by Judy Troy
I LEFT WHILE it was still dark, turning off my cell phone and keeping my lights off until I was on Canyon Road, and not breathing normally until I was on the interstate. It wasn’t as if I expected Sam Rush or Lee to appear behind me, or as if I thought of myself as a criminal. But I liked the secrecy. I understood what a refuge it could be. Withhold, and people wanted to know what you thought. Stand back, and people wanted you to come closer. It had taken me a long time to learn that; it didn’t come naturally. My tendency was to be too much out there, although not socially. I had always been solitary. I meant that I needed to keep feelings reigned in, not lose control within myself to what I had lost in the past.
Once I was farther north, in the high desert, it was colder than I had expected, with a quarter moon hanging low. Just beneath the darkness you could sense the light, and when the red disk of sun appeared I could feel the shivering of the pickup as the wind hit it sideways. In Camp Verde I got off the interstate and had a sausage biscuit at McDonald’s, sitting in the bright restaurant, watching teenagers behind the counter pour coffee and hand early birds their food. I recalled my first job, which was at a Taco Bell where nobody sufficiently explained to me how to use the computer/cash register and I walked out after an hour and a half. I was intelligent, yet I often had difficulty figuring out what came easily to others. I never expected things to be obvious; therefore the obvious eluded me.
I got onto I-40 and drove through Flagstaff, where the traffic was heavy. People going to work, was what I thought about. I kept my mind off the university. It was just a matter of practice, I thought, just a kind of mind control. Then I was east of the city and in the flat desert, with the sun in front of me, just openness and wind and air. Winslow was ahead, and I decided I would keep my eyes on the highway as I drove through it. That I wouldn’t look at the town that lay just to the south, where Jody had grown up and made her good and bad decisions, the town she had moved away from and moved back to, lived with pain and caused pain to others, more than she knew. But who would want to admit that to themselves? I saw that simultaneously she had protected herself and left herself open. It was a weird kind of balancing act she had performed. She made herself unlovable and yet was lovable in spite of herself. I had liked her better for what I didn’t know she was.
I felt my breathing ease as I left Winslow behind. I didn’t look at it in my rearview mirror.
I told myself it was a town I had never seen before. I had learned that you could change how you felt by changing what you thought, even by changing what you knew. Things were not this or that, this fact or some other fact; things were what you told yourself you believed.
HOLBROOK WAS A small, dusty, loosely held-together town of houses and trailers, vehicles up on blocks, broken toys in broken yards. The Catholic church was on East Florida Street, one of the first streets you came to after getting off the highway. A plaque on the outside of the church read: I BIND MYSELF TO THE LABOR FOR THE CONVERSION OF FALLEN WOMEN AND GIRLS NEEDING REFUGE FROM THE TEMPTATIONS OF THE WORLD, which struck me as ironic, unfair, true, and untrue, this iron plaque of worn letters on the white siding of the church.
The cemetery was behind the church, and I found Jody’s name on a small, gray stone. The word that came to me was her name, and I said it out loud, if by chance Jody could feel or hear my being there. I did not believe she could, but it was not impossible, and I was open to what was not impossible. Nobody but the dead knew what the world of the dead was like. Jody now knew more than I did.
It’s not so easy being a girl. That was what I was thinking, at Jody’s grave. They don’t believe they know how to be alone in the world, even when they’re doing it well enough. They don’t trust themselves. They don’t feel like anybody. You can see that about them if you pay attention, and I noticed everything about Jody. I accumulated so much knowledge about her that I could feel my way into her thinking and get deeper inside her than she was inside herself. But I had not been able to put my knowledge into her. That had been my biggest failure.
