The Quiet Streets of Winslow

by Judy Troy

  There was a good side to that and a bad side, and when I started thinking of the latter I put the room key in my pocket and went out into the night to walk the streets of Flagstaff. It was late, and a light snow started falling, despite the fact that it was late April. I had left the room without a jacket, but I had drunk enough not to feel the cold. I walked down Milton Road all the way to University Drive and walked through the campus. A real campus, not the kind of commuter school that I had attended, where you lived at home, where your life didn’t change much from high school.

  The campus was hilly, with a creek flowing through it. There were trees and paths and bicycle racks. I sat on a bench across from a dormitory and looked at the lit-up rooms: bunk beds and desks, a girl sitting at a computer, a girl standing at the window, talking into a cell phone. Three long-haired boys walked past me, laughing. Somebody jogged past. I could see a small group of students outside a building, smoking. The late hour didn’t matter here. Everybody did what they wanted to. That was what college was for. To leave home and try your wings, to be protected but not, to make that transition in a softer way, so that the shock of the world wouldn’t be too much for you.

  I thought about the life I had missed, the four years I could have had in a place like that, making my own decisions, forging my own path, becoming who I was meant to become. Why hadn’t I? Why had I lacked the courage back then? Why had Lee and Sandra not pushed me? Why hadn’t somebody said, This is what you do, Nate? This is how you go about having a life.

  But I had missed my chance. You couldn’t go backward. As I left the campus and walked back to the motel there was a change in me that I couldn’t explain. It was as if I had glimpsed in the sky a spaceship that would save everybody on Earth but would leave me behind. I was a planet in the wrong orbit. I was a whale finding itself in fresh water. I had walked farther than I realized and began to doubt that I would ever get back.

  Back in the motel room I did not undress. I lay on the bed and thought about texting Jody just to make a connection, to do it for my sake, not for hers. I pictured what she might be doing at that moment, which was a mistake. It allowed reality in, and now it was there in front of me. She had wanted me out of Winslow, and I knew what that probably meant. There were a hundred ways of lying to yourself, of telling yourself that what was true wasn’t, and I had done a great deal of that. The anger began slowly, but once I saw it I wasn’t able to stop it.

  On television an angry-looking man was standing at an open window in a high-rise apartment building. Below him was New York City, all those lights shining in the streets below. Jump, I wanted to tell him. Nothing in your life is going to get better. Your wife has left you. You have lost your job, your children won’t speak to you. Then I looked at his face and realized he looked more lonely than angry, and at that moment a woman came into the room and put her arms around him.

  WHEN I WOKE I didn’t know where I was. A sound had startled me, and I couldn’t identify it—a car door slamming, maybe. Then I was asleep again, and Jody was in bed with me, naked, and I had my hand on the small of her back. I fought not to wake, but your dreams can’t keep you in them. There wasn’t what you would call real light yet—just the suggestion of it beneath the blue-dark sky with its scattering of stars. I thought about the house and life I had envisioned for Jody and myself, and understood that it was possible to believe and disbelieve, to trust and mistrust, to hope and feel hopeless at the same moment. Somehow your mind could manage those discrepancies. I knew that Jody could be in bed with a man, as I lay in that motel-room bed alone, and I hated her for that. I hated her more than I ever had.

  A FEW MINUTES is a long time to have an intense feeling. Hours is what it felt like. You lose track. It’s deeper than time. When it subsided the dream began to come back to me, the one Jody trying to replace the other. That’s how I would describe it.

  chapter twenty-nine

  TRAVIS ASPENALL

  ON FRIDAY BILLY Clay wasn’t waiting for the bus. At school I learned that Billy’s father had been found dead at six that morning. Jason’s father was friends with Billy’s uncle, who had been the one to find him.

  “Vodka and empty pill bottles,” Jason said. “Lortab and Percocet. That was probably what he died from, not cancer. They won’t know for a while. He didn’t leave a note, or if he did, it hasn’t been found. His girlfriend was a nurse, and that might be where the pills came from.”

  “Which girlfriend?”

  “The blonde one. The one who looked strung out,” Jason said.

  We were talking in the cafeteria at lunch. Jason had waited until then to tell me. He said he hadn’t wanted to say the words.

  “I suppose we have to go there after school,” Jason said, “give him some way to get away from his relatives.”

  “We could hang out in his room,” I said, “or go outside, take a walk or something.”

  We were drinking Cokes and eating potato chips.

  “They’re going to outlaw this stuff here,” Jason said. “Did you hear?”

  “I did.”

  “Un-American, Billy’s father would have called it.”

  I nodded, then I glanced at Harmony sitting with her friends. In English class that morning I had smiled at her, and she had barely smiled back. Now it was Jason she was looking at, and I wondered and thought no. No way. Jason was heavy and had acne. He was uncomfortable around girls.

  “I guess we should tell people,” Jason said. “I almost told Harmony.”

  “When was that?”

  “Before first period,” he said. “She asked me about our math assignment.”

  “Asked you?”

  “I know this is hard to believe, Travis, but I’m not some dumb ass. A few people think I’m intelligent.”

