The Quiet Streets of Winslow (11 page)

Halfway into December Jody and Carla Kirby happened to work the same shift and had an argument over who was going to wait on a certain man, a truck driver, who tipped well. He was put in Jody's
section, Jody said, but Carla had come running over to say a big, loud hello, one arm going around his shoulder. Jody told me all this in detail. He said, “I'll have the BLT, honey, with fries,” and Carla said to Jody, “Well, I might as well go ahead and get this,” and Jody said, “Why should you? He's in my section,” and Carla did anyway, and that was the end of their friendship. Jody said that Carla had cut the cord between them, and when Jody walked into the RV that afternoon she said, “I couldn't wait to get out of there. I just wanted to come home to you.”

That meant a lot to me, and I wasn't sorry about the way it happened. I had not liked the bond they had formed; I don't think most men would have. But I didn't expect Jody to have so much difficulty losing her. Jody cried over it, said it reminded her of when a friend in middle school had moved to Nevada and never called or emailed. Just disappeared, Jody said. I didn't point out that it wasn't like that at all, that Carla hadn't disappeared, and that Jody could have let Carla wait on that trucker, and she and Carla could have remained friends. Why was it so important for Jody to wait on him, anyway? Just how much did that trucker mean to her? But I didn't want to be critical, especially when Jody seemed lost over the end of the friendship—not just lost but distraught, as in overly so. I tried to think of what might distract her.

“Let's go to the Humane Society and get a dog,” I said. This was close to Christmas.

Jody had had one as a child, and I had had one as well, and naturally I liked the idea of Jody and me adopting one together.

“Really?” Jody said. “That would be all right with you?”

It was a chilly, gray afternoon, and as we drove there we discussed whether to choose a small dog or a large one, a male or female, and
so on, and we came up with a list of names. But once we were at the shelter Jody got a glimpse of the dogs in cages, looking at us as their one hope, she said, their only way out, and she couldn't bring herself to choose one and leave the rest behind. It seemed unfair, she said. It seemed unfeeling.

In the parking lot she said, “Let's get as far from here as we can,” and we drove into the mountains, all the way down to Kirkland and west to Bagdad, where snow started falling—big flakes as if the sky were weeping big tears, Jody said. I drove carefully, with Jody sitting close to me. She wouldn't wear a seat belt. It didn't matter how many times you asked her to. She gave a reason: in such-and-such a place somebody was killed in an accident because they were trapped in a seat belt. I told her it probably happened one time out of a hundred thousand, but she said no, it had to have happened a lot more than that, or else she wouldn't have heard of it. Anyway, she didn't want to wear one, and I couldn't make her, but I liked her sitting close; in that respect I didn't mind.

In Bagdad we pulled into the parking lot of the Mountain Tavern and stood in the snow, feeling it on our faces, opening our mouths and tasting it. Then we went inside and drank until we were warm and drunk, and we danced to Willie Nelson on the jukebox, even though I didn't know how to dance. But when you wanted something badly enough, you didn't have to know how. That was how love came into existence. Maybe that was how every important thing did.

I
JUST WANTED
to come home to you
. I couldn't forget her saying that—the words, her voice, her expression. To me it proved that she knew she had a home with me. She could have driven home to me every
night of her life, and I mean even if she never slept with me. Looking back, I believe I would have accepted that, if I had had to. I like to think I would have. Nobody understands that about men, about some men, and I don't mean men who don't care about sex because all men care about it and want it and fantasize about it. I mean men like me, who wouldn't settle for a girl other people might think was a more realistic choice—a girl not so pretty, a girl who saw the world as you did, a girl who wanted you. Granted, there weren't a lot of those around for me. Nonetheless I was aware of what I was choosing.

There was a day in my childhood when Lee and Sandra took me to the playground and I climbed up the big slide and saw them below me, Lee to the left and Sandra to the right, and I thought about jumping. Maybe I was trying to bring them together, not that I could have known that at the time; maybe I wanted to get away from them. Maybe I was having that impulse to jump that a lot of people have. Or maybe it was a thought that meant nothing at all except, wow, jumping was one of the possibilities that existed for you at the top of a slide.

But everything changed when I had that thought, when I saw that you could do something weird, something crazy, something nobody else would understand. That had to be true for everybody, I thought. It was a mistake to think that you weren't like other people. Nobody was special. Nobody was any more or less entitled to love the wrong person than I was.

chapter seventeen

TRAVIS ASPENALL

“J
ODY WAS UNDER
the bed, Travis. She was dead but she was moving her hands.”

I turned on the light so that he could see me checking. Damien wouldn't take your word for anything.

“A pair of socks are under there,” I said, “but that's it, and they're not moving.”

He had his head over the side of the bed, making sure.

“We didn't know her,” I said. “Don't think we did, Damien. We saw her once, when she was alive, but that was all.”

“But we saw her dead.”

“Doesn't count,” I said.

From the hallway we heard Pete coming down the hall, back into the room with us. Now that he was older he slept on the braided rug between our beds. He couldn't jump onto Damien's bed anymore.