There was nothing on her gravestone, as there were on some of the others: no flowers, plastic or real. Although a sprig of something yellow was lying on the ground beside her headstone—separated from its bouquet, maybe a remnant of what somebody had left for her, her mother possibly, if she had been able to talk somebody into driving her there. More likely somebody had dropped it on their way to another grave. I had not thought to bring flowers or anything else. I had a blue sweater of Jody’s at home in my RV. She had left it by accident, and I had kept it. It smelled like the lotion she used. My skin gets so dry, she used to say. Would you put some on my back for me? We did that one night. She took off her sweatshirt and lay on the rug on her stomach. She wore jeans and a beige bra, and she unhooked the bra and I worked the lotion in. It’s like we’re at the beach, she said. Can you hear the waves, Nate? Can you hear the seagulls crying?
Although I knew how sorry Jody and I both were, I did not have the sense of peace I had expected to find. I realized how unrealistic I had been, about everything. I had moved too far from normal. I didn’t want to see that about myself and didn’t know how to get away from seeing it. I looked up at the sky, in which white clouds were too great a contrast to the blue. There was no subtleness, no gentleness. The world was a cutting place in which there was no forgiveness. My life had always been some version of that pain, from which I had detached myself. I had a moment of seeing that quite clearly before it disappeared.
I was facing the church and could see the shape of somebody walking past a window, perhaps the window of the church office or rest-room. I walked away from Jody’s grave in the direction of the older-looking headstones, reading names and dates. 1903–1947. 1852–1900, 1919–1921. The short lives, the infant graves. Then I walked back to my pickup and drove toward the interstate. But once I was on the interstate I couldn’t stand the thought of driving back through Winslow, and I got off at the next exit and drove north, on the Reservation.
chapter thirty-eight
TRAVIS ASPENALL
EVERYBODY BUT ME was asleep when Nate left. I heard his pickup, and when I went into the kitchen I saw the lights of his truck on Canyon Road just before they disappeared around the curve where Canyon turned into River Bend. I thought maybe Nate couldn’t sleep and was going to Byler’s Amish Kitchen, which opened at five. But it was a long time until five, and I went out to the Airstream and saw that he had left for real. The Airstream was clean, the way he always left it, and he hadn’t left a note, not any place that I could see.
I didn’t wake my parents. It wasn’t as if Nate was under arrest at our house, and I went back to bed and lay there feeling my heart beating as Billy slept restlessly in Damien’s bed and I waited for morning to come.
At sunrise I heard my parents get up. I knew that soon they would notice Nate’s truck being gone, and they would go out to the Airstream, and then they would know. I stayed in bed as long as I could. I didn’t want to hear them talking about it or calling Sam Rush. I knew that they wouldn’t do either of those things in front of Billy, who was still asleep. But Damien was already up. I could hear him moving around in the den, then taking the dogs out.
When Billy woke he and I went into the kitchen. Damien was already there.
“You boys go ahead and have a bowl of cereal,” my father said. “Then Mom’s going to drive you down to New River so you can hike up to the Indian Ruins. She’s got a backpack ready for you. You’ll be all right with that, won’t you, Billy?”
“Sure,” Billy said. “I’d like that.”
“Maybe Nate wants to go,” Damien said.
“Nate got up early,” Dad said. “He’s running some errands for me. So the three of you will go. Mom will drop you off and come back for you later.”
I would have known my father was lying even if I hadn’t known. He was terrible at it. He and Mom both were. During breakfast I noticed him sitting with his head bent as if listening for the sound of Nate’s pickup outside. I wasn
’t listening for it. Nate had a hard time making decisions, but once he made one, he never changed his mind, not that I had ever seen. It was like once he decided something he had to go through with it.
MOM WAS QUIET in the car, and on River Bend I saw Sam’s SUV coming toward us in the other lane. He raised a hand to Mom, and she raised a hand back; it looked more like a signal than a wave.
“Maybe he’s coming to our house,” Damien said.
“Maybe so,” my mother said.
On the interstate she told Billy and me to keep an eye on Damien. “You know what the dangers are,” she said. “That’s free grazing out there, and occasionally there will be a bull. You stay clear of it. Don’t fool around, all right? Promise me. And it’s a long walk through the desert. Stop and take a drink now and then. I put Gatorade in the pack. And when the day warms up, watch out for rattlers.”
