The Quiet Streets of Winslow

by Judy Troy

  The park reminded me of one in Prescott, near where I had grown up. On my twenty-fourth birthday, the day before I moved to Chino Valley, I walked over to the park as a good-bye to the past, a good-bye to childhood, I suppose. A girl I had gone to school with from the third grade on was there, pushing a stroller, and when I said hello she said hello back without recognizing me. That seemed a fitting end to my Prescott life. The next day I moved out.

  “I can stay home and help,” Sandra said at breakfast, and I said, No, go to work, Sandra. I can handle this. I could picture her face if she were there: the mixture of I-want-what’s-best-for-you-honey and I-don’t-know-why-you-are-doing-this-to-me-Nate. Perhaps she was unaware of it. It was possible. What I kept bumping into in my life was another person’s blindness and how it impaired your ability to hold on to your own perspective. Don’t be angry, Nate, I told myself. She can’t help it. Look at the pain on her face. In truth there was nothing more maddening, yet somehow there seemed nobody there to be angry at.

  I didn’t rent a U-Haul; I didn’t have much. Chino Valley was not far from Prescott. I could make two trips if I needed to. The RV had a bed and a kitchen table built into it, and I had bought a futon couch, a small recliner, and two lamps at an estate sale I had gone to with Sandra, and she was giving me kitchen things—plates and glasses and cookware, extra things she had. She went to yard sales and estate sales. Everything in our house had belonged to somebody else before it had belonged to us.

  It was a hot morning, and I started packing my truck right after Sandra left. I went back and forth between my room and my truck and the kitchen and my truck. I worked hard and fast, and as soon as I was done I drove to Chino Valley and carried it all into the RV, one load after another, until I was sweaty and tired, hungry and thirsty. But I hadn’t thought to bring so much as a Coke or a box of cookies with me, and suddenly it began to seem as if the only place in the world there was food was Sandra’s house, and only she knew how to cook, and only at her kitchen table was it possible to eat. There I was in a soulless place, with the bare bones of a life. I did not realize then that I was seeing my new life and myself as Sandra might have, or as I thought she might have, which may or may not have been the same thing. There was a picnic table outside the RV and for I don’t know how many hours I lay on it on my back, looking up through tree branches at clouds flashing past, or so they seemed; the day was windy and hot.

  The first month I remember only pieces of. I ate fast food, did not grocery shop or do laundry or take showers. I must have worked some; that was the arrangement, but I still do not recall it. Eventually, Sandra came by and saw things for herself, called Lee, and Lee came over from Black Canyon City. I’m all right, I said through the screen door and wouldn’t open it. Then I suppose I began to do things for myself. As Sandra put it, I “came out of it.” It offended me that she would talk about it. I told her I wouldn’t meet her for dinner anymore if she continued to. We would meet at the Mexican restaurant where we used to eat so often, even though I didn’t want to eat with her there or anywhere else. But I tried not to show it. Be a good son, Nate, I told myself. Don’t let her see. “I’ll pay tonight, Sandra,” I would say, and she would say, “Of course not, honey. But that’s sweet of you.” It’s easy to please women superficially. Beneath that, beyond that, down where they lock their pain away, it’s hopeless to try and reach.

  THE FLAGSTAFF PARK had emptied. I ended up at a restaurant on Navajo Boulevard called Eddie’s, where I ordered barbecue and drank a beer as I waited. I was thinking that I could drive to California or Oregon or Washington and start a new life. Sleep in my pickup until I found a job and an RV or a mobile home or an apartment, and slowly purchase with cash the few things I needed. Even as I thought it, though, it was moving out of sight. I was on my way home.

