by Judy Troy
It was Friday, and he was spending the weekend with us. Everything was crazy, he had told me on the bus that morning. His father’s house had caught fire and everything was lost. The clothes Billy and his sister had not taken out of there yet were gone, along with the keepsakes they had wanted: the tent and sleeping bags from their camping trips to Utah; their father’s record collection; photographs of Billy, his sister, and father, the three of them together. Their father had let the insurance on his house lapse, and he had had $73 in his savings account. Not that Billy or his sister cared about the money. It was their mother who did, on Billy and his sister’s behalf. She was disgusted, Billy had said. You could see it in her face. Disgusted but sort of miserable, he said, like maybe, underneath it all, and he hadn’t finished the sentence but I knew what he meant.
“I tried to walk over,” Billy told me now, “but she made such a big deal over it I said, fine, whatever, I don’t care.”
“My parents hate that word,” I said.
“Whatever?”
“Yeah.”
“All adults hate it,” Billy said.
He had on his alligator boots and was carrying his backpack.
“I couldn’t wait to get out of there,” he said quietly. “Dennie won’t come out of her room, and my mother won’t quit trying to make her.”
I pictured Dennie sitting on her bed, thinking about her dad, wanting to reverse time to last week or last year, wanting what was true not to be.
“I can see why she’d want to be by herself,” I said.
“No kidding,” Billy said. “But that’s a crime at our house.”
“Why is that?”
“Who knows? We might be having a thought they don’t know about, or make a move they can’t see. It’s like a jail over there.”
The boxer jumped up on him. She jumped up on everybody, which we were trying to train out of her.
“So this is the new one,” he said.
“Recluse,” I said. “Damien named her.”
“How did he come up with that?”
“No idea,” I said, although I did know. Damien and I had heard Mom say it to Dad one night, about Nate. Damien probably didn’t even know what it meant.
As we got closer to the Airstream I called loudly to the dogs so that my father and Nate would hear, but my father had gone into the house by then. I thought that Nate would come out. When he didn’t I said to Billy, “Nate’s still staying in the Airstream. That’s why his truck is here. He’s helping my dad, still.”
“Is he,” Billy said, but he was fooling with the dog, not listening. Half the time you thought you had to explain things you didn’t. People weren’t wondering. Their minds were on their stuff.
I went inside for the football, which Billy, Damien, and I threw to each other until dusk turned to darkness. We couldn’t have seen each other toward the end if there wasn’t a moon and a slew of stars. None of us felt like going in.
When we did my parents were in the kitchen, where my mother was baking, which she was doing for Billy’s sake. She made people eat, my father said, when she wasn’t sure what else to do.
“How about pound cake and ice cream?” she said to Billy. “How does that sound?”
Billy said it sounded good. Sure he would like some.
I thought my mother might ask us to see if Nate wanted any, but she didn’t.
Damien was to sleep on the foldout couch in the den so that Billy could stay in our room. That was the arrangement we had. Billy and I messed around with the computer until everybody was asleep, then we slipped out and climbed to the top of the ridge, where we smoked the pot Billy had brought with him, his father’s pot. The moon by then was small, and the stars were glistening. Billy said that last summer he and his father had gotten stoned together one night behind his father’s house, near Black Canyon Creek. Just the one time, Billy said. They looked at the stars, ate a bag of Milano cookies, and discussed how interesting it might be to be dead. “Because nobody knows,” his dad said. “Isn’t that something? Biggest mystery in the world.”
The marijuana Billy and I were smoking was stronger than what I had smoked before. The dogs had come up with us and were watching us, for some reason, the boxer, especially, and it began to seem to both Billy and me that we had somehow crossed the boundary between human beings and dogs. They were reading our thoughts, Billy said, and could finally see how hard it must be for us, having only two legs. No wonder human beings were so screwed up, Billy said. Finally the dogs got that. We were crippled, more or less.
“It’s all in the physiology,” Billy said. “You see what I mean? It doesn’t matter what we think or feel. Nothing else makes any difference.”
“What’s all in the physiology?” I said. I had been thinking about Harmony and lost track somehow.
“Whatever it is I was just now saying.”
“You think having more legs would make us smarter?” I said.
“I think being dogs would make us smarter.”
“You think dogs are smart enough not to fall in love with each other?”
“It’s worse than that,” Billy said. “They fall in love with us.”
We rummaged in our pockets for the candy bars we had meant to bring with us, and we decided to save the rest of the pot for next time if we were to have any hope of walking down from the ridge upright. Below us was my house and my parents’ vehicles and Nate’s pickup and the Airstream, in which a light was on and the curtains were open. It looked as if Nate was walking back and forth, back and forth, and suddenly I felt very sorry for him. I felt sorry that Jody Farnell had not wanted him, and sorry that girls were the way they were, picky and not generous, and careless and insensitive when it came to people’s feelings. Then there was the hold they had over you because of the way they looked, and the fact that they made the most of it. But I had to admit that there were less good-looking girls you could like, except that you, as in myself, didn’t want them. That was how things were.
