Adam gathered his strength, looked up. He saw the silhouetted profile, the strong brow and thick beard, and he had to force himself not to turn away. His heart was pounding, and the air inside the bathhouse suddenly felt cold. The shadow seemed to deepen as he stared at it, the entire interior of the banya growing darker around it, and for a fraction of a second it appeared to have three-dimensional depth.
He thought he heard a sigh, a whisper, and, his pulse rate shifting into high gear, he bolted out of the banya and back into the sunlight, running as fast as he could, not stopping until he had reached the line of paloverdes.
It was the longest he had ever stayed in the banya, and he was proud of himself for that. He was getting braver. Always before, he had been out the door immediately after setting eyes on the shadow, but this time he’d been able to look at it for a moment before having to run.
He shivered, thinking of that sigh, that whisper, and quickly started back down the path toward the house.
Next time, he would borrow Sasha’s watch and time himself, see if he couldn’t stay in there a little longer each visit.
He slowed down and turned to look behind him, but the banya was already hidden behind boulders and trees. He stood there for a moment, catching his breath, then continued on.
It was hard for him to believe that the bathhouse had ever really been used. Even if it hadn’t been scary, he couldn’t imagine himself going in there, getting naked, and sitting around with other guys while they whipped themselves with tree branches. Part of him felt embarrassed even to be related to people who did that.
But of course, that was not really anything new.
He’d often been embarrassed about his background.
Last year, they’d had an “ethnic pride” day at school, and it had been pure hell. They were all supposed to share the foods, clothes, language, and traditions of their families’ cultures with the other members of the class, and he’d brought in some borscht his mom had made. Mrs. Anders had insisted on pronouncing “borscht” the way it was spelled, sounding out the silent “t,” and no matter how often he said it correctly, she refused to vary her pronunciation. He had the feeling she was trying to correct him, as though she was hinting to him that he said the word wrong, and that made him feel even more embarrassed. It was as if she was making fun of him, something she did not do with Ve Phan or George Saatjian or any of the other kids in class.
He’d passed out the wooden spoons and small sample bowls of the Russian soup and had been expected to talk about the history of the Molokans as the class ate, to describe how they acted and what they believed in, and he’d said most of what he’d planned to say, but he’d been too embarrassed to bring up the pacifism. It was at the core of the Molokan religion, was what Babunya had drilled into his head since he was little, but it shamed him to admit to it. He honestly believed in those principles, deep down, but at the same time he didn’t really want to. Babunya had always told him that it was in man’s nature to kill, that Cain, the first truly human being in the Bible, the first made from the union of man and woman rather than by God, had killed his brother. It was an evil act, but after he had murdered his brother, he had been marked by God, protected from all human justice, and she said that this not only showed God’s mercy and forgiveness but indicated that God did not want humans to judge other humans, that He forbade revenge, that only He could mete out punishment. It was a prohibition against violence, against war, against the death penalty, and Molokans took their pacifism very seriously. They had left their mother country for it, and they had refused to fight in any of America’s wars because of it.
That was all well and good, and when he was in his bed in his pajamas and Babunya was telling him Bible stories, it was nice to hear, and he believed in it. But at school those ideas seemed not only irrelevant but embarrassing. It was impossible not to want to hurt people who hurt you, and more than once he had wished Jason Aguilar or Gauvin Jefferson or Teech Sayles dead. Hell, if he’d still said his prayers, he probably would have prayed for God to strike them down. But he had stopped praying several years back. He was not really sure why that was, but at some point he had just felt foolish clasping his hands together and asking God for favors.
It was not something he would ever admit to Babunya, though.
The truth was, he was not sure if he even was a Molokan. His family didn’t go to church anymore, and even when they had gone, when he was little, they’d gone to a Presbyterian church in Norwalk.
His parents also hadn’t taught him Russian, and he knew that was one thing Babunya was not happy about. He knew a few words here and there—popolk, belly button; zhopa, butt; babunya, grandma; dushiska, sweetie—but he couldn’t even remember the short Russian prayer his grandmother had made him say each Thanksgiving when he was younger. Even Babunya herself spoke less Russian than she used to. When he was little, his parents and his grandmother used to talk in Russian all the time, especially when it was something they didn’t want him to hear. When his dad used to talk to Babunya on the phone, his end of the conversation was often entirely in Russian. But that had changed over the years and now they almost always spoke English.
He walked past the cottonwood around to the front of the house. His mom, dad, and Babunya were now sitting on the front porch, his dad reading the newspaper, his mom reading a magazine, Babunya crocheting. Teo was playing with her Barbies on the steps. The sound of rap music blasting from one of the upper side windows told him that Sasha, as usual, was in her room.
He’d been planning to explore the front yard and see if he could find any more snakeskins, but the whole idea of all of them sitting around, doing family things together, made him gag, and he knew that he had to get away. His dad might be trying to get into all that small-town family-values crap, but on the off chance that a potential or future friend walked past on the road and saw them acting like rejects from the 700 Club, he needed to disassociate himself. He didn’t want to be humiliated.
There was nothing more uncool than hanging with your parents.
He walked up to the porch steps, grabbed the railing and looked up at his dad. “Can I walk down to the store?” he asked.
“Which store?”
“Does it matter? They’re both practically right next to each other.”
“Why?” his mom asked.
“Jeez! Am I going to get the third degree every time I want to leave the yard? You let me and Roberto go almost everywhere. And that was in California. Now I can’t even walk a couple of blocks in this crummy little town?”
His dad smiled. “Go ahead.” He looked at his mother. “What’s he going to do?”
“Be back in forty-five minutes,” she said.
He nodded and took off running before Teo could say that she wanted to go too.
At the store he made a friend.
It was purely by accident. He was standing by himself, next to the comic books rack, glancing through the new Spiderman, when a kid about his own age came into the small market, causing the bell over the door to jingle. Adam looked up, saw a boy with longish hair, wearing torn jeans and a Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt, and then went back to his comic book without giving the kid a second thought.
The boy said something to the clerk, then walked over to where Adam was standing. Adam stepped back a pace, and the boy twirled the rack. “Where’s Superman ?” he said, turning back toward the front of the store. “I’m here to pick up the September Superman.”