by Judy Troy
“What would you think if I told you I went back the next day?”
“That you’re human,” I said. “That it’s understandable. And it would explain how your motel receipt got in her car.”
“And that I killed her.”
“Not necessarily.”
“I’ve told you from the beginning that I didn’t hurt Jody,” he said. “What you want me to do is defend myself as if I did.”
“What choice do you have?” I said.
Nate’s expression turned blankly dull. He didn’t answer. His beer remained untouched in front of him.
chapter twenty-two
NATE ASPENALL
IT WAS AROUND New Year’s that Jody began talking about Winslow. I don’t mean a detail or story or two, but always. It was the only thing on her mind. It was like she was following a map inside herself, like an internal GPS system, like a migrating pattern that had brought her to Chino Valley and would take her home again in the spring. I was divided between fearing it and observing it. There was something compelling about seeing somebody getting ready to do something self-destructive. It was like watching a person walk into a fire. You wanted to shout no, but knew it wouldn’t stop them. I suppose that was the worst part. They weren’t going to listen. You didn’t matter enough to them. Let them go, a part of you says. Let them walk into the flames and see that you were right.
At the same time I dreaded that she would leave without telling me, that I would come home one afternoon and she would be gone. I became so afraid that I started spying on her when she came home from working the lunch shift. I would stand behind the RV as she went in to change out of her uniform, then I would watch her come out to fill the bird feeder, which was too high for her to reach without standing tiptoe. I would wait to see a bit of her pale back when her sweatshirt drew up.
I had come to believe that pretty girls got used to being watched by men, so used to it that they behaved as if they were being watched even when they were alone. I imagined that Jody knew I was watching, and that what we were doing was a silent form of communicating. But I was wrong. I came out from behind the RV one afternoon and startled her into tears. After that I pulled back and stayed away most afternoons. I had to talk myself into letting what was going to happen, happen. But it got increasingly harder to come back to the RV not knowing if her car would be there. I had to steel myself for that, each evening, talk myself into being a stronger person than I was. Weakness is a hard thing to acknowledge in yourself, and to some extent I blamed mine on her, whether or not she deserved it.
FOR JODY’S BIRTHDAY I took her to Jerome for lunch at the Jerome Tavern, which had been a brothel, long ago, when the mining company was in operation. It was a bright, cold Saturday. After lunch we walked down the steep, narrow streets, with Jody looking in the shops at the artwork and pottery. I bought her a silver wind chime, and she held my hand as we left the shop. She said, “Tomorrow let’s put it in the eucalyptus tree,” and I put a lot of hope on that, more than I should have. Then there was the hand-holding, which was something she seldom did. It was a powerful thing, the touch of another person. Right away it goes to your heart, especially if you’re not used to it. She had to know the effect it had.
But on the drive home she said, “It’s snowing in Winslow. My mother sent me a text,” and I saw that nothing in her plans had changed—those plans she had not acknowledged to me outright, and possibly not to herself.
She told me that she had woken up the night before with this idea that people should die where they had been born—that the end should be like the beginning. “That’s morbid,” I told her, and she said no, she didn’t mean it that way.
“Where you’re from and what happened to you there matters. It’s important. It’s your history, even the parts you’re ashamed of. Do you see what I mean, Nate? How even the bad parts belong to you?”
“What kind of bad parts?” I asked her. “Are you talking about when you were using drugs?”
“How can you bring that up when I’ve already paid such a price for what I did?”
“You more or less brought it up,” I told her.
“Did I?” she said.
When she grew silent and huddled against the passenger door I started to see that I had given my life and myself away. Maybe at one time or another everybody does. I understood that human beings were lost, that we handed ourselves over and didn’t know how to get ourselves back. I had acquired this habit of observing what was going on with myself, seeing my mechanisms, my inner workings. I could separate myself and see what I was up to, even though I could never stop what I was doing. I couldn’t learn. I could see, but I couldn’t change. It was a dangerous way to be, I began to see, like looking into a mirror so long that you start not to recognize your reflection. You have to move your hand or leg, reassure yourself that your brain is telling your body what to do, that is, that they’re connected. You have to feel yourself become just the one organism.
THAT NIGHT JODY and I lay together on the rug and watched They Came from Outer Space. Slowly Jody began to tell me about the Winslow boyfriend with whom she had moved to Chino Valley. She said that he was the one who had helped her stop using drugs because he had stopped, and that they hadn’t loved each other but needed each other for that short time, to get away from Winslow, to find out who they would be in another place. He got a job as a bouncer at the Star Tavern, in Prescott Valley, and she danced there for two months. She used to have a picture of herself up on the stage, she said, and described it all to me: the red g-string, the high heels, the peace-symbol necklace she wore so that customers could see her wanting what was best for the world. She had liked men looking at her, she said, so long as she had the boyfriend there, but he fell in love with somebody shortly after that, another girl who danced, which was when Jody started renting a motel room by the month and waitressing at Denny’s.
