The Town

by Bentley Little

  He stared at the headstone, wiped a tear from his eye. The engraving was so faded that if he had not already known what it said, he would never have been able to read it.

  He took a deep breath, walked past a series of newer tombstones, and stopped in front of Jim Petrovin’s grave. He stared at it for a moment, then looked around. The milk was getting warm and he needed to get home, but he scanned the ridge for signs of anyone else.

  There was no one here, and he hesitated only a second before unbuckling his belt, unbuttoning his Levi’s, taking out his pecker, and pissing on the minister’s grave.

  Fourteen

  1

  Adam lay on his bed, listening to tunes while he read through the new Spiderman. His parents’ friends Paul and Deanna Mathews were over tonight, and after dinner he and Teo had been sent off to their rooms so the grown-ups could talk. Sasha, as usual, was out with her friends somewhere—

  I like ’em long

  —and she probably wouldn’t be back until . . . well, whenever.

  Teo had tried to hang with him, but he’d kicked her out of his room, closed and locked the door, and put on his Walkman headphones so he couldn’t hear her whining.

  He wished he had a television in here. Even a black-and-white one. They’d won the lottery, they were supposed to be rich, but his parents didn’t seem to be doing anything with the money except spending it on themselves. He still didn’t have a decent stereo or a computer . . . or a television.

  The television was a necessity. Especially for nights like this. Hell, Scott had his own TV. Even Roberto had had one. But his mom had some bee up her butt about limiting the amount of time kids watched television. She’d made him read an article about some group that was sponsoring an “Unplugged” week, a week where everyone was supposed to turn off their TVs and do something else. The woman who was president of the organization said that since giving up television viewing, she’d had more time for knitting and reading and playing Scrabble.

  He’d thought that meant that their TV viewing was going to be curtailed, but luckily for him and Teo, their dad had weighed in on their side, laughing at the woman in the article and saying that she could learn a lot more watching PBS than she could sitting in a silent house and knitting.

  “Her ‘reading’ must consist of romance novels,” he said.

  Their parents had gotten into an argument after that, and the upshot of it was that their father had granted them unlimited viewing privileges rather than the two hours a night they’d previously been allotted.

  But, meanwhile, he still didn’t have a TV in his room.

  He finished Spiderman, picked up a Hulk that Scott had lent him, but then he finished that comic book and the tape in his Walkman ended.

  He was thirsty and bored, and he tossed the comics aside, took off his headphones, and walked over to the door, opening it slowly. He hadn’t exactly been exiled from downstairs or banned from going out to the kitchen, but it was more exciting to think he had, and so he planned a route that would enable him to sneak out and snag a can of Coke without his parents or their friends seeing him.

  Adam looked up and down the hall, made sure there was no sign of Teo, then walked to the edge of the stairs. He could hear the mumbled buzz of adult conversation but could see no sign of anyone, and he crept down the steps. They were all in the living room—he could see the side of his mom’s head at the close end of the couch—and he considered trying to sneak into the kitchen that way, but he would have to pass through a corner of the living room and then through the dining room, and detection was almost certain. Even crouching down and scuttling behind furniture, there wasn’t enough cover.

  So he settled for the easy route, going into the kitchen from the hall doorway.

  He could tell from their voices that the adults had had a little too much to drink, and he made it successfully across the kitchen to the other side, moving past the open entryway of the dining room without being seen. A plate of leftover tortilla chips and an empty salsa bowl were on the breakfast table, and he popped a couple of chips into his mouth, sucking on them instead of biting so that they wouldn’t crunch, not wanting to give himself away.

  He opened the refrigerator, took out a can of Coke, and started back the way he’d come, grabbing a few extra chips for the return trip. He paused for a moment at the edge of the dining room, listening to the conversation, hoping to hear something about himself or his sisters.

  “Well,” his father was saying, “my first wife, Andrea, absolutely loved the idea of living in a small town. She wanted to move to Oregon or Washington—”

  Adam felt as though he’d been punched in the stomach.

  His father’s first wife?

  His parents’ friends were talking now, but Adam had no idea what they were saying. The conversation had become background noise to his thoughts, which were coming fast and furious, tumbling over each other in his head. The overwhelming feeling was one of betrayal, and the idea that kept repeating in his brain was that this man, his father, was a stranger to him, was not the person he’d thought he was, was not the person he knew.

  Adam practically jumped out of his skin when his mother passed by, walking into the kitchen.

  She saw him before he had fully recognized her, and she smiled at him. “Thirsty, huh?” She motioned toward the table. “Want some chips?”

  He shook his head dumbly, though he still had quite a few tortilla chips in his hand.

  “Well, you’d better go back to your room and get ready for bed. It’s getting late and tomorrow’s a school day.”

