The Quiet Streets of Winslow (13 page)

“I'm going for a walk,” I said. Quickly, I put on my jacket and left before I had a chance to say or do something that revealed the humiliation I felt, the anger, the confusion, the distance between my intention and her reaction. I almost lost track of the fact that I had not said what I had planned and she had not rejected me. Not this time.

It was after eleven, dark and cold. The moon was a sharp, white sliver, and lining the roads of the park was the frozen, dirty last of a snowfall. I walked fast, trying to exhaust myself past feeling. But before long I had in my mind a story Jody had told me about a party she had gone to in high school, a drunken party at which kids disappeared with each other into bedrooms to experiment with sex—not intercourse, Jody said, not for her, not except once, she said, along with some “other things,” which she did not name, that she had not done before.

“The world is different from when you were young, Nate,” she said, and I had wanted to say, bring me up to date, then, Jody. Show me how the world works now. I couldn't see why engaging in sex with people she hardly knew was all right but I wasn't. I couldn't see what it would have cost her.

The wind was gusting and the air was crystallized and haloed under the old-fashioned light posts we had in the RV park. In a few RVs I heard televisions going and saw the glow of them through the curtains. But most people were asleep; many of the residents were middle-aged and older. I started seeing myself in the future, lonely and old, having never had a wife or a family or what Lee and Sandra would have called a real job, a real house, a real life. I knew that what they expected of me I had not accomplished and probably never would. I was a loser, of sorts; that was how they saw me and probably how Jody saw me. But she was in that same category herself, it seemed to me, if not in a worse one. That was what was in my head that night.

Sandra took me to a psychologist when I was in the sixth grade. The school counselor had suggested it. He has a high IQ, but low grades, Sandra was told. He doesn't speak in class or make friends. The psychologist's office was in a brick building near the hospital, with a courtyard. I resented the psychologist's personal questions, not that I answered them. No and yes were all I said.

Afterward Sandra and I went to supper at a Mexican restaurant near Prescott College. I told Sandra I didn't want to see the psychologist again, and she said, “Are you sure, Nate?” But I could see she was relieved; it had cost so much. She said, “Use your intelligence in your own way. And talk to people sometimes.” Later, she would call Lee, and they would buy me a computer and ask if I wanted to be on a soccer team or join the Boy Scouts.

At supper she was cheery, drinking a margarita. She was always that way at first, then she would get an abandoned look afterward. Whenever we went out, people recognized her from the billboards that advertized the dealership she worked for, and sometimes a man would
come up to us. “You don't know me,” she would say. “What sense does this make?” It bothered her that they would ask her out in front of me, and it bothered me as well. I didn't like thinking about her with men. This was before Ernest Sterling, the only one of her boyfriends to live with us, and the only one I liked.

Saturday nights Sandra and I sat on her bed, with chips and salsa, watching movies. Above us was a yellow and orange Indian bedspread tacked to the ceiling. She had put a blue and green one on the ceiling in my room. Our house on Delia Lane, off Nightfall, was small: two bedrooms, a bathroom, a tiny kitchen, a narrow living room Sandra and I painted orange. A creek ran behind the house, and in the backyard were two cottonwoods and a willow. We put up a tent and slept there, some nights. Our neighbors were students, mostly, and when they felt like it they came over and had a beer with Sandra and played computer games with me.

I spent every other weekend with Lee. He had moved to Black Canyon City by then and lived in a duplex on Abbott Street, next door to Sam Rush. I remember a girlfriend he had one year who accidentally slammed Sam's cat in a door. I remember a blue bicycle Lee bought me, and he and Sam teaching me to ride it. Lee had quit drinking by then, and was quieter, not all over the place anymore, tossing a ball, breaking a window, wanting to take me to this place or that place.

I'd feel him watching me, trying to figure out who I was now that he was sober and he could see me. I believe he did feel love for me, but he was seventeen when I was born. I was a baby doll somebody handed him. A bag of flour like we had had to cart around in our ninth-grade health class. It's a baby, they told us. You can't leave it. It can't survive without you.

I'd see the look on Sandra's face when Lee picked me up, every other Friday afternoon. She would stand in the yard, watching me go, and I would make myself wave to her until Lee turned the corner and she couldn't see me anymore. That was the price I had to pay. When he brought me home, Sundays, she wouldn't talk to me or look at me, at first, then she would give me a tight hug, hold me too long, ask too many questions.

As I got older and stayed in my room, reading, Sandra would say, “Why don't you want to be with me anymore?” and I would say, “Because I'm a teenager now. That's what teenagers do.” She seemed not to know how that worked. We weren't in sync during those years, but it wasn't like we didn't eat supper together or talk some. It was true that I never called her Mom, or Lee Dad, but that meant nothing. I had always called them what they called each other, but it wasn't like I didn't know who they were to me.

Delia Lane comes into my dreams even now—the small, low houses; the empty field at the end of the street; the black pickup that ran over my dog when I was seven. I dream of storm clouds hovering over the creek; of a house next door that is just like our house except the windows and doors are boarded up. What happened there? I want to know. In my dreams I'm always asking.

T
HAT NIGHT IN
Chino Valley I was so cold I was numb when I got back. Behind the partition Jody was asleep, oblivious. There was relief in that. When I was a small kid I thought people could read your mind. I thought you had to monitor the inside of your head, keep right thoughts on display and wrong thoughts hidden. I felt that pressure all the time.

