The Quiet Streets of Winslow (24 page)

Terrified people found each other. That was my next thought—I can't say how I knew that, either. But I thought it possible that I had always had my fears. Deep fears about Nate Aspenall and his life. Fears about finding a place in the world for this oddball whose definition of himself was being part of nothing. I'm not saying that I generally felt afraid. Often in my life I had not felt much. Living alone, for example, I had cooked my food, worked on the RVs, kept those gravel roads smooth, watched television in the evening, went out some, slept and
dreamed, like anybody else. Had supper with Sandra, occasionally, visited Lee, stayed in the Airstream. Drove home to Chino Valley, thinking about all I didn't have. Did that come with a feeling? I suppose it had, but I couldn't recall one.

Nothing was going on in Mike Early's truck. I told myself it couldn't be, not with my sitting there. Like my presence determined the world. The strangest thing, the most peculiar thing, was that I didn't once think about walking over there to see. I mean it never entered my head.

chapter thirty-five

TRAVIS ASPENALL

“I
F YOU PLAYED
any part in it, Nate,” my father said, “and you don't own up to it, nobody is going to be able to help you.”

“Just say it,” Nate said. “Tell me what you think I am.”

The door to the Airstream was open, and I heard their voices when I came outside with the dogs to wait for Billy. It was just after supper. I walked quickly toward Canyon Road, wanting to hear but not wanting to be caught listening. It wasn't like them to argue. Nate was quiet, and my father didn't raise his voice the way he told us he had when he was drinking. He had told Damien and me, “You wouldn't have liked me then.”

I was almost to Canyon Road when Billy's mother drove in and pulled up next to me. I saw her reach over and put her arm around Billy before letting him out of the car.

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

P
AUL
B
OWMAN 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.”

“So Kevin Rainey,” I said. “How is it you know him?”

“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.”