The Quiet Streets of Winslow (23 page)

Toward the end of the meal I asked her how married life was, and she said, “Good. Interesting, actually,” and that she and her husband were expecting a child in seven months.

“We're both a little on the old side for this,” she said, “but what's too old, really, since we got started so late?”

“The next time you feel old,” I told her, “remind yourself that you're ten years younger than I am.”

After court that afternoon, on the drive back to Black Canyon City, I wondered if I could have made myself sound any more self-pitying than I had.

I
T WAS NINE
that night before I was able to reach Wes Giddens, that is, Joe Weneka. After I identified myself there was a moment before he said anything. Then he told me that he knew of Jody's death.

“I read the Winslow newspaper online once a week,” he said, “and learned of her death three days after it happened.”

He was shocked, he said, and he was sorry, but he hadn't known Jody well to start with, and he had not known she had moved to Chino Valley, nor that she had moved back to Winslow. He had not wanted to stay in touch with her. Back then, back when he had known her, she had been in more trouble than he knew. Drugs and so forth. And she had never tried to find him, not that he was aware of.

“How is it you're aware now about her move to Chino Valley?” I asked him.

“It was in the newspaper article.”

“Was it?” I said.

“Maybe not in the first article. But there were follow-ups.”

“You remember where you were the night of April 24?”

“In a night class of twenty students at Cater Hall,” he said, and he supplied me with the course number, the room number, and the name and phone number of the professor.

In response to my questions about Hannah he said that he had a babysitter for her and was planning to homeschool her. She had developmental difficulties.

“Well, you can imagine,” he said. “You've probably spoken to Alice Weneka. Hannah was born with health issues.”

“What makes you think I've spoken to Alice Weneka?” I said.

“The fact that you were trying to locate me,” he said. “It would make sense that you would have contacted her.”

“What kind of developmental problems does Hannah have now?”

“It's hard to know where to start,” he said. “Balance. Motor coordination. Language problems. She didn't start talking until she was almost four. That's just some of it.”

“Yet you don't have special help for her?”

“The babysitter is a student at the university,” he said. “That's her field, child development.”

“Can you give me her name and phone number?”

“Well, I could, I suppose, but Hannah doesn't have anything to do with Jody being killed. I mean, Hannah was far in the past, for Jody.”

“In a murder investigation you never know what will be important,” I said. “When questions arise you need answers to them, and here's what puzzles me. I haven't seen a picture of this child since she was three months old. Alice Weneka said that you've never brought Hannah to see her, nor did she seem troubled by that. That seems odd to me.”

“I figured Alice told you—I needed a new start,” he said. “As for pictures, well, I guess we just had so many other concerns, with Hannah.”

“Still,” I said, “it seems unusual.”

There was a pause.

“Jody wouldn't have hurt Hannah,” he said, “if that's what you're thinking. Not deliberately, anyway, not any more than she had
already, during the pregnancy. And I certainly wouldn't have. Nobody would have.”

“I don't believe a crime has been committed, Mr. Weneka, where Hannah is concerned. It's Jody's murder I'm investigating. I'm just wondering if there isn't something you—both you and Alice—are holding back from me.”

“I could fax you a picture, if that's what you need to see.”

“I don't believe a picture would do it, Joe,” I said. “How would I know it's Hannah? What I need is a reasonable explanation for why nobody has seen this child in years. And why you don't want to give me her babysitter's phone number.”

There was a long silence.

“You might want to talk to Alice,” he said.

“I have talked to Alice. I'm fairly sure that's not going to get me anywhere.”

“Maybe you should speak to her again,” he said.

“After the two of you speak to each other? Is that what you're saying?”

“I mean . . . well . . . maybe. But not because we're trying to tell you the same made-up story. It's not like that.”

“Why then?”

“Because we both know the truth.”

“So why can't you just tell me? Why so much mystery?”

There was silence again.

“Because I don't want to, and I don't have to. And that's my right.”

chapter thirty-four

NATE ASPENALL

I
DON'T KNOW WHY
I went on the Reservation. Maybe I expected something to happen there, some kind of transformation. Nate among the Navajos, the Hopis, the Apaches, if there were any Apaches. Maybe I thought they would see something in me, something white people couldn't see. Or that in a place like Low Mountain or Square Butte or Blue Gap, whose names I was drawn to, I would see my life more clearly and something would wake up in me. But I was just a tourist. I didn't belong, even though I was attracted to the quiet and the openness and felt like a foreigner in my country, as they probably did. I was looking for any reason to form a connection, to not feel left out, as I had on the university campus in Flagstaff. And when I couldn't make a connection something started coming apart in me.

The only person I talked to was a girl at a jewelry stand in Caliente, a soft-voiced girl with long hair and a turquoise necklace. There was a baby on the ground beside her, and that affected me, seeing what amounted to a Jody and a Hannah. Well, what did I expect to find but my own life in all that empty space, on those two-lane roads, in those long vistas? What was I doing there anyway, and why had I spent the
night in Flagstaff? In part I had a hangover, but that wasn't all of it. I was separating—coffee from cream, oil from water. I felt as if I was not in control of what I was doing, even though I was driving, keeping my truck between the lines. It's not an easy feeling to put into words.

