The Town

by Bentley Little

  Could they repeat this? he wondered. If they took more pictures of the inside of the bathhouse, would they get other scenes of other people, other times? He was eager to try it out, and he picked up the package and opened it up again, taking out the photos.

  They were different.

  His heart jumped, and he suddenly felt like he was back at the bathhouse, the fear in him so strong it was almost overpowering.

  The people were seated in different spots, facing different directions. They were the same fat old men and women, but whereas before they’d been sitting together like husband and wife, now the two men were seated next to each other and the two women were on the opposite bench.

  One of the women was smiling into the camera.

  She no longer had a towel on.

  He could see everything and it was gross. She was hairy and disgusting, and there were rolls of fat hanging down almost everywhere.

  He dropped the photos, scared.

  Even on the floor, the pictures creeped him out. All but one of the bathhouse photos had fallen facedown, but in that one he could still see the old lady’s inappropriate smile. He backed away from them.

  He was still clutching the package, and on impulse he opened it and pulled out the negatives, searching quickly through them.

  The ones from the bathhouse were blank.

  He was having a hard time catching his breath. Something was going on here that he did not understand but that frightened him to the core. The near-euphoria he’d experienced only moments before at his discovery had curdled into terror, and he wanted nothing more than to be through with all this, to be safe and secure back in his normal old life. He would give up money and fame forever if he could just get rid of these pictures.

  He considered leaving them where they were and letting his dad take care of them when he came home, but he knew he could not do that. He wanted to protect his parents from this. He did not want them to know anything about it. He wanted to keep it from Adam and Dan, too. He didn’t want anyone to know about what had happened.

  He stared down at the photos on the ground. He was afraid to touch them, afraid to be anywhere near them, but he knew he had to get rid of the pictures, and he reached down, scooped them up, and ran to the kitchen sink, where he dumped them in. Their vacation photos were mixed up in there, too, but they were probably contaminated as well, and if he got rid of all the evidence, his parents would never miss them. They’d probably forgotten they still had film in the camera anyway.

  He dumped the negatives into the sink as well.

  He half expected the photographs to leap up, to start moving, to try and escape, to make noises, to do something in order to stop him, but nothing unusual happened as he pulled open a drawer, took out a soup ladle, and used the big spoon to herd the pictures over to the drain mouth and shove them into the garbage disposal.

  He turned on the water, turned on the disposal.

  A sense of relief coursed through him as he heard the grinding, as he saw the little flecks of paper that spit out from the drain mouth as the disposal chewed up the pictures.

  He turned off the garbage disposal, took the 1-Hour Photo package in which the pictures and negatives had come, and shoved it down there as well.

  He turned the disposal back on.

  “Hey,” his mom said behind him. “What’re you doing?”

  He turned to see his parents walking in, carrying sacks of junk they’d bought at the garage sales. He flipped off the disposal switch. “I was going to clean the breakfast dishes,” he lied. He was aware that his voice sounded too high, and he knew that he was sweating profusely. His heart was still pounding crazily in his chest.

  “You don’t have to do that,” his mother told him. “I’ll get them.”

  “Okay,” he said, backing away.

  His dad frowned at him. “Is something wrong? You look a little funny.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

  Twelve

  1

  They were alone at the bar. Paul had just left to pick up his car from Henry’s Automotive, where Henry Travis had charged him an arm and a leg for simply flushing out the cooling system, something Odd told him he would’ve done for free, but Gregory and Odd had decided to stay for an extra round of drinks.

  There were no other customers today, and even the bartender was keeping his distance, giving them privacy, pretending to be wiping glasses at the far end of the counter.

  Gregory had had three beers already and was feeling pretty good, but when he glanced over at Odd, his mood faltered. The old man was looking into his beer, not drinking, and the expression on his face made Gregory feel uneasy.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Odd shook his head.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Something.”

  “You don’t want to—”

  “Yes, I do,” Gregory told him.

  There was a pause. “People are talking,” Odd said finally.

  “About what?”

  “You. Your family.”

  Gregory could feel his face tighten. “What about us?”

  “These . . . deaths didn’t start happening until you all moved into town.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” But his heart was pounding.

  “I know it is, I know it is. But the timing’s there. And you know how superstitious these yokels are. Someone noticed that Loretta Nelson’s murder over at the realty office happened about the same time you bought your place in town, and it probably spread from there. And Chilton Bodean was the capper. Everyone knows you two weren’t exactly pals and that you threatened to beat the shit out of him.” He lowered his voice. “Hell, the bartender saw it.”

  “Come on. I saw him that one time since I moved back. And you were with me.”

  “I know.”

  “Besides, he stabbed himself.”

  “But he stabbed himself because he had another peeder growing outta his belly button. That’s not a normal everyday occurrence.”

  “And that’s my fault, too?”

