by Judy Troy
“What makes you sure you’d stay sober?”
“The number of years since I’ve had a drink.”
“So you’d just leave out the years before that.”
“I guess I would.”
“That’s the thing,” I said. “You can’t leave out any possibility.”
“You don’t think there’s such a thing as having character?”
“What I think is that everything can suddenly change. We tell stories to ourselves about who we are, and we think that’s the final word. What we think about ourselves doesn’t necessarily mean shit.”
“You believe that.”
“Yes,” I said. “But so what if I believe it?”
“It’s another story, you’re saying.”
“Yes.”
“So nobody and nothing is trustworthy.”
“Rain is trustworthy,” I said. “Heat and cold. Snow and ice.”
“You have zero faith in people. That’s what you’re saying?”
“No villain need be. We are betrayed by what is false within.”
“Philosophy 101?” Lee said.
“Literature 101. George Meredith.”
Lee looked outside at the lit-up BYLER’S AMISH KITCHEN sign going off. The night was black without it; the moon was hidden by clouds.
“Sandra called,” he said. “She wants to hire a lawyer she knows from the dealership, but Nate has been telling her no. I don’t know if Nate doesn’t trust the lawyer or if he doesn’t want one or if he doesn’t want to involve his mother or all three. I don’t know what’s going on with him. We drive to the clinic and back, most days, and we don’t talk. I try, and he doesn’t. He looks out the window or turns on the radio. He listens to old stuff, for the most part. He listens to our music.”
“I wonder why that is.”
“Sandra always played it.”
“Sandra called me, too,” I told him. “I didn’t return the call. I’m already going out on a limb keeping you updated.”
“I haven’t told her anything,” he said, “and I know that Nate hasn’t. The one thing he has told me is that he usually doesn’t answer her calls. Well, you know Nate and questions. He doesn’t like them. To him they’re invasions.”
“I’ve noticed,” I said.
AFTER WE PAID the check we went out to the parking lot and stood between our vehicles.
“I want to tell you this, so you’ll know,” I said, “so you’ll be prepared. After spending the night in Flagstaff, I believe Nate went back to Winslow in the morning. I have pretty good proof of it. But he hasn’t admitted it.”
“So he doesn’t know you have any proof.”
“He does know,” I said. “And he’s lied to me before.”
Lee looked across Old Black Canyon Highway at the desert, which stretched west to the mountains. The mountains were very faintly visible, as if outlined in charcoal.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I don’t know what to do or what to think. The situation doesn’t feel real, and I don’t like that feeling.”
“Nobody would,” I said.
“If you were in my place, you’d believe in his innocence?” he said. “Unless or until you knew for an absolute fact otherwise?”
“What else is there to do?” I said.
chapter twenty-five
NATE ASPENALL
JODY LEFT ON a blustery, gray morning before breakfast. She had told me the night before that she was going, that she would stay with her mother until she found a job and a place to live. It turned out she had already packed most of her things, without my knowing. That was a betrayal, her doing that secretly. It wasn’t necessary. I wasn’t somebody she needed to tiptoe around.
We were in a restaurant when she told me, a steak restaurant down the highway from the RV park, which she had chosen; it reminded her of a restaurant she used to go to with her father. When she was in the fifth grade her father took her there, ordered her a Shirley Temple, and told her that he and her mother might not stay together. Things didn’t always work out in families, he said, and he wanted her to know that, beforehand, just in case. Then he said, “Cheer up, honey. I might be wrong. I might be at your mother’s side when I’m an old man.”
Tears slid down her face as she told me the story, and I knew they were manipulative, as was her choice of restaurant. Everything had been set up to be about her. But I’m not saying she was aware of that. To the extent that she took care of herself—and I suppose you could call it that—she did it instinctually. She was a genius in that respect. You almost had to admire it. But you couldn’t trust what guided her.
