The Quiet Streets of Winslow (5 page)

That was how Jody was—naive and a little unintelligent. And maybe, for reasons I didn't understand, she looked for trouble. Plus she knew how to utilize her looks. She'd adjust her smile depending on the kind of man she was waiting on. I would tell her, “You don't have to make a prostitute of yourself to make a living,” and she would say, “It's not called being a prostitute. It's called being a waitress.” When it came to that subject and many others, I would try and explain my point of view to her, which she wasn't interested in hearing. If my thoughts didn't agree with hers, she was certain I was wrong. She just assumed it. It was irritating, as it would have been for anybody. I was smarter than she was, and she couldn't see it. But I was also sorry for her because of it. It was complicated, how we were with each other. I could never simplify it to myself.

She was sad a lot of the time. If we were having a rum and Coke together, she would start to talk about Hannah and want more to drink so that she could feel sadder still—that was how it seemed to me. She
told me about her mother becoming an addict, and about how she—Jody—started stealing a few pills, then a few more. She told me about her father leaving them for a woman who ended up trying to stab him at a Burger King with a plastic knife. Jody would laugh when she got to that part of the story, then she would cry when she got to the ending, which was that a year after the woman abandoned her father, her father had a heart attack and died and four days went by before anybody found him. Four days, she said.

I tried to respect Jody's emotions even if that meant forgetting my own. I asked her how she felt and pretended to listen to the long answers. Sometimes resentment dug a hole in me, and it was difficult not to fall into it since I used to do all right, living by myself—not happy, but not lonely. It's the crowd that makes you lonely. I was all right with the life I had, not expecting more, not mourning what I didn't have or hadn't had in the past. But most of the time, with Jody, I sidestepped resentment and was kinder to her than anybody else had been. And I tried to teach her things.

Ernest Sterling said that every moment of your life you should think about the fact that you weren't dead. Like when you were eating a hot dog or barreling down a highway, you should remember,
Life. I have it
, and not ask for anything more. When I said that to Jody she said she would kill herself, thinking that way. She would want to kill herself every minute; why would I put a thought like that in her head? She couldn't see that I was trying to help her. She couldn't see that there was another way to look at your life and another way to feel. It was like she refused to think deeply or use her imagination.

She had a childish side that pulled at you when she was sitting alone with her feet tucked under her, or when she was standing quietly
for a moment, at a window. You would wonder what her thoughts were and you would imagine what she was feeling, and for some reason you would lose track of the fact that you couldn't know. You couldn't know with anyone.

At night I was affected by the fact that she was sleeping behind a thin partition twelve feet from me. I would lie on the futon and masturbate like I used to at home when I was in middle school. If Jody was aware of what I was doing, she never said. It would have embarrassed both of us, and there wasn't that kind of closeness between us anyway. She didn't want it and maybe she didn't know how to do it and neither did I. It might not be enough to want to. You might have to make room for it in yourself, set aside some of you for some of it. Then you would have to get used to that new configuration. So I left Jody alone when it came to my sexual feelings. I was afraid of looking like one of those jerks who wanted things from her, and I thought that when she was ready she would come around to me. Only, the longer I waited the longer it didn't happen.

In the afternoon we sat together on the steps of the RV. Each RV was set into a private island of eucalypts and pine. Beyond the trees you could see the narrow, white-gravel roads that wound through the park. They were like paths in a fairy tale, Jody said, like you'd expect them to take you someplace good. Her hair was longer then, falling to her shoulders. It was soft and dark against her white sweatshirt. We would watch the light dying, and if Jody was cold, she would say, “Put your arms around me, Nate,” and we would sit that way. We would sit that way long past sunset.

chapter eight

TRAVIS ASPENALL

N
OBODY COULD HAVE
predicted it, my father said, that much rain in April—enough for Tonto Creek to flood with five families from Black Canyon City camping alongside it. Four children washed away. It was in the newspaper and on television; and in English class on Monday, when Mr. Drake read to us,
Stars, I have seen them fall, / But when they drop and die / No star is lost at all / From all the star-sown sky
, Selena Maynard started crying and it turned out that she used to babysit for one of those drowned children. Mr. Drake walked her down to the nurse's office. We were pretty much silent while he was gone. We didn't look at each other. Some people went so far as to look at their books.

“I wish I had never done anything with Selena,” Billy said to Jason and me after class. “Now I feel like a creep.”

“That's because you are a creep,” Jason said.

The three of us joked around all the time, but it wasn't like we didn't know we felt things.

In Honors Physical Science, third period, when we were supposed to be talking about the periodic table, we talked about global warming
instead—what the phrase meant and what some scientists said had caused it and what people on the other side of the argument said. Ms. Hanson said that she believed global warming was what was happening to the Earth, although it was impossible to prove, and that most scientists believed it, and Harmony Cecil said that the Earth was getting too small for the kinds of people who lived on it.

“What does that mean?” somebody in the back row said.

