by Judy Troy
“Are you afraid of dying?” Harmony asked me.
“No. Not really.”
“Me either. There’s too many things to do first.”
“No kidding,” I said.
When I saw that she had said it seriously, I asked, “Like what?” and she said, “Well, stuff after high school, like going to college or whatever, but also some things now. Smaller things.”
We were sitting close enough that our shoulders were touching, and I took a chance and said, “I feel the same way,” and I put my arms around her and kissed her. At first I could tell that she hadn’t done it much before, but soon it was as if she had always known how, and while I could have tried to do more, I didn’t. I would wait for next time. I would give her time to hope I would.
I didn’t know how long we had been there until I heard the cactus wrens and quail start up, the way they did early and late in the day, and in the middle of kissing part of a poem from English class came into my mind: . . . that time allows / In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs. I thought about telling Harmony. I wanted to show her that I remembered it word for word, that I was sensitive like she was, that I had a poetic soul or whatever, which I probably didn’t, and which she probably knew. She was as smart or smarter than I was. It was safer to keep it to myself.
chapter nine
SAM RUSH
THE DAY BEFORE Jody Farnell’s landlord was due back in Winslow, I drove up to Flagstaff to the Hilton Inn where Jody had worked and spoke to the assistant manager, a heavyset woman with cropped hair. She knew of nobody problematic in Jody’s life, although Jody had been overly chatty with the male clientele at first; the other maids had commented on it, felt she was doing it in order to receive tips. The assistant manager’s take was that Jody was lonely, a little troubled, maybe, but well-meaning. She had a talk with Jody about it; that was all it took. Moreover one of the male guests turned out to be her uncle. “A big, white-haired man with glasses,” the assistant manager said. “I believe he stayed with us just the one time. That was back in March.”
Overall, the assistant manager told me, Jody was a diligent employee who seldom missed work, and they were sorry to hear what had happened to her and sorry to lose her.
FROM FLAGSTAFF I made the forty-five-minute drive to Winslow and had lunch at Bojo’s on Second Street, the restaurant Nate had mentioned to me. The manager said that Jody had eaten there once or twice a week, including the day I was asking about, April 24, the last day of her life. She had eaten lunch there, he said, with a white-haired man in his sixties, whom he identified from the photograph I showed him of Mike Early.
“You’re certain?” I said.
“Yeah, I’m certain. I paid attention. It was obvious he wasn’t her grandfather, if you know what I mean.”
In the afternoon I made the drive to Chino Valley and was waiting for Mike Early at his RV when he came home from work. It was breezy and cool, with the sun behind the trees.
Early, a big-headed man with carefully parted white hair politely asked me in, as he had last time. He was a large man, an inch or two under my height. He took the chair opposite me. His RV was paneled, which made the interior dim, despite the overhead light. The photograph of Jody, I noticed, was no longer in sight.
“As I told you on the phone,” I said, “it appears that you and Nate both got the date wrong about when you had that water leak.”
“Well, I don’t have the best memory,” he said. “I’ve said that.”
“The odd thing was that your dates matched. You both told the same story. Why do you think that was?”
“I don’t know. Coincidence, maybe.”
“Can you see how that looks to me,” I said, “two people alibiing each other? I’m not saying that you were both somehow involved. I’m just saying I have to consider it, especially since you each had a relationship with her.”
“Not the kind you’re thinking of. Neither of us did.”
“How do you know that?”
“Jody told me,” he said. “She offered that information to me.”
“Nate cared for her. You must have known that. Would he have been jealous of you or any man who had relations with her?”
“Maybe,” Early said.
“Would he have been angry at her?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t say. I don’t know him in that capacity.”
“Then let’s focus on you for a minute,” I said. “Where were you the night Jody was killed? Your neighbor said you didn’t come home all night. She said she was sure of it.”
He took off his tie and lay it carefully over his leg. “What I did,” he said slowly, “was confuse Thursday with Friday. I realized that finally. I have a sister and brother-in-law in Snowflake, and I thought it was Friday night I spent with them, when in fact it was Thursday night.”
“After going to Winslow to see Jody,” I said.
He was silent, surprised. He averted his eyes and smoothed the tie with his big fingers.
“The manager at Bojo’s said that Jody had a late lunch there, the day she was killed, with a white-haired man in his sixties, who was seen getting out of a pickup that matches yours in make and color. He identified you from a copy of the photo on your driver’s license.”
Early removed his glasses, looked down at them as he spoke.
“She asked me to come,” he said. “She called me earlier in the week, saying she didn’t have anyone in Winslow except her mother, who had pneumonia. She might be dying, Jody said. Then there were other issues. Somebody was knocking on Jody’s bedroom window late at night, and calling, then hanging up. She didn’t know who. Plus there was her landlord, who had offered to drop her rent in return for sex. And she was nervous about the father of her child. She hadn’t found him yet, but maybe he had heard she was looking for him and why, and didn’t want to give the child back. Jody said she needed to see somebody she could depend on, and that if I could come visit soon, she’d . . .”
“What?”