“There's Pete,” Damien whispered, and I went back to bed and heard Damien's breathing slow down and mine slow down with it. I knew from science class that we were all physiologically affected by each other. Yawning was contagious; nobody knew why. And when
girls hung out with each other, they got their periods at the same time. Placebos were another example. If you believed something was working, your body could respond as if it were working.

Then there was genetics—not just blue eyes or brown eyes but tendencies to be a certain kind of person: good, bad, kind, evil, whatever, if there were such a thing as evil. There was research done on twins who had not grown up together. There was a lot to discover, still. Similarities in brain chemistry lead to similar personalities, similar likes and dislikes. Then there were studies done on the differences between the genders—what was inborn and what was learned. In what ways did our brain chemistries differ? How much choice was involved in what we felt and thought? Why were we so different from each other?

I heard my parents getting ready for bed and the wind rise outside. In the spring the wind blew down hard at night from the Bradshaws. I looked at the shadows on the wall and thought about the five-sided house Harmony lived in on Wanda Drive. I had ridden my bike past often enough to know which room was hers. I had seen her through the window, in front of the mirror, brushing her hair, and I had hung around on my bike longer than I should have, given how bad it would have looked to her parents if they had seen me. I rode my bike around and around the block almost until dark, so that watching her was like watching a movie. She was sitting on her bed by then, with her iPod in her lap. I was hoping she would change her clothes, while I was watching, take off her top and change into a sweater. It was getting cold out by then. Instead her mother came to the doorway, and Harmony followed her out of the room and the movie was over.

I had done things with girls, not as much as Billy had, but probably more than Harmony knew. In the fifth and sixth grade girls used to call
me. I hardly knew why, at first. That aspect of my life was easier than I had thought it would be. The girls I ended up doing things with were more into me than I was into them. I wouldn't think about it much, after. Then they'd be mad; I wasn't paying enough attention to them, and I would feel like a jerk for a while until the next girl came along. I didn't feel good about that, but I didn't feel as bad as somebody else might have. Now there was Harmony, and I wasn't on such safe ground.

“Travis,” Damien said in his sleep. “I lost my shoe in the circus tent. Tell Dad to come build a bridge.”

I heard a sound from outside that wasn't the wind, and I went into the kitchen and looked out the window and saw that Nate was on the patio with a screwdriver in his hand, tightening the bolts on my mother's glider. She had mentioned it once. Nate was in jeans and boots, without his shirt on. I hadn't realized how skinny he was, how much weight he had lost in the little bit of time he had been here, or maybe before that. We hadn't seen him in some time. He hadn't wanted us to visit, and now we knew that it was because Jody Farnell had moved in with him. He had told my father that. She had been living in a motel, when we met her. He didn't say why he hadn't wanted us to know. Just that she had been sharing his RV, and then she had moved to Winslow, where she was from.

Nate sat in the glider, pushing himself back and forth on it with his foot. Then he was on his hands and knees with WD-40, oiling the springs. Next he stood on a chair and straightened out my mother's wind chime, which had tangled in the wind, and after that I watched him put the WD-40 on the patio table, next to the pliers, and then slowly and carefully climb to the top of the ridge behind our house. He stood with his arms out to either side as if they were the wings of a
hawk. The sky was starry and the moon was above him. Then he put his arms down and looked in the direction of the wash where we had found Jody. You could see a long way, from where he was, all the way to where we had found her. He looked for a long time, as if he could see her.

Then he climbed down from the ridge and stood in the clearing between our house and the Airstream. His arms were hanging loose at his sides. His head was bent down. I thought about going out there to let him know somebody was watching. It seemed so private, what he was doing, even though he wasn't doing anything. But he was heading to the Airstream with slow steps. He went inside and closed the door.

chapter eighteen

SAM RUSH

J
ODY
F
ARNELL'S 2001
Corolla was discovered on Bucket of Blood Drive in Holbrook, which was thirty miles east of Winslow. The Navajo County deputy sheriff who called me with the information said, “Odd, isn't it? The car left on that particular road? Makes you think it had to be intentional.”

He had found the car himself, he told me, pretty much by accident. The Toyota was undamaged, with the license plate removed. In the back seat was a red sweater, a small pillow, a brown microfiber blanket, and a brochure from La Posada hotel in Winslow. What appeared to be a small, hand-drawn map, in pencil, without street names, was in the compartment between the front seats. A destination on the map was marked with a small, hard-to-make-out symbol. In the glove compartment was the Toyota manual, and under the driver's seat, crumpled, was a cash receipt for a night's stay, the night of April 23, at the Old Route
66
Western Motel, in Flagstaff. And that was it. No blood, no signs of a struggle, no fingerprints, no cell phone, no purse, no journal.

“You'd expect to find the victim's fingerprints, obviously,” said the deputy sheriff. “But they were only on her belongings. The car itself
was wiped down well, whoever did it. I mean inside and out. Yet that receipt and the map were left there.”