Empty Mile

CHAPTER 24

The next time I saw Gareth was the day before Marla moved into Empty Mile. Stan and I only had half a day’s work and after we’d finished I dropped him at Empty Mile and went back into town alone. Since my return to Oakridge there hadn’t been much of my time that wasn’t fraught with the stresses of trying to understand what was going on with my father, or Gareth, or Marla, or the Empty Mile land. And on this last day before Marla and I began living together I wanted an hour or two to myself, to grab a coffee, to gaze out of a café window.

I went to the Mother Lode in Old Town and was doing a pretty good job of not thinking about much when Gareth wandered in. He saw me right away and without bothering to order anything came quickly over and sat down across the table from me.

“Dude, you won’t believe it, we actually had a bunch of council assholes up at the lake today scoping things out. Wanted to discuss how we’d feel about restricted access on Lake Trail while they worked on the road! They still have to do what they call ‘canvassing the community’-some bullshit the eco-liberals stuck in to make sure the tree huggers are happy. But it’s movement, man, it’s movement!”

He clapped his hands and sat back grinning. It was only then that he noticed the stony look I was giving him.

“What’s the matter?”

“Wait here. I have to get something.”

I went outside to my pickup and got the two L-shaped brackets I’d stored in the glove compartment. Back in the café I dropped them on the table in front of Gareth.

“One’s from a tree in the forest at the lake, the other one your father gave to Stan when we were up at your place. They’re the same. The one I found on the tree was the one you fixed a camera to so you could film Marla and me while we fucked for Bill Prentice. I’ve seen the video.”

Gareth folded his arms. “Oh really? And where did you happen to stumble across that piece of cinema?”

“Bill’s cabin.”

“I wouldn’t have thought Bill would be showing it around.”

“He wasn’t home at the time.”

“You naughty boy.”

“I know you set the whole thing up.”

“Courtesy of Marla, no doubt.”

“I figured it out myself.”

“Bullshit.”

“She told me you forced her into it, you prick.”

“Oh, come on, Johnny, we had all this out before. Don’t call me a prick. You abandoned her, she wouldn’t have started hooking otherwise. Just like you abandoned your father, just like you abandoned your brother. Call me a prick? Fuck, man, I’m an amateur next to you. I’d never walk out on my father.”

“But you’d destroy some guy’s life. Why? Because of the fucking road?”

Gareth smiled slyly, though he tried to hide it. “You know how important that road is to us. And you know how it affected my dad when it didn’t get built.”

“Bill’s wife killed herself watching that video.”

“That sounds a bit farfetched.”

“I saw the disk in her bedroom when we found her. It was in the machine.”

“Careless old Bill.”

“You really are a fucking psycho.”

“Look, I made the vid to get some leverage on the road. I gave Bill a copy to show him I could fuck him up if he didn’t play ball. And seeing how the council guys came around today, maybe he took the hint. If his wife found it, it isn’t my fault. She was going to kill herself one day, anyhow.”

“But you made it happen.”

“You wanted to fuck Marla, Bill wanted to watch. Marla’s dumb enough to be exploitable. Bill thinks with his dick. Everyone made it happen, man. I just filmed it.”

Gareth stood up.

“I don’t know why you don’t want to be friends, Johnny.

I’m trying my hardest.”

After he left I ordered another coffee and sat trying to figure out why I had the feeling something didn’t quite add up. In the end the closest I got was that the idea of Bill leaving such a disk where anyone could find it was ludicrous.

So much for turning off for a couple of hours.

Marla moved into Empty Mile on a Friday. She took a day off work and we ferried her things over in the pickup starting early that morning. We were finished by noon. We spent another few hours distributing her stuff around the cabin and when that was done we were all set to begin life as a newly created family.

In the early evening, too tired from moving furniture to be bothered with cooking, Marla and I decided to go into town for dinner. Stan had invited himself to eat at Rosie’s and didn’t come with us.

We went to a cheap place in Back Town and ordered steaks and a bottle of red wine. Marla talked about things we could do to the cabin and it seemed that the activity of the day, perhaps some notion of a fresh start, had lifted her spirits a little. I told her about my conversation with Gareth at the Mother Lode, how he’d admitted to making the video, but she asked me not to spoil the evening and steered the conversation back to ideas for a vegetable garden and whether or not it would be too expensive to build a deck.

We finished our food and stayed to drink the last of the wine and by the time we left the restaurant we were both relaxed and a little drunk. So when we bumped into Chris Reynolds on the street, hurrying to that night’s Elephant Society meeting, and he reminded us that we’d promised to attend, trying to talk our way out of it seemed not only rude, but also too much effort.