My thoughts came and went quickly, and it took me a while to notice that Billy’s shoulders were shaking and that with his back to me he was crying. From the other side of the interstate was the long, sad sound of a train whistle, and it all seemed to go together, how Billy felt and how I did and the sounds we were hearing and the wind that was blowing. I wanted to tell him that it was all right; everything in the world fit together. I was about to say that when I thought about how it would sound to him, and I knew that he wouldn’t be able see to it the way that I did—not now, after what had happened. He was some other place, some place I couldn’t get to; there just wasn’t a door.
chapter thirty-six
SAM RUSH
PAUL BOWMAN WAS sitting in his truck in the Burger King parking lot, waiting for me, and we went inside, ordered coffee, and settled ourselves in a booth.
“I don’t have much time,” he said. “What is it you want to ask?”
He didn’t look good. Paler than the last time I had seen him. He wore a green shirt and suspenders.
“Where are you about to be off to?” I said.
“Nowhere but home. I’m not feeling up to par.”
He showed me the heart monitor he was wearing—a small electronic box worn at the waist, attached to electrodes taped to him under his clothes.
“Heart palpitations,” he said. “They’re trying to figure out what the problem is.”
“I won’t keep you long,” I said. “I’m just wondering what you have against a young man named Kevin Rainey. K, you might know him as.”
“The lawn mower fellow?”
“That’s the one,” I said. “The first time I asked you about him, you said you didn’t know him.”
“I don’t recall that.”
“Well, that’s the thing about working in law enforcement, Mr. Bowman. We remember what we ask and we remember the answers.”
“It’s the heart bypass,” he said. “It fools with your memory. Ask anybody—anybody who has had one, this is.”
“To say that I know him is an exaggeration,” he said. “He wanted to do some work for me at one of my rentals, and I said no. End of story.”
“Where Jody lived?”
“No. He doesn’t know I own that place. Why would he? It was a place I own on Green Street. He saw me there, one day, putting up a mailbox. Asked if I wanted help. Said he could mow the lawn and so forth, and I said no. Like I told you, Deputy Sheriff, I do my own work.”
“Even now, after your bypass?”
“Now is a different matter. But I’ll hire somebody from here, not Holbrook,” Bowman said. “It’s how I like to do things.”
“So you knew he lived in Holbrook. How was it he happened to mention where he lived, little as the two of you talked?”
“Said it in passing, I guess, the way that people do.”
“What was your impression of him?” I asked. “I mean, just generally.”
“He seemed all right. Ordinary, I suppose.”
“So you’re not hiring him wasn’t a matter of trust, or anything of that nature.”
“No,” Bowman said. He wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve. “My own stubborn character, was what it was.” He tried smiling. “I like to think I’m on top of things.”
“Kevin Rainey goes to PT’s fairly often,” I said. “The owner told me that. Maybe you’ve seen him there yourself. Now I understand you’re having memory problems, but is it possible you’ve seen him there talking with Jody? They knew each other, according to the owner.”
Bowman put a hand to his face.
“I might have seen him there, now that you mention it. I can’t say for sure, but it’s possible. As for seeing him talking to Jody, no. I don’t believe so.”
“How about other men talking to her?” I asked.
“Well, that happened often enough. Though I don’t recall anybody ever getting out of line with her. Nobody was ugly. I don’t know of anybody who would have hurt a woman.”
That struck a chord with me, and I wanted to give myself a minute to think why. I excused myself, went to the counter for a coffee refill, then visited the restroom, which was when I remembered Paulette Hebson using the same sentence: I don’t know of anybody who would have hurt a woman. Did either or both of them know of somebody who would have hurt a man but not a woman? Were they talking about the same person? And if so, how was it they both knew the same person, and why were they trying to protect him?
An investigation is like a jigsaw puzzle: when you look at the pieces separately, you can’t see the picture; when you look at the picture, you can’t see the pieces. But now it came together. If I hadn’t been tired, I might have seen it sooner.
I went back to the booth with my coffee.
“I gather that you and Paulette Hebson go way back,” I said. “She’s the woman you had an affair with at one time?”
There was an uncomfortable pause.
“Three decades ago.”
“And Paulette was married then?” I said. “And married when she had the baby? That’s why your name’s not on the birth certificate?”
He put his hands on the table and placed one over the other. He was shaken.
“Polly was never married,” he said. “It’s her mother’s maiden name she used. Her mother was the one who raised Kevin.”
“But he lives with Polly now?”
“No.”
“Where then?” When he hesitated I said, “You’ve already impeded an investigation, Mr. Bowman. And I’m going to find him soon enough anyway.”
Two children behind us started laughing, and he waited until they had quieted.
“In the Holbrook Court Trailer Park,” he told me quietly. “Number 17.”
“And Kevin knows you’re his father?” I said.
“Suspects. Doesn’t know. Polly had kept a photograph of me.”
“And you thought it was Kevin who broke into your house and stole the keys to your rentals?” I said. “That’s why you didn’t report the break-in?”
