Read Online The Quiet Streets of Winslow by Judy Troy - Free Book Online Page B

possible that a lot of men did some version of what I was doing. As for women, I didn’t know. My experience was limited to two. The first girl I met in college, and the second I met at the Chino Valley Recreation Center, which was what people like me, who frequented it, called the Highway 89 Tavern, on Havasu Boulevard. The first girl started seeing somebody else, and the second girl, who was from the Philippines, ended up returning to the husband who had mail-ordered her. I used to call the second one after she stopped seeing me. I thought we could continue as friends, if nothing else, unrealistic as that was, needy as that might have seemed to an outsider. I called after she asked me not to. I called until her husband answered her phone and said, “Never call this number again.”
    I wasn’t in love with her or with the first girl either. I didn’t care for either of them that much. But at least I got to have sex. I got to hold somebody. I got to belong to that club of which everybody else seemed to be a member.
    O N THE FIRST Sunday in January, Jody stayed up with me to watch a meteor shower. We sat on the picnic table, wrapped in blankets; the temperature was near freezing. The moon was shining, and the stars were glittering. We put our heads back, watching one meteor then another carry out its short fall, its flash out of existence.
    â€œJust bits of dust and rock burning up as they enter the atmosphere,” I told Jody.
    â€œI thought they were stars, Nate,” she said. “I thought I was seeing planets and moons disappear.”
    She was shivering—we both were—and when we went inside I followed her to bed and got in with her. It seemed natural, cold as we both were. I thought she would see that, somehow, know what I was thinking, know me well enough by then to trust me. Maybe I was testing that trust, or maybe I was just being myself for a change, not twisting myself out of shape in order to put her needs over mine. You didn’t always have to have a reason to do what people were meant to do as physical beings, as creatures of the natural world.
    â€œWhy are you doing this, Nate?” she said.
    â€œTo warm you up, and myself, too. No more than that.”
    â€œI don’t want you to.”
    â€œJust for a few minutes, Jody.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI won’t touch you,” I said. “Look. I’m not touching you now.”
    â€œI don’t care. I don’t want you this close.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œI just don’t,” she said. “Not now anyway. Maybe someday but not at this minute.”
    What choice did I have? But as I disappeared behind the partition I knew as a certainty that she would have said yes if there had been something to gain by letting me stay, or if I were the kind of man who had expected a yes from the beginning and behaved as if I had. I could feel that from her. It was possible that to her I hardly existed.
    In the morning she had a headache and a temperature. She took aspirin and drank tea with whiskey. It’s medicine, she told me. Watch a Western, Nate. That’s what they used it for.
    She was sick for three days—the flu, I suppose it was. Her temperature went higher than I thought it would and I waited on her—made hersoup, cooled her forehead with a wet washcloth, as my mother used to do with me. That soothed her and made her open up to me. She told me about Winslow and how it happened that she got pregnant.
    Wes Giddens had worked at Vince’s Auto Repair, she said, down the street from the high school. She would see him as she walked past, this nice-looking, part-Navajo young man who was saving up money to go to college. She would say hello to him, get him talking. He didn’t want to go out with her because she was in high school, but he did finally. She talked him into it. It was her idea to have sex, not his. He had resisted at first, which had made him all the more