“Do you still have what you wore?” I asked her, and she said no. She said she was down on herself, one night, thinking about it, and she threw the underwear and shoes in a Dumpster. She kept the peace symbol. She thought it might help her make peace with herself someday. She hoped that was possible. Maybe hating yourself for your actions was an act against the universe or something, she said, for you were part of the universe, she believed, and the world was forgiving. Grass grew where you wouldn’t think it could. Daffodils appeared after the coldest winters.
All that night I woke up with pictures in my head of Jody on that stage. I tried to focus instead on the other things she had said, but your mind does what it wants, late at night, in the quiet, and after all, she had paraded that in front of me. The next morning I went to the mall and bought a red thong for her and red high heels, and that evening I said, “Do you want a rum and Coke, Jody?” I made her one and one for myself, and I said, “Would you do something for me?”
It had begun to snow outside and she was sitting at the window, watching it settle on the trees. “Like what?” she said, and I showed her what I had bought her. I saw the disappointment and sorrow in her eyes. She had expected more from me.
“Never mind,” I said. “That was a mistake on my part.”
I turned on the television as if it had not happened. I practically convinced myself it hadn’t. But the next morning she appeared in the kitchen wearing only the thong and high heels, and she danced a few steps.
“See?” she said. “This is how I looked up on that stage.”
Then she put on her robe and made coffee.
chapter twenty-three
TRAVIS ASPENALL
HARMONY SHOWED ME the grade she had gotten on her history paper. This was after third period. Her first D, she said. She was supposed to have chosen one of the twentieth-century wars to write about. Instead she had written about the fact that people who had never fought in a war, or seen one up close, were ignorant on the subject. Any account of a war that wasn’t firsthand was not worth reading. There was nothing you could learn from it.
“I expec
ted to get a C,” she said, “and that would have been all right with me. It’s true that I didn’t do what I was supposed to do. But a D isn’t fair. I spent a lot of time on the paper, and I felt I had important things to say.”
She was upset, and I had to stop myself from saying, It doesn’t matter what grade you got. Are you crazy? Instead I took her arm at the elbow and I said, “Let’s get out of here. We’ll skip school for the afternoon.”
“And go where?” she said.
“Anywhere.”
We left by the back door, near the gymnasium, walking down Klammer Road as if we had a right to be there. That was the secret to looking innocent. On Old Black Canyon Highway we stopped at the Laundromat to get Cokes and candy bars from the vending machine, which was Harmony’s idea and a good one. Nobody we knew would be there. We both had washing machines and dryers at home, and we both had parents who reminded us five times a day of our lucky existences versus other people’s. We talked about that as we walked.
“It’s like they think we wouldn’t notice otherwise,” Harmony said. “Like we’re blind or deaf or just stupid and spoiled.”
We crossed the highway and walked out into the desert toward Black Canyon Creek and the mountains, away from houses and streets and people. The wind blew Harmony’s short hair against her face, and when she tripped over a patch of prickly pear I caught her around the waist. Close to the creek we sat on an outcropping of rock, and neither of us knew what to say. Then she leaned against me, and I thought, great, but she was taking a picture out of the pocket of her jeans. It was of her brother, before he went to Afghanistan, standing in front of their five-sided house on Wanda Drive.
“He looks like you,” I told Harmony. He had her black hair and round face, her brown-black eyes with the straightforward expression. He was tall, with long, muscular legs.
“He has prosthetics,” she said, “but he’s not whole anymore. That must be how he feels.”
“Maybe he feels heroic,” I said.
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s because you’re not a guy,” I told her. “We have daydreams of rescuing children from burning houses, you know, where the mother hugs you afterward and tells you how great you are and you say, ‘I’m just glad I was there to help, ma’am.’ That’s what it’s like, being a guy.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“If my brother felt like a hero, he would want to see us.”
“Maybe he does want to.”
“Then why wouldn’t he?”
“Because of other macho things.”
“Like what?” Harmony said.
“Like he thinks it was wimpy of him to get hurt.”
“But it wasn’t. That wouldn’t make sense.”
“That doesn’t mean he isn’t thinking it.”
We sat in the wind with our arms around our knees.
“My brother had a girlfriend,” she said. “I mean, he did when he joined the army and went to basic training and left to get himself blown up in Afghanistan. Then one day he got a letter from her, and it was just like the letters a lot of guys were getting, he said, and not just guys but some of the girls he served with, too. An It’s only fair letter, he called it, as in, I met somebody else, and it’s only fair that you know. He didn’t see what was fair about it. He thought it was fucking unfair, and that was what he wrote her. Only she didn’t write back,” Harmony said. “She was probably married by then. It seems like everybody is always falling in love with the wrong person.”
“Not everybody,” I said.
We drank our Cokes, which had gotten warm by then, and I told her that my half brother, Nate, who was staying with us for a while, had had a dog at one time, named Hardy, and that when Hardy died of old age my father had said to Nate, after some time had passed, “Let’s get you another dog,” but that the only kind of dog Nate wanted was one that would live forever and unfortunately none of those had ever been born.
