by Judy Troy
chapter thirteen
NATE ASPENALL
JODY SLEPT DEEPLY. I would get up in the night and stand at the foot of the bed to make sure she was breathing—the comforter rising and falling, the sound of her breath going in and out. It was around New Year’s when I started doing that. Maybe I felt I had a right to, since I was taking care of her and since I was patient in terms of what I was hoping would happen between us. Her hair was dark against the white pillowcase and I would put my hand on it, or else I would rest my palm on the slight rise of her breasts under the bedclothes.
I dared myself, I suppose you could say. There was a getting-away-with-something quality to what I was doing, there in the silence, with just the two of us alone in the darkness. I could smell the soap she used, I was standing so close, and I imagined using it on her someday, her asking me to—Come shower with me, Nate. Let’s be naked together. I believed she would let me do that and more, once she was ready, in whatever way she defined that word. Meanwhile I had this private experience of her, which I would never tell her about, no matter what happened between us. It wasn’t hers to know.
Whatever form of sex occurred between two people, there was another, private side that nobody admitted to. That was my belief. It was possible that a lot of men did some version of what I was doing. As for women, I didn’t know. My experience was limited to two. The first girl I met in college, and the second I met at the Chino Valley Recreation Center, which was what people like me, who frequented it, called the Highway 89 Tavern, on Havasu Boulevard. The first girl started seeing somebody else, and the second girl, who was from the Philippines, ended up returning to the husband who had mail-ordered her. I used to call the second one after she stopped seeing me. I thought we could continue as friends, if nothing else, unrealistic as that was, needy as that might have seemed to an outsider. I called after she asked me not to. I called until her husband answered her phone and said, “Never call this number again.”
I wasn’t in love with her or with the first girl either. I didn’t care for either of them that much. But at least I got to have sex. I got to hold somebody. I got to belong to that club of which everybody else seemed to be a member.
ON THE FIRST Sunday in January, Jody stayed up with me to watch a meteor shower. We sat on the picnic table, wrapped in blankets; the temperature was near freezing. The moon was shining, and the stars were glittering. We put our heads back, watching one meteor then another carry out its short fall, its flash out of existence.
“Just bits of dust and rock burning up as they enter the atmosphere,” I told Jody.
“I thought they were stars, Nate,” she said. “I thought I was seeing planets and moons disappear.”
She was shivering—we both were—and when we went inside I followed her to bed and got in with her. It seemed natural, cold as we both were. I thought she would see that, somehow, know what I was thinking, know me well enough by then to trust me. Maybe I was testing that trust, or maybe I was just being myself for a change, not twisting myself out of shape in order to put her needs over mine. You didn’t always have to have a reason to do what people were meant to do as physical beings, as creatures of the natural world.
“Why are you doing this, Nate?” she said.
“To warm you up, and myself, too. No more than that.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“Just for a few minutes, Jody.”
“No.”
“I won’t touch you,” I said. “Look. I’m not touching you now.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want you this close.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t,” she said. “Not now anyway. Maybe someday but not at this minute.”
What choice did I have? But as I disappeared behind the partition I knew as a certainty that she would have said yes if there had been something to gain by letting me stay, or if I were the kind of man who had expected a yes from the beginning and behaved as if I had. I could feel that from her. It was possible that to her I hardly existed.
In the morning she had a headache and a temperature. She took aspirin and drank tea with whiskey. It’s medicine, she told me. Watch a Western, Nate. That’s what they used it for.
She was sick for three days—the flu, I suppose it was. Her temperature went higher than I thought it would and I waited on her—made her soup, cooled her forehead with a wet washcloth, as my mother used to do with me. That soothed her and made her open up to me. She told me about Winslow and how it happened that she got pregnant.
Wes Giddens had worked at Vince’s Auto Repair, she said, down the street from the high school. She would see him as she walked past, this nice-looking, part-Navajo young man who was saving up money to go to college. She would say hello to him, get him talking. He didn’t want to go out with her because she was in high school, but he did finally. She talked him into it. It was her idea to have sex, not his. He had resisted at first, which had made him all the more attractive to her. “Plus I thought it would make him like me more,” she said. Although by the time she knew she was pregnant he was dating somebody else. “So we weren’t together too long,” she said, “and there are things I don’t remember, due to what I was into, back then.”
In grade school she thought she would be famous one day. She would invent something or cure a disease, be a singer or an actress. She wasn’t sure when her I’ll-be-famous feeling went away, only that when she stopped having it she kept waiting for what would come in its place, and nothing did. She hardly noticed me as she spoke. She was looking beyond me into the past at what she had lost and what she had ruined for herself.
