by Judy Troy
“Let’s go back to the night Jody died,” I said. “It was Mike Early’s RV that had the water leak, you told me. Where was the water leaking from?”
“A broken pipe under the shower,” Nate said.
“He contacted you directly? Or spoke to the manager of the RV park and had the manager contact you?”
“Directly. We’re friends. Friends the way that neighbors are.”
Nate picked up his coffee.
“I’ve been to Chino Valley,” I said, “and I’ve spoken to Mike Early. You and he both seem pretty certain what night that was, but the woman in the RV across from his said that Early wasn’t home that night. She was sure of it. She said he hadn’t been there all day, and that she didn’t see him or his vehicle again until the following night. She didn’t know whether or not you were home. She can’t see your RV as easily.”
“If you’re talking about Doris Farmer,” Nate said, “she’ll say anything to anybody. Plus, you know how the RV park is laid out, with the trees. It’s not all that easy to see what’s going on.”
“Unless you’re nosy and make a point of it.”
Nate glanced in the direction of the Airstream, which was thirty feet or so from where we sat. The sun had come up and was glinting off the silver.
“Well, it’s possible I was wrong about what night Mike had that leak,” he said. “Maybe he and I were both wrong. I get calls to fix things all the time. It’s hard to keep track of what happened when.”
He looked at his coffee, in which the cream was separating, and he put his index finger in and stirred.
“What kind of relationship did Jody have with Mike Early, from your perspective, Nate?”
“They were friends. I told you that. Mike was lonely, and his son had disappeared, which gave him and Jody a connection to each other.”
“So Jody liked older men,” I said.
“You mean, in general? No. I don’t think so. But she did like Mike Early. We both did.”
“Here’s why I’m asking,” I said. “Mike has a picture of Jody that was taken in his RV. She’s sitting at his table in a plaid robe. His plaid robe. I asked him.”
“You mean she’s wearing it over her clothes.”
“No,” I said. “In place of.”
Nate’s eyes were down. He was sitting perfectly still.
“What did Mike tell you about it?” he said.
“That it was raining the day that picture was taken. That she had gone for a walk and gotten wet and stopped in for coffee, and that he had given her his robe to wear while he took her clothes to the laundry room you all share, up near the manager’s office.”
“Okay then,” Nate said. “There was a good reason for the robe.”
“Why wouldn’t she have gone to your RV first to change out of her wet clothes?”
“Jody wasn’t logical.”
“Why do you think Mike would have that picture right out there,” I said, “where anybody could see it?”
“Well, she’s not naked or anything. So why shouldn’t he have it out?”
“Maybe he likes the implication of the picture,” I said. “And maybe he has reason to feel that way. Maybe the rain that day gave Jody an excuse to undress in his RV, to excite him, to entice him a little.”
“I don’t think she would have done that with him.”
“So it’s the kind of thing she might have done with somebody, but not with him?” I said. “What makes you so sure?”
Nate shook his head.
“I knew her and you didn’t,” he said.
“You could say that makes me the more objective one.”
“Objective, maybe,” Nate said, “but about somebody you never met, never talked to, never spent time with.”
“Well, you’re right about that,” I said. “And so far you knew her better than anyone I’ve spoken to, which is why it’s useful to me to have you here. It would be a help if you could stick around. Your dad said he would pay the rent on your RV until you were able to get back to Chino Valley.”
“He told me.”
“So just stay close, if you would,” I said.
“For how long?”
“I don’t know. Two or three weeks, maybe longer. We’ll have to see. Can you do that?”
“Do I have to?”
“I was hoping you’d want to help.”
The expression in his dark eyes was troubled, nervous, both resistant and compliant. He hesitated too long before answering.
“I’ll stay as long as I can,” he said.
chapter seven
NATE ASPENALL
I COULD ALMOST SEE her lying there, that was the eerie part. Like a dead bird with its wings spread out, or a deer lying still and whole on the side of the road. Lee didn’t walk down into the wash with me, but Sam did, shadowing me with his large frame and big, plain face, and I put my hands on the ground, feeling the rocks and gritty sand, hoping I could feel something of her, her soul or spirit or whatever it was that didn’t want to leave the earth. The dog stood beside me, and I thought, Pete, you’ve got gray in your muzzle and you’re slower than the last time I saw you. Travis and Damien are going to have a hard time losing you. But everything brought into the world is taken out again.
I read the Bible for a class in college. I also read philosophy, history, literature, psychology, and science. I don’t mean just what I was assigned, but whatever I could find in addition. That’s how you got educated, I believed, outside of what you were taught, outside of what you were supposed to learn. You read in order to figure out what questions to ask, never mind if you couldn’t find the answers.
“When will the funeral be?” I said.
“That hasn’t been determined yet,” Sam said. “It will be a private Catholic service in Holbrook. The mother wants it that way.”
“That seems selfish.”
“It’s her right to be selfish,” Sam said. “It’s her decision.”