  He nodded, walked out the way he’d come in, but instead of going back upstairs, he made his way down the short hall to Teo’s room. Her door was closed, but it wasn’t locked, and he let himself in, shutting the door behind him. Teo frowned and was about to yell at him to get out, but he put a finger over his lips, indicating that she should be quiet, and her annoyance disappeared instantly, replaced by curiosity.

  He crossed the room noiselessly, sitting down on the bed next to his sister. He looked at her, came straight to the point. “Dad was married before.”

  “What?”

  He held up his Coke can. “I came down to get something to drink, and I heard them talking. Dad said he was married before. To someone else.”

  “Nuh-uh!”

  “Uh-huh. Mom’s his second wife.”

  There was silence as he let the revelation sink in. Teo looked like a ghost. All of the color had drained out of her face, and she blinked rapidly, her lids and lashes the only movement on her otherwise still features. She looked like she was about to cry. He felt a little like crying himself.

  “He said her name was Andrea.”

  “He was married to someone named Andrea before he married Mom?”

  “I guess.”

  Teo still looked like she was about to cry, and for the first time since she’d been a baby, Adam felt like reaching over and giving her a big hug.

  “Does Sasha know?”

  Adam shrugged. “Maybe. You think she’d tell us if she did?”

  “But how come . . . ?” She looked up at him. “Does Mom know?”

  “Of course. She was there too, and she wasn’t surprised about it or anything.”

  “How come no one ever told us?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted.

  He stayed in Teo’s room for over half an hour, the two of them talking, analyzing what had happened, going over and over the few sentences he’d heard, until their mother came in, intending to make sure Teo was in bed, and found him there. She was surprised to see him, but she did not overreact. She simply told him to go upstairs, it was time for both of them to go to sleep.

  He half expected Teo to bring it up, to ask their mother about it, and he purposely lingered, wanting to hear what was said, but Teo kept it to herself, and he and his mother left the room at the same time.

  “Now go to bed,” she told him sternly. “You have school tomorrow.”

  H
e nodded, went upstairs.

  Teo was obviously very upset. Normally, it was impossible for her to keep her mouth shut, especially when something was bothering her, and the fact that she was not willing to ask their mom about this indicated that its magnitude was off the scale.

  He was pretty shaken up himself, and he wished he hadn’t been so stupid, wished he’d listened in on more of the conversation, but he told himself that they were probably talking about something else anyway and the subject of his father’s first wife had come up only in passing.

  His father’s first wife.

  It was an idea he still could not seem to get his mind around.

  He did not even check to see if Sasha’s door was unlocked but went immediately into his own room, slamming the door behind him and plopping onto the bed. He tossed the Walkman and the comics on the floor.

  His father had been married before.

  It devalued everything, he thought. Mom was not his first choice for a wife. They were not his first choice for a family. They were the runners-up, the ones he’d had to settle for.

  It occurred to him for the first time that Babunya knew all about this. She’d been someone else’s mother-in-law before his mom’s. She could have been someone else’s grandmother.

  Was she someone else’s grandmother?

  No, they would have known about that, they would have heard of it before.

  But which wife did she like better? he wondered. Had she liked the first wife more? Had she wanted his dad to stay married to her?

  He felt betrayed by Babunya too, although the feeling wasn’t quite as strong.

  What if his mother had been married before?

  He stared up at the ceiling, ashamed of his next thought: what if Sasha was her daughter from the first marriage and was not really his full sister? It wouldn’t exactly be incest, then.

  He shouldn’t even be thinking about that. He’d just found out that his mother was not his father’s first wife, and he was horned out over his sister? What kind of sicko loser was he?

  But what if she wasn’t his sister?

  He reached under the bed and pulled out Sasha’s panties. He knew it was wrong, knew it was especially inappropriate now, but just thinking about Sasha had turned him on, and without any preamble, he did what he always did: unbuttoned, unzipped, and pulled down his pants, stretching out.

  He grasped his penis firmly and began stroking it.

  He closed his eyes. His door was unlocked, and in his fantasy Sasha came home early and walked in on him just as he was reaching his climax.

  That moment was already getting close, and he used his left hand to pick up her panties. At the last second, he wrapped them around his erection, poking the head of his penis against the cotton panel where he knew her vagina had been.

  He looked down and watched the explosion of white wetness burst against the confines of the cotton crotch as he came.

  Afterward, he lay there for a few moments, breathing heavily, before tossing the panties back under the bed.

  He pulled up his pants, went over and locked the door, lay back down on the bed, and began to cry.

  2

  There was nothing for him to do.

  Gregory awoke late, the sun shining through slatted slits in the window shades, and realized that he had nowhere to go.

  Oh, he could putter around the house, do yard work, fix up the storage shed, but those things weren’t necessary. And the truth was that things at the café were running themselves. He wasn’t needed. Shows were booked through the end of the month, there was no problem with any of the equipment, procedures were in place and working smoothly, and everything ran like clockwork. He didn’t have to be there.