“Greedy people don't give a shit about whether the Earth is polluted,” Harmony told him.

“Does that sentence need a four-letter word?” Ms. Hanson said.

“I think it does,” I said, and Harmony smiled at me.

She sat in the window aisle in a blue shirt and a jean skirt, with a cuff bracelet on her wrist. She was wearing sandals and she slipped her feet out of them. Her toenails were painted a pinkish color. Her legs were bare and her skin was gold and smooth. I couldn't concentrate on what was happening to the Earth. I couldn't care about it. It was like Harmony was the wind pushing every other thought aside.

S
EVENTH PERIOD WAS
cancelled that afternoon, and we were asked to gather in the gymnasium. We didn't have to go, the principal said over the intercom, but it was an important decision and we should think about it before we decided. We should think about the meaning of community and what life would be like if everybody were self-interested instead of generous. So we all understood we had to go.

I sat in the bleachers with Harmony, making it look as if it had just happened, as if I had been headed in that direction anyway, and she said, “Oh, hey,” as if she hadn't suspected anything different. She was drawing a picture on her hand between her thumb and index finger,
of what looked like a spider web, then she looked down at the center of the basketball court, below us, where the principal and vice principal were standing with the counselor. The counselor started speaking into a microphone. He told us that when a sad and tragic thing has happened, people should come together. We should come together and think about those four children even if we hadn't known them, and we should think about their families.

“We're going to have three minutes of silence,” he said, “during which we can express our feelings silently in our own way.”

Most of us looked at the floor and waited for the time to be up, thinking our own thoughts. Mine were about how Jody Farnell had looked when Damien and I had found her. It's hard to describe what it's like, seeing a dead person. It's as if they're not inside their body anymore, and you try to imagine what they had been like alive and you can't, even though in my case I half-remembered Jody Farnell as a waitress. And as much as you don't want to keep looking at the body, you do; you can't help yourself. You're looking at how you're going to be one day. How everybody will. You're thinking, How can that be real? But it is real. It's in front of you. So you can't stop looking because you're trying to convince yourself.

When the three minutes of silence were up the counselor said that he and Ms. Deakin and Mr. Hollis would stay until five in case anybody wanted to talk to them privately. Hardly anybody did.

I
NSTEAD OF
H
ARMONY
and I getting on our buses, we called home, made excuses, and walked down to Byler's on Old Black Canyon Highway. We stood in the parking lot in the wind and sun, watching a dust devil spin and jump and skip far off in the desert. Then we got
take-out Cokes and walked up to High Desert Park and sat on a picnic table with our feet on the bench.

The interstate was below us, and to the west were the mountains. Between the park and the interstate was Community Cemetery, and we looked down at the gravestones, which seemed tiny from where we sat, miniature gravestones in a miniature cemetery. We made up sayings we wanted to have put on ours, such as,
Just Visiting
, which was mine, and
Looks Better with Makeup
, which was hers, even though Harmony didn't wear makeup as far as I could see. But Nate had told me that all girls wore it, that if they put it on well enough you could be fooled completely, which was the point of it. I used to believe most of what Nate told me, and I realized suddenly that I didn't anymore, and I wasn't sure when I had stopped.

“Are you afraid of dying?” Harmony asked me.

“No. Not really.”

“Me either. There's too many things to do first.”

“No kidding,” I said.

When I saw that she had said it seriously, I asked, “Like what?” and she said, “Well, stuff after high school, like going to college or whatever, but also some things now. Smaller things.”

We were sitting close enough that our shoulders were touching, and I took a chance and said, “I feel the same way,” and I put my arms around her and kissed her. At first I could tell that she hadn't done it much before, but soon it was as if she had always known how, and while I could have tried to do more, I didn't. I would wait for next time. I would give her time to hope I would.

I didn't know how long we had been there until I heard the cactus wrens and quail start up, the way they did early and late in the day, and
in the middle of kissing part of a poem from English class came into my mind: . . .
that time allows / In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
. I thought about telling Harmony. I wanted to show her that I remembered it word for word, that I was sensitive like she was, that I had a poetic soul or whatever, which I probably didn't, and which she probably knew. She was as smart or smarter than I was. It was safer to keep it to myself.

chapter nine

SAM RUSH

T
HE DAY BEFORE
Jody Farnell's landlord was due back in Winslow, I drove up to Flagstaff to the Hilton Inn where Jody had worked and spoke to the assistant manager, a heavyset woman with cropped hair. She knew of nobody problematic in Jody's life, although Jody had been overly chatty with the male clientele at first; the other maids had commented on it, felt she was doing it in order to receive tips. The assistant manager's take was that Jody was lonely, a little troubled, maybe, but well-meaning. She had a talk with Jody about it; that was all it took. Moreover one of the male guests turned out to be her uncle. “A big, white-haired man with glasses,” the assistant manager said. “I believe he stayed with us just the one time. That was back in March.”