was there. When you die, somebody’s there with you. You don’t die alone, but other people cannot see it.”

  “What if a regular person sees a ghost? What if someone who’s not dying sees a ghost?”

  She shook her head. “Ghost is nothing.”

  “I thought you said Masha saw her husband dressed in black. Wasn’t that a ghost?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “It was evil spirit.” She thought for a moment. “Devil like mean things. He want to disturb her more and more and more, see? That’s why you have to pray. It happen to Sonya, my cousin. She live in San Diego and her mother die. She so close to her mother. She lost husband on account of mother. She take care of her mother, husband took other lady. So after her mother die, she said, ‘My mother came and visit me and she talk to me.’ When she told her father, he said, ‘What you mean, you talk to your mother?’ They have to have prayer, too. See, it wasn’t her mothe
r but the form of her mother. Because she cry too much. You don’t cry. Well, you cry, but not everyday everyday everyday, you know?”

  Julia felt chilled. “So when you have too much grief, they come back?”

  “Evil come back. That’s why when John die, I pray every single night. It’s hard, but it’s easy. If you say prayer, he not going to come in. When you pray, they don’t like it. The devil will leave.” She leaned back. “Those things happen.”

  Those things happen.

  Julia was glad that Gregory and his mother were here, that she was not alone in the house.

  “Anyway, that’s what I believe. That’s what I think happen.” She gave Julia a meaningful look, then stood and walked back over to the sink. “Dishwater getting cold,” she said.

  Gregory drank his coffee and shrugged apologetically, but Julia ignored him, looking away, watching his mother’s back as she began washing plates. She felt bad about the way they’d treated the old woman over the years, guilty for the manner in which they’d automatically dismissed her obviously deeply held beliefs.

  Was Julia a believer now herself?

  No, not really. She was spooked, yes, but she still thought that it was probably due to the fact that she was spending too much time in the house. That was what was at the root of the problem, not anything supernatural. She just needed to get out, meet some people, find something to do.

  Maybe volunteering wasn’t such a bad idea.

  But she had a newfound respect for her mother-in-law, and as she walked out of the kitchen and back to the bedroom to change out of her pajamas and bathrobe, she vowed that she would no longer disparage the older woman’s convictions. After all, this was her culture as well. She was American, but she was Molokan, too, and perhaps it was time she started honoring her roots.

  She walked into the bedroom. The drapes were open, but it was still dark in here, and Julia shivered involuntarily as she quickly flipped on the light.

  3

  There was a letter waiting for him when he got home from school, a letter from Roberto, and Adam took it immediately into his bedroom and closed the door. He plopped down on the bed, tore open the envelope and read. Roberto had written a hilarious account of the first day of school, catching him up on what all of the other kids had done over the summer, how Sheila Hitchcock had ballooned up even more and now looked like a white whale, how the sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Mejia, wiggled her butt when she wrote on the chalkboard and how Jason Aguilar stood behind her and did a killer imitation and then quickly sat down in his seat before she turned around. He’d included, as promised, a Spiderman card, a new one, and Adam immediately added it to his collection, placing it on the top of the rubber-banded stack on his dresser.

  He reread the letter, then lay on the bed, looking up at the ceiling.

  As much as he liked Scott, he wished Roberto was here instead.

  He missed his friend.

  He missed California.

  But he was getting used to McGuane, and already his feelings of homesickness had faded from the peak intensity of that first week or so. He broke out his English notebook, ripped out a page, and wrote Roberto a reply, describing his own first day of school, what the kids were like here, Scott. He embellished and exaggerated, made everything sound a lot more exciting than it actually was. He considered telling Roberto about the banya, but he didn’t quite know what to say or how to describe it, and he decided to save that for another time.

  It cheered him up, writing, and he felt good as he addressed the envelope, slapped a stamp on it, and carried it up the drive to the mailbox. He popped up the little red flag on the box to signal the postman that there was outgoing mail, and then jumped as a hand smacked the back of his head.

  “Loser,” Sasha said.

  She started down the drive to the house, swinging her backpack, apparently having forgotten that he even existed, and he was tempted to run after her and smack her in return. Maybe knock her backpack into the dirt, but even though she was a girl, she was still bigger than he was and could easily kick his ass, so instead he waited by the mailbox until she was halfway to the house before following.

