The Town

by Bentley Little

  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.

  Nine

  1

  In her dream, Agafia was walking through the Molokan cemetery toward the edge of the cliff. It was a cold day with a dark monsoon sky, and only occasional indistinct flashes of lightning illuminated the otherwise gloom-shrouded ridgetop.

  She did not know why she was walking toward the cliff, but she was striding with purpose. She desperately wanted to see what lay over the edge, at the bottom of the mine—even though she knew that whatever was down there was evil and would destroy her.

  There were no other thoughts in her mind, only that simple, instinctive desire to look into the pit, and she pressed forward with the single-mindedness of the obsessed.

  She walked over her husband’s grave.

  Walked over Jim’s.

  The ground beneath her feet suddenly shifted, and in the second’s worth of illumination provided by a flash of double lightning, she saw a hand emerging from the rocky soil. She managed to avoid it, but another one grabbed her right ankle and held tight, cold fingers digging into the skin of
her leg with death-grown nails. She kicked at it, stomped down as hard as she could, and got away, but in another flash of lightning she saw that hands were coming up everywhere.

  She was still walking, making a beeline for the cliff, but she glanced quickly around and saw that there were no hands coming up from either Jim’s or her husband’s graves. The ground above their burial plots remained completely undisturbed.

  That energized her for some reason, and she increased her speed, lifting her legs high and stomping her feet down hard in order to crush any hands that might be trying to grab her.

  As the rain started to fall, she reached the edge of the cliff.

  And looked into the pit.

  Where, climbing up the slippery slope from a black pool of mud at the bottom, she saw Gregory, dressed all in red, his face painted white, grinning up at her.

  Agafia awoke feeling cold, her hands shaking as they pulled up the covers she had kicked off during her dream. Her heart was pounding. She forced herself to remain unmoving and stare up at the ceiling as she took a series of deep breaths. This was the second nightmare that she’d had about her son in as many months, and that worried her. What did it mean? she wondered. This was not coincidence, not chance. It was not the random workings of her brain that had brought on these nightmares. They had been shown to her. She had been allowed to see them.

  There was a reason she was being led in this direction, but although she could think of many possible explanations, none of them felt right to her, and that left her feeling not only frustrated and angry but afraid.

  She sat up, took a drink of water from the glass atop the nightstand next to her bed. There was a lot going on that she could not explain, and she wished her father were here. Father would be able to make sense of this. He knew a lot about both this world and the next world.

  About evil.

  There was no one around now with that same level of knowledge and comprehension. Jim might have been able to understand what was happening, but she herself did not and there was no one else she could rely on.

  One thing she knew for sure—one thing they all knew—was that the police were wasting their time conducting interviews and looking for fingerprints on the Bible and footprints in the dust. There was no murderer. Jim had not been killed by anything human. It was some type of evil spirit, and though they were not yet sure exactly how to proceed, they knew a Cleansing was in order.

  She was still not sure who would take charge of that. Nikolai Michikoff was a well-meaning man, but he was not deep. He saw only the surface, repeated only what he’d been taught. He was not a seeker, not a thinker, and she did not think he had the leadership qualities necessary to see them through something like this.

  They would do something, though. Vera Afonin was still alive and kicking. She seemed sharper than she ever had, and with Vera around, they could be sure that a Cleansing would occur.

  Whether it would be the right one or not remained to be seen.

  Agafia rubbed her eyes. Her breathing had returned to normal, her heart had stopped pounding so furiously, and already she was feeling sleepy again. She took one more sip of water, replaced the glass on the nightstand, and lay down, adjusting her body so that her feet, hands, and everything except her head were situated safely under the blanket.

  She closed her eyes, sank quickly back into sleep.

  She dreamed of the grave.

  And Gregory.

  Ten

  1

  It was cold and breezy on his walk home from school, the sky overcast, the sun low in the west. Multicolored leaves skittered along the sidewalk, snapping and crackling beneath his tennis shoes. There was the smell of burning wood on the wind. Fireplaces, Adam assumed. A warm, comforting smell that reminded him of movies that took place in big colonial mansions in New England.

  He would not have expected the desert to have seasons—Southern California didn’t—but both Scott and Dan had told him that it got pretty darn cold here during the fall and winter, and he could tell that they were right.

  He walked down the canyon road, past the high school, intending to cut through the football field and hit his street without having to go through the downtown area. He reached the school and was halfway across the field when he stopped, shifting his books from his right hand to his left. Ahead of him, he could see a group of slutty-looking girls, lighting cigarettes as they walked slowly around the left side of the gym, and he hesitated for a moment. Were these girls part of the pack he and Scott had met up with that night?

