The Quiet Streets of Winslow (30 page)

“But that's not real proof,” Paulette said quietly.

I
ARRIVED IN
Black Canyon City in the afternoon, stopped at the substation, and spent the rest of the day trying to catch up on the rest of my job. Then I had supper at the Rock Springs Café. I knew Audrey Birdsong was working. I had already checked for her car. Another frustration was not how I wanted to end the day.

“How are you, Sam?” she said.

“I've been better, actually,” I told her.

She brought me coffee and a menu and said, “The special's good. I can bring you a taste, if you want.” She was in jeans and a pink
KEEP BLACK CANYON CITY WEIRD
T-shirt. They used to sell those at Ron's Market. I was given one by Cy Embrick, and had never worn it. In the opinion of a law officer, anyway, Black Canyon City, like most small towns, was weird enough as it was.

“I'll have the special,” I said, “whatever it is. I'll take your word for it.”

She laughed. “That doesn't happen to me every day.”

“People taking your word for something?”

“A lot of people don't see you when you're a waitress,” she said. “I mean, not really see you. My theory is that if you're nobody, they get a chance to be somebody.”

“So you're an observer of human nature in here.”

“What else is there that's interesting?” She smiled and put her hair up; it was starting to fall out of its clip.

“Tell me about being a pretty woman,” I said. I felt my face color. I had not meant it to come out exactly that way. “I'm not saying it as a compliment,” I told her, “or not just as a compliment.” Embarrassment again. “I just want to know, for the sake of a case I'm working on, why you might stay away from certain men. Not the obviously dangerous
ones, but the ones who seem attractive to you, at first, only you sense something and decide to say no to a drink or a date or what have you. What motivates turning them down? What is it you're afraid of happening?”

She slid into the booth and got thoughtful.

“That they won't let you say no to them,” she said.

“You mean rape?”

“No. I mean, that if you see them a few times and then don't want to anymore, they'll act as if you're not doing it, like they just won't believe it. Maybe because they feel like they can't survive it or something, and so they can't let it happen. I don't know. I'm trying to imagine what it's like inside their heads.”

“How would that translate into action?”

“Following you around, getting angry if they see you with somebody else. Getting violent, maybe.”

“Has that happened to you?” I said.

“Not to that extent. But I had boyfriends before I married Carl, and these days, well, you get hit on a lot, as a waitress. So do the others, especially the young ones, and I watch and listen and think about what I see.”

“Hit on,” I said. “I can imagine. You understand that when I—”

“You're in a different category altogether, Sam.”

Then she went to put in my order.

chapter forty-three

NATE ASPENALL

A
FTER
I
LEFT
the cemetery I drove on the Reservation, west through Dilkon and Bird Springs to Leupp, then southwest to Flagstaff. It was a long, dusty drive, with the San Francisco Peaks ahead of me looking rough and stark. Instead of getting on the interstate I wound my way through Flagstaff past a hilly park with gym equipment, where I stopped and sat, listening to starlings announce the end of the spring afternoon. Three children were on the playground while a mother watched, and in a grassy field behind the playground I could hear the shouts of boys kicking around a soccer ball. I had my cell phone on the seat beside me, turned off, and I left it off.

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.

T
HE
F
LAGSTAFF 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

“T
HE 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.