We ordered drinks, then two more. Jody was sweet to the waitress, said she was one, too, she knew what hard work it was. The waitress was an older, stout, let’s-stick-to-business type who didn’t seem to care for Jody, as many women didn’t, and it bothered Jody. The more the waitress ignored her, the harder she tried. “Give it up, Jody,” I said. “She’s busy. She doesn’t have time to be nice,” and Jody looked at me resentfully, knowing it was more than that. She chose to be irritated with me instead of with the waitress.
We drank and ate too much, which saved us from having to talk.
BACK AT THE RV I didn’t sleep most of the night. I tried to hear her breathing without going closer, tried to get a sense of what it would be like, not having her there. I wanted to go behind the partition and beg her to sleep with me. Please, honey—putting into motion the maneuver I had almost but not tried with her. What did I have to lose? My self-respect, my dignity, and any chance I might have in the future, which was the only thing that stopped me. I would have sacrificed the rest.
I turned on the television and kept it low. That was what I slept to when I was alone—whatever happened to be on, actors on a screen, music in the background, the idea of life continuing, the idea of it being there to come back to in the morning. Why not start now, I told myself. Embark on your lonely life. I was sorry for myself, which in my view was a substitute for pain—a way to hurt and be hard on yourself at the same time. As I said, I could see my inner workings.
In the morning she was up before daylight, dressing, hurrying, shoving last-minute items into an overnight bag. “Good-bye, Nate,” she said. One quick hug and she was out the door. No coffee. No breakfast, her car starting reluctantly in the cold as I stood in the open doorway with the smile I put on my face—no way would I let her see what this was costing me. The white of the exhaust, the dark, brooding trees, the light barely beginning, and Jody driving away from me. I stood there a long time. Perhaps I thought she would come back.
AFTER SHE LEFT there wasn’t a moment I didn’t miss her—when I heard a moon bird calling at dusk, when I woke to her not making coffee, when I returned to the empty RV in the afternoon. If you’ve never loved anybody, it won’t make sense to you, how disappeared you become. There is absence where there used to be presence, yet at the same time there is too much of you. To say that you feel hollow is to say that you feel full of hollowness. That was my condition. A hole can take up a very big space.
One night at the Chino Valley Recreation Center I talked about Jody to a man named Tom. We were both drunk. He was an exterminator, close to my age, with an ex-wife he was sorry he had cheated on, and when I told him the story about Jody he said, “We could be in Winslow by daylight and take her out for breakfast. I’d like to meet this girl.”
We got as far as Cody Boulevard, which is to say, half a mile in the wrong direction, when we realized we were driving without headlights and we couldn’t remember how to put them on. “Maybe we should go for breakfast in the here and now,” Tom said. We found a Waffle House, had coffee and eggs; I remember thinking, Well, at least I’ve made a friend. But the next time I saw him he had gotten his wife back, somehow, and he didn’t remember that night. Your loss was your own. Hurt wasn’t something you could share.
After that I stayed home to drink. It was a cold month, colder than usual; there was snow and sleet, nights when the wind h
owled, nights when you let the faucets drip so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. Sandra kept calling. She said she heard things in my voice. “Let’s meet for supper, Nate,” she said. “Come on, honey. I don’t like eating out alone.” I gave in so that she would stop asking. We went to the Mexican restaurant we used to go to, and she told me about a man she cared for and how he cared for her and that she couldn’t wait for us to meet. And we would, as soon as he got his life in order and could afford a new truck and could drive down to Arizona from Wyoming. She showed me his movie-star picture. “Can’t wait, Sandra,” I said, and she smiled, and I pretended to.
When I got home I turned on the electric heater and realized that every second was a hundred lifetimes; you just had to notice. I wanted to call and tell Jody about it even though I could hear her saying, I don’t know what you mean, Nate. I opened the door and stood with the warmth of the heater behind me and chilly night before me and the silver moon shining above the trees, and I was sorry I didn’t have Ernest Sterling to talk to because that was important, to have one person who understood you.