“There were tags on those keys, with the addresses, and I had the locks changed right away, so I figured, why add to his troubles? If you’ve figured out this much, Deputy Sheriff, you’re aware that Kevin has had a few problems. They’re small ones, but for Polly’s sake I didn’t want to add to them.”
“And you didn’t want your wife to know.”
“Would you have?”
“Why didn’t you want your son to know where your other rentals were?” I said.
“I didn’t want him coming to my house, maybe telling my wife who he was.”
Bowman looked down at the table, then up at me.
“I have contributed to his support over the years, Deputy Sheriff, just so you know.”
“And you lied to me about knowing Kevin because you knew he knew Jody?”
“Kevin wouldn’t have hurt her.”
“But how did you know he knew her?”
“He mentioned her to his mother.”
“So that’s why she didn’t tell me she had a son,” I said. “The two of you were nervous. Is that it? You two talked about it?”
“We worried how it might sound.”
“When was it you had this conversation?” I said.
When he didn’t respond, I said, “I can check phone records. You’re better off telling me.”
He looked down at his hands.
“We met at the Little Antelope Tavern in Holbrook,” he said. “Shortly after my wife and I got back from Amarillo. We discussed Kevin, thought it best not to mention him. That’s all. You have kids, you protect them. But as I said, neither of us felt he was involved.”
He put a hand to his waist, on the heart monitor.
“Then why so nervous?” I said.
“My wife. She’s made threats. If I talked to Polly, if I saw her, that kind of thing. She won’t believe that we stopped sleeping together all those years ago.”
“Did you?”
He looked out at the blue sky over Winslow, then at me. His expression gave him away.
“So you and Polly have been friends all these years,” I said. “More than friends. You see her and you tell her things, and maybe you tell her about Jody Farnell and you mention details about this boyfriend Jody has in Chino Valley, whose family lives in Black Canyon City.”
“No. I never did. First, I didn’t know much, and second, there was no reason for me to tell her. Why would I? We had other things to talk about.”
“Clear this up for me,” I said. “I’m just curious. You tell your wife that Kevin is your son, that you still see Polly, and your wife leaves you, making you free for Polly. Doesn’t that make your life happier?”
“Yes. If she wanted me. But she doesn’t. I’ve asked.”
He looked at the door opening and three lively teenagers walking in.
“One final thing,” I said. “I can’t stop you from making a phone call, but I’m asking you not to. As I’ve said, you’ve impeded the investigation, held back crucial information—not just you but Polly as well. Don’t talk to her until I do. She would be in serious trouble if she helped Kevin leave the state.”
“I understand. I don’t want to make things worse for her or for me.”
“You all right?” I asked. “You need help out to your truck?”
“The only thing I need help with is telling my wife,” he said.
chapter thirty-seven
NATE ASPENALL
IT WAS LONELY where Lee and Julie lived, with the wind and dust, the looming mountains, the long stretches of desert. Every morning I woke in the Airstream before dawn, knowing that I could leave before the saguaros and the outline of the ridge behind the house were visible, and that if Sam wanted to come after me, he could. Yet I couldn’t move. I’d hear the far-off sound of the interstate. I’d hear the boys outside, walking the dogs. Sounds of life, sounds of normalcy. It was reassuring, even though I was outside of it. There was also how
it would look, if I left. I suppose that was the bigger factor.
Then I looked back at the weeks I had been there, and it was like looking at a graph at what it had cost me, and now it was costing too much. I have trouble making decisions, but once I make one it becomes the only thing I see. I’ve always been that way. I stayed up late packing what little I had brought with me, leaving behind the shirts and jeans that Julie had bought me, none of which I had asked for and none of which I needed or wanted. Once you had more than you needed you had to make decisions, had to find places for things. I liked my life small, clean, and orderly: here is what I wear, here is the pot I cook in, here is where I live. Better to fill a small space than lose yourself in a larger one. I had read that somewhere and believed it.
After I packed, I scoured the sinks in the kitchen and bathroom, cleaned the toilet, swept and washed the floors, stripped the sheets off the bed, and left them folded on the mattress next to my towels. Just like I’d never been there. Nothing of me left behind. I sat on the couch for a while with the television on; then I turned it off and sat in silence. I turned off the lights and sat in dark silence. I thought about notes I could leave: We don’t know each other anymore, or You’ll never see me again, or Nate Aspenall was a figure of your imagination. They were overly dramatic; I saw that. What bothered me more was that they were an attempt to connect, and I felt I had to leave that urge behind. Therefore, I tried not to think about the boys. I had been nineteen when Lee married Julie, and had watched the family form itself, which for me had been like watching a second heart or liver begin to grow on the outside of my body; but for the boys, I was a natural presence. They had always known me. Don’t think about them, I told myself. They don’t belong to you.
I got into bed and tried to sleep. On the nightstand was the address of the Sisters of the Good Shepherds Catholic Church in Holbrook, where Jody was buried. I had looked it up on the Internet. The photograph was of a plain, white building that had probably at one time been something else, and there was a glimpse of a cemetery behind it, sheltered by cottonwoods. Jody under the trees, I thought when I saw it. That was better than I had imagined. I heard coyotes howling, and some time later I fell asleep.