Empty Mile

CHAPTER 25

Jeremy Tripp opened the front door of his house holding a magazine about sports cars. He motioned Marla and me inside without speaking and led us through to the deck at the back.

The sky was a high clear blue and there were small clouds in a line to the east. The archery target still stood at the end of the property but I could see no sign of the rabbit.

Jeremy Tripp sat down at a large round table and drank from a glass of sparkling water. He didn’t offer us a seat, but after standing uncertainly for a moment I took one anyway and Marla followed and held my hand under the table. Jeremy Tripp put his glass down and scanned the sky.

“You can feel autumn in the air. I can, anyway-a slight edge. Easier to notice here in the mountains.”

“You’re Patricia Prentice’s brother.”

“Until she killed herself.”

“And you think we had something to do with it.”

“I think you had everything to do with it.”

“Because of the video.”

Jeremy Tripp frowned. “I would have denied knowledge of that if I were you. That way you could have done the whole ‘It wasn’t us, we didn’t know anything about it’ routine. But yes, because of the video. You made it, Patty watched it, and then she killed herself.”

“We didn’t even know there was a video until two weeks ago.”

“And then it came to you in a dream?”

“I broke into Bill’s cabin. I wanted to see if he was planning to sell our warehouse. I saw the disk. I’d seen it in Patricia’s room the day she died-”

“Killed herself.”

“We watched it. Before that we didn’t know it existed.”

“I thought your brother was the retarded one.”

“He’s not retarded. And we didn’t know, I promise you. We didn’t know anything about the camera. We were just… performing for Bill.”

“And you’re telling me this… because?”

“Because you’re attacking us. You broke in and bleached all my plants-”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be silly enough to do something like that.”

“-you’ve set up your own company to compete against us, and you kicked Marla out of her house. And we’re not the right people. We didn’t do anything.”

“Please don’t tell me Bill made the video. He’s a degenerate but he loved his wife, in his own way. And he’s not stupid enough to put himself on film.”

“It wasn’t Bill. It was the guy who pimped Marla to you-Gareth Rogers. Everyone knows about Bill, what he’s like. Gareth used his… tastes to manipulate him.”

Jeremy Tripp looked at me like he didn’t expect anything but lies. “Go on.”

I took the two brackets out of my jacket and put them on the table in front of him. “Once I knew about the video I did some looking around. I found one of these on a tree where we did it. I’m pretty sure it’s what the camera was attached to. The other one I got from Gareth’s father’s workshop.”

Jeremy Tripp looked at it and snorted. “Does it have his name on it?”

“It’s custom made. You can’t buy them anywhere. His father does piecework for a fittings company. They’re part of a batch he made. Plus he and Gareth live at the lake, they own the cabins there.”

“Could have been the father by that logic.”

“He’s in a wheelchair.”

“Still doesn’t mean it was Gareth. Someone else could have gotten hold of one. You, for instance.”

“There’s more.”

I nudged Marla. She cleared her throat and tried to look him in the eye but failed and dropped her gaze to the surface of the table.

“It was supposed to be just another trick. Gareth wanted me to get Bill to watch me having sex with someone. He said it had to be in a certain part of the forest and his name wasn’t to be mentioned. I’d tricked with Bill once or twice a long time ago and when I put it to him he jumped at it. But I didn’t know it was going to be filmed. Gareth never said anything about that.”

“Of course he didn’t.”

“I was Pat’s friend. She used to come to my house. Why would I make a video of myself screwing in front of her husband?”

“I don’t know. What I do know is that my sister killed herself because of a video of you two. Therefore, you had a hand in killing her, and that’s a little wrinkle I just have to iron out.”

Marla leaned back in her chair. There was nothing else she could offer. I spoke again.

“You’re not fixing anything if you have the wrong people. What about motivation? What do we gain from it? I’ve been out of town for eight years. All I care about is scraping a life together-”

“Bill owns the warehouse you use-perhaps you wanted a rent reduction.”

“We hadn’t even started the business when the video was made. Jesus Christ! Look, Gareth made it because he needs a proper road built up to the lake and he was going to use the video to blackmail Bill into lobbying it through with the council. He told me this himself three days ago. And believe me, he’s more than capable of blackmail. He hates Bill’s guts because when Bill sold him the cabins he told him that the council was just about to put the road in. That would have meant a ton of business and Gareth and his father would have ended up rich. But the road never happened, Gareth’s father tried to kill himself and got crippled instead, and Gareth’s blamed Bill ever since. He thinks the road was just some bullshit Bill concocted to offload the cabins. If anyone has a reason to make the video it’s Gareth.”

For several moments Jeremy Tripp stared off across his garden. Then he started flipping through the pages of his magazine. “I’ll talk to Bill.”

After that he ignored us and Marla and I left.

Two days later, in the early afternoon, Stan and I were back at Empty Mile after our Plantasaurus day had finished. Marla was at her job in town and Rosie was out cleaning houses. The weather was still warm enough for it to be pleasant outside, so I sat with my brother on the stoop and we drank cans of soda and ate corn chips. Stan had made himself a small pouch out of the end of a sock and fixed it around his neck with the gold chain my father had given him. He kept his moths in it now and several times a day he’d tip them out onto his palm to “reconnect.” He did this once while we were sitting on the stoop, turning out the insects like an addict with a drug, self-conscious but unable to stop himself.

We chatted idly for a while and crunched chips and took swigs of our drinks, then Stan, who had been staring for several minutes at the line of trees that hid the river, frowned.