ONCE JODY FOUND a house to rent she emailed me pictures: the wide streets of Winslow, pickups driving down her street at dawn, trains passing on the southern edge of town, their Santa Fe engines picturesque as toys. The house she was renting was blank-windowed and deserted-looking, with a barren yard, yet she had chosen it over me and my RV, which had trees outside and white, winding roads.
Her mother needed her, she said. Her mother needed rides to the pain clinic in Flagstaff, to the drugstore, to the liquor store, to the Walmart for groceries. Her mother needed Jody to cook for her. Her mother showed her pictures of herself when she was young. “See how I used to be, before your father left me?” Afterward Jody would get into her Toyota and drive to a bar she liked and drink rum and Cokes until she felt like herself again.
“Is the wind chime still in the eucalyptus tree?”
She was calling from the bar. I could hear the jukebox, the whack of pool cues hitting pool balls. She hadn’t thought to take the wind chime with her, and I had not thought to give it to her, and at night when I heard the long, echoing melody in the wind, I pictured Jody taking my hand after I bought it for her and the two us walking down the narrow brick sidewalks of Jerome. The next morning I took the wind chime down and packed it up. Jody was already asking, would I meet her in Flagstaff. Would I come see her, and that was why I went the first time, in February. Because she asked me to.
chapter twenty-six
TRAVIS ASPENALL
SUNDAY AFTERNOON MY father and I were driving home from Cave Creek with the boxer pacing in the back of the Jeep when we saw a coyote lying in the desert fifteen feet or so from the pavement. My father braked and pulled over. She had been hit recently, my father guessed, hit hard enough to have been killed on impact and thrown that far.
“People hit an animal and just leave it there,” Dad said. “How do you explain that?”
“What are they supposed to do?”
“Call Animal Control, like I’m about to. That’s what you do. Or if you live close by, and you’re a decent human being, you come back with a shovel. You bury it.”
“I guess people don’t think about that,” I said.
“They don’t think, period. That’s the point.”
In the back of Dad’s Jeep the dog was whining.
“Don’t be an irresponsible person,” my father said to me. “There’s no excuse for that. You have to know what it is you’re doing, admit to yourself what you’re doing, even if it’s difficult. That’s important.”
“I know that,” I said.
“Don’t just be reactive. You understand what I mean by that?”
“I guess.”
“Don’t just guess. Either know or ask.”
“Okay,” I said. “What does it mean?”
“It means don’t just do what your emotions dictate. Stop and think. Use your head. Use your intelligence.”
On his cell he called Animal Control, then started up the Jeep, which quieted down the dog, although she couldn’t seem to stop pacing.
“It’s all right,” my father said to the dog. “We’ll be home soon.” But his voice was tense and the dog kept going in circles.
My father had been like that around all of us lately, even my mother, who usually calmed him down, he had told me. That was one of the first things he had noticed about her. “Someday, Travis,” he had said, “you’ll want to find the person who’s going to do for you what you need.”
It was late afternoon and sunlight was streaking down from behind the clouds. The mountains looked gray and sort of unreal, like a movie set. We got onto the interstate, and my father watched the traffic while I looked out the side window, from where I could see trails in the wilderness made by dirt bikes and four-wheelers. I imagined myself on the dirt bike I wished I had, flying along with Harmony sitting behind me and her arms around my waist. We could get away from Black Canyon City, from school and our parents, from all the parts of our lives where we were supposed to be a certain way, accomplish certain things, have certain kinds of thoughts. We could take a break from all that, at least for a while, and I started picturing us getting off the dirt bike and making out and my taking off her blouse and seeing her golden skin in the sunlight.
“You have homework for tomorrow?” my father said.
“I’ve done most of it.”
“Well, whatever’s left, do it first thing. I don’t like you developing the habit of putting things off. If you have work to do, do it.”
“You know, Dad, I don’t put much off.”