We signed the attendance log at the door of the hall. There were only five names before us and the lecture heading printed in red at the top of the page read, Geological Reengineering Through Topographical Catastrophe-Randolph Morris. Chris, who hovered around us for a few moments, digging membership forms out of the desk where the door woman sat, “just in case you want to consider it,” sighed in resignation as he looked about the mostly empty hall.

“Might not be the most exciting of meetings, I’m afraid.”

He wandered off to sit in the first row of a block of chairs that had been set up in front of a movable whiteboard. I looked at the woman behind the desk. She smiled and shrugged apologetically.

“Randolph’s already given his talk once this year. It’s his only subject. A lot of the members tend to skip it.”

Marla and I sat in the back row. With so few people the hall seemed overly quiet and a little sad, like something that had been passed by and was now only a place for people too out of touch to know better.

Chris Reynolds stood up in front of the whiteboard and began to go through the minutes of the last meeting. I listened for a while and tried to stay interested in the state of the Society’s finances, the plans for the next outing, some sort of communication from a sister society in Australia… but the wine and the tiredness from moving Marla’s furniture began to catch up with me and in the dim hall I found my attention drifting so that periodically I had to drag myself back from some hazy other-world where I had been aimlessly turning over the trivia of daily life-groceries to buy, calculating if I had enough gas to get home…

On one of these returns I saw that Chris Reynolds had been replaced in front of the whiteboard by a grizzled old guy who was pointing to parts of a diagram thrown against the board by an overhead projector. The diagram was a topographical map of some area and appeared to show a number of rivers winding between blobs of concentric altitude lines.

I guessed the guy was Randolph Morris and that we were now in the middle of the lecture so many of the Elephant Society’s members had stayed away from. He spoke without pause in a zealot-like tone, grinding out figures on the history of seismic upheaval, erosion and the localized collapse of geological features in area after area around the world and throughout the United States. His point seemed to be that occurrences like earthquakes and landslides had in some cases been responsible for altering the course of ancient rivers and that the riverbeds they’d left behind-what he called “tertiary rivers”-could still be found through geomagnetic surveys, aerial photography, and something known as “cesium vapor analysis.” Where a river that existed nowadays cut through one of these tertiary rivers there was a good chance that it would contain rich deposits of gold. In fact, Randolph asserted, many of the larger strikes during the Gold Rush could be explained in this manner.

I’d never heard of tertiary rivers before and the idea was interesting, but Randolph spoke in such a torrent of words and repeated himself so often that after a couple of minutes I found myself again wondering about what to buy at the store.

In the end I dozed off. When Marla nudged me awake Randolph and the other Society members were already filing out of the hall and Chris Reynolds was pushing the whiteboard into a corner. The lady at the door was gone. Marla and I went over to Chris and said goodbye. He smiled a little sheepishly and shook my hand.

“You’re welcome if you ever want to come back some other night.”

Marla and I were halfway across the hall when he called after us.

“Hey, Johnny, I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but there’s another plant company making the rounds, looking for business.”

“Yeah, Plantagion. I know about them.”

“The owner came into the Nugget Shooter a couple of days ago, tried to talk me into going with them. I told him I was happy with Plantasaurus.”

“Thanks. We’d really hate to lose anyone.”

“I figured. Funny thing, though, this guy-we talked for a bit, and because I hadn’t seen him around before I asked him how long he’d been in Oakridge. Turns out not long, moved here after his sister died.” Chris paused for a moment. “Guess who his sister was.”

I shrugged.

“Patricia Prentice. Bill Prentice’s wife. Funny who you meet, huh?” He gave a small wave and headed off toward the office at the back of the hall.

I asked Marla to drive us home. I sat in the passenger seat of the pickup with a rushing in my ears, as though some angry autumn storm blew privately around me. Everything suddenly made sense. The scene with Jeremy Tripp in front of our customers, the break-in at the warehouse and the destruction of our stock, the rival firm setting up in competition to us, even Marla’s enforced prostitution episode and eviction from her house.

These things hadn’t happened randomly. They weren’t unplanned. They hadn’t even happened, or at least not primarily, because Jeremy Tripp wanted to build a hotel on the warehouse land. These things had happened for an old-fashioned reason that you saw in movies and read about in books but never thought could possibly be part of your own life. These things had happened because of a desire for revenge.

