by Judy Troy
“You’d expect to find the victim’s fingerprints, obviously,” said the deputy sheriff. “But they were only on her belongings. The car itself was wiped down well, whoever did it. I mean inside and out. Yet that receipt and the map were left there.”
He faxed me the receipt and the map and told me that a woman named Paulette Hebson, who owned Hebson’s Automobile Graveyard, just to the south of Bucket of Blood Drive, could show me the specific location. He had spoken with her. I drove to Holbrook and met with her. She was a stocky, attractive, blonde woman in her late fifties. Polly, she said to call her. She wore men’s clothes—jeans and a Carhartt jacket.
Her house and office were just south of the automobile graveyard, and in the strong, midafternoon sun she walked me north across the property. It was a shining jumble of cars and pickups and semi cabs and farming equipment, bordered on the north by Bucket of Blood Drive, where the car was found. The deputy sheriff had come upon the Toyota on his way to her junkyard with his son, who was looking for a carburetor. Paulette herself had not noticed the Toyota, but then, as I had just seen, she said, she lived to the south. She didn’t usually drive down that particular stretch of the road.
“I don’t know how long it would have taken me to notice it myself,” she said. “And if I had, I probably wouldn’t have thought anything about it.”
“Were you aware of Jody Farnell’s death?”
“I read about it in the paper,” she said. “It was sad, how young she was. But she was from Winslow, and the body was found a long way from there, if I’m remembering right. Somewhere in the direction of Phoenix? And of course I’d never heard of her. So I doubt if I would have connected it.”
“Do you recall seeing anybody around in the last few weeks, anybody or anything that might have made you wonder for just a second?”
She stood a minute, thinking, with her back to the sun. The wind blew her hair back from her face.
“I don’t recall anything unusual,” she said. “But I’m inside doing paperwork a good deal of the time.” She smiled. “That’s what nobody tells you about running a business. The paperwork.”
“What about whoever works for you? Might they have seen anything?”
“Women run things alone these days, Deputy Sheriff. At least this woman does. There’s just me here. I followed in my father’s footsteps. He was the one who started the business, and when he died I took over.”
“That was some time ago?”
“Seventeen years.”
“So you’ve never hired anybody to help you?” I said, “even briefly?”
“I never needed help.”
“You have any family that helps out? A sibling, or one of your kids? Anybody who knows this place fairly well?”
“No,” she said. “I had a brother who died in Vietnam, but that was it. No husband, no child. No children.”
I nodded and looked at the street sign.
“Bucket of Blood Drive,” I said. “It’s an odd name for a street. Do you know where it comes from?”
“Everybody does. There used to be an old saloon along it, a wild place, apparently. In the 1800s there was a gunfight there, which left what was said to be buckets of blood on the floor. So that became the name of the place. If you drive down a few blocks, you can see the stone walls that are left. There’s a plaque put up. Anyway, Holbrook used to be a rough, cowboy town, and that street used to be called Central, but for the sake of history, and a good story, I suppose, it got changed.”
“You wonder if whoever left Jody Farnell’s car here,” I said, “liked the idea of being thought of as rough and tough, like those outlaw cowboys back then. You know anybody like that? Does anybody at all come to mind?”
“My grandfather, dead now.” She smiled again. “But no. I don’t know of anybody like that. I don’t know of anyone who would have hurt a woman.”
We walked back through the automobile graveyard. Beyond it to the south was mostly empty desert sloping down to the wash of the Little Colorado River. I wondered why somebody would have gone all the way to Black Canyon City to deposit Jody’s body in a wash that wasn’t substantially different from this one, if you left out the view of the mountains and the fact that the Aspenalls lived near it. Unless Jody had left the car here herself, for some reason I couldn’t imagine, before getting into another vehicle, or unless the car had been stolen and abandoned here, which seemed unlikely. It was in good condition for a relatively old car, but it was old enough not to be a temptation.