  I was sitting two tables from the window, watching the sky grow dark. There were only a few people in the restaurant, and there were two waitresses. Neither of them was as pretty as Jody had been, or as open-seeming to what life could bring you. The carpeting was a dull brown with alternating squares of green and yellow, the walls needed repainting, and you could smell the disinfectant they used on the tables. I should have kept driving, I thought. I should have waited until I was back in Chino Valley to have eaten, where things were familiar. Home seemed like a refuge compared to where I was now, in that restaurant. Everything changed when you were comparing things, and when you stopped comparing things, well, I didn’t know what that would be like. It seemed I was always looking at one thing as against something else—my life before and after leaving home, my life before and after Jody, my life as it was compared to what it could have been. It was possible that I couldn’t see anything for what it was.

  As I ate supper I watched a mother two tables away trying to get her little girl to eat. “Just one more bite,” she was saying, and the little girl in the booster chair shook her head. A little black-haired girl with dark skin and dark eyes—Hispanic maybe, or Navajo. Hard for me to tell. She wore a blue-striped top and had ketchup on her face. When her mother wet her finger and put it to the child’s face, the child tried to twist away, but she was caught in that booster chair.

  I drank two cups of coffee, then I paid and walked out to my truck. It was full night by then, and the wind was rising, and I was still far from home. I found my way to I-40, then I continued west to Williams. In my head was the vacant-looking rental Jody had lived in and the ring I had bought her. Put that out of your mind, Nate. It never meant anything to her. Then I was on Highway 89, which would take me to Chino Valley.

  When you care for somebody you expect it to be returned. I started wondering if love was meant to have that function, or if it got distorted when you tried to make it do what it wasn’t meant to do. Maybe love wasn’t about getting back from people what you gave them. It might not be about other people at all. It was about opening you up, somehow, so that you could see the world as it was and people as they were. What would Jody have looked like to me if I had been able to see her without expecting anything? The answer was a glass breaking, a moon flying apart, a galaxy trying to hold itself together. I shouldn’t have loved Jody, I thought. I should have just loved. Then everything could have been different.

  chapter forty-four

  TRAVIS ASPENALL

  “THE FIRST THING to know about science,” Ms. Hanson said, “is that it seems to promise a full explanation for the nature of the universe. How many of you think it does?”

  A few people raised their hands.

  “So who can give me a definition of gravity?” she said.

  “We don’t float off into space,” Jason said.

  “We can’t tell that the Earth is moving around the sun at like sixty-seven thousand miles per hour,” somebody else said.

  “But are those definitions of gravity, or are they descriptions?”

  “Descriptions.”

  “Right,” Ms. Hanson said. “Isaac Newton wrote, ‘the cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know.’”

  “So what is the definition?”

  “That’s the point,” Ms. Hanson said. “Nobody knows. Everything in the universe at some level becomes a mystery.”

  “For now, though, or for always?”

  “Anybody want to guess the answer to that?” Ms. Hanson said.

  “I will,” somebody else said. “It’s a mystery.”

  “Why become a scientist then?” Billy said. “Why bother?”

  “Because you could figure out just one more thing,” Harmony said.

  “How are you supposed to live with all that unknowing?” somebody behind me asked.

  “You’re already living with it,” Billy said. “You can’t count on anything. You don’t know how long you’re going to live or how you’re going to die. You don’t know a fucking lot of things.”

  “Billy Clay,” Ms. Hanson said.

  “Well, you don’t, do you?”

  “No,” Ms. Hanson said. “But do you have to use tha
t particular word to say it?”

  “Well, in terms of what I was saying, shit, yes,” Billy said.

  Everybody laughed, including her. She didn’t like profanity, but she knew smart when she heard it.

  On the bus that afternoon Billy said, “I might be done with honors classes. My grades suck, and I’m tired of working so hard. Who cares, anyway? My mother’s new son can be the brains of the family.”

  “You mean one of Cy’s kids?” I said.

  “Yes. But not one he has already.”

  “You’re kidding me,” I said.

  “She’s forty-six. I mean, who would think?”

  “Was it on purpose?”

  “Fuck. I hope not.”

  He looked out the window at the dusty sky.