Jeremy Tripp’s sister was dead, pushed to suicide by a video. And because Marla and I were the star performers he blamed us for her death. I was certain of it. Of course, that meant he had to know about the video. But being Pat’s brother meant he was also Bill’s brother-in-law, close enough for Bill to swallow whatever guilt he felt and share that piece of amateur pornography with someone who had the personality to seek retribution for what it had caused. I remembered the night I’d seen them through the window of Bill’s cabin watching something on the TV. I remembered the look of desolation on Bill’s face and the way the muscles about Jeremy Tripp’s jaw had clenched.

Jeremy Tripp believed we killed his sister and he was going to make us pay. But he wasn’t a hit man. He wasn’t a thug with a baseball bat. He was a corporate executive with a lot of money. When I first met him he’d talked about destroying someone, not physically hurting them, but destroying their entire life. And this is what he had begun to do to us. Get at Marla by kicking her out of her house. Get at both of us by hiring her as a prostitute and making me watch. Get at me again by attacking Plantasaurus, not because he cared if I suffered financially, but because he knew it would destroy Stan and by doing so hurt me worst of all.

Plantasaurus had not gone under yet. We had enough money, just, to buy replacements for the plants that had been bleached to death, but I knew we couldn’t take another hit like that without the business folding.

But there would be another hit. And another, and another after that, until Plantasaurus no longer existed. I’d seen the way Jeremy Tripp had fucked Marla, I’d seen him shoot the rabbit with his bow and arrow and leave it to scream through the night without a second thought, and I knew that he was a man who would not stop until he got the revenge he wanted. And I couldn’t let that happen to Stan. I couldn’t let something I’d done destroy his dream.

There was no point in telling Stan that Jeremy Tripp was Patricia’s brother, no need to make him even more worried about the future of Plantasaurus, so I didn’t mention the evening’s discovery to him when we got back to the cabin. But Marla and I discussed it as we lay in bed. Or rather I talked about it and she made noises in the right places-cursed when I suggested it was the reason she had lost her house, shook her head in disgust at the threat to Plantasaurus. But there was an underlying current of disinterest to her responses, as though she didn’t really want to engage. Eventually I called her on it.

“You don’t seem very worried.”

“I’m worried.”

“Come on. You’re lying there like I’m talking about football.”

“Johnny, it happened. Knowing he’s Pat’s brother doesn’t change anything.”

“It changes what’s going to happen. He’s going to keep at us until we’re completely fucked.”

Marla took a breath and said quietly, “Maybe it’s what we deserve. I do, anyhow.”

“We didn’t make the video. We don’t deserve anything. And Stan sure as shit doesn’t deserve to be punished. We have to stop Tripp doing anything else.”

Marla snorted. “He’s going to do whatever he wants.”

“Not if we take away his reason for doing it.”

“We can’t make him un-see the video, Johnny. We can’t make Pat be alive again.”

“I know that. But we can tell him we didn’t have anything to do with it.

“Good luck.”

“I have the brackets.”

“Like that’ll convince him.”

“It will if you tell him Gareth made you set the whole thing up.”

“I really don’t want to do that.”

“Why the hell not? We tell him about Gareth and Gareth becomes his target, not us.”

“Gareth’ll go psycho.”

“Gareth’s already psycho.”

“And he can tell the council about me whenever he wants. I’m not going to risk my job, Johnny. It’s the only thing of my own I have left.”

“Gareth said all that blackmail shit was over.”

Marla looked at me sadly and shook her head. “Nothing’ll ever be over with Gareth until someone kills him.”

“Well, you saw what happened to that rabbit. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“It’s not a joke, Johnny.”

I saw in her eyes how frightened she was and for a moment I had a flash of something inside her, as though behind her face there stretched a huge dark sea of experience, an expanse of past events that I knew absolutely nothing about.

“I know it’s not a joke. But unless you’re going to go out and buy a gun this is the only hope we have of getting Jeremy Tripp off our backs. Who knows what he’s going to do next? We have to give him Gareth. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to.”

Marla looked at me for a while without saying anything, then she turned over and pulled the covers up around her.

“Marla?”

“I’m going to sleep.”

I tried a couple more times to get her to respond, but she stayed silent and kept her back to me.

In the morning I got up early. The sun was coming in through the window and I was still tense from trying to figure out what was going on with Marla, why she wouldn’t support me about Gareth and Jeremy Tripp.

The door to Stan’s room was open and his bed was empty. I went outside and stood on the stoop and looked across the meadow. The sun had been up for a little while but the air was still cool from the night. From Rosie and Millicent’s house the almost subliminal sound of a radio threaded its way through an open window. It was tuned to a classical station and swelled or diminished as currents of air moved across the long grass.