“I’m just being a father,” he said. “That’s my job.”
“Well, I’m being fourteen. That’s what I’m doing.”
Dad was silent. He opened the compartment between the seats and got out a cigarette and buzzed down his window. It was the first time he had ever smoked in front of me.
“This is between us, all right?” he said. “I don’t want your mother worrying, thinking this is something I do all the time.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I don’t want you worrying, either.”
“I won’t.”
“Or smoking,” Dad said.
“I don’t smoke.”
“I don’t mean just now. I mean, don’t take it up in the future.”
“All right. I heard you.”
He gave me an irritated look, then he stubbed out his cigarette and closed his window.
“It’s an easy thing to start, but you get addicted,” he said. “Then you’re out of control. It’s just out of your hands at that point. Drinking is the same problem.”
“I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. But it’s screwed up, trying to be perfect all the time.”
“You think you’re perfect?” Dad said.
“No.”
“How imperfect would you like to be?”
“Well, I don’t want to blow up buildings or go around killing people or anything.”
“What a relief,” Dad said.
“So you don’t even get what I’m saying?”
“No,” Dad said. “I do. That’s what worries me.”
He got off at the first Black Canyon City exit, as opposed to the one closer to us. He liked to drive down Old Black Canyon Highway through town, take Mud Springs Road under the interstate, then Squaw Valley Road to River Bend and Canyon, where town turned into desert. Community was important, he would tell Damien and me, but it was also good to live outside it.
AT HOME NATE came out of the Airstream and stood with Damien and my mother as Dad let the boxer out and we gave her time to get used to us and Pete and the surroundings. It was almost the beginning of evening by then, and the sky was transparent looking, with a pale, orange tint to it.
“What will we call her?” Damien said, and my father told him that her name had been Belle, like about a third of the female dogs people brought into the clinic. He didn’t know what it was about that name that people liked so much.
“Give her a new name,” he told Damien. “Give her any name you want.”
“I have to think about it,” Damien said. “I have to see what kind of name would fit her. What do you think we should name her?” he asked Nate, and my father said, “You come up with one yourself, son,” before Nate had time to answer, and Nate said quietly, “That’s right, Damien. You name her. She’s your dog.”
Nate was wearing the jeans he always wore, which had holes in the pockets and knees—not jeans made that way on purpose, like the ones you could buy at the mall in Glendale, but jeans that had ripped from too much wear. Nate was prejudiced against anything new, and he didn’t like to spend money. He cut his own hair and bought his clothes at thrift stores. He said that it made him feel sick to walk into a store, especially a mall. Grocery stores were the exception. After all, he said, you had to eat. For a while, though, he wouldn’t buy groceries either. He would Dumpster-dive instead. He said you wouldn’t believe how much good food got thrown away every day. After he got caught once, he stopped. It wasn’t worth getting in trouble for, he said. Stay away from the police, Travis, he told me. It’s easy to be misunderstood by them, especially if you’re not like other people. Everything they do is based on what is normal versus abnormal. But who knew what normal was? Who wanted to be like most people, anyway? That was how Nate talked, once he got going. Or how he used to talk. He was so different now.
I knelt down and let the boxer come to me, as I had at the clinic. She took a step toward me and jumped back two.
“She’s scared still,” Damien said. “She doesn’t know what we’ll do with her.”
“We’ll be her refuge,” my mother said, “like Father Sofie says about faith, during Mass.”
“What refuge will Dad have?” Damien said.
“You don’t need to worry about me,” Dad said.
“What about Nate?” Damien asked.
“Nate comes to Mass with us sometimes,” Mom said, “don’t you, Nate?”
Nate looked at us. “I don’t know that it can be a refuge for me,” he said to Damien. “I would like it to be, and I’ve probably thought about it more than most people have. It’s possible that I’ve thought about it too much. It might be one of those things you need to just fall into, like sleeping or dreaming, and I’m not so good at that. I don’t know that I can do it.”