I knew what it was like to make a mistake and not be able to fix it, how it replayed in your head, made you want to reverse time and undo it. I hit a cat in the road once and kept on going. As a kid I pushed a boy off the top of the monkey bars, called an Hispanic kid a greaser, chased a girl off the swings. You do things. You screw up. You are a mystery to yourself. That was what Freud believed, so far as I understood him, and that was a preoccupation in the Bible—all those people who let God down. I mean, there were multitudes.
Ernest Sterling used to have this quotation taped to his dashboard: Our human life is ten thousand beautiful mistakes. He couldn’t remember where he had come across it, but there it was in front of him every day, and it would come into his thoughts at other times, he said, like when his dog was peeing on somebody’s flower bed, or when his toast popped up burned, or when he waited too long to pay his water bill. Then suddenly there it was, he said, those beautiful mistakes that make up a life. “Do you get what I mean, Nate?” he said. And I said no, and he said, “Me neither,” and right then, he said, right at that moment of not knowing shit about anything, we were in the midst of it.
AFTER JODY RECOVERED from the flu I had a dream about her. She was sitting on Mike Early’s lap, naked, whereas he was clothed. The odd thing was that this was before I knew about the picture, before I knew anything was going on between them. I thought the dream was about how vulnerable Jody was, about how vulnerable maybe everybody was under the surface, no matter what they told you or what their actions were. There was an outside self and an inside, a public and a private, a self they sought to control and a vulnerable self they couldn’t. And they tried however they could to make peace between the two.
I was trying to be happier, Hannah, and I went about it wrong. But I was still a good person. I was still trying to be a mother to you.
But all the regrets in the world never saved anybody. I learned that myself. It didn’t matter how sorry you were.
chapter fourteen
TRAVIS ASPENALL
HARMONY CECIL SAT with her friends at lunch, and I sat with mine. There were no rules about it, but nobody moved around much, not from the first or second grade on, even though you could have. Nobody would have stopped you. It was like once you started school you didn’t know what freedom was anymore, and that was partly on my mind when I said to Harmony, in the cafeteria, “Yo
u could sit with me, you know,” and she surprised me by doing it. She sat with me, Billy, and Jason at lunch, instead of with her friends. Her friends sat two tables over, and I noticed her looking toward them as if she were nervous. I wondered if the fact that I had had girlfriends before was something they held against me, or if the fact that I liked Harmony was something they held against her.
Girls were competitive with each other, Nate had told me; you had to watch out for all that jealousy that went on between them. I didn’t know then that Nate had never had a real girlfriend, that he was just giving what my father would have called “advice without experience.” But he was right about the jealousy, except that it could take a different form, which was that a girl might want to be the girl she was jealous of. I saw that, listening to girls and watching them, and it seemed strange to me, to want to give up your body and never go back, leave your whole self behind as if it didn’t count for much.
NEXT TO ME, Harmony was eating her sandwich while Jason and Billy talked to each other instead of to me, as if I had broken some sacred rule by asking a girl to sit with us. Then Harmony said to Jason, “Didn’t somebody in your family fight in Iraq?”
“His uncle,” Billy said. “His uncle died in Iraq.”
“I’m sorry,” Harmony said. “I didn’t know that part.”
“Yeah, well, he went there and didn’t come back,” Jason said.
“Was he your dad’s brother?”
“My mom’s,” Jason said. “Her younger brother. Well, her only brother.”
“What does she think about Afghanistan?”
“She’s not in favor of people killing each other.”
“It seems crazy to me, too,” Harmony said.
“My dad will argue the whole patriotic thing,” Jason said, “and on the Fourth of July he’ll put the flag up and my mom will take it down and they won’t talk to each other for a few days.”
“After my brother left for Afghanistan,” Harmony said, “my mom burned the flag my dad came home with. Just set it on fire in the trash can, right in front of him, and said, ‘Don’t you dare,’ when he tried to rescue it.”
“The war comes to Black Canyon City,” Jason said.
“Exactly.”
“It never goes away.”
“I know,” Harmony said. “My brother doesn’t want to see us.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know,” Harmony said. “I’m not sure. It’s like we’ve done something wrong, only we can’t figure out what.”
After that we talked about other things, like the empty house down the street from school, where kids went to get stoned; and how screwed up it was that the school secretary was getting fired for being pregnant without having a husband, when everybody knew that the father of the baby was the football coach, who was married, sort of; and why it was that being naked on the Internet was such a big deal, when everybody at every moment was naked under their clothes. But that was mostly just Billy, Jason, and me talking shit, as Billy’s father would have called it, fooling around the way we usually did, with Harmony watching us like she had come from another planet in order to check out the earthling males, and was maybe not sure the trip was worth it.
IN ENGLISH CLASS that afternoon Mr. Drake read us a poem, and Harmony sat with one elbow on her desk and her chin in her hand, looking out the window, where clouds were forming shadows on the desert. She had a black headband in her hair, which you could hardly see against the black of her hair. After a few minutes she looked down and followed the poem along in our textbook:
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
“What is Frost saying about walls?” Mr. Drake said. “Are they good things or bad things?”