Movement down at the bottom of the meadow caught my eye. Stan and Rosie were just disappearing into the corridor of trees that separated the land from the river. I would have left them alone to pursue whatever adventure Stan had dreamed up for them, or whatever lovemaking they might be snatching at the start of the day, but before the branches closed around them I saw that they were both carrying towels.

I stood there for several minutes wondering what this might mean. Water, a towel, Stan… In the end I stepped off the stoop and started down the meadow.

I entered the trees at the same point as Stan and Rosie and walked toward the river. As I neared it the stronger light beyond the trees made it possible to see through to the bright glitter of water. The shapes of two people moved there but they were hazed against the backlight and I could not make out what they were doing. I walked the last few yards softly and stopped, hidden by a bush where the riverbank began.

Stan and Rosie stood holding hands on a large flat rock that jutted out into the slow-moving water. They were both naked and in the morning light their bodies were luminous against the dark green of the leaves on the far bank. His, smooth and full and rounded, standing on solidly planted feet. Hers, very thin, back curving so that her chest and stomach seemed to be what was left after a larger body had been hollowed out. Both of them were very pale, though their arms and necks were brown from the summer.

There was a small sound of water moving, but along the whole length of Empty Mile the river was too broad to move quickly and I could easily hear what my brother and Rosie said to each other.

Rosie stood with her arms straight down by her sides and stared at the light on the water. After a while she said, “You don’t have to.”

“Johnny will keep feeling bad if I don’t.”

Stan inched forward until his toes curled over the edge of the rock. Rosie let go of his hand, took a step forward, pivoted on one foot, and fell backwards into the river. She rose spluttering a second later, wet and shining, rubbing her dark hair. The river was just below her waist.

“I hit my head.”

Stan started running on the spot, breathing heavily through his mouth. Rosie lifted her hand toward him. Stan stopped running and bent his knees. He took a breath and squeezed his eyes shut and froze.

From the water Rosie said, “It’s okay.”

And Stan leapt from the rock into the river.

He sank to his chest and immediately pushed himself upright, eyes and mouth wide open as though the water was so cold he couldn’t get his breath. He stayed that way for a moment, shocked into immobility, then his body relaxed and he smiled and smiled and smiled and ran the flat of his hand over the surface of the water.

“Wow.”

He looked at Rosie.

“Wow.”

Rosie looked down at herself and stroked drops of water from her breasts and said with her head bent, “The water rushing by takes your thoughts away with it.” She lowered herself until the water was up to her neck. “Your hair’s not wet.”

Stan moved so that he was in front of her and crouched down until he too had only his head above the water. He took a deep breath and pinched his nose and with his cheeks puffed out went under completely. Rosie did the same and for several seconds I could see only a patch of disturbed, coiling water where they had been. When they came up again I thought they might start laughing but they did not. They crouched in the river with the water moving about their shoulders, saying nothing, their eyes on each other. Stan reached out and touched the side of Rosie’s face.

I crept backwards until I was safely out of sight, then I turned and walked away and when I’d gone far enough I started to run, driving myself forward so that the branches of the trees tore my clothes and scratched my skin. When I was in the meadow again I stopped, panting, and in the sunlight and the space did the best I could to hold myself together.

What I had witnessed had been a monumental leap forward for Stan, of course, and I felt good that he had carved this achievement from the granite face of life. But there had been a terrible side to it too. Because he had not leapt into the water to overcome some damaged part of himself, but to overcome me and the guilt I felt, a guilt, it seemed, which was beginning to infect him with my own unhappiness.

I trudged back up the slope of the meadow. It wasn’t until I was almost at the cabin that I noticed Gareth’s Jeep parked beside my pickup.

In the house Marla sat stiffly on a hard wooden chair in the middle of the living area. Across the floor from her Gareth sprawled on the sofa. When he saw me he straightened impatiently as though I’d kept him waiting.

“You’re up early, Johnboy. Tendin’ them hogs?” He clapped his hands and sat forward. “Right… I’ve been thinking about our conversation in the Mother Lode. I think we need to clarify where we all stand.”

As he said this he shot a look at Marla and I saw her sag. Then he looked at me and winked.

“Shouldn’t take long. Stand up, Marla.”

I’d been poised just inside the front door and I took a step into the room. “What the fuck are you doing? Don’t order her around.”

Marla stood up. She stared emptily at the floor and wouldn’t look at me. I tried to catch her eye.

“Marla, sit down.”

She didn’t move.

“Marla.”

