She herself was a viewer of this scene but not a participant in it, and though she wanted to call out to her son, wanted to yell for Gregory to get away from the body and run into the church, she could only stand there and watch as he bent down and tentatively touched the figure’s face.
The wind instantly grew stronger, and the deformed child lurched to its feet. She saw unnaturally short legs and unnaturally long arms, a tilted head that was far too large for the supporting neck and was of a disturbingly peculiar shape. Gregory backed up, backed away, but he was already changing, his head enlarging, his arms lengthening, his legs shriveling, and in a few brief seconds, he became the identical twin of the malformed child before him. He screamed, a piercing cry that carried over the howling wind, and then the blowing dust obscured them both, fading them into the vague shapes that were hovering behind the curtain of sand.
She awoke drenched with sweat.
She sat up, breathing heavily, a muffled pain in her chest. She did not know what this dream meant, but it did not bode well and it frightened her. Closing her eyes again, she folded her hands, bent her head.
Prayed.
Two
1
They followed the moving van, making quick stops only for gas and pee breaks. Gregory didn’t trust movers on general principle, and he wasn’t about to let these jokers out of his sight. They looked like men even a carnival wouldn’t hire. The kids had been moaning and complaining since Phoenix, begging to stop at McDonald’s or Taco Bell or some other fast-food place for lunch, but he told them to eat the pretzels and chips they’d brought along.
They sped through Tucson, headed east toward Wilcox.
The night before last, they’d had a going-away party with all of their friends and family, a big blowout at Debbie and John’s that had spilled back to their own house, the revelers sitting on packed boxes and the floor, drinking out of paper cups placed on the empty kitchen counter. Julia had ended up crying most of the evening, hugging people and promising to keep in touch, accepting invitations to stay at various homes on the promised frequent Southern California vacations, issuing invitations to all and sundry to visit them in Arizona, but he himself had not teared up at all. He’d been more excited than sad, looking more toward the future than the past, and that forward-looking optimism still held. He felt good driving across the desert, and despite the kids’ complaints and Julia’s sagging spirits, he felt happy. They were getting a new start, their future was bright and wide open, and they had the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted.
God bless the lottery.
They’d bought a new vehicle for the trip, a Dodge van, and it was nice to experience a smooth ride, air-conditioning that actually worked, and a state-of-the-art radio/cassette/CD player. He’d grown used to the tepid air-conditioning and rough-and-ragged suspension of the old Ford, and the striking contrast between the two vehicles made the van’s pleasures that much more enjoyable.
He glanced in the rearview mirror, saw Sasha reading a Dean Koontz book, Adam and Teo playing Old Maid. Behind them, in the backseat of the van, his mother stared straight ahead. Her eyes met his in the mirror, and she favored him with a slight smile.
He smiled back.
His mother was with them on a trial basis. She’d brought her clothes and Bible and a few other necessities, but she had not even tried to sell her house, her furniture was still safely in place inside the home, and she reserved the right to return at any time. As he’d expected, as he’d known, she was not really enthused about leaving her friends and her church and the rest of her family, but she did seem to recognize that she was not as young as she once had been, and since he was her only son, she’d agreed to come. On some level, she seemed to realize that she was more dependent on him than she was ordinarily willing to admit, and he was encouraged by the fact that her love for her family appeared to be stronger than her ties to the Molokan community.
This was the first time in his life he’d ever gotten that impression.
Like most of the other Molokan women her age, his mother lived for church, and her entire life revolved around the religion and its attendant social functions. She was getting on in years, though, and lately she’d been spending even more time at church than usual, going to funerals. He didn’t like her driving into East L.A. by herself. There was a lot of gang activity in the neighborhood adjacent to the church, but she continued to see the area as it had been years ago, her mind not recognizing the changes that the years had wrought. He expected to hear one day that his mother or one of her friends had been gunned down in a drive-by or mugged on their way to their cars, but so far the Chicano gang members and the strangely garbed Russian churchgoers had managed to peacefully coexist.
He himself had not gone to church for years, not since they’d moved to California. As a child, his parents had taken him to church each Sunday. The service lasted all day, and though he liked eating the food when they broke for lunch—the cucumbers and tomatoes, the freshly baked bread and the freshly cooked lopsha—he had been frightened of the service itself, of the old men and women and the way they acted when the Holy Spirit entered them. These were his relatives and his parents’ friends, people he knew and saw on a daily basis, but they seemed somehow different in church, like strangers, and he held tightly to his parents’ hands as, one after the other, the churchgoers were possessed by the Holy Spirit and began leaping up from their benches, lurching spasmodically across the open room, stomping loudly on the hardwood floor, and crying out in Russian. It was disturbing to see, this sudden abandonment of ordinary behavior and individual personality, terrifying even to a little boy who had been raised in the religion. There was one old, old man who had to be in his eighties, a man he didn’t know and saw only at church, who scared him even more than the others, who jumped up in the air with his eyes closed, screaming and lashing out with his hands. Once, he’d even had a vivid nightmare about the old man, a dream he’d never forgotten, and in which the possessed man, eyes closed, screaming, had attacked him, leaping on him, hitting him, taking him down.
Gregory himself had never felt the intrusion of the Holy Spirit into his body, and as a child that had worried him. He felt guilty, unworthy, because God did not see fit to possess him. Even his parents were periodically invaded by the Holy Spirit, his father weaving back and forth in place, his mother crying and humming psalms as she danced, and though no one ever said anything to him, Gregory always assumed that the other Molokans viewed him as not being sufficiently good or righteous, not deserving enough to be touched by God.
It was one of the many reasons that, try as he might, he attended church as an outsider, as an observer, rather than a participant.
The Molokan religion was indeed a strange one, but although he had not felt a part of it, he’d always felt protective of it. In McGuane, they’d been the object of ridicule, the town joke, harassed by hard-drinking cowboys and teetotaling Mormons alike. Molokans were foreign, they spoke with Russian accents, they were clannish, and in small-town America that made them suspect.
He remembered one Sunday morning in particular, when some cowboy-hatted rednecks outside the bar on the way to the church made fun of their clothes, derisively referring to his father as a “milk drinker.” That was exactly what the word “Molokan” meant, but it sounded mocking and disdainful coming from their mouths. He and his parents had ignored the men, who’d hooted and hollered as they passed by, and Gregory had felt ashamed of both his father and his religion. It was at that moment that he’d decided he would not go to church when he grew up.