“They suck,” said somebody.
“Why?”
“Well, the guy in the poem has apple trees, and his neighbor has pine trees,” somebody else said, “and trees don’t eat each other. So the wall is, like, useless.”
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” Mr. Drake read. “What’s the something?” he asked.
“God,” said a girl in the front row.
“No, nature,” said Harmony. “It proves it by making gaps in the wall.”
“Well, it was God who made nature,” said the girl.
“God is not in the poem,” Harmony said.
“He is there because He made the world and everything in it.”
“You’re being just like the neighbor,” Harmony said. “You want to see things the way you were taught to, instead of thinking for yourself.”
“At least that way I’ll go to heaven.”
“What if there is no heaven?”
“There has to be.”
“Why?”
“Okay,” Mr. Drake said. “What wall could be erected right now, in our classroom?”
“A wall between people who think one way and people who think the opposite way,” said a boy in the second row.
“Does the wall need to be there?” Mr. Drake said.
“It’s already there,” said somebody else. “We’re all, like, fighting with each other. We’ll never get along.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because it’s always been that way.”
“Is that what Frost is saying in the poem?” Mr. Drake said.
“Maybe.”
“But what is possible for us now,” Mr. Drake said, “without a wall in here, that wouldn’t be possible if we built an actual wall?”
“Well,” another person said, “we could cross the room and kill each other.”
“What if we think about this differently? More peacefully?”
“We could walk through the wall,” somebody else said, “since it’s not there, I mean.”
“Yes. What else?” Mr. Drake said. “What happens in the poem?”
“We could walk next to each other,” Harmony said.
ON THE BUS home that afternoon, people were screwing around in the aisle and cracking jokes, and the bus driver was half participating and half telling them to shut up and sit down. How was he supposed to pay attention to the road with all that bullshit going on?
Billy was sitting next to me. After a while he told me that his mother was getting married again. He and his sister were being included in the ceremony, and his sister was into it, he said, because she liked the dress she was getting to wear and because she was an idiot. He, himself, was planning on waking up sick and staying home.
“It’s bad enough that I’m going to have to live with this asshole,” he said.
His mother was marrying Cy Embrick, who owned Ron’s Market. Cy was famous for having once lived with a woman who became an actress in X-rated movies, and for setting up folding tables and chairs in the parking lot of his grocery store and serving a free Thanksgiving dinner. But Billy didn’t like the idea of his mother having somebody permanent when his father didn’t. Plus, his father was sick. His father had cancer—I wasn’t sure what kind—and drove to Phoenix once a week for some form of treatment. Billy didn’t talk about it, and neither did his father. It was just this thing going on all the time in the background of Billy’s life, like rain always falling behind where he stood. I didn’t like thinking about it. I had to remind myself, Oh, right. Billy’s dad is sick. That’s what’s going on. Then I’d forget it again and start over.
chapter fifteen
SAM RUSH
“JODY CALLED MIKE Early four days before she was killed,” I told J Nate. “She asked him to come up there. She told him that somebody was harassing her.”
It was shortly after seven, and I had woken Nate up. At the back of the Airstream the bed was unmade.
“She also told Early that her mother was seriously ill,” I said. “Jody asked him to come to Winslow, and he did. He had lunch with her the day she died. The waitress identified him.”<
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Nate’s face was unexpressive. I had brought two take-out coffees from Byler’s and two sausage biscuits, and he started drinking the coffee.
“The afternoon Mike Early was there,” I said, “he had a sexual encounter with Jody in his truck. You need to know that.”
“Why?”
“Because it happened.”
Nate blinked at the early light coming through the window opposite us.
“There must have been a reason,” he said. “Maybe he did a favor for her, and she didn’t know how else to repay him.”
“With sex.”
“That was what most men wanted from her.”
“So you’re not shocked. I thought you might be.”
“It doesn’t matter what I am,” Nate said.
“Why is that?”
“It’s not important. What difference can that make now? I don’t think Mike was the one to hurt her. Somebody else did, the person she was afraid of, or the landlord, maybe, or Wes Giddens, possibly.”
“The landlord was out of town, Nate. I told you that. And for all Jody’s talk of Wes Giddens, he wasn’t and isn’t in northern Arizona, not as far as I can discover. Did Jody tell you she had located him?”
“No. But she wanted her daughter back. She never stopped wanting that.”
“I’ve spoken on the phone to Alice Weneka,” I said, “the woman who cared for Wes Giddens after his mother died. She told me that Hannah was born more than a month early, with breathing problems and cocaine and alcohol in her system. Did Jody tell you that?”