“Be . . . grateful.”
“In a sexual way? She’d have intercourse with you?”
“No. A lesser thing,” he said. “I don’t like to say. I don’t use those words. I’m not comfortable . . .”
“She would perform oral sex on you.”
“Yes.”
“She had done that before?”
He looked at the paneled wall, on which was hanging a picture of a bright-faced young man in a red polo shirt.
“It happened just once,” he said, “shortly before she left Chino Valley.”
“She suggested it, or you did?”
“I lent her money and she wanted to thank me. She said, ‘I’ll do such-and-such.’” He sagged forward, forearms on his thighs. “I wouldn’t have asked. You don’t know me. I’m not like that.”
“What about the time you stayed at the Hilton Inn in Flagstaff, where Jody was working? What did the two of you do then?”
He avoided looking at me.
“It was just . . . well, it didn’t amount to much . . . I was trying to help her out.”
“With money?”
“Yes.”
“For which she paid you back in sex,” I said.
“It wasn’t that type of arrangement. I don’t like the way that makes either of us sound.”
“Leaving aside how it sounds, Mr. Early, do you know if she had this kind of arrangement with any other man, or men?”
“No. I can’t believe she did.”
“Why is that?” I said.
“Because come to think about it, it might have been my suggestion. I’ll just go ahead and say that now.” Early looked out his window. The sun was down and there were glimpses of red sky behind the trees. “The friendship we had was the basis for it,” he said. “Jody was warm. Sweet. She’d hug me hello and I felt our relationship was . . . loving, I suppose you would say. I thought maybe she saw it in the same light.”
“Did Nate know anything about the sexual aspect of your
relationship?” I said.
“No. Not so far as I know.”
“So why did she want you in Winslow on the twenty-fourth,” I said, “rather than the two of you seeing each other in Flagstaff, as you had before?”
“She sounded, well, nervous, alone. Wanted to see a friendly face in Winslow. That was my impression. She was on edge.”
“Where and when did the oral sex with Jody take place?”
He kept his eyes on the floor as he spoke.
“It was after lunch,” he said. “We drove separately to the overlook for the Painted Desert, on the Reservation. She got into my truck and we drank some. I had stopped at the liquor store earlier. Then after a while, she . . . well, it happened, and before she left I gave her $300. To help her, Deputy Sheriff, whether you believe that or not. Then she got into her car—this would have been at four or so. And I drove down to Snowflake, where my sister and brother-in-law live. I got there at suppertime and spent the night. I can give you their phone number.”
I said, “What about this man Jody was afraid of? Did she say anything else about him that day?”
“That she saw him once, for a second. He was in his thirties or forties, she said, about the same age as her landlord.”
“Her landlord is seventy-one.”
“It’s easy for young people to get ages wrong,” Early said.
“Yes it is. But usually they err in the opposite direction.”
“Well, she was afraid of somebody,” he said. “Probably more than one somebody. Jody could . . . sometimes it was hard to tell with her. But she didn’t invent it. There was always a truth underneath.”
“Does Nate know you were in Winslow that day, or that she asked you there?”
Early glanced in the direction of Nate’s RV.
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t like him to . . . I’m not sure what he would think.”
“Just how well do you know Nate?” I asked. “How much has he told you about his family? For example, his father’s second family and where they’re located?”
“Well, he told me that his mother’s in Prescott. I believe his father lives in Black Canyon City, or near Black Canyon City. Out in the desert a ways, Nate said. Nate has half brothers. He’s told me that, too, although I’ve never met them.”
“What about Jody? Did she talk at all about Nate’s family? Where the father lived? Anything like that?”
“Never mentioned them,” Early said.
IN MY SUV, five minutes later, I called Mike Early’s sister and brother-in-law. They said that Early had arrived at suppertime, on April 24, and spent the night. However they lived fifteen miles outside of town and didn’t have neighbors. They were afraid there were just the two of them to verify it.
“How long did Mike stay with you?” I asked. It was the sister I was speaking to.
“He left fairly early the next morning. He didn’t spend the day with us, as we had been hoping.”
chapter ten
NATE ASPENALL
THE FIRST TIME you see a girl you care for, naked, well, you know basically what to expect, physically, but you don’t have any idea about seeing the heart inside the body, by which I mean the inside of a person suddenly appearing along with the outside. You get an erection at the same time that you see the fragility of a human being, the soul in a person, if you want to put it that way. It had never happened to me; I had never cared for a girl that much. It made me want to protect her from whatever could hurt her—pain and sickness; growing old; herself, maybe; men who didn’t love her; and a child she might never see again.
It had been an accident, my walking in midmorning as she was stepping out of the shower, the sunlight from the window on her small, pretty breasts, on the whiteness of her stomach and legs. She wrapped herself in a towel, and I said, “Sorry,” and went outside to give her privacy and take hold of myself. Her body was in my head now—how it looked and what I felt and the whole effect of it.