“We know,” I said.
“I know you know. I’m reminding you,” she said. “And don’t bring any pottery shards back, no matter how small they are.”
“It’s illegal and you’ll turn us in,” I said. “We know that, too.”
“I realize you’re a teenager,” Mom said to me, “but don’t be one now, Travis. Give me a break today.”
“What’s today?” Damien said.
“Irritable adult day,” Mom said. “We get to have one.”
IN NEW RIVER she let us off at the northern end of Twenty-Seventh Avenue and said she’d be back for us at two—sooner, she said, if we called. We might have cell phone coverage once we were up on the ridge.
The three of us set out, hiking for twenty minutes or so before we reached the wash where people went to target shoot—you could see the wooden targets they left up and the shell casings on the ground—and then we hiked up out of the wash and across the flat desert where a few cows were grazing far to the east of where we were. After that was the gradual rise to the foot of the steep path, with Billy reminding me to stop every so often so that we could have a drink and give one to Damien, who kept falling behind us.
“He’s just looking around,” I said, “being a kid. He’s not really that slow.”
“Maybe,” Billy said. “But you’re walking faster than you think you are.”
The three of us made the hard climb to where the ruins were. We had been to the ruins maybe twenty times, but you never got used to what you came upon: the foot-and-a-half-tall circular enclosures, built of rocks, built longer ago than anybody knew, which was all that was left of the walls; the bits of broken pottery you could still find if you went to the enclosures farthest east from the path up to the ridge; the patchwork of houses and desert yards you could see far below; and, most of all, the New River Mountains on the back side of the ridge, which you couldn’t see until you were up there. Then suddenly there they were, with their peaks and folds, the crevices the sun couldn’t reach except maybe an hour a day, the steep rock faces that nobody, probably, had ever tried to climb.
“What do you think it would be like to hike down into them,” Billy said, “you know, to just walk away from everything you knew?”
“Horrible,” Damien said.
We sat on the rocky ground in the warm wind, which was strong, up that high. Supposedly the Indians, whichever tribe it was, back then, didn’t live up that high all the time. They went only when they were expecting to be attacked. I had the thought that this was where Nate could have come.
Billy and Damien were going through the backpack for what my mother had fixed for us: hard-boiled eggs, apples, trail mix, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and another bottle of Gatorade. I wasn’t hungry, but I ate anyway. I was hoping Nate had gone to Mexico or Canada, though why he hadn’t done that earlier I didn’t know. It now seemed a fact to me that he had killed Jody. A second later I was sure he hadn’t. My mind was busy. If he did do it, I didn’t want him to get caught. I thought it was natural to want criminals to get away. It was an animal thing—don’t let the antelope get caught by the lion. Laws were man-made anyway; a lot of them didn’t make sense. They didn’t give people enough freedom. Then I thought about Jody Farnell lying dead and alone in the wash.
I wasn’t aware of how long I was quiet, or that Billy and Damien had started talking—about space, it turned out, and their wanting to visit the moon someday, in whatever spacecraft there would be, by that time, for ordinary people who wanted to see what it was like on that satellite of Earth they had been seeing all their lives in the sky at night.
“Not that we’re ordinary people,” Billy said. “Ordinary people would rather go to Walmart.”
Damien and I laughed, and Billy didn’t. He had been making the same kinds of comments he always did, but not as if he thought they were funny. It would be a while before he could. Overhead a formation of Canadian geese flew north. One of their resting areas was Lake Pleasant, which was on the other side of the interstate, not too many miles southwest of where we were. Before Billy’s father had gotten sick, he used to take Billy, Jason, Billy’s sister, and me camping there and out sailing on the boat he once had. “Leave everything behind,” he would tell us. “Don’t bring any shit with you when you’re out on the water,” meaning worries and emotions. He especially didn’t like emotions, which was his main complaint about women, since, as he put it, “They’re always trying to drown us in them.”