I GOT ONTO I-40 and got off in Winslow, stopping at the drive-up window of Burger King for coffee, then sitting in my SUV, looking at my fax of the map found in Jody’s car. I phoned Alice Weneka, the woman who had taken in Wes Giddens, and asked if we could talk in person. My intention was twofold: to question her about Wes Giddens, and to see if she, being Navajo, recognized the symbol on the map as Navajo. It looked possibly Native American to me.
She lived on North Prairie in a white stucco house with a red-tiled roof and wooden shutters, and she came to the door with a small boy in her arms—her younger daughter’s child, she said. He had a cold. She invited me in and offered me coffee, and in the sunlit kitchen she held her grandson on her lap. She was a small woman with deep brown eyes and less gray in her hair than I had.
“It must be hard not to have Hannah nearby,” I said. “You ever wonder why Wes doesn’t bring her home to see you, from wherever he is? Just for a visit?”
“Well, he’s probably in college by now, and has a new life. That was what he wanted for himself.”
“You don’t keep in touch by phone, then,” I said.
“I’m not much for the telephone.”
“Seems strange to me, though, that he wouldn’t want to tell you about Hannah, how she’s doing and so forth.”
She resettled her restless grandson. “Between my two daughters I have five grandchildren, and they all live near here,” she said. “I have enough, Deputy Sheriff.”
“Can you show me the picture you have of Hannah?”
She went into the other room and came back with the same picture Jody’s mother had shown me—a tiny three-month Hannah, lying on her back in a crib in a blue-walled room.
“Where was this taken?” I asked.
“My sister’s house,” Alice said.
“Here in Winslow?”
“On the Reservation.”
“As I mentioned on the phone,” I said, “Jody Farnell told a lot of people that she wanted to get Hannah back from Wes. That she wanted to find out where Wes and Hannah were and so on. Jody never contacted you about that? Not even after she moved back to Winslow?”
“No,” Alice said. “I didn’t know she had moved back.”
“I thought everybody here in Winslow knew everybody else, or at least everybody else’s business.”
“My community is mostly family, Deputy Sheriff, and Navajo. And while we thought of Wes as family, well, Jody wasn’t known to us. That’s how I would put it.”
“But you knew her.”
“A little.”
“How much is that?” I said.
“I saw her twice. Perhaps three times at most. Long ago.”
She let her grandson off her lap and he stood uncertainly, one hand on her knee.
“He’s just started to walk,” Alice explained.
“He has a lot to experience then.”
“Yes.”
“While I’m here,” I said, “I wonder if I could ask your help with something.”
I showed her the map and told her where it had been found, and she put on her reading glasses and took her time studying it.
“What about the symbol?” I said. “I thought it might make sense to you from your Navajo religion.”
“It’s not a Navajo symbol, or Hopi or Apache, for that matter, not anything I’m familiar with. I don’t know what it signifies.”
“Does the configuration of roads look familiar to you?”
She looked at the map carefully. “No,�
� she said. “It seems like it could be lots of places.”
“Any of those places come to mind?”
“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “Just that it could be anywhere.”
She took off her glasses and picked up the little boy, then she walked me to the door and told me to be careful driving. She had been to a funeral that morning, she said. Her cousin’s wife, Ida, had been killed. “Just driving into Winslow for groceries, you know, like she does every week. Expecting to get there and home safe.”
“We all have that expectation, don’t we?” I said, and she nodded, holding her grandson on her hip. As I left, he lifted his hand in a wave.
Outside, the wind was cool and the sun low. On the wide streets of Winslow people were driving home from work past empty storefronts in the small town that had once been the second largest in northern Arizona. I drove to La Posada, a restored railroad hotel, and spoke to a young man at the front desk in the lobby, which doubled as a shop selling Native American jewelry. I showed the man photographs of Nate Aspenall and Jody Farnell, and he said, “I don’t recognize them, but I’m just part-time here. Let me keep a copy and I’ll ask.”