I drove through Kykotsmovi and Hotevilla, then back through Second Mesa up to Polacca and Keams Canyon, Jeddito and Steamboat Canyon and Burnside Junction. There wasn't a lot to see: mobile homes and concrete houses, a gas station, a black-and-white horse grazing, a cow or two, a child on a broken swing set. I looked at everything I was driving past and tried to figure out what was going on with me. The separation was between a Nate I thought I knew and a Nate I knew just well enough not to trust. Somehow I was newly aware of that, though it seemed to have always existed. But who these Nates were or weren't didn't seem to be the problem. The problem was the distance between them—that they didn't know each other, that they didn't seem to
be
each other. It was frightening but in a remote way, like watching your house burn down and thinking you were in it, but knowing you couldn't be or else you couldn't be seeing it.

I was driving with my windows open to the hot wind and the blue-sky emptiness. It helped that I had to keep my hands on the wheel and pay attention. I had the road to myself most of the time, but each time I saw a vehicle coming toward me, I thought for a second that they were about to come into my lane. They weren't, and I think I knew that, but what was the difference between what seemed and what was? Sentences like that came into my head, and I felt that I was skirting the edges of the subject. I was watching myself trying to keep together what was coming apart. I turned on the radio, and when a voice came on, talking in a different language, I grew calmer. You're all right, Nate, I
told myself, whichever Nate you are. It helped me to find humor in it. But there was truth in it, too, in the sense that nothing catastrophic had happened. In that sense I was the same as I had always been.

Then I started thinking, What is Jody doing? Where is she, and who is she with? The anger I had felt in the motel room came back to me, and I thought about the landlord, Wes Giddens, the man knocking on her window, Mike Early, the truck driver Carla Kirby stole from her, even the long-ago boyfriend who watched her dance on a stage. She might be with two at once, for all I knew, and suddenly I had an erection and felt like a pig. A minute later I recalled her trying on rings at La Posada, when she had not expected me to buy her one. Despite the number of men who desired her, not many had been kind to her. She was not a girl who expected much from the world.

There was a sense of unreality to the fact that I had asked her to marry me. It was as if I had done it through a puppet of Nate on my knee. The fact that she hadn't given me an answer was what was causing me unrest. That was what I decided. Uncertainty leaves you hanging, Lee used to say. You'll be all right if you stick to a plan. I didn't have a plan. But I thought that as soon as I saw Jody again I would settle down. I would feel like myself, or to be more specific, I would feel
inside
myself. For the first time I wanted to be inside myself more than I wanted to be inside her. It was funny, but I didn't laugh.

I turned around and drove back to Second Mesa, then south on Highway 87 toward Winslow. There was a dead cat in the road, and I remembered Sandra saying, Just sleeping, whenever we passed a dead animal on the highway. I used to wonder how they could sleep with all those cars and trucks speeding by, and how, in the case of one coyote we saw, it could still be alive when its head was squashed, and when
I asked Sandra, she said, “Animals are not like us, honey. They have magic qualities,” and I said, “Bullshit, Mom,” perhaps the only time I didn't call her Sandra. For some reason that memory came back to me. The magic and the real and how we boomeranged from one to the other. If I cross my fingers, my dog won't die. Or everything dies and I can't stop seeing it. That was how people were, at the extremes, anyway. Luckier people managed to stay in the middle.

Halfway to Winslow I saw the Painted Desert Overlook sign and turned in at the arrow. There was a long, wide parking lot, perhaps seventy feet in length, with a steep drop-off to the west. I stood at the edge, next to my truck, looking at the mauves and pinks and golds of the plateaus. It was an unusual sight, in that you couldn't see any of it from the highway. There was both the beauty and the unexpectedness of it, which took me out of myself. Whatever I was going through with Jody, I was small. I was insignificant. Then I turned toward my truck and saw the orange Corolla and the white pickup parked side-by-side perhaps thirty feet north of where I stood. I knew who they belonged to. I knew both vehicles well. Jody's was empty. Mike Early was sitting in his truck with his window open, facing the view. I could see him distantly but clearly.

I didn't have to get closer to have an idea of what they were doing. And if I was right, I was being been made a fool of, for which I hated them as well as myself. But I didn't know for sure. I had had those sexual thoughts not long before, an erection and so on; my mind was overactive. I knew nothing, really. I was just wrought up, I told myself.
Wrought up
was what Sandra used to say. I would come home from school—who knew what had happened. Something small, usually, a remark a kid had made. Apparently I used to get into that state.

I drove to the other end of the long parking area and backed my truck into a space. I was thinking that if Mike Early drove out first, I could talk to Jody, and she could explain that she had been asleep on his lap, or that she hadn't been in his truck at all, but walking out to the plateaus beyond where I could see, or that she had been in the wooden building that housed the restrooms. She could explain that she and Mike had gone to the overlook to talk, the way they used to talk in Chino Valley. Mike had a sister in Snowflake, I knew. He sometimes went to see her. Jody, in Winslow, would simply have been on his way. Any of those possibilities were just as likely as the sexual interpretation I had made.

Had I seen more in Mike Early's truck? Had I seen strands of Jody's hair lifted by the wind? No, I told myself. I couldn't have, not from that far. She and Mike Early were friends; that was all. Jody was too afraid to have feelings for any man. That was the thought that came to me, unasked for. Because I had known, almost from the day I had met her, that she was afraid, so afraid that she liked to get as close as she could to the worst thing that could happen. She didn't know how else to feel brave. I can't say how I knew that about her. Her fear wasn't visible, but it had symptoms I was aware of, even if I couldn't say what they were.