  “Cy says he’s going to build us a bigger house, maybe with a pool,” Billy said. “This would be somewhere on the other side of the interstate. Some new street I’ve never heard of. So there goes taking the bus with my friends.”

  “Maybe it will never happen.”

  “No,” Billy said. “Not with Cy. That’s what would have happened with my dad.”

  We got off at the same stop and walked the mile or so to what was left of his father’s house. Most of the rubbish had been cleared away, and there was only the foundation left and the brick fireplace, which they had never used. Sand had blown across the concrete, and Billy marked off with a stick where the living room used to be, the kitchen, and the bedrooms.

  “Here is where my dad was found,” he said, and drew a picture of the recliner in the living room. “He died where he wanted to be, doing what he liked to do.”

  “Drinking, you mean?”

  “And drugs,” Billy said. “He was into pills before he got sick. I found his stash once, a long time ago. I was so young and stupid I didn’t take any.”

  He drew a picture of the concrete Buddha statue his dad used to have sitting on the hearth.

  “That’s a smart hiding place,” I said.

  “I was trying to move it over, I can’t remember why. I expected it to be heavy, but it was hollow inside, and there they were, stuffed inside a pea can. Peas,” he said, “like you would eat.”

  “Painkillers, peas, peace,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “Did the Buddha burn?” I asked.

  “It got blackened. Dennie has it in her closet.”

  We headed back. The sun was low behind us, but in front of us the day was bright, as if we were walking backward, toward lunch instead of supper, toward last year instead of next year, as if with each step we were undoing the past, even though it meant we would have to do all those same things again. We wouldn’t be able to change anything. That was how science worked. You could make discoveries, which could make things better in the future, but you couldn’t undo anything that had happened or had been set in motion. It was the one sad fact about the universe.

  WHEN I GOT home my mother was in the Airstream, ripping up a corner of the brown carpeting.

  “I want to redo in here,” she said. “It’s dated and worn. Depressing looking. When Billy comes to spend the night, you and he could stay out here. A bit like camping.”

  She looked down at the carpeting. “I suppose we could have just gotten it cleaned,” she said, “but I think we’d be better off starting over. What do you think?”

  It wasn’t a real question.

  “Okay then. You can get started before supper. I’ll leave it to you,” she said, as I had known she would. That was how she got us to do what she wanted done.

  I put the radio on and listened to country-and-western while I worked—music that Harmony didn’t like. All those cowboys who hate Indians, she used to say. All those pretend heartachy people. As for the heartachy part, well, nobody had damaged hers yet. She might say something different when and if that happened. Maybe Jason would break up with her at some point, I thought. He was going out with her now. He had not come out and said that, but it was obvious.

  When my father got home from work he came into the Airstream to see what I had done and to tell me how I should have done it instead. “It’s fine, though,” he said. “It’ll work.” One sleeve of his shirt was ripped. “Doberman mix,” he said. “Don’t become a vet, Travis. Animals hate us.”

  “I wasn’t going to.”

  “What field might you go into then? Do you think about it?”

  “Not really.”

  “You might want to start. Time moves fast.”

  “I thought I’d be a teenager a while longer.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Dad said.

  Just before I went in for supper I moved the bed out of the back corner, and just under the edge of the carpeting was where I found the coral ring. It was a smallish, woman’s ring, and I was pretty sure that Nate had bought it for Jody Farnell. Sam Rush had told my father about it, and he had told me. “That’s how much Nate cared for her,” my father had said.

  I put the ring in my pocket and tried to figure out what to do with it.

  chapter forty-five

  SAM RUSH

  WITH MY SLIDING glass door open to the night wind, I sat at my kitchen table in front of my computer, preparing for my meeting in Prescott with Bob McLaney. I had typed up my notes from the beginning of the investigation and emailed them to him, including my recent conversation with Paulette Hebson. Now I wanted to familiarize myself with the information and make sure of the correct sequence of events. I drank coffee in order to keep myself alert, and when I made changes on the computer, typing with two fingers, I wished not for the first time that I had taken a typing class in high school.