  “You never know what’s up with girls,” I said. “You think you do, and it turns out you’re completely wrong.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s not against the law for one person to talk to another.”

  We watched two cheerleaders walking past with trays of food, and we watched the geometry teacher checking them out. Then we watched seniors two tables over start a food fight.

  “I suppose people will find out,” Jason said. “By tomorrow probably everybody will know.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “There’s not much to say about it really.”

  “I know,” I said.

  In class that afternoon I tried to think of what I could say to Billy. Everything I came up with sounded lame and rehearsed, like from a movie. It all sounded fake, like things I wouldn’t want anybody saying to me.

  AFTER SCHOOL JASON rode my bus, and we walked to Billy’s house on Green Valley Road, a name Billy made fun of; nothing was green in the desert except in and along the washes. There were two cars and four pickups parked at the house, which was small and two storied, with squares of sodded grass in front, newly put in. To the west of the house was a corral for their quarter horse. Billy was sitting on the wooden fence, watching her. When he saw us he got down and the three of us walked in the direction of the Agua Fria with the wind blowing hard against us.

  “It sucks, what happened,” Jason said.

  “It does,” I said. “I’m sorry, Billy. I really liked your dad.”

  Billy nodded, walking with long, slow steps. He was wearing the boots his father had found for him at the Black Canyon City Flea Market last fall. They were Black Jack alligator cowboy boots that cost $1,000 new. “You can give them to your own kid someday,” his dad had told him. “Tell him they’re from his granddad who was rich as a king at one point in his life.”

  “I don’t think he did what he did on purpose,” Billy said. “I believe he would have told me. Not my sister, but honestly I think he would have just come out and said, Here’s what I might do someday, Billy, if things look bad.”

  “Did things look bad?” Jason said.

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  We
stood near the wash, watching a lizard skim the length of a tree root.

  “My fucking mother could have waited to get married,” Billy said. “She could have waited until he was well, or else not.”

  “They’ve been divorced a long time,” Jason said.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “It was probably an accident, like you say,” Jason said. “It’s easy to do with pills and drinking. Remember that kid last year?”

  “That’s what happened then,” Billy said.

  When we got to the wash we sat and threw rocks at a crushed beer can.

  “He was in his recliner when my uncle found him,” Billy said. “He was wearing his cowboy hat, for some reason. He had on the hat and gym shorts, like he was kicking back.”

  “That sounds like him,” Jason said.

  “It does, doesn’t it?”

  The sun was hot, and the air was hazy with blowing sand. Over the mountains were high, thin clouds and we watched them sailing east.

  “There wasn’t a note,” Billy said. “So there’s that, too.”

  “Your dad liked to talk,” I said. “No way would he not have had his say.”

  “He could talk to the moon,” Jason said.

  “He did talk to the moon,” Billy said.

  We watched a hawk riding the air currents—dipping and curving and rising and falling.

  “You wake up one morning, and the whole world changes,” Billy said.

  “It’s unreal,” Jason said.

  “Except it’s not,” Billy said.

  He stood up, and we started walking back. The wind was behind us. From a distance we saw his sister, Dennie, coming out the back door of the house—looking for us or just going outside.

  “She never really believed he was sick,” Billy said. “She knew what he had and how long he had had it. He had told us the details. But because she wanted to be stupid about it all, she was stupid.”

  He walked more quickly, and she stopped and watched him come toward her. When she bent over we saw that she was crying. She was younger than we were by two years, with reddish-blonde hair down to the center of her back. She was athletic, with long arms and legs. I had seen her on their horse, galloping bareback through the desert. She hoped to compete in barrel racing in two years, as their mother had as a teenager. That was only one of her dreams, Billy said. He said she had too many for any one of them to come true.

  chapter thirty

  SAM RUSH

  “MY HUSBAND’S ASLEEP,” Mary Bowman said on the telephone, “and I don’t want to wake him, Deputy Sheriff. He’s been having heart palpitations. I made him a doctor’s appointment for tomorrow. Is there something I could answer for you?”

  It was eight thirty in the evening, and in the background I could hear a television playing.

  “Here’s what I was wondering,” I said. “What happens if one of your renters has an emergency when you and your husband are out of town?”

  “Well, it just never has happened,” she said. “Paul gives renters his cell phone number, and if something does go wrong, he knows a plumber here in Winslow, and somebody who does electrical, but I don’t believe he’s ever had to call either one. We don’t go out of town all that often. We’re homebodies, mostly. We always have been.”

  “You don’t have anybody to keep an eye on things?” I asked. “Nobody you trust with keys, just in case?”

  “We do things ourselves, that’s all. As I told you, we don’t have family here. We have just our daughter in Texas. We weren’t lucky enough to have more. So we rely on ourselves and do the best we can.”

  “But after Jody Farnell’s body was found,” I said, “your county sheriff’s department had access to the rental. How was it they were able to get in?”

  There was silence for a few moments, then she said, “Paul gave the neighbor a set of keys. I had forgotten about it.”

  “Paul gave him his own set, or a spare?”