Billy’s father didn’t include Billy’s sister in that category. Somehow she was the exception. And while he never kept girlfriends for long, he did have girlfriends, including the last one, the one Jason had said was a nurse. I could see why women might not have liked him. He was a jerk in certain ways. But he was funny and interesting and different from anybody else you knew, and it seemed impossible that I would never see him again.
When it was time for us to hike back we went more slowly, with Damien between Billy and me on the steep path down. It was Billy’s idea; it was in his head too much now that people could die. Halfway back across the desert we saw people hiking toward us, and I was sorry they knew about the ruins. There was something about having a place like that to yourself, as your secret. That was the original point about it anyway, for the Indians. They had to protect themselves, be ready to attack before they were attacked. They had to live by their instincts. That was how people were, even though civilization was always trying to civilize that out of you. We had read Huckleberry Finn last year and that was on my mind, how things really were as opposed to the way the world was trying to make you see them.
Ahead of us on Twenty-Seventh Avenue I could see my mother’s SUV. I could see her standing next to it with her arms folded, and suddenly I wanted to turn and run. I almost couldn’t stop myself. But there she was, waiting, and Billy and Damien were behind me, and I wasn’t Huck Finn. I was sorry I wasn’t, but sorry didn’t turn me into him.
chapter thirty-nine
SAM RUSH
WHEN I DROVE up to Alice Weneka’s house on North Prairie, she was sitting on her porch swing in a dress and white sweater. She motioned me to a wicker chair, asked if I would like coffee, and came out a few minutes later with two cups on a tray. I asked how her grandson was, and she said he was fine now.
“Children get sick quickly but recover quickly,” she said, “lucky children, that is,” then waited for me to tell her that I had spoken to Joe Weneka, as he was called now, and that I knew she already knew about our conversation. She didn’t say yes or no to that, but waited for me to continue.
“Let’s start with what happened to Hannah,” I said. “Am I right in assuming that she didn’t survive?”
Alice took a drink of her coffee before beginning. She held the cup as she spoke.
“My sister and I are both nurses,” she said. “We knew from the beginning that Hannah’s chances weren’t good. Everybody did. She had an enlarged heart, her lungs had not developed normally, she had fetal alcohol syndrome, mental retardation, most likely, although that early you can’t know for sure. There’s a list I could give you. But her breathing was
the immediate concern. We had her at my sister’s house, in Leupp, where we were both looking after her. Wes—Wes, he was then—stayed there often as well. That’s where we were when she started struggling, and we brought her to the Indian Clinic here in Winslow. This was when she was five months old.”
“So she died at the Indian Clinic.”
“On the way.”
“Of what exactly?”
“Respiratory failure,” Alice said.
“Why didn’t you just tell me this the first time I asked about her? Why all the mystery?”
Alice put down her coffee, went inside, and returned with the death certificate.
“Because we changed her name,” she said. “We gave her my sister’s husband’s last name, and for her first name we chose Rowena, which was Wes’s mother’s name. Hannah had been Jody’s choice, not Wes’s.”
“And you changed her name why?”
Alice looked across the street, where a heavyset neighbor in a red shirt was soaping his pickup.
“Jody’s mother didn’t know about Hannah’s death, and we didn’t want her to know. We wanted to bury Hannah in the cemetery beside my sister’s church, outside Leupp, rather than in Jody’s mother’s church in Holbrook. We wanted Hannah near us. That was important to us. Maybe Jody’s mother wouldn’t have raised a fuss, even if she had known. Maybe she wouldn’t raise a fuss about it now, if she knew. But we didn’t want to take that chance.”
Alice watched the neighbor rinse off his truck.
“In addition to her troubles with drugs,” she said, “Jody’s mother had her prejudices. We just thought it was easier this way.”
“So the map, then, found in Jody’s car? That’s showing the way to the cemetery outside Leupp?”