The Quiet Streets of Winslow (7 page)

Jody's mother would smoke and look at the house and be silent, and Jody would be counting one, two, three, four, she said, as far up as she could stand, then she'd sing songs in her mind, or think of a boy—whatever it took for her to survive that time in the car with her mother without remembering when her parents had been together and she had had a family.

When you cared for somebody, you got caught up in her story; it became more real than your own. For it wasn't as if I didn't have my own. The day my father, Lee, left, his car caught fire. Whether Sandra torched it, or he torched it himself, for some reason, I never knew—the two of them could get crazy with each other, they each told me later, as if I didn't remember the flames, the sirens, Sandra screaming, and black smoke billowing up. I was five or so. For a long time I would dream that day and wake up choking.

Your long-ago past collides with your present. For no clear reason I'll find myself thinking about three people I knew in high school who considered suicide on a daily basis. Truthfully, two of them would not have been missed, but the one who would have was the one to do it.

He and I used to skip class to smoke pot behind the Phippen Museum and watch the reflection of clouds as they sailed along in those
plate-glass windows. Or else we would drive out to the Ernest A. Love Field and watch the small planes take off and land. After graduation we were going to join the military together, for him to be a pilot and me to be in tanks. A daydream, really—a castle in the air. He hanged himself from an upper branch of a cottonwood tree. He used to say that if he had been born somebody else, he could have helped out the person who had been him, but that as it was, he had only the one of him, and it wasn't enough. But his thinking wasn't always that dark, and if he hadn't died, I believe we might have remained friends.

Everybody's life gets peppered with losses. That's what I tell myself. But I see it the other way, too, by which I mean I see what my friend lost, and I see what Jody lost. I don't forget that part. I don't think it's all or only about me.

chapter eleven

TRAVIS ASPENALL

“I
SEE THIS IS
a birthday dinner,” Nate said. He didn't smile. There wasn't emotion in his voice. He wished we had forgotten.

He sat at the table wearing the Grateful Dead T-shirt that had once belonged to Dad. Mom put a plate of chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes in front of him—the meal he ordered when we went to Byler's Amish Kitchen. Nobody said anything about Sam Rush not being present. Whether or not my mother had invited him I didn't know, but his not being there felt stranger than it would have been if he had come. Normally on birthdays he was with us.

Damien and I had made a CD for Nate—“Purple Haze,” “Black Magic Woman,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Gimme Shelter,” “Born to Be Wild,” and so on, the only music Nate listened to. My parents had given him a Kindle and shouldn't have. Nate didn't get excited by what you could do with an iPhone, and he had never been on Facebook or Twitter or anything. He needed to stand apart, and I guess that was how he chose to do it. If he were running a race, I thought, he would try to be the slowest.

After supper Damien and I cleared the table, and my mother brought out the cake. She lit the candles, and Damien said, “Aren't we going to sing?”

“No,” Nate said. “Let's just eat.”

My mother sliced the cake, and Nate ate a piece, then a second one. We were quiet because he was. He had worked with my father, that day, at the veterinary clinic, which my father had started asking him to do—to get him out of the Airstream, my mother said. It bothered her and Dad that he spent so much time alone.

“Next year's birthday will be better, Nate,” Dad said. They were sitting at either end of the table. Our kitchen and dining room were combined into one rectangle, with yellow walls and a wood floor.

“Better in what way?” Nate said.

“Let's hope in every way.”

“You might have a new girlfriend next year,” Damien said.

“I might,” Nate said. “I might have one who likes me better.”

“How come Jody didn't?” Damien said.

“Don't ask personal questions,” Mom said.

“Sometimes girls don't like you back,” Nate said.

“What didn't she like about you?”

“I don't think it was any one thing.”

“Who did she like?”

“It was hard to tell.”

“Maybe nobody,” Damien said.

“Yes,” Nate said. “That's possible.”

N
ATE AND
D
AMIEN
and I cleaned up, despite my mother saying “Don't help, Nate. Really. It's your birthday. You shouldn't have to.”

He nodded his head slightly to signal that he had heard her. But he didn't pay attention. He filled the sink with water and got to work. He washed the dishes slowly and with concentration while I stood next to him, drying. He didn't talk at all. It was like he was a worker in a restaurant.

When he finished he got the broom from the closet and swept the floor. “Dog hair,” he said, as if that were our fault.

Instead of going back to the Airstream he got a beer and went outside with us. My father watched him drink it. Dad worried that we were going to become alcoholics someday, since he had been one, or, as he put it, still was one; he went to AA meetings twice a week. He was often warning us about it.

“I appreciate your spending time with us tonight,” Dad said to Nate. Dad was in a patio chair, and Nate was cross-legged on the concrete, a few feet away.

