“Sorry,” the clerk said, “we’re all out.”
“You said you’d tell me when they came in.”
“Sorry. We’ve been busy.”
“Shit.”
“I have that one,” Adam offered.
The boy looked at him for the first time. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Who are you?”
“I just moved here,” he said. “My name’s Adam.”
The boy thought for a moment. “You like comics?”
“No. I’m just looking at these for my health.”
The kid smiled. “Superman fan?”
“Spiderman mostly. But I like ’em both.”
“Me too.” The kid nodded in greeting. “I’m Scott.”
They were shy with each other at first. It was no longer as easy for Adam to make friends as it had been when he was younger, when every time he’d go to the park or go to the beach he’d make a new friend for the day, someone he’d never see again but who, for those few hours at least, was his best buddy in the world. Scott, too, seemed to be hesitant, unsure of how to proceed, how to tentatively approach the boundary of friendship without coming off like an asshole.
That was another thing they had in common.
But by the time they made their way around to the shelf of trading cards next to the candy, they were talking: Adam describing life in the big city, Scott explaining what a hellhole McGuane was for anyone who wasn’t what he termed a “goat roper.”
Like himself, Scott was going to be in seventh grade, and after they left the store, Scott took him by the school to check the place out. It was bigger than he’d expected and more modern than most of the other buildings in town. The two of them walked up to a drinking fountain on a wall adjoining the tennis court, and Adam got a drink while Scott took out a pen and began writing on the brown stucco above the fountain. He looked up as he wiped off his mouth and saw the word “Pussy” written on the wall—with an arrow pointing down to where he’d been drinking.
Scott burst out laughing.
They walked around the empty school, wondering where their classes were going to be, wondering where it would be safe for them to hang out so the eighth- and ninth-graders didn’t beat them up. They took a shortcut across the field to Turquoise Avenue, and Adam invited his new friend to come over, thinking he could show him the banya, but Scott said he was supposed to have been home an hour ago and he’d better get back before his mom threw a fit.
“Where do you live?” Scott asked.
“Twenty-one Ore Road.”
“What’s it look like? Your house?”
Adam shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s white. Wooden. Two stories. Set back from the road. There’s like a hill behind it and off to the right, and I guess we own that, too.”
Scott’s eyes widened. “The old Megan place?”
“I think I heard my dad say something about that.”
“Cool. I’ll cruise over there tomorrow. What time’re you guys up and about?”
“Me? Early.”
“What about your parents?”
“Everyone should be up and everything by nine or so.”
“I’ll be there.” Scott started down the street, waved. “And have that Superman ready!”
“You got it!” Adam called back.
He started home, feeling good. He’d made his first friend, and that was a big worry off his shoulders. He’d been dreading going to school cold, knowing no one, being “the new guy,” and he was grateful that he’d found a pal.
And Scott seemed pretty cool.
Maybe McGuane wouldn’t be so bad after all.
It was getting late, and he could tell by the angle of the sun and the shadows in the canyon that he’d been gone more than forty-five minutes. He knew his mom would be mad, and he didn’t want to end up being grounded, so he broke into a jog. They’d wound their way around from the store to the school, and though he didn’t know the layout of the town that well, it looked to him like he could cut across a few streets and take a shortcut around the hill behind their house and get home quite a bit faster than he would if he went back the same way he’d come.
He jogged down unfamiliar streets, following the landmarks of cliffs and hills, and did indeed find a small dirt trail that looked like it led around to their property.
The banya.
He’d known he would pass it returning this roundabout way, known he would have to see it in this dying afternoon light, but he hadn’t allowed himself to think about it, had concentrated instead on getting home.
Now, as he ran between outstretched ocotillo arms and irregularly shaped boulders, he could not help thinking about it.
And, suddenly, there it was.
He approached the bathhouse from the back, from a direction he had never come before, seeing it from an angle he had never seen. As expected, the banya stood in shadow, past the ruined foundation of the old house, while the tops of the trees behind it were still in sunlight.
Inside the bathhouse, he thought, it was probably like night.
The adobe wall in front of him was the one opposite the door, the one on which the shadow was projected, and he increased his speed, trying not to look at it as he ran by, feeling cold.
He looked at it anyway, though.
The banya stood there, door open onto blackness.
Waiting.
Shivering, he dashed past it and ran through the rest of the huge yard into the house. Babunya was in the kitchen chopping vegetables, and they exchanged a glance as he came in the back door. She’d seen him through the window, knew the direction from which he had come, and though he saw the look of disapproval on her face, she said nothing. He knew she felt guilty because she had not blessed the banya before walking into it, had made no effort to cleanse it of evil spirits, and she considered herself partially responsible for the banya being the way it was. He didn’t believe any of that, he told himself, not really. But she did, and that spooked him. It gave everything a bit more credibility and made his runs to and from the bathhouse seem less of a game, seem much more ominous.
“I didn’t go there,” he said in response to her look. “I just came home that way. It was a shortcut.”
She said nothing, just continued chopping vegetables.
He walked out to the living room, where Teo was lying on the floor, watching TV, an open storybook on the carpet in front of her. Neither of his parents was around, and for that he was grateful. They hadn’t seen him come in, and that had probably saved him from a grounding.
He plopped on the floor next to Teo, poked her in the side. She yelled and hit him.
He glanced over at her book. Shirley Temple’s Fairy Tales. It had been his mom’s originally, but it had been passed down to Sasha, then to him, then to Teo. In the center of the book, he recalled, was a two-page picture of Rumpelstiltskin, a cavorting dwarf with a sly, evil face, and he thought that that was what Jedushka Di Muvedushka must look like.
He dreamed that night of Rumpelstiltskin. It was the first nightmare he’d had in their new house, and in his dream the dwarf was naked in the banya, sitting in steam, the shadow wavering above him, hitting himself with leaves, grinning.
Four
1
Gregory walked with his mother to the Molokan church.