“He sounds kind of nuts,” Harmony said.
“Or else smart.”
“Because he knew that everything was going to die one day?” she said.
“Because he decided that it wasn’t worth it.”
“That might be the crazy part,” Harmony said. She unbent her knees and stretched out her legs. “Does that story have something to do with what we were talking about?”
“Well, I thought it did.”
“Maybe I’m unrealistic,” she said. “Maybe that’s the point you were trying to make.”
“Unrealistic how?”
“Like I expected to get a C when I didn’t write the paper I was supposed to. Like I think people and countries should be smarter than to get into wars. Like I think I’m better than everybody else, self-righteous or whatever, because I know these things and other people don’t.” She looked down at the rocky wash, and her dark hair fell forward and she was close to tears.
“Maybe there’s nothing wrong with you at all,” I said.
“Right. Like I’m perfect.”
“No. Like, I like how you are.”
“Why?” she said.
“I just do.”
“There has to be a reason.”
“I don’t care what the reason is,” I said.
I said it too confidently, or else she just didn’t believe me. You never say what you really mean to say, I thought. You try to, but the words never fit. Your real meaning stays locked inside you.
chapter twenty-four
SAM RUSH
LEE AND I sat at Byler’s Amish Kitchen, just the two of us in the restaurant, with the waitress behind the counter, some distance away. They were due to close for the night. Lee wore a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had a fresh scratch on his right hand.
“A boxer,” he said. “Scared of everything, apparently. Jumped out of a second-story window at the sound of a truck backfiring, the owner told me, and now he’s thinking he doesn’t want her anymore.”
“So you’re taking her?”
“I might. Pete’s thirteen, and we lost the other two dogs this past year. I don’t want the boys losing Pete without having another. Anyway, the dog needs a home.”
We drank our coffee and looked out the wide window at Old Black Canyon Highway, which was dark and empty under the streetlights. Occasionally a flash of headlights went past.
“So where are we now?” Lee said.
“There’s Nate’s neighbor, Mike Early,” I said, “whose alibi remains somewhat unconfirmed, that is, his sister and brother-in-law say he was there when he said he was. But they live out of town a ways—nobody living close by, no one to verify his vehicle.”
“Maybe this Mike Early left the sister’s house after supper,” Lee said, “killed Jody Farnell, brought her here, then went back to his sister’s.”
“Unlikely. His alibi is stronger than that.”
“But possible.”
“Meanwhile we know that Nate was in the vicinity of Winslow twelve hours or so before Jody was killed.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“He said so?”
“Yes, finally. I need to go back up there and check out a few things, and I’ll do that as soon as I can.”
“Nobody tells the whole truth,” Lee said. “Hell, people don’t tell me the truth about their animals—what they’ve fed them, how often they exercise them.”
“This is different,” I said.
Lee rested his forearms on the table. It was almost unsettling how much he and Nate resembled each other.
“If you think Nate might have done this,” he said, “you must think that anybody is capable of anything.”
“I don’t think he did it,” I said. “I just don’t know. But depending on the circumstances, yes is the answer. Anybody is capable.”
“You think that you and I are psychologically capable of breaking a woman’s neck?”
I watched the waitress at the counter. She was waiting
for us to leave, and I was hoping she would come over and tell us that, save me from the question. But she wouldn’t. She knew me, and she knew Lee. She would let us sit an extra ten or fifteen minutes.
“What I believe is this,” I said. “Anybody becomes a murderer the second he performs that action. So a murderer is not a type. A murderer is a human being on a really bad night.”
“But you see Nate as being more likely to kill somebody than we would be.”
“Is that a real question or an argument?” I said.
“Both, maybe.”
“Then yes,” I said. “I do. Nate’s solitary. He’s an underachiever. He’s never had a real girlfriend and has had few if any friends. Then there’s the fact that he cared a great deal about Jody Farnell, enough to buy her a ring—that was the day before she was killed—and she gave back very little. She gave a lot more to others.” When Lee was silent I said, “You asked.”
“Nate knew about Jody and other men?”
“He knew enough,” I said. “There was nothing about her he didn’t take note of. And she was a troubled person. From what I can see, there was a lot to notice.”
Lee sat back against the booth.
“It’s hard for me not to blame her,” he said. “I don’t suppose you can see it that way.”
“You find out what you can about a victim’s life,” I said, “and the more you find out, the more alive she seems, and the more alive, the more human. Except that she’s dead, and whoever killed her isn’t. So it focuses you, wins your sympathy. Plus she didn’t kill anybody, no matter what else she did.”
“At least not that you know about,” Lee said.
“You mean, she might have ruined somebody’s life, somehow.”
“You don’t think so?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Sure. Maybe. But that’s not against the law. And nobody is predictable. You think you know what you would do in an emotional situation. I think I know what I would do. And we’re both wrong.”
“I know what I would do sober,” Lee said. “I’ll add that condition to it.”