  He walked slowly, looking down at the ground, kicking small rocks ahead of him. His birthday was coming up soon, in a few weeks, and he found himself wondering what they were going to do about it. Ordinarily, his parents took him and a group of friends to Chuck E. Cheese or someplace like that, someplace with pizza and video games, but this year there were no friends to take. Scott, maybe, but that was it. He half hoped they’d simply ignore his birthday this year. The thought of going someplace with just his family depressed him, and he didn’t want anyone from school to see him sitting in some crappy restaurant with Babunya and his parents and his sisters like . . . well, like a loser.

  He’d rather not celebrate his birthday at all than be humiliated.

  But his parents probably had something planned, and he thought that he’d better let them know he just wanted a quiet celebration at home before they went out and made reservations at some embarrassingly public place.

  It was Friday, and although there were Fox shows he wanted to watch, when Scott called after dinner asking if he felt like hanging out, checking what was happening around town, Adam agreed to come over.

  He knew his parents wouldn’t want him to go, so he put the best spin possible on it as he presented the plan to them. “Scott asked me to come over,” he said.

  His mother frowned. “Now? It’s getting dark.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t want you wandering around out there at night.”

  “I’m not a baby.”

  “Why don’t you just stay home?”

  “I thought that’s why we moved here. So we could do things like this.”

  “There may not be gangs in McGuane, but there are coyotes, snakes, drunk rednecks, who knows what all.”

  “And perverted cowboys,” Sasha said, grinning.

  “Sasha,” his father warned.

  “Scott was born here. He knows this town. And, besides, we’re not just going to ‘wander.’ I’m going to his house, we may walk down to French’s and get a milk shake or something, and that’s it. Then I’ll come home.”

  “Why don’t you have your father drive you?”

  Adam grimaced. “Why don’t you just hang a big sign on my back that says ‘Mama’s Boy and Wuss’?”

  “We could do that,” Sasha said agreeably.

  Teo laughed.

  “Knock it off,” his father said. He turned toward Adam. “What are your real plans?”

  “That’s it! That’s the plan! God!”

  His parents exchanged a glance.

  “Be home by eight-thirty,” his mother said.

  “That’s only an hour and a half!”

  “How much time do you need to get a milk shake?”

  “It’s that or nothing,” his father said. “Take it or leave it.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  His father grinned. “If you’re five minutes late, I’ll be out in that van looking for you, asking everyone I see, ‘Do you know where Adam Tomasov is? His mommy wants him to come home.’ ”

  Teo burst out laughing.

  Adam kicked the sole of her tennis shoe as he walked by, pretending to be annoyed, but he was secretly pleased. Things had gone a lot smoother than expected. He grabbed his comb and wallet and was out of the house before his parents could change their minds.

  Scott was waiting for him on the low wooden fence that encircled his yard. From inside the set-back house came the loud, angry voices of a man and a woman arguing, and Scott said, “Let’s hit the road. My old man and old lady are going at it, and, believe me, you don’t want to be around when that happens.” He jumped off the fence and led Adam across the street and through the yard of a darkened home abutting a dry ditch.

  They hopped into the ditch and followed it behind a line of houses and buildings, emerging in the field behind the high school. Scott led the way through the
school grounds onto Malachite Avenue, and they walked down the sloping street toward the center of town.

  “Can you believe this place is so dead?” Scott said disgustedly. “The whole town closes up at six. What a fucking hellhole.” He looked over at Adam. “I bet it’s not like this in California.”

  Adam laughed. “No, it’s not.”

  But he went on to tell his friend how they wouldn’t be able to walk around like this at night in Southern California. There were gangs and drive-bys, sickos and psychos.

  Scott was incredulous. “You can’t go out at night?”

  “Well, you can if you have a car. I mean, my dad or my sister could drive us places like movies or malls or something. But you can’t, you know, just wander around like this.” He grinned. “This is bitchin’.”

  Scott nodded, smiled. “Yeah, it kinda is.”

  They reached the shopping district and walked down the intermittent sidewalk through the center of town. There were lights on in a few of the stores, but French’s was the only business actually open, and even it was devoid of customers. They stopped by the restaurant, bought two Cokes and split an order of fries to go, then continued on, eating out of the greasy bag they passed back and forth.

  At the park, Scott sat down on top of one of the picnic tables. Adam tossed the empty bag into an adjacent trash barrel and leaned against a chain-link backstop. The park seemed different at night, its contours changed, its boundaries expanded by the darkness. They were the only ones here, but while that would have been a plus back in California, where any gathering of two or more people at night signaled possible gang activity, in this place it only served to heighten the disquiet that Adam felt. Leaning against the backstop, he was facing Scott, facing the street, but the bulk of the park was behind him, and he didn’t like having all that empty darkness at his back. Casually, he moved over to the picnic table, sitting next to his friend.