  By one in the morning I had done what I could, and I went outside. My neighborhood was asleep. It was mostly older folks, aside from a young couple down the street who partied late and had too much company. But tonight even their lights were out. There was a white moon, and I focused on it and tried to let my mind empty, especially of Lee and Julie Aspenall. I was sorry I had taken on the case, yet I understood what my reasoning had been, and it still made sense to me. A sense of certainty belongs to your twenties and thirties. After that, you make do with the complexities of being human. I went inside and lay on the couch and fell asleep in front of the television.

  On the drive to Prescott in the morning I had my paperwork on the passenger seat, and I went over the investigation one more time in my mind, trying to see what if anything I had overlooked, not given enough significance to, or not followed up on. In the back of my mind was Jody Farnell in her Toyota, a girl on her own who knew too many men, in too many different ways, stopping at PT’s in the early evening. Despite how much we knew, we still knew too little. But unless you had a confession or indisputable physical evidence, there was always the chance that anything could have happened.

  THE MORNING WAS warm and cloudless when I left Black Canyon City. Prescott was considerably cooler, with low clouds hanging raggedly over the hills. Bob’s office was upstairs from the Sheriff’s Department. I could remember when the county attorneys had their offices in the pretty courthouse across the street, as could Bob.

  He was waiting for me, wearing jeans and a black Western shirt—not one of his days to be in court. He was a few inches shorter than I was, darker complected and thinner, with brown hair mixed with gray, a focused, sharp expression, and a sense of humor you didn’t expect. I had gotten us two coffees, and I handed one to him and sat in the chair opposite his desk.

  “You look tired,” he said.

  “I bet.”

  “Myself,” he said, “we had a crying grandchild staying with us. Seven months old, with strong lungs. Guess whose bed he slept in.”

  Then we looked at our notes and started talking about the case.

  “We have a fair amount of evidence against Nate Aspenall,” he said, “even though it’s circumstantial. Nate has history with Jody, is fixated on her big-time, sees her at the overlook performing a sexual act with Mike Early one day after he proposes to her, she ends up dead f
ive hours or so later, his pickup is parked near her house—all night, possibly—and somebody makes a phone call the next morning to Mike Early from the town in which Jody’s car is found.”

  Bob took a drink of coffee. “The fact that Jody’s body was found near Nate’s father’s house could go either way, I suppose, although I tend to see it as strong. How about you?”

  “Leaving her body close to somebody he has ties to,” I said, “that was my thinking. So that he doesn’t feel as if he’s just abandoning it. Plus he doesn’t just throw it in the wash—he can’t bring himself to. But he likes the idea of tossing her away, now that he’s been tossed aside by her. So he positions her that way. It’s the closest he can come.

  “Since we’re assuming unpremeditated,” I said, “it’s possible he had a need to be caught. He’s horrified by what he’s done. Can’t admit it to us, or to his parents, maybe not even to himself. So he leaves the body near his father’s house. Maybe throwing a little blame in his father’s direction at the same time. Nate’s childhood wasn’t easy.”

  “None of that sounds far-fetched to me,” Bob said.

  We drank our coffee.

  “Then there’s Jody’s Toyota being found in Holbrook,” Bob said. “Assuming it wasn’t stolen by somebody else entirely, and left there—which seems unlikely—Nate may have left it there in order to misdirect us to this person Jody knows in Holbrook. Even if Nate didn’t know him by name, he knew of him, am I right?”

  “Yes. And he mentioned knowing about him early in the investigation,” I said.

  “Or maybe Nate just wants to throw us off, complicate our investigation. That covers all the bases—the need to be caught, combined with the desire not to be. He’s a contradiction, like everybody else in the world. Did you ever find anybody to verify whether Nate’s pickup was in Winslow all night?”