  “I’m not saying it is. All I’m saying is that people are talking. They’re saying that even if you didn’t do anything on purpose, maybe you brought this weird shit with you. Part of it’s probably those old anti-Molokan feelings creeping out. But you gotta admit that there’s some strange stuff been happening here lately.”

  Gregory’s face felt flushed.

  “I debated whether to tell you or not, but I figured you wouldn’t hear it from no one else . . .”

  “Paul’s not—” he began.

  “Hell, no!” Odd looked at him. “Your friends are your friends. You can count on that. And this is probably nothing. It’s probably just a few people and it’ll blow over before long.” He took a long drink of beer. “Maybe I shouldn’t’ve even opened my stupid mouth.”

  “No,” Gregory told him. “No, I’m glad you did.”

  “Just forget about it.”

  “So they don’t think me or my family did anything. We didn’t murder anybody. We’re just . . . the cause of it somehow.”

  “I told you they’re superstitious.”

  “But why blame us? What about the Megans?”

  “There’s talk about that, too. Maybe it’s your house. Maybe you activated it or it activated you or something. Some type of chemical reaction.” He shook his head. “I told you you should’ve gone after Call, gotten a new place instead. Hell, maybe you still can. I’m not sure what the statute of limitations is on something like that, but if he sold you your home under false pretenses—”

  “No.”

  “Well, just forget about it, then.”

  “What do you think?” Gregory asked.

  Odd squirmed in his seat. “Don’t matter what I think.”

  “Odd . . .”

  The old man sighed. “I seen a lot of things over the years. This ain’t no murderer or serial killer. I know that.”

  “But do you think
I’m involved? Or my family?”

  “Oh, hell, no. I know better’n that. But . . .” He took a deep breath. “It ain’t inconceivable that your house is somewhere down in the mix.” He downed the rest of his beer in one huge gulp. “McGuane’s a funny place. Not funny ha-ha, but funny strange. I seen things myself over the years, heard about a lot more. But lately it’s sort of . . . turned nasty. People are getting killed, and that scares me. There’s probably not one reason for it all, no single thing that’s the cause of it, but it’s happening, and I understand why people are looking for easy answers.”

  “You don’t think there’s an easy answer.”

  “I don’t know if there’s a hard answer. I don’t know if there’s any answer. You know that saying, ‘Shit happens’? That’s kind of how I look at it. Shit happens, and the best thing to do is just stay out of the way.” He took a five-dollar bill from his pocket, placed it on the bar. “That’s why I’d get out of that house if I were you. A lot of people died there, and that can’t be good.”

  Odd got off his stool, patted Gregory’s shoulder. “I gotta go,” he said. “Lurlene’ll kill me if I’m late. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

  Gregory nodded, watched the old man walk out of the bar. He picked up Odd’s five, then took out some bills of his own and walked down to the end of the counter to pay the tab. He handed the money to the bartender, but he didn’t like the look on the other man’s face. It reminded him of the nearly identical expressions on the faces of the men who had berated his father outside this very building—

  Milk drinker

  —and he considered taking back the tip he’d included, but he knew he was probably reading meanings into things that weren’t there because of his conversation with Odd, and so he just smiled, nodded, and left.

  He walked back to the café, where his van was parked.

  When he got home, Gregory headed straight into the kitchen, found the bottle of aspirin in the cupboard next to Julia’s vitamins, and popped two tablets. He had one big bastard of a headache, and he closed his eyes against the pain, willing the aspirin to work faster. It seemed like he had a headache every time he walked into this damn house lately, and he wondered if he wasn’t allergic to something in here. Maybe there was something wrong with the insulation, or the cleanser or furniture spray they used was affecting him. Maybe it was one of Julia’s new drought-resistant plants. He didn’t know, but the headaches were starting to become a pattern, and that was a pattern he wanted to break.

  The stress from what Odd had told him could not have helped, and maybe that was why the headache today was so much stronger than usual.

  He walked into the living room, flipped on the TV, lay down on the couch, and closed his eyes.

  The headaches made him irritable, and he realized that he’d been a little hard on Julia and his mother and the kids lately. He didn’t mean to take anything out on them, and he vowed that tonight he would be cheerful. He wouldn’t let any headache or allergy get the best of him, would not get angry with anyone for anything.

  But later that evening Teo started fighting with Adam, playing with the remote control and speeding through television channels, running back and forth between the living room and the kitchen, and he ended up yelling at her and sending her to her room. Julia thought he overreacted, but she didn’t say anything until they were in bed, and then they wound up getting into a fight. They’d been having a lot of fights lately, and he was getting tired of it, and then they started fighting about that.

  Julia finally refused to respond to his increasingly angry arguments, and she pulled the blanket up around her neck and turned away from him, facing the other direction.