From Winslow I drove to Flagstaff and located the Old Route 66 Western Motel and spoke to the clerk at the front desk. On the night in question, they had had eight single-room occupants, among them a Nate Aspenall from Chino Valley, with a 2003 blue Ford F150.
I was disheartened on behalf of the Aspenalls, but I wasn’t surprised. As much as Nate had cared for Jody, as hard as he had tried to remain close to her, it had seemed inconceivable to me that he wouldn’t have gone to see her more than the one time he had met her in Flagstaff. As for why he had lied, well, people lied not just for the obvious reasons, but for reasons that never made sense to anybody else. They lied to you, or they lied to everybody but you, or they lied to themselves—you came to expect the unpredictability of it and lack of apparent meaning. So I didn’t waste time speculating. I did wonder why Nate would have left that receipt in Jody’s car, but in a rush and in an anxious state, he might have simply missed seeing it.
I ARRIVED IN Black Canyon City in time for a late supper at the Rock Springs Café, where Audrey Birdsong had the night off, it turned out. That was my second disappointment of the day, and for the moment this one mattered more to me. I hadn’t realized how much I had looked forward to seeing her until I walked in to find her not there.
The following morning, first thing, I phoned Lee and told him that Nate had been in Flagstaff, just fifty miles from Winslow, the night before Jody was killed. “He needs to come forward with that information, on his own. It’s the smartest thing he can do. Maybe you can get through to him.”
chapter nineteen
NATE ASPENALL
JODY’S MOTHER WAS calling with problems. This began late in December. A boyfriend had stolen money from the mother, rats had gotten into her trailer, the “bitchy” woman next door had called the police because the mother’s music was too loud, the mother had sprained her foot, and there was nobody to take care of her. Wasn’t Jody the only person her mother could trust? Shouldn’t Jody look after her mother just as her mother had looked after Jody all those years of growing up?
Jody would go outside after the calls. She would sit on the steps of the RV with a blanket around her shoulders and her hands in her lap, one nestled in the other.
“Come inside,” I would tell her, and she would say okay and wouldn’t move. Her mother turned her into a stone, a statue. I couldn’t stand how remote she became. Out of desperation one night I said, “Come inside, honey,” and when she turned to me I saw the power it held for a girl. She came in from the cold and sat beside me. She said, “Make me a drink, Nate,” and I did.
The following night I had the thought that she would have sex with me if I said, “Sleep with me, honey.” I know how cold that makes me sound. But I believed it would be good for her to make love with a man she could depend on. That would be a change for her. She and I were watching television, when I was considering this; we were sitting on the futon together, and I turned to her to say it. But before I could, she looked at me as if she were seeing somebody else—Wes Giddens, perhaps, or one of the men from the restaurant, somebody who had ended up letting her down. Or else it was Nate Aspenall she was seeing, and I was seeing in her face that none of her wanted me.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said. Quickly, I put on my jacket and left before I had a chance to say or do something that revealed the humiliation I felt, the anger, the confusion, the distance between my intention and her reaction. I almost lost track of the fact that I had not said what I had planned and she had not rejected me. Not this time.
It was after eleven, dark and cold. The moon was a sharp, white sliver, and lining the roads of the park was the frozen, dirty last of a snowfall. I walked fast, trying to exhaust myself past feeling. But before long I had in my mind a story Jody had told me about a party she had gone to in high school, a drunken party at which kids disappeared with each other into bedrooms to experiment with sex—not intercourse, Jody said, not for her, not except once, she said, along with some “other things,” which she did not name, that she had not done before.
“The world is different from when you were young, Nate,” she said, and I had wanted to say, bring me up to date, then, Jody. Show me how the world works now. I couldn’t see why engaging in sex with people she hardly knew was all right but I wasn’t. I couldn’t see what it would have cost her.