“Are you being sarcastic?” Nate said.

“I'm being serious.”

“I can't always tell,” Nate said.

“Am I usually sarcastic with you? Is that what you think? Maybe you misinterpret my tone.”

“Everybody hears things differently,” Nate said.

“I don't intend to be sarcastic, Nate. Intention has to count for something.”

“Maybe so,” Nate said.

“We're together for your birthday,” Mom said. “I'm glad for that.”

Nate drank his beer without looking at us. It was almost dark by then. He hadn't been this quiet a person before now. He used to talk in rushes. He would get on what my father would call a rant about one thing or another—usually some philosophical subject, such as how you
should live your life away from the crowd, or why you should be suspicious of anything that managed to find its way into print. His quietness used to come only at intervals. But now it had taken over. We were all sitting right there near him, but it was as if he were sitting there alone.

L
ATER
, I
WENT
with the dog in the direction of Billy's mother's house. She and Billy's father were divorced, and Billy and his sister lived with their mother during the week and with their father on the weekends. His father lived a mile away, near Black Canyon Creek, in a house that had an open feel to it. He was more or less a hippie. Billy and his sister could do what they wanted within reason, and so could I, including drinking. “One apiece,” his father had told us last Saturday. “Any more and the two of you will be drunk on your asses.”

We were sitting outside, watching his father teach Dennie how to run hurdles. There was something hilarious about it. I came close to telling Billy about what was going on with Nate. Billy had seen Nate's pickup more than once. He had asked about it. I pictured myself telling him to see the look on his face and so that we could make jokes about how weird the situation was.

But in the end I didn't tell him. I knew I couldn't. If I hadn't been used to keeping things to myself, it would have been harder. But I had always been the kind of person to listen and not say a lot.

Pete started lagging behind, and I walked him back. The moon was rising, and it created a milky path across our property. When we passed the Airstream I could hear Nate's television going, as I always could at night and early in the morning. Nate kept it on all the time. He had always been that way. He couldn't sleep without company. He was lonely in some way I didn't understand.

chapter twelve

SAM RUSH

P
AUL
B
OWMAN WAS
a broad man in suspenders, with deep-set eyes and a fleshy face, who had had a heart bypass in January, his wife told me, and was trying to quit smoking. But he smoked as I sat with them in their kitchen in Winslow. Mary Bowman, who was short and big-breasted, with bright blue eyes, made coffee.

“We hardly knew the girl,” Bowman said, “but here's what I can tell you. She responded to an ad we put in the paper, and I met her there, at the house. It's about five blocks north of here. She asked if I could reduce the rent by $50, and I said no, and she said she'd think about whether or not she could afford it and let me know. Meanwhile I came home and told my wife and she said . . . well, she can tell you herself what she said.”

“I knew her mother a long time ago,” Mary Bowman said. “We used to run into each other at the Laundry Mat.” She smiled. “That's what it's called. You can see the name for yourself on the side of the building. Anyway, we each had a small child, and we talked about them, how tiring it was, how you feared they'd hurt themselves. Lisa Farnell was younger than I was, and there was something sad about her
and I could never figure out what. Then years and years later, when I heard she was into the drugs, I thought, well, that sadness must have taken her there.”

“You're getting off the subject,” her husband said.

“Yes. I do that,” she said to me.

“The point is,” Bowman said, “that Mary told me to lower the rent, so I did.”

“You argued with me first,” Mary said.

“True. But I told Jody she could have the house for $350 instead of $400, utilities included, and she thanked me for that. She said it would help.”

“She didn't want to move in with her mother,” Mary said. “There were the drugs, and the fact that her mother's trailer was too small for two people, let alone three, if you include the child Jody was due to get back.”

“You spoke to Jody yourself?” I said. “And she told you this detail about the child?”

“Yes. Once, when she came by to pay the rent. Generally I don't get to know the tenants. We have three other rentals, and Paul is the one who keeps them up and rents them out. I just do the bookkeeping. Anyway, I spoke to her only that one time, and that was what she told me.”

“We weren't here the night she was killed,” Bowman said. “You know that already. We had left on our trip a few days before that, and we didn't hear about the murder until our neighbor called and said a Navajo County deputy sheriff was looking for us. Where was it we were the night she was killed, honey?” he asked his wife.

“Albuquerque.” Mary rummaged through a drawer and handed me a receipt from a Comfort Inn. “Our daughter lives in Amarillo, and
we visit as often as we can. She has three little girls. I keep saying to Katie, ‘Move back here so we can see more of you and the children.' But there's Roy, who doesn't want to come back, even though he could get a job in Flagstaff. He's got something against us.”