  In fact, he hadn’t been there for a while. He’d hung out, helped Paul and Odd with a few menial tasks, but he hadn’t been to a performance in over two weeks, and he hadn’t even bothered to check with the café’s other employees to find out how the shows had gone. He assumed that if there was a problem, someone would tell him. And since no one had told him, that must mean everything was fine.

  Gregory sat up in bed. His work was done and he had nothing to take its place.

  He didn’t know how to react, how to use this unstructured, unrestricted free time. He supposed he could try to think of other projects, but the truth was that his short burst of ambition and drive seemed to have fled, leaving in its place a disconcerting lethargy. He recalled, years ago, reading an interview with Pete Townsend, one of his idols. It had been a long interview, wide-ranging, and Pete had responded thoughtfully to all of the questions, but there was nothing he seemed excited about, nothing he seemed interested in, nothing he wanted to do. He and his wife had just had a baby, and he didn’t even seem interested in that. It was as if he’d seen everything, done everything, and there was nothing new. He was just putting in his time, waiting to die.

  At the time, the interview had depressed the hell out of him, and he had not been able to understand how someone so rich, so famous, so talented, with so many things going for him, could have such an attitude. But he thought he understood now, because he felt the same way. He’d won the lottery. He no longer had to work, he could do whatever he wanted to do—and there was nothing he wanted to do.

  He’d thought moving to McGuane would change his life, and it had. But not for the better. Things were not working out well here. He was not happy. He was not satisfied. He was not content. He was just . . . lost. And he didn’t know what to do about it.

  He found himself wondering what his life would have been like had he remained with Andrea. She was completely different from Julia: flamboyant where Julia was subdued, spontaneous where Julia was thoughtful. He had loved her, he supposed—even though she was an outsider, as his mother had never ceased reminding him—and it had hurt him to break up with her, but it was the aftereffects of the breakup that had been hardest to deal with: having to explain to the family what had happened, having to adjust to seeing friends without her by his side, having to meet people by himself instead of on equal footing, as part of a couple. He was not meant to be alone, was not the kind of guy who did well by himself. He wasn’t clingy, but he needed a woman, and socially he worked better if he was part of a team.

  It was why he’d gotten married again so quickly.

  He had never thought of it that way before, had never even considered that the life he had now, the family he had now, had not sprung from a foundation of love and romance but had resulted from his unwillingness to be alone and his need to be married.

  Did he love Julia?

  He’d always thought he did, but now he wasn’t sure. They seemed to be drifting apart, and he didn’t think it was simply a temporary downturn on the graph that measured their relationship. They had moved to a small town in another state, basically cutting themselves off from their friends and their previous life. It was a sink-or-swim scenario, and they were sinking. They were not drawing closer together in this pressure-cooker situation—the test of true love in his book—but were coming apart. It pained him to think that the only reason their marriage had survived for so long on such a relatively even keel was because he had a life, she had a life, and they saw each other only on nights and weekends. Now that they were together so often, now that they had more of a life together, things were not working out.

  And lately he’d been thinking about other women.

  That was a shock to him. He’d never had any respect for those wealthy older men who dumped their longtime wives for some young chippie, had never had any use for married losers who looked elsewhere for sex and were unfaithful to their spouses, but now he could understand where they were coming from.

  He thought of the checkout girl at the market.

  Kat.

  She seemed to like him. She always talked to him when he came through the line, always smiled at him when she saw him come in for groceries, and she had mentioned more than once that she was not married and had no boyfriend. She was a regular at the café as well, a
nd Wynona had even joked that she only came to the concerts to look for him—which meant that he wasn’t the only one who had noticed her interest, that it wasn’t all in his mind.

  Kat was a nice girl, and he had the feeling that she was more understanding than Julia, more open, more willing to compromise within the context of a relationship.

  Not that he necessarily wanted a relationship with her.

  But sex would be nice.

  The last time he and Julia had had sex, it was the checkout girl he’d visualized as he pumped away between his wife’s thighs. He’d imagined a tighter vagina, slimmer hips, perkier breasts, and he had come much more quickly than usual.

  He had been to the store only once since then, but in line he kept thinking of how Kat would look naked, how she would behave in bed.

  She was probably wild.

  She would probably let him do whatever he wanted.

  “Gregory!” Julia called from downstairs. “Are you up? I’m going to do the breakfast dishes! This is your last chance!”

  He groaned, rubbed his eyes.

  “Gregory!”

  He kicked off the covers, got out of bed. “I’m up!” he yelled as he walked into the bathroom, and there was a touch of anger in his voice. “I’m up!”

  The kids were at school—a friend had picked up Sasha, Julia had driven Adam and Teo before she even tried to wake him up—and Julia was in the den, working on her children’s book. His mother, as usual, was at church or doing some other Molokan thing.

  He was the only one at loose ends, and he found himself wandering around the house before finally drifting upstairs into the attic.