  “I believe it was our spare set,” she said. “Paul always has his with him.”

  “Why don’t you go ahead and give me your neighbor’s name and number, and that way I won’t have to bother your husband.”

  “I suppose I can,” she said, “but I don’t like to. I hate for you to bother him. He’s in his eighties and lost his wife six months ago.”

  “I promise not to be a bother.”

  “All right then,” she said, “but you tell him what I said. You tell him I was looking out for him.”

  “While I have you on the phone,” I said, “is the name Kevin Rainey familiar to you? He does yard work around town, a light-haired fellow around thirty.”

  “I don’t remember that last name,” Mary said, “but there was somebody to come around once, with a lawn mower, wanting work. His looks fit what you’re describing. I told him I’d ask my husband, and he wrote down a phone number and the letter K. I suppose that was what he went by.”

  “You’re sure it was a K?”

  “I am. Because it sounded like a girl’s name. I mean, if you said it.”

  “And you gave it to your husband?”

  “I did,” Mary said. “He threw it away, I believe. ‘Don’t answer the door for him or anybody else, Mary,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what they’re up to.’ I’m the kind of person who likes to help a soul out, Deputy Sheriff, but Paul felt strongly about it.”

  “Any idea why he has such strong views on the subject? I’m just curious. I have people looking for work in my neighborhood, too. Never know what to do.”

  “Well, it’s his not trusting people. It’s a safety concern. It makes him angry when I’m ignorant of that.”

  “You might not want to tell him I was asking, then,” I said, and my sense was that she agreed.

  AFTER I GOT off the phone I went on my computer and looked up heart palpitations on WebMD, to check what I was fairly sure of already. Stress could cause palpitations, rapid heartbeat, rises in blood pressure, and so on, even in people without heart problems. So what was Paul Bowman stressed about? He had been out of state when Jody was killed, and despite whatever had or had not gone on between the two of them—Jody taking off her blouse came to mind—I didn’t get the sense that she was much of a loss to him, except as a renter.

  I phoned the Bowmans’ neighbor, a man named Sonny Calhoun, and asked him about the keys.

  “The Bowmans don’t go away often,” he told me, “but when they do Paul brings me a set. Not that there’s much I could do anymore, at my age, but I’ll drive past his rentals once a day to check, make sure things look okay.”

  “So he’s always brought you the keys,” I said.

  “Oh, no. Only since his house got broken into some months back.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “At the beginning of February, I believe. He and Mary used to keep the keys on a hook inside a closet door,” he said, “and they got taken. Paul had to get all the locks changed.”

  “Did he file a police report, as far as you know?” I asked.

  “Well, Mary wanted him to, but he told me there wasn’t much else taken and no real damage done. A few valuables were missing, he said—a watch, I think he mentioned, but nothing to warrant the trouble. He couldn’t see the point. He didn’t think they would catch the thief, anyway.”

  “Were there other break-ins in the neighborhood?” I said.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Where were the Bowmans when it happened?”

  “Spending the night in Page, I believe,” he said. “Mary has a sister up there.”

  “You think Paul might have had some idea who did it?” I asked.

  “Well, if he did, he didn’t tell me.”

  “Ever heard of a kid named Kevin Rainey? I say kid, but he’s about thirty. Light hair, medium build. Does yard work.”

  “The fellow with the lawn mower, you’re talking about?”

  “You know him?” I said.

  “No. But I’ve seen him. Never hired him myself. I asked Paul if
he knew anything about him, and he, that is, Paul, said, ‘Nothing good.’ I didn’t really need the help anyway. I have a nephew in town.”

  “So he never did work for Paul.”

  “No.”

  “Okay, good,” I said. “Now in terms of your checking on Paul’s rentals, Jody Farnell lived in the one on the corner of Hicks and Maple. When the Bowmans were gone to Amarillo this last time, you drove past that house every day?”

  “I always check on them just before dark. Everything looked fine to me there.”

  “Any chance you can remember the night of April 24? It was a Thursday. Did you see anything unusual at that house? Any vehicles parked nearby?”

  “Let me think,” he said. “The house was dark, as I remember. Don’t remember any vehicle in the yard or out front on the street.”

  “No pickup you recall? A blue Ford F150?”

  “Best-selling truck in America,” he said. “I own one. I do remember a Ford F150 around the corner, on Maple, though I don’t recall the color.”

  “Anything else you noticed about the truck?”

  “There were bumper stickers I couldn’t read. I remember that.”

  “Was anybody in the vehicle?”

  “My impression was yes, and I’ll tell you why. During my first marriage—my bad one—I used to go sit in my vehicle sometimes to cool off. That’s what I figured this fellow was doing. I just remember having that thought and driving on.”

  “You could see that it was a male?”

  “No. I just assumed.”

  “And you’re sure of the date you saw it?”

  “As sure as I can be,” he said. He was quiet a moment. Then he said, “Now that we’re talking about it, I bet that from the rental you couldn’t have seen that pickup, but from the pickup, you might have had a view of the rental. Of course I didn’t think about it at the time.”