In a strong wind we walked back along the wash, and I looked to the south at the small houses and mobile homes of Black Canyon City, the town split in half by the interstate, with Mud Springs Road running underneath it like a river. I used to describe the town to Jody and explain to her about Lee and his second family, where they lived and what they did and how old the boys were and what we did together and where I stayed, when I was there. I used to think about Lee’s family a lot—what he had versus what I had. I think it’s natural to want whatever has been put in front of you. “Once you find Hannah,” I used to tell Jody, “she can live here with us and we’ll call us a family.” I pictured the three of us in my RV, with Jody and me together as a couple, maybe married. It was the first thought I had when I found out she was dead—that my dreams were gone. It was like I missed them, at first, almost more than I missed her. Everybody comes with attachments.
BACK AT THE house, in the patio chairs under the corrugated roof, Sam Rush asked me questions and told me about the photograph Mike Early had of Jody in his robe. I hadn’t known about it and it shocked me and I tried to act as if it hadn’t. But I knew better than anyone how many men were attracted to Jody, and I also knew that she knew that and used it. I might have told Sam that if he were not so hard on her, not so judgmental and cold. I could have told him about the men at the restaurant who watched her, stared at her as she came out from behind the counter and crossed the room. One of them stalked her for a month—followed her to the RV and drove past it daily, she said, until I happened to be there, one afternoon, and he saw me. Another customer had seemed decent and kind to her, at first. She had become friendly with him, just as she had become friendly with me, and one afternoon she walked outside with him and got into his car—a new red Altima, she said it was. She sat in his car because it was cold outside and she told him about Hannah and what a private detective would cost and he said, “Let me help you,” and he gave her $50, and the next day he came into the restaurant and said he would give her another fifty if she would sit in his car again. She considered
it, she told me. She said that for five minutes it didn’t occur to her that he could speed off in the car with her in it. The possibility just didn’t come into her mind.
That was how Jody was—naive and a little unintelligent. And maybe, for reasons I didn’t understand, she looked for trouble. Plus she knew how to utilize her looks. She’d adjust her smile depending on the kind of man she was waiting on. I would tell her, “You don’t have to make a prostitute of yourself to make a living,” and she would say, “It’s not called being a prostitute. It’s called being a waitress.” When it came to that subject and many others, I would try and explain my point of view to her, which she wasn’t interested in hearing. If my thoughts didn’t agree with hers, she was certain I was wrong. She just assumed it. It was irritating, as it would have been for anybody. I was smarter than she was, and she couldn’t see it. But I was also sorry for her because of it. It was complicated, how we were with each other. I could never simplify it to myself.
She was sad a lot of the time. If we were having a rum and Coke together, she would start to talk about Hannah and want more to drink so that she could feel sadder still—that was how it seemed to me. She told me about her mother becoming an addict, and about how she—Jody—started stealing a few pills, then a few more. She told me about her father leaving them for a woman who ended up trying to stab him at a Burger King with a plastic knife. Jody would laugh when she got to that part of the story, then she would cry when she got to the ending, which was that a year after the woman abandoned her father, her father had a heart attack and died and four days went by before anybody found him. Four days, she said.
I tried to respect Jody’s emotions even if that meant forgetting my own. I asked her how she felt and pretended to listen to the long answers. Sometimes resentment dug a hole in me, and it was difficult not to fall into it since I used to do all right, living by myself—not happy, but not lonely. It’s the crowd that makes you lonely. I was all right with the life I had, not expecting more, not mourning what I didn’t have or hadn’t had in the past. But most of the time, with Jody, I sidestepped resentment and was kinder to her than anybody else had been. And I tried to teach her things.
Ernest Sterling said that every moment of your life you should think about the fact that you weren’t dead. Like when you were eating a hot dog or barreling down a highway, you should remember, Life. I have it, and not ask for anything more. When I said that to Jody she said she would kill herself, thinking that way. She would want to kill herself every minute; why would I put a thought like that in her head? She couldn’t see that I was trying to help her. She couldn’t see that there was another way to look at your life and another way to feel. It was like she refused to think deeply or use her imagination.
She had a childish side that pulled at you when she was sitting alone with her feet tucked under her, or when she was standing quietly for a moment, at a window. You would wonder what her thoughts were and you would imagine what she was feeling, and for some reason you would lose track of the fact that you couldn’t know. You couldn’t know with anyone.
At night I was affected by the fact that she was sleeping behind a thin partition twelve feet from me. I would lie on the futon and masturbate like I used to at home when I was in middle school. If Jody was aware of what I was doing, she never said. It would have embarrassed both of us, and there wasn’t that kind of closeness between us anyway. She didn’t want it and maybe she didn’t know how to do it and neither did I. It might not be enough to want to. You might have to make room for it in yourself, set aside some of you for some of it. Then you would have to get used to that new configuration. So I left Jody alone when it came to my sexual feelings. I was afraid of looking like one of those jerks who wanted things from her, and I thought that when she was ready she would come around to me. Only, the longer I waited the longer it didn’t happen.