  He thought of the way the boys who’d chased them had promised to hunt them down and beat the hell out of them.

  “I’ll get you, you little shit!”

  He still worried about that sometimes. Scott was right, there was no way those assholes could identify them—and as the weeks passed, it became less and less likely that they would—but, still, the possibility existed, and it never hurt to be too careful.

  He squinted. The girls were too far away to see clearly, but they could easily be the same ones the two of them had run into that night.

  And they were taking exactly the same route he had planned.

  He didn’t want to meet up with them, but it was getting late, and rather than backtrack and have to go two streets out of his way in order to get home, he changed his course and made his way toward the right side of the gym rather than the left. There was another exit from the campus by the office, and while it would take him a block out of his way, it was a short block and he thought it safer.

  He reached the gym and walked along the right side of the windowless building toward the center of campus. The school grounds were quiet, empty save for himself and the girls, and he could hear the diffused, muted sounds of their voices bouncing off the walls of the other classrooms. He came to the end of the building and started across the open blacktop toward the office. The acoustics changed here, and now he could clearly hear several female voices behind him.

  And one of them sounded very familiar.

  He stopped, looked back, but the girls were not in front of the gym. They were either still on the other side or had walked out to the street, and he hesitated only a moment before hurrying back and making his way past the closed double doors and along the gym face. The voices were muffled again, but he knew what he’d heard, and he reached the far end and carefully peeked around the corner to make sure.

  It was Sasha.

  He ducked back behind the wall. She and the other girls were standing next to the school fence, looking out at the street, smoking.

  He moved as close as he could to the edge of the building without being seen and stood there, listening.

  “Have you ever—you know—done it?” one girl was asking.

  Sasha laughed, and though he recognized the sound of his sister’s voice, the cadence of the laugh seemed odd, unfamiliar. “Of course.”

  His heart was pounding. He was doing something wrong, eavesdropping on a private conversation like this, and though she was doing something even more wrong, he felt guilty. And frightened. It was his sister standing around that corner, but he was just as afraid—no, more afraid—of being caught by the girls now than he had been before. He didn’t know what Sasha would do if she caught him, but he didn’t want to find out.

  “I like ’em long,” Sasha said.

  The other girls giggled.

  Adam’s heart was pounding. He could not believe this was his sister. If their parents ever found out . . .

  He thought of that time at the restaurant, his birthday, when he’d seen her panties, and as sick as he knew it was, he was suddenly hard. He moved his books down, pressed them against his growing erection.

  The light was fading, the afternoon disappearing. He should have been home by now, but he and Scott had stayed late in the library in order to finish a report that was due and they’d forgotten the time.

  He wondered what lie Sasha was going to give for her lateness, what she would tell their parents she’d been doing.
/>
  “I always make ’em lick me first,” one of the other girls said, between puffs on her cigarette. “Otherwise, I might not get to come at all.” She laughed huskily. “And after they sniff me and taste me down there, they’re usually hard enough that I don’t have to suck them.”

  “I like to suck them,” Sasha announced.

  “Do you let them come in your mouth?”

  “Every time.”

  There were squeals and laughter.

  Adam was suddenly nervous. He’d heard too much, and he was filled with the absurd certainty that he would be caught, that the girls would decide to walk around the corner to where he was hiding and find him. It made no sense, but it was a feeling that was impossible to shake, and, moving in the shadows, he retreated back along the front of the gym until he reached the far side. Looking over his shoulder to make sure that neither Sasha nor one of her friends was following, he sped across the open center of the campus and past the office, emerging onto the street.

  He ran two blocks out of his way just to make sure he wouldn’t be seen.

  He thought about Sasha all the way home.

  So she’d had sex. She was doing it. He imagined her naked, with her legs spread wide and her most private area open to the world, and he wondered if she was hairy down there.

  He desperately wanted to share this with someone, wanted at least to be able to tell Scott what had happened, what he’d heard. And he would have, had it involved anyone other than Sasha. But he could not present his sister like that to other people. He did not know if it was because he wanted to protect her or because he considered anything that involved a member of his family a reflection on himself, but he did not want Scott to discover that Sasha was . . . the way she was.

  Back in California, it would have been hard to imagine Sasha even talking about sex, let alone doing it. She’d been a bitch sometimes, yeah, but she’d also been kind of a goody-goody, and the type of girls she was hanging out with now were the type she and her friends had made fun of then.