“I’m scared!” Teo announced.
“If he came with us, would he ride in the van or would he ride on the roof? Is he invisible?”
“I’m sacred!”
“Mother,” Gregory said sternly.
She put an arm around Teo. “No. Not scary. Good. He there to protect you, keep you safe.” She smiled. “My father saw him one time. We live in Mexico, on the farm, and Father went to feed the horses. At night. Little man was standing there giving hay to the horses. And Father watch and he came and told Mother, ‘Jedushka Di Muvedushka feeding the horses.’ He don’t get scared, nothing. In the morning we go look, the horses’ hair all braided. So beautiful! All their hair braided.” She shot Gregory a defiant look. “So there is such a thing.”
“You weren’t scared?” Teo asked.
“No. Not scary. But the braids, you cannot even undo them. Jedushka Di Muvedushka help Father by feeding the horses and just want to show us that he… that he’s watching us, taking care of us. But Jedushka Di Muvedushka not scary. He’s the Owner of the House. He don’t do nothing bad.”
Gregory remained silent, waiting for the subject to go away. Teo was already frightened, and being in a new house after hearing this story, she was bound to have nightmares. Adam wasn’t entirely immune either. Moving was tough enough without having to put up with scary folktales, and he hoped his mother knew how upset he was, how angry he was with her. They were going to have a long talk later, and he was going to have to set down some rules of the house, rules she would have to follow if she lived with them.
He glared at her, but she looked neither embarrassed nor apologetic. Her face was set and grim, and when he met her gaze in the rearview mirror, it held his own, reproachfully.
“I should have invite him myself.”
2
Julia stared out the window as they drove. The scenery was amazing, like something out of a movie. Endless vistas, blue sky, clouds that appeared to be the size of continents. They could see hundreds of miles worth of weather patterns: a rainstorm far off to their right, gathering thunderheads to their left, clear skies straight ahead. A series of dark mesas and jagged blue mountains on the horizon before them seemed to remain perpetually the same size, serving only to reinforce the vastness of this land and the awe it inspired.
She looked out at the late-summer wildflowers that lined both sides of the highway. Blooming ocotillo, deep-green saguaros and lighter-green paloverde trees filled in the landscape and belied the common conception of the desert as a dead, arid place devoid of life. Indeed, she’d been surprised herself by the beauty and lushness of the land when they’d first driven out here to look for a house. She’d been hesitant at first about Gregory’s sudden brainstorm, his plan to just pull up stakes and move. As she’d told him, she had always lived in Southern California, and despite her chronic complaints, she had never really been able to imagine herself living anywhere else.
But traveling through the open country, Liz Story on the stereo, she’d actually been able to see herself living in a small town, a town where everybody knew everybody else, where neighbors helped each other and cared about each other and were willing to work together for the good of the community. It was a comforting thought, a welcome thought, and her belief and conviction in Gregory’s plan had grown stronger the further they traveled from California.
Even the kids were quiet as the road dipped through dry washes, wound around low hills, and finally began snaking through the canyons of a rugged desert mountain range. McGuane was in these mountains, and once again Julia found herself captivated by the rough beauty of this wild countryside. To their right, cliffs with the same multicolored striations as the Grand Canyon towered above them. Huge cottonwoods grew on the canyon floor, the trees providing umbrellas of shade to barely visible corrals and occasional ranch houses.
“Almost there,” Gregory said. He pointed ahead. The road passed through a tunnel carved through the rock, the zigzagging remnants of an old dirt trail still visible on the cliff above. “McGuane’s just on the other side.”
“Cool!” Teo said.
And then they were there.
According to Gregory, the town was almost exactly the way it had been when he’d left. There were no chain stores, no corporate gas stations, not even one of the name-brand fast-food joints that had taken over most of small-town America. There was no Wal-Mart or The Store, no Texaco or Shell, no McDonald’s, Burger King, or Jack-in-the-Box. McGuane had retained its local individual character rather than succumbing to the increased homogenization that was sweeping through the land, and from the first that had impressed her. Emerging from the tunnel was like coming out of a time machine, and she felt as though she’d been transported back thirty years and had entered the world of Gregory’s childhood.
They passed a small diner, saw a pickup truck and several bicycles parked in front of it, five or six teenagers clustered around a picnic table to the side. They looked up, waved as the van drove by. In Southern California, she thought, they would have yelled something or flipped off the vehicle. Across the road, two boys jumped down from a tree house into the dirt, laughing.
It was a refreshing change, and she understood what Gregory had meant when he’d said that McGuane would be a good place to raise kids. It was a Huck Finn world, a children’s paradise, a place where boys and girls could climb rocks, explore canyons, build forts and clubhouses instead of simply sitting inside the house and watching TV or playing Nintendo.
The highway came into town from the west, ending at the tan-brick courthouse, where it split into two narrow streets that wound through the diverging halves of the community.
The geography of the town was determined by the geology of the land. At McGuane’s south end was the mine, an ugly open pit long since closed down and fenced off from the highway by rusted chain-link. The old mining office was now the realty, where they’d bought their new home, and it sat dwarfed at the edge of the massive hole, a matchbox next to a drained swimming pool. The rest of the town snaked northward from the mine up two branching canyons to a sagebrush plateau. At its peak, according to Gregory, McGuane had had a population of thirty thousand, but that had been down to ten thousand when he’d lived there, and he was not sure what it was now.
“Are we almost there?” Adam whined.
Gregory looked over at Julia and smiled.
“Almost,” Julia said.
There was not enough room to back in, so the moving truck parked on the street rather than in the drive, its wide bulk blocking both lanes of the narrow road. Gregory pulled the van into the dirt driveway and stopped just in front of the carport next to the house. The movers had not even gotten out of the cab, much less opened the rear door of the truck and started unloading, so he sorted through his keys in order to open up the house before hurrying back to oversee their work.
“Hurry up,” Sasha said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Wait!”
He’d unlocked and opened the front door and was about to walk inside, when his mother stretched a bony arm across the doorway. She looked up at him. “We have to bless the house.”
Gregory nodded, motioning the kids back and shooting Julia a look of apology as his mother recited a prayer in Russian. She told them to remain outside, then walked in, going through each room, ordering out all evil spirits and repeating the same Russian prayer.
Adam’s eyes widened. “Are there really evil spirits in there?”
Great, Julia thought. Now Teo would never get to sleep.
“No,” Gregory said.
“Then why’s Babunya—”