This happened in December, and from that moment on I was magnetized to her, whether we were in the RV, or at Denny’s with her waiting on me, or at the grocery store, or in my pickup as I was giving her a ride to or from work—saving her gas money, was the excuse I used. “Let me help, Jody. I have errands to run anyway. Really, I don’t mind.” I was nervous when I couldn’t see her—jittery, as if I were in withdrawal. My time away from her was spent waiting until I could see her again.
I started thinking of her as this rare bird who had flown into my possession and was my sacred responsibility. Who else but me could show her the safest route? She had come to me naked, and I understood what she didn’t: the darkness within ourselves, the shortness and loneliness of life, the unknown that awaited us. It was up to me to protect her and make her wise, give her what nobody else could or would.
I told her that people believed in the world too much, with its stores and lights and restaurants, and she should wean herself away from that. I explained that the world was outer, like the skin of a balloon, and people were inner, like the air inside, which was oxygen and nitrogen, meaning it had substance, that there was no nothing. There wasn’t a vacancy we had to fill.
“I don’t care, Nate,” she said. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
We were in the parking lot of the Prescott Mall, where she had wanted to go. I couldn’t talk her out of it, couldn’t persuade her that the mall was a fantasy that she should let go of. But ultimately we went in, and I followed her from one store to another, where she couldn’t afford anything, she told me. How was it everybody else could? What was the fairness in that? Then on the way home she grew teary; she told me that she and her mother used to shop in Flagstaff at the thrift stores. This was when Jody was eleven or so. They would drive there and back listening to her mother’s music from the eighties, and afterward they would drive past the house Jody’s father had moved into with the woman who ended up stabbing him with a plastic knife. They didn’t go up and knock or anything, Jody said, but sat in the car across the street from the house—a shotgun house, Jody said, no bigger than a trailer, with peeling paint and a faded pelican statue stuck in the yard, as if whoever had put it here—Jody’s father or the woman with the knife or somebody else entirely—had not figured out that the ocean was a state and half of desert away.
Jody’s mother would smoke and look at the house and be silent, and Jody would be counting one, two, three, four, she said, as far up as she could stand, then she’d sing songs in her mind, or think of a boy—whatever it took for her to survive that time in the car with her mother without remembering when her parents had been together and she had had a family.
When you cared for somebody, you got caught up in her story; it became more real than your own. For it wasn’t as if I didn’t have my own. The day my father, Lee, left, his car caught fire. Whether Sandra torched it, or he torched it himself, for some reason, I never knew—the two of them could get crazy with each other, they each told me later, as if I didn’t remember the flames, the sirens, Sandra screaming, and black smoke billowing up. I was five or so. For a long time I would dream that day and wake up choking.
Your long-ago past collides with your present. For no clear reason I’ll find myself thinking about three people I knew in high school who considered suicide on a daily basis. Truthfully, two of them would not have been missed, but the one who would have was the one to do it.
He and I used to skip class to smoke pot behind the Phippen Museum and watch the reflection of clouds as they sailed along in those plate-glass windows. Or else we would drive out to the Ernest A. Love Field and watch the small planes take off and land. After graduation we were going to join the military together, for him to be a pilot and me to be in tanks. A daydream, really—a castle in the air. He hanged himself from an upper branch of a cottonwood tree. He used to say that if he had been born somebody else, he could have helped out the person who had been him, but that as it was, he had only the one of him, and it wasn’t enough. But his thinking wasn
’t always that dark, and if he hadn’t died, I believe we might have remained friends.
Everybody’s life gets peppered with losses. That’s what I tell myself. But I see it the other way, too, by which I mean I see what my friend lost, and I see what Jody lost. I don’t forget that part. I don’t think it’s all or only about me.
chapter eleven
TRAVIS ASPENALL
“I SEE THIS IS a birthday dinner,” Nate said. He didn’t smile. There wasn’t emotion in his voice. He wished we had forgotten.
He sat at the table wearing the Grateful Dead T-shirt that had once belonged to Dad. Mom put a plate of chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes in front of him—the meal he ordered when we went to Byler’s Amish Kitchen. Nobody said anything about Sam Rush not being present. Whether or not my mother had invited him I didn’t know, but his not being there felt stranger than it would have been if he had come. Normally on birthdays he was with us.
Damien and I had made a CD for Nate—“Purple Haze,” “Black Magic Woman,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Gimme Shelter,” “Born to Be Wild,” and so on, the only music Nate listened to. My parents had given him a Kindle and shouldn’t have. Nate didn’t get excited by what you could do with an iPhone, and he had never been on Facebook or Twitter or anything. He needed to stand apart, and I guess that was how he chose to do it. If he were running a race, I thought, he would try to be the slowest.
After supper Damien and I cleared the table, and my mother brought out the cake. She lit the candles, and Damien said, “Aren’t we going to sing?”
“No,” Nate said. “Let’s just eat.”
My mother sliced the cake, and Nate ate a piece, then a second one. We were quiet because he was. He had worked with my father, that day, at the veterinary clinic, which my father had started asking him to do—to get him out of the Airstream, my mother said. It bothered her and Dad that he spent so much time alone.