In the afternoon we sat together on the steps of the RV. Each RV was set into a private island of eucalypts and pine. Beyond the trees you could see the narrow, white-gravel roads that wound through the park. They were like paths in a fairy tale, Jody said, like you’d expect them to take you someplace good. Her hair was longer then, falling to her shoulders. It was soft and dark against her white sweatshirt. We would watch the light dying, and if Jody was cold, she would say, “Put your arms around me, Nate,” and we would sit that way. We would sit that way long past sunset.
chapter eight
TRAVIS ASPENALL
NOBODY COULD HAVE predicted it, my father said, that much rain in April—enough for Tonto Creek to flood with five families from Black Canyon City camping alongside it. Four children washed away. It was in the newspaper and on television; and in English class on Monday, when Mr. Drake read to us, Stars, I have seen them fall, / But when they drop and die / No star is lost at all / From all the star-sown sky, Selena Maynard started crying and it turned out that she used to babysit for one of those drowned children. Mr. Drake walked her down to the nurse’s office. We were pretty much silent while he was gone. We didn’t look at each other. Some people went so far as to look at their books.
“I wish I had never done anything with Selena,” Billy said to Jason and me after class. “Now I feel like a creep.”
“That’s because you are a creep,” Jason said.
The three of us joked around all the time, but it wasn’t like we didn’t know we felt things.
In Honors Physical Science, third period, when we were supposed to be talking about the periodic table, we talked about global warming instead—what the phrase meant and what some scientists said had caused it and what people on the other side of the argument said. Ms. Hanson said that she believed global warming was what was happening to the Earth, although it was impossible to prove, and that most scientists believed it, and Harmony Cecil said that the Earth was getting too small for the kinds of people who lived on it.
“What does that mean?” somebody in the back row said.
“Greedy people don’t give a shit about whether the Earth is polluted,” Harmony told him.
“Does that sentence need a four-letter word?” Ms. Hanson said.
“I think it does,” I said, and Harmony smiled at me.
She sat in the window aisle in a blue shirt and a jean skirt, with a cuff bracelet on her wrist. She was wearing sandals and she slipped her feet out of them. Her toenails were painted a pinkish color. Her legs were bare and her skin was gold and smooth. I couldn’t concentrate on what was happening to the Earth. I couldn’t care about it. It was like Harmony was the wind pushing every other thought aside.
SEVENTH PERIOD WAS cancelled that afternoon, and we were asked to gather in the gymnasium. We didn’t have to go, the principal said over the intercom, but it was an important decision and we should think about it before we decided. We should think about the meaning of community and what life would be like if everybody were self-interested instead of generous. So we all understood we had to go.
I sat in the bleachers with Harmony, making it look as if it had just happened, as if I had been headed in that direction anyway, and she said, “Oh, hey,” as if she hadn’t suspected anything different. She was drawing a picture on her hand between her thumb and index finger, of what looked like a spider web, then she looked down at the center of the basketball court, below us, where the principal and vice principal were standing with the counselor. The counselor started speaking into a microphone. He told us that when a sad and tragic thing has happened, people should come together. We should come together and think about those four children even if we hadn’t known them, and we should think about their families.
“We’re going to have three minutes of silence,” he said, “during which we can express our feelings silently in our own way.”
Most of us looked at the floor and waited for the time to be up, thinking our own thoughts. Mine were about how Jody Farnell had looked when Damien and I had found her. It’s hard to describe what it’s like, seeing a dead person. It’s as if they�
��re not inside their body anymore, and you try to imagine what they had been like alive and you can’t, even though in my case I half-remembered Jody Farnell as a waitress. And as much as you don’t want to keep looking at the body, you do; you can’t help yourself. You’re looking at how you’re going to be one day. How everybody will. You’re thinking, How can that be real? But it is real. It’s in front of you. So you can’t stop looking because you’re trying to convince yourself.
When the three minutes of silence were up the counselor said that he and Ms. Deakin and Mr. Hollis would stay until five in case anybody wanted to talk to them privately. Hardly anybody did.
INSTEAD OF HARMONY and I getting on our buses, we called home, made excuses, and walked down to Byler’s on Old Black Canyon Highway. We stood in the parking lot in the wind and sun, watching a dust devil spin and jump and skip far off in the desert. Then we got take-out Cokes and walked up to High Desert Park and sat on a picnic table with our feet on the bench.
The interstate was below us, and to the west were the mountains. Between the park and the interstate was Community Cemetery, and we looked down at the gravestones, which seemed tiny from where we sat, miniature gravestones in a miniature cemetery. We made up sayings we wanted to have put on ours, such as, Just Visiting, which was mine, and Looks Better with Makeup, which was hers, even though Harmony didn’t wear makeup as far as I could see. But Nate had told me that all girls wore it, that if they put it on well enough you could be fooled completely, which was the point of it. I used to believe most of what Nate told me, and I realized suddenly that I didn’t anymore, and I wasn’t sure when I had stopped.