“I agree.” Julia looked out at the garden and sighed.
“The frightening thing is not just how paranoid and cynical these people are, but how stupid. They don’t trust the government. Fine. But they don’t trust anything else, either. Except their own loony little network of people. Researched, verified stories from newspapers they don’t buy, but some anonymous posting on the Internet they accept as gospel. Some disgruntled janitor from Kentucky comes home after work, eats his Hamburger Helper and starts ranting on the computer, and they believe him more than they do the trained journalists who work for legitimate news-gathering services. It’s scary.”
Deanna laughed. “I knew I liked you.”
“You know, Gregory wanted to move back to McGuane because he thought it would be a better place to raise the kids. Southern California’s so full of drugs and gang violence and everything that it didn’t seem like a great environment for Adam and Teo to grow up in. He wanted to come back here because he thought a small-town atmosphere might be better. I thought so, too. Originally.”
“And now?”
“I don’t know.”
Deanna smiled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing…”
“What?”
“It’s just that it’s still hard for me to think of Gregory Tomasov as someone’s dad, as a middle-aged guy worried about where to raise his kids. In my mind, he’s still that obnoxious teenager who tried to sneak into the girls’ locker room.”
“Gregory?”
“Him and a couple of his friends. The coach caught them and gave them the choice of being suspended or joining the track team. At the time, McGuane High didn’t have enough boys to even have a track team. Gregory, Tony, and Mike pushed them just above the minimum limit.”
Julia laughed. “So tell me about Gregory back then. I can’t even see him trying to sneak into a girls’ locker room.”
“Oh, he did more than that, let me tell you. A lot of those Molokan boys were hell-raisers. I don’t know if they were trying to rebel against their background or what, but they were holy terrors back then.”
“Same thing in L.A.,” Julia said. “I even dated some of those boys.”
“Then you know what I’m talking about. And Gregory was one of them. He was smarter than most of the other kids, more… I don’t know… modern, I would say, but outside the classroom he was just as bad.” She grew thoughtful. “Although he seemed to change quite a bit after his dad died. He wasn’t here that long afterward—he and his mom moved to California—but there was a big difference in the way he acted. It was like he suddenly turned into an adult or something. He was quiet, serious, seemed to have lost his sense of humor.” She met Julia’s eyes. “I guess I can imagine him as a middle-aged man. I’d almost forgotten about that Gregory.”
“Every time I ask his mother about what he was like as a boy, she tells me what a perfect and well-behaved child he was.”
Deanna laughed.
“I always suspected she was whitewashing the truth.”
“Or she didn’t know the truth.” Deanna leaned forward. “Let me tell you what he was really like…”
“I talked to Deanna today.”
Gregory shifted his pillow against the headboard, opened his Time. “Yeah?”
“About you.”
He laughed. “I’ll bet she had some stories to tell.”
“And tell them she did.” Julia pushed down his magazine. “Did you really put red dye in the school swimming pool and then claim it was from girls who were having their period?”
“I didn’t put the dye in.”
“But you were there.”
“I plead the Fifth.”
“And you told the gym teachers that it was from girls’ periods?”
He grinned. “Yeah. I guess I did.”
She hit his shoulder. “You were a brat!”
“I probably was,” he admitted, laughing.
“That’s it!” she said. “That’s it!” She started tickling him, and he dropped his magazine to defend himself. She got in a few good underarm shots before he grabbed hold of both her hands.
She gave him a quick kiss even as she struggled to escape. “So what was Deanna like?”
He shrugged. “Stuck-up bitch.”
She stopped struggling. It had been clear from what Deanna said that she and Gregory had not gotten along as kids, but there hadn’t been any maliciousness in her descriptions, any resentment in her retelling of old stories. These were things that had happened long ago, and she obviously viewed them as simply humorous anecdotes from childhood.
There hadn’t been this pettiness in her voice, this flat meanness.
Julia pulled her arms free. “What did you say?”
“I said she was a stuck-up little bitch.”
“That’s what I thought you said.”
“And she was.”
“She’s not now.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”
She moved away from him. “I don’t believe this.”
“I know you’re friends and all, and I’m glad you’ve met someone you like, but that doesn’t mean I have to like them.”
He reached for her, but she pushed him back. The mood was shattered, and though she’d wanted to make love tonight, she rebuffed his advances and turned away, pulling the covers over her, as he picked up his Time and resumed reading.
5
Jesse Tallfeather dropped the empty Mountain Dew can on the ground at his feet and kicked it into the pile next to the kiln. He walked slowly through the statuary.
Business sucked.
If things didn’t improve—and fast—he was going to have to declare bankruptcy. He wished he could get out from underneath this, but he’d looked at it from every angle possible, and he just didn’t see a way. He sure as shit wouldn’t be able to sell the business. No one on the reservation had the cash. Hell, no one in McGuane had the cash. Most of the other shop and store owners were barely hanging on themselves. Unless he could somehow convince that Molokan who won the lottery to either purchase the place or come in as a partner—and the chances of that were pretty damn slim—he was going to go down with the ship.
The ironic thing was that he hadn’t even wanted to get involved with the statuary in the first place. His father had started the business, and his brother Bill had been set up to follow in his footsteps, but then Bill had up and run off with Hank Wilson’s teenage daughter, hightailing it out of town, and Jesse had sort of ended up with the statuary by default.
In his father’s day, things had been good. The family had made a decent, comfortable living. But times had changed, and there wasn’t much call for statues any more. No one put them on gravesites these days, and even decorative driveway figures and lawn ornaments were not much in demand. He still sold some small stuff—an occasional fountain or birdbath or those little cement quails and ducks that old ladies liked to put in their gardens—but he’d been barely making a living for the past several years, and, unless there was a miracle, it looked like he was soon going to have to shut down completely.
He sighed. If McGuane had a casino he wouldn’t have any of these problems. He’d wished many times that their tribe would jump on the casino bandwagon. Up north, the Navajos had nixed the idea, but a lot of other tribes throughout the Southwest had gotten rich off gambling, and there were no casinos at all in Rio Verde County. It was virgin territory, and since theirs was the only reservation in this particular corner of the state, they would have a virtual monopoly.