“Teo.”
The shadows shifted, moved. Nothing passed in front of the door, nothing moved outside, but the darkness within the bathhouse flowed clockwise, like a scene in a film using time-lapse photography, and shadows swirled slowly over the rubble in the center of the room before dispersing and once again flattening out on the walls and ceiling.
There seemed something different about the picture of the Molokan man on the far wall, but Teo couldn’t quite figure out what it was. She knew she should probably be scared, but for some reason she wasn’t, and she adjusted her butt on the board but did not stand up. This was weird, but it was not frightening, and the banya still felt friendly to her.
“Teo.”
It was the bathhouse itself that was talking to her, she realized now, and, hesitantly, tentatively, she said,
“Yes?”
“I’m hungry,” the banya whispered.
Into her mind popped the image of a dead animal. A small dead animal, a rat or a hamster. She didn’t know what made her think of such a thing, but she knew with a certainty she could not explain that that was what the bathhouse craved. It was hungry, and it had not been fed in a long time, and it had somehow recognized in her a kindred spirit. It wanted to be her friend.
“Friend,” the banya whispered, agreeing.
And again: “I’m hungry.”
There was the slightest hint of desperation in the voice, and Teo thought for a moment. She’d seen a dead rat somewhere recently. Somewhere nearby.
No. A bird. It was a bird she’d seen, on the side of the path on her way over here, and she stood up and hurried out of the bathhouse and back down the path the way she’d come. Sure enough, there it was, lying in a small tuft of dried brown weeds, several dead cottonwood leaves having blown against its unmoving form, one covering its feet like a blanket, one next to its head like a pulled-over pillow.
She crouched down next to the weeds and examined the bird. It looked like a baby. It was small, and there was something innocent and delicate about its little body. Usually, things like this grossed her out. Adam was always pushing dead bugs on her, holding up worms and dried beetles in front of her face, forcing her to look at flattened frogs in the road. And she supposed that was why she had passed it by on her way to the banya.
But it did not gross her out now, and while she felt sorry for the little birdie, she realized that it still had a function to perform, that even though it was dead it was still useful. Everything had more than one purpose, and it made the birdie’s death seem not so sad when she understood that it could help maintain the life of the banya.
She wished she had a shovel, but it was getting late and even if she ran all the way back to the house to get one, it would be too dark for her to find this spot again. Already the light was fading and the bird’s body had started to blend in with the weeds and leaves on the ground. She reached out and picked up the bird, scooping it up using both hands. The lifeless body felt surprisingly stiff and cold, and instinctively she curled her hands around it, trying to warm it up. It was not disgusting to her at all, and she wondered why she had once been afraid of things like this. Death was perfectly natural, and there was nothing scary about it. After creatures lived, they died. That was the way it was supposed to be.
She carried the dead bird back to the banya and placed its body on the pile of small bones in the center of the room. Immediately, she felt the play of cool wind on her face, light, soft breezes that came in from all directions, caressing her skin with a feathery touch and then disappearing into the dark. It was like nothing she had ever experienced before, the most sublime form of thank-you she had ever known.
There was a pause. A hush.
She sensed that the banya was grateful, that it was anxious to satisfy its hunger. But it did not want her here while it ate—she sensed that as well—and so she retreated, walking back outside.
She turned, once she was through the doorway, but the body of the bird was already gone, swallowed by shadows.
From inside the building came the whisper of air against her face: “Thank you.”
She smiled back into the darkness. “You’re welcome.”
4
Julia and Deanna sat at the small table on Deanna’s back porch, sipping iced tea.
“I love what you’ve done here,” Julia said.
Her friend smiled. “Thank you.”
Julia really was impressed. The yard looked like something out of Country Living or one of those kinds of magazines. A rustic birdhouse emerged from an overgrown patch of pink Mexican primrose, and a narrow dirt path wound between purple-blooming sage and a host of wildly growing desert plants. She and Gregory hadn’t had time to get their yard in shape—they’d cleaned it up a bit, but they hadn’t started planting—and looking at Deanna’s backyard gave her quite a few ideas, making her eager to start working on her own garden. Maybe this weekend, they’d go over to the nursery and buy some seedlings.
“Paul told me that Gregory had a run-in with our old pal Marge.”
“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it a run-in. He went in the library to use their computer and she put on a big fake smile and told him that they all missed me.”
“Kind of creepy, isn’t it? I stayed away from that place the first couple of months after I quit because I didn’t want to face Marge or her gang, but then I thought that was stupid. This is my town, too, and I’m not about to go around being afraid to do something or go somewhere because of them.
“So I started going to the library once a week. At first I was militant about it. I’d just go in there and grin at her as she checked out my books for me, but gradually things simmered down, and now I’m just like a regular patron. We sort of peacefully coexist.”
Julia shook her head. “Strange.”
“There’s something to be said for the anonymity of a big city. There, if you have a problem like this, you just go somewhere else. You pick another library.”
“Or talk to that person’s supervisor.”
“Exactly. But here, you’re bound to see that person again. You have to deal with her. It’s tough.”
“I take it McGuane has a lot of… ‘militia sympathizers, ’ for want of a better word.”
“You’re right about that,” Deanna said.
“Why do you think that is?”
Deanna shrugged. “Who knows? My theory is that these people are basically dissatisfied with their own lives, unhappy with their marriages or their jobs or whatever, and they need someone to hate. For some reason, hating someone else makes them feel better about themselves. And with the Soviet Union gone, they have no real enemy anymore. No organized enemy, that is. No one they can blame all their conspiracies on.”
“So now they hate our government.”
“Pretty much. I mean, these are the same people who were so pro-American back in the eighties that they wanted to bomb Libya and bomb Iran and bomb Iraq and bomb Russia. Now they want to bomb abortion clinics and government offices.”
Julia smiled. “Maybe they just like to bomb things.”
“Maybe. But it seems to me that if everyone would just live their own lives, would just concentrate on themselves and not worry about what everyone else is doing, we’d all be a lot better off. Happy people don’t march in protests or spend their weekends playing soldier. These guys are losers, and if they’d just try to fix their own lives rather than dictate to everyone else how they should think and what they should do, we’d all be a lot better off.”