When I woke the following morning it was late. Jody had gone to work and left me a note:
You have a fever. I felt your forehead
. She had put her hand on me; that was what struck me. I looked at the note for a long time—the large loops of her letters, the smiley face with which she dotted the
I
. The night before seemed a long time ago. I had a hard time remembering how the whole thing had started.

chapter twenty

TRAVIS ASPENALL

“I
N ORDER TO
anticipate what might happen, Travis,” Dad said, “in any situation, you have to train yourself to see things the way other people might. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

It was Saturday, and my father had gotten me up early. Before Nate had started working at the veterinary clinic, it had been my job, Saturday mornings, to clean the animals' cages and mop the floors in the examining rooms. “We don't want Travis to lose his work ethic,” Dad had said to Mom at breakfast. “Before long Nate will go home, and Travis will have to get used to working again.”

Once Dad and I were on our way he wasn't in a hurry to get there. He pulled into the Roadrunner in New River and ordered coffee. We sat at a table outside in the chilly morning, with the sun spilling across the desert. The air was so clear that you could see as far as the foothills of Carefree, and Dad looked at the landscape, and that was when he started talking.

“It seems as if Nate might have gone up to see Jody before she died,” he said. “There's no crime in that, and it's easy to understand why he might not have told Sam Rush. Nobody wants to be suspected of doing
what he didn't do, Travis, and nobody wants to admit to chasing after a girl. Nate does have an alibi, of a sort. He was home in Chino Valley that night. But his neighbors can't verify having seen him or his pickup.”

Dad paused when the coffee arrived. I had ordered a Coke.

“So the possibility of Nate having gone to see Jody when he did,” he said, “is just between us. You're old enough to understand the importance of that.”

“You mean don't tell Nate we know,” I said.

“It's simplest to say nothing to anybody. That's the best thing. It's what is required of you as a man, and here's what I mean by that. In a family it's the husband and father who's responsible for more than the family realizes. The family has to be able to depend on him, no matter what. In my opinion that's how it should be. It doesn't mean that Mom isn't responsible, or that she's less important than I am. It just means that I know what I need to do in order for my family to be able to count on me, whether she or anybody else realizes it.”

“So Mom doesn't know what you're telling me,” I said.

Dad glanced at the door opening and two men in work clothes coming outside.

He said, “No. Not yet. Mom and I are in this together, Travis, but until Nate was in college she didn't know him. She didn't see firsthand what Nate had to deal with, between Sandra and me. Nate didn't get to have the kind of childhood you and Damien have had.”

“I know that.”

“And Mom knows it, too. But she didn't see it. Nate might be something of a mystery to her. There's no way she can understand him the way I can. What you can't understand, you can misunderstand. Do you see what I'm saying?”

He stopped to drink his coffee.

“I realize that I'm putting a lot on you,” he said. “Normally I would have Sam to talk to, but, well, you see the situation.”

“Sam doesn't trust Nate, you mean.”

Dad took off his windbreaker. The day was heating up.

“You could say that it's Sam's job not to trust Nate,” he said. “And here's what he's faced with. Nate is the only person connecting Jody Farnell to where her body was found. That's how things stand, Travis, even though that in itself makes it unlikely Nate had anything to do with this—the obviousness, I mean. Why would Nate do that to himself?”

The waitress came outside and poured Dad more coffee. I waited until she had gone.

“What if Nate went to see Jody and he killed her without meaning to?”

Dad's eyes were on the desert.

“If that's what happened,” he said, “then that's what happened, and we'll support Nate however we can.” Dad knocked the table with his knuckles, as he did whenever he was making a point about something.

He took out his wallet and left money on the table. But after we got in the Jeep he didn't move for a minute.

“Nate used to do this thing on the phone,” he said. “He must have been seven or eight or so. He would say, ‘Is this the party with whom I'm speaking?' I suppose he heard it on television. He was always smarter than people gave him credit for.”

Then Dad started the Jeep and we drove to his clinic. Cave Creek was made up of a collection of small businesses straggled along Cave
Creek Road, and the clinic was at the northwestern end. Inside I got the dogs from the cages in the back—a collie mix and two who-knew-whats—and took them out to the fenced-in area behind the clinic, from where you could see the small houses along the side street. For a brief while Dad came out and stood with me. It was still early enough that the birds were noisy. The collie mix started digging a hole under the fence, and Dad said, “She wants out, and who can blame her?” He whistled and reached into his pocket for the treats he carried.

W
E LEFT THE
clinic early in the afternoon, stopped for hamburgers, and discovered at home that my mother, Damien, and Nate were taking down the curtains in the house.

“Spring cleaning,” Dad said. “She goes crazy every year.” But he joined in, and so did I; we didn't have a choice. We worked until five, when Dad and Nate went to pick up Chinese food, which we ate outside as the sun went down.

“Where's Pete?” Nate said.

None of us knew. We looked in the house and around the house, then went out to Canyon Road and up to the ridge. He wasn't anywhere, and it was getting dark. We sat on the patio, hoping to see him emerge from somewhere in the dusk.

“He'll come back when he's ready,” Dad said, but we knew it had been years since he had gone off like that. Meanwhile five mule deer were filing down from the ridge to drink from the small, shallow pool Dad and I had dug under the palo verde tree. They walked as silently as Indians, or at least as silently as Indians walked in movies. Harmony, I thought, probably hated those movies. She probably saw all kinds of things differently from the way I did.