  He was sorely tempted to go downstairs and sleep on the couch. That would teach her a lesson. They’d never slept apart in all the years they’d been married, had made a pact after their first fight that they would always try to resolve their differences before bedtime and never sleep separately, but tonight he would have moved down to the couch had his mother and the kids not been here. It would be too difficult to explain to them, though, and he pulled up his own side of the blanket, turned away from her, and closed his eyes until he finally fell asleep.

  2

  Julia wandered through the ruins of Russiantown.

  She did not know what had compelled her to come here, why she had walked all this way to look at a bunch of abandoned shacks, but ever since Paul and Deanna had led them on the walk through McGuane she hadn’t stopped thinking about this place.

  She peeked into the open doorway of a one-room house with no roof, saw a collection of rusted tin cans lined up in what remained of an open cabinet, saw clumps of dead dried weeds poking through missing sections of floor. There was no furniture in the tiny shack, just as there’d been no furniture in most of the abandoned houses she’d looked through, and she chose to believe that families had taken their belongings with them when they’d moved to better homes.

  Several of the buildings were no longer standing, were nothing but cement foundations and stumps of charred beam, and she could not help wondering when the fires had occurred. She’d asked Gregory’s mother about Russiantown, but the old woman had not wanted to talk about the subject. There was an element of denial or cover-up in her refusal to speak, even after all these years, that made Julia think that something bad had happened here.

  What was it that Paul had said? There’d been problems in the past? That was vague enough to cover a multitude of sins.

  She was surprised that Gregory wasn’t more conversant with the specifics of Molokan history in McGuane, but she knew how secretive her own parents had always been about their past, and she understood how it could happen. She’d had a friend in college, Janet Yoshizumi, whose parents had been interned at Manzanar during World War II, and she recalled how Janet had said that they never discussed their internment, that they refused to talk about it and chose to pretend that it hadn’t happened.

  Was that what had happened here? Something so bad that no one wanted to talk about it?

  She was probably romanticizing what was no doubt a very ordinary, very prosaic chapter in local history, but unanswered questions invited that sort of speculation.

  She could go to the library, she thought, see if she could find some information about Russiantown.

  No. She’d rather not know than have to see Marge and her pals again.

  She stepped over a small prickly pear and walked over to the next empty house.

  It was strange how interested she’d become in not just Russiantown but all things Molokan since they’d moved here. She’d never understood the fascination some people seemed to have for their roots, their ethnic background, and she’d always dismissed as trendy and self-absorbed those women who tried to track down distant relatives in distant lands or who spent money on classes to learn the languages and cultures of the nations their ancestors had left behind. But she was beginning to understand that connection to the past. She herself had been feeling more Russian since they’d moved here. She was not sure if it was because Gregory’s mother was living with them, or because everything was so personalized and community-conscious in a small town compared to the anonymous individuality of life in a metropolitan area, but it was as if her American veneer was cracking, gradually revealing the Russian beneath.

  Maybe the fact that she wasn’t feeling as close to Gregory as before had something to do with it, the fact that their relationship was no longer there to support her against the influences of the outside world.

  She couldn’t sustain her lifelong rebellion against Molokan culture knowing she did not have him to lean on.

  They’d been fighting a lot lately, and sometimes it felt as though they were two strangers living in the same house rather than a couple who had been together for eighteen years. She’d never believed those dire warnings that money could ruin a person’s life, attributing their origin to the rich who wanted to keep the poor content with their lot by pretending that it was better
not to have money, that poverty was somehow morally superior to wealth.

  And, truth be told, it wasn’t money that had changed their lives.

  It was moving to McGuane.

  Although they’d been able to move to McGuane only because they’d won the lottery.

  She peeked in a back window of a big house, saw the rusted skeleton of an old bed, the rotted wood of what had probably been a vanity. On one remaining wall hung the top three sides of an empty frame, glittering shattered glass visible in the pile of dirt and dust beneath it.

  Deep down, she wished they’d never left California. Or at least that they’d moved somewhere else. New England, perhaps. Or the Pacific Northwest.

  Anywhere but Arizona.

  She did not like this house, and rather than peek in one of the other windows or walk inside, she headed up a rocky path behind it, past the crumbling walls of a banya, to a building that looked like it had once been a store or a place of business. She stood for a moment with her hands on her hips, sizing it up. It was definitely not a house, and though there were cracks and rock holes in the dust-covered windows, the glass was still there for the most part, and she cupped her hands on the sides of her eyes and peered inside. She saw a leaning desk, an overturned chair, what looked like a broken safe.

  She was in the approximate center of Russiantown right now, and she took the opportunity to look around at the empty shacks, the burnt and crumbling buildings.

  There were ghosts here.

  The thought came unbidden. She tried to tell herself that she was thinking of ghosts in the most mainstream, literary sense—as a synonym for memories or history—but that was not true and she knew it. She was thinking of literal ghosts, real ghosts, and even though it was broad daylight and she could hear the sounds of children playing at the grammar school, could see down the canyon the roofs and top stories of the business district, she felt isolated enough that the thought frightened her.