The wind was gusting and the air was crystallized and haloed under the old-fashioned light posts we had in the RV park. In a few RVs I heard televisions going and saw the glow of them through the curtains. But most people were asleep; many of the residents were middle-aged and older. I started seeing myself in the future, lonely and old, having never had a wife or a family or what Lee and Sandra would have called a real job, a real house, a real life. I knew that what they expected of me I had not accomplished and probably never would. I was a loser, of sorts; that was how they saw me and probably how Jody saw me. But she was in that same category herself, it seemed to me, if not in a worse one. That was what was in my head that night.
Sandra took me to a psychologist when I was in the sixth grade. The school counselor had suggested it. He has a high IQ, but low grades, Sandra was told. He doesn’t speak in class or make friends. The psychologist’s office was in a brick building near the hospital, with a courtyard. I resented the psychologist’s personal questions, not that I answered them. No and yes were all I said.
Afterward Sandra and I went to supper at a Mexican restaurant near Prescott College. I told Sandra I didn’t want to see the psychologist again, and she said, “Are you sure, Nate?” But I could see she was relieved; it had cost so much. She said, “Use your intelligence in your own way. And talk to people sometimes.” Later, she would call Lee, and they would buy me a computer and ask if I wanted to be on a soccer team or join the Boy Scouts.
At supper she was cheery, drinking a margarita. She was always that way at first, then she would get an abandoned look afterward. Whenever we went out, people recognized her from the billboards that advertized the dealership she worked for, and sometimes a man would come up to us. “You don’t know me,” she would say. “What sense does this make?” It bothered her that they would ask her out in front of me, and it bothered me as well. I didn’t like thinking about her with men. This was before Ernest Sterling, the only one of her boyfriends to live with us, and the only one I liked.
Saturday nights Sandra and I sat on her bed, with chips and salsa, watching movies. Above us was a yellow and orange Indian bedspread tacked to the ceiling. She had put a blue and green one on the ceiling in my room. Our house on Delia Lane, off Nightfall, was small: two bedrooms, a bathroom, a tiny kitchen, a narrow living room Sandra and I painted orange. A creek ran behind the house, and in the backyard were two cottonwoods and a willow. We put up a tent and slept there, some nights. Our neighbors were students, mostly, and when they fe
lt like it they came over and had a beer with Sandra and played computer games with me.
I spent every other weekend with Lee. He had moved to Black Canyon City by then and lived in a duplex on Abbott Street, next door to Sam Rush. I remember a girlfriend he had one year who accidentally slammed Sam’s cat in a door. I remember a blue bicycle Lee bought me, and he and Sam teaching me to ride it. Lee had quit drinking by then, and was quieter, not all over the place anymore, tossing a ball, breaking a window, wanting to take me to this place or that place.
I’d feel him watching me, trying to figure out who I was now that he was sober and he could see me. I believe he did feel love for me, but he was seventeen when I was born. I was a baby doll somebody handed him. A bag of flour like we had had to cart around in our ninth-grade health class. It’s a baby, they told us. You can’t leave it. It can’t survive without you.
I’d see the look on Sandra’s face when Lee picked me up, every other Friday afternoon. She would stand in the yard, watching me go, and I would make myself wave to her until Lee turned the corner and she couldn’t see me anymore. That was the price I had to pay. When he brought me home, Sundays, she wouldn’t talk to me or look at me, at first, then she would give me a tight hug, hold me too long, ask too many questions.
As I got older and stayed in my room, reading, Sandra would say, “Why don’t you want to be with me anymore?” and I would say, “Because I’m a teenager now. That’s what teenagers do.” She seemed not to know how that worked. We weren’t in sync during those years, but it wasn’t like we didn’t eat supper together or talk some. It was true that I never called her Mom, or Lee Dad, but that meant nothing. I had always called them what they called each other, but it wasn’t like I didn’t know who they were to me.
Delia Lane comes into my dreams even now—the small, low houses; the empty field at the end of the street; the black pickup that ran over my dog when I was seven. I dream of storm clouds hovering over the creek; of a house next door that is just like our house except the windows and doors are boarded up. What happened there? I want to know. In my dreams I’m always asking.