She spoke tiredly then, without looking up. “Let’s just get it over with.”

“Get what over with?”

From the couch Gareth said matter-of-factly, “Marla has a very good idea of the way things are supposed to operate. And what I’m hoping is, that she’ll be able to convey some of that to you, Johnny. Take your top off, Marla.”

“You fucker!” I charged across the room, grabbed Gareth by the front of his shirt, and hauled him upright. Before I could hit him, though, I felt Marla’s hands on my shoulders, pulling me away.

“Johnny, stop. Stop it!” She jammed herself between me and Gareth and pushed me back a few paces. “I told you he wouldn’t stop.”

She kept her hands on me until she was satisfied I wasn’t going to move, then she turned around to face Gareth and pulled the T-shirt she was wearing quickly up over her head and dropped it on the floor.

She wasn’t wearing a bra and her small breasts looked pale and vulnerable. I could feel how much she wanted to cross her arms over them. Gareth looked levelly at me and shook his head like I had let him down.

“You two brought this on yourselves, you know. Take off the pants.”

“I don’t have anything on underneath.”

“We’ll be finished quicker then, won’t we? Take them off.”

Marla undid her sweat pants angrily and stepped out of them. “Are we done?”

“Lie on your back and spread your legs.”

“What?” There was a small tremor in Marla’s voice.

I took a step toward her, but she held up her hand. I turned my attention to Gareth. “You fucking prick. Why are you doing this?”

“You ask too many questions and Marla talks too much.”

“This is about Bill? About the video? Jesus, I found the disk-what do you think, I’m not going to ask her if she knows anything about it?”

“What I think, Johnny, is that she can make her own choices.”

Marla started to cry, but there was anger under the tears. “You pig. You fucking pig!”

She lay down on the floor and spread her legs in front of him. For a moment he stared at her and something like sadness passed over his face, then he crossed the room and left the cabin and a moment later I heard his Jeep start and drive away. On the floor Marla had her hands over her face. I picked her up and carried her into our bedroom and put her on the bed with the covers over her. She held both my hands to her face and rubbed at her tears with my knuckles. The burn on her forearm was beginning to flake.

“You won’t leave me, Johnny, will you?”

“Why would I do that?”

“I’m so disgusting. There’s nothing good left in me.”

“Why did you let him do that to you?”

“You know why.”

“Because of your job? Because of your fucking job?”

“They’ll fire me if they know I’ve been a whore.”

“This is crazy. He completely degraded you. You do admin work for a bunch of small-town politicians, for Christ’s sake. It’s not worth it! How long is this going to go on, this random fucking exploitation?”

“It wasn’t random. It was because you hassled him about Pat and because he figured out I told you about setting up Bill. It was a warning.”

“I get that. But we can’t live life endlessly being his victims.”

Marla shuddered and took a breath and said quietly, “I know…” Her crying had stopped but her face was still wet and her hands were trembling. “I know we can’t.”

“Well let’s fucking do something about it. Let’s hit back. We’ve got the weapon. All we have to do is tell Jeremy Tripp about him making the video. It’s got to stop, Marla.”

She nodded and reached for a tissue on the nightstand and blew her nose. “All right… all right.”

A few minutes later Stan came home with Rosie in tow. He stood in the doorway of the bedroom beaming at us, holding her hand.

“Hey, Johnny, look, my hair’s wet.”

They were wearing only their towels and their skin still shone from the water of the river. Stan stepped forward and put his arms around me and pressed the side of his damp head against my chest.

“You know what, Johnny? I feel like if I wasn’t holding on to you I’d float away. Come on.”

He took my hand and led me out of the cabin and he and I and Rosie walked down the meadow to the river.

At the edge of the water Stan didn’t waste any time. He positioned me carefully on the bank and told me not to move. Then he walked out onto the rock. Rosie made to follow him but he stopped her, so she stood near me and the two of us watched as he dropped his towel and started swinging his arms out in front of him, bending his knees as though he was preparing to dive.

“You watching, Johnny?”

“I’m watching, man.”

“You know how long it is?”

“Since you went swimming? Twelve years.”

“You think I’m going to do it?”

“I think you’re going to do it.”

“You bet I am. And you know what it means, don’t you?”

“You’re the bravest guy in the world.”

“It means you can’t feel sad about me anymore. You have to be happy. All the time.”

And then he whooped and launched himself out over the water and plunged feet-first into it through a shining crown that rose above him and came apart high in the air so that he surfaced in a rain of droplets that caught the sun and broke it into rainbows.

As I watched him I understood a little better what Marla meant about deserving punishment.