“Johnny, don’t you think it’s weird how when you get inside the trees there’s that part where they’re scrawnier than everywhere else? I think it’s weird how the trees are different there.”

Maybe some buried part of my brain had recognized the same thing and been turning it over beneath the threshold of consciousness. Maybe it was just that I was relaxed enough at that moment for some particular synapse to fire and connect the dots. Whatever it was, Stan’s phrase, the particular words he’d used, made me suddenly wonder if I possessed the key to the puzzle of my father’s purchase of Empty Mile after all. The trees are different…

I got up and went around to the shed at the back of the cabin where we stored firewood and the things we didn’t need inside. My father’s wooden trunk was there in a corner under a tarp. I opened it and found the folder in which I kept everything that had anything to do with the Empty Mile land. In it, among other things, were the journal pages, the land deed, the papers transferring ownership to me… and the original of the black-and-white aerial photograph my father had had framed and with which he’d been so pleased.

I took the photo out and turned it over. On the back, in my father’s handwriting, I read the words Stan had so closely mimicked: The trees are different. I looked closely at the front of the photo and found the tiny rectangle that was the roof of our cabin. From there I could trace the sweep of the meadow across to the edge of the trees that filled the semicircle the Swallow River made as it bent around Empty Mile.

After squinting at these trees for several moments I saw something I hadn’t noticed before, something running horizontally through the semicircle. A shadow, a ghost, an impression… stretching from the end of the rock spur to where the curve of the river straightened again downstream-something that looked like the memory of a pathway or a channel. This was what the inscription on the back of the photo referred to. This was where the trees were different.

For a long moment this smudge on the landscape held my eyes while a sharp fizz of excitement rose within me. I could see a reason for the land now. I could see why my father had mortgaged his house to buy it. It was a crazy Hardy Boys adventure reason, so far beyond the run of ordinary life that it was hard to take seriously. But it worked. It made sense.

I found an envelope in the trunk and slipped the aerial photograph inside it. I put the rest of the papers back in their folder and closed the trunk. I was about to leave the shed when I changed my mind and went back and opened the trunk again. After a minute of rummaging I found what I was looking for-the photo of my father in front of the roller coaster in San Diego. I’d been carrying the one of Marla around with me since I’d found it. I took it out now and compared the two. There was no doubt. Everything about them indicated they’d been taken on the same day-the color of the sky, the light, even the poses looked like a quick change between photographer and subject. I folded the two pictures together and put them in my wallet and went back outside.

I didn’t tell Stan what I thought I’d found on the aerial photograph, but asked him instead if he wanted to go exploring. He jumped to his feet immediately and he and I spent the next hour walking alongside the rock wall that formed the northern boundary of the meadow. We moved away from the river, back into the forest behind the cabin. When we’d gone about half a mile the edge of the wall began to soften and turn from a sheer face to a steep slope that was broken here and there with runnels and ledges. Another half mile later the slope, though still steep, became climbable and Stan and I sweated and scrambled and hauled our way up it. At the top, when we could breathe normally again, we turned and headed back along the ridge of the spur in the direction we’d just come.

Where we’d climbed it the spur was a couple of hundred yards wide, but it narrowed steadily as it approached the meadow and the river. Very little vegetation grew up there. A few low shrubs had found a hold in the hard ground and there were some clumps of dry stringy grass, but that was about it. There was a light breeze and Stan and I cooled quickly from the exertion of our climb.

We were about sixty or seventy feet above the surrounding land and below us the forest rolled away in green waves. Looking straight out over it, scanning the mid-distance, there was very little sign of man-a segment of Rural Route 12, the occasional power-line pole, a few isolated dwellings, a thin column of smoke way off to the west…

We passed the meadow on our left. I could see our cabin, and Rosie and Millicent’s house. Washing hung on a line behind it but the breeze we felt did not reach the meadow and the clothes were still.

The end of the spur was not a vertical drop but a series of ragged steps that formed a steep broken slope, as though at some time in the past this leading edge had grown tired of holding itself erect and had fallen to its knees, exhausted.

Here, there was nothing to block our view on three sides. Ahead of us the forest stretched out to a spine of hills, and beyond these hills there were more in ragged lines. The trees were mostly evergreen but there was a scattering, too, of those that autumn had colored.

From our right, on the other side of the spur to the meadow, the Swallow River came toward us in a long straight line. Miles away it would have boiled through Oakridge, broken by low rapids as it passed under the road bridge that led into town, but here it flowed smoothly. The river was aimed directly at the sloping edge of the spur, but fifty yards out it twisted from this course and began the pronounced curve that skirted the spur and became the Empty Mile bend.

I tracked it from right to left, turning slowly on my feet, running my eyes along the trail of water. The river might always have run this course. The troughs and hollows of the land and whatever else makes rivers run as they do might naturally have made it bend this way. But it was not difficult to imagine another scenario-that the slope of the spur was a newer addition to the landscape, one that had thrust itself into the river’s original path, forcing it to swing out and around and become the curve that now existed.

I had brought the aerial photo with me and I compared it with the landscape around us. Stan looked over my shoulder and did the same, then shrugged disinterestedly and went off to stand at the very tip of the spur, shading his eyes like an explorer scanning the distance. Empty Mile and our land were on the left of where I stood. I peered down on the trees that separated the meadow from the water. From this moderate height they seemed at first to be a solid mass, without much to differentiate one area from another. By using the photo as a guide, though, I was just able to see a lighter pathway running through them, continuing the straight line of the river from the other side of the spur.

I thought about the lecture Marla and I had endured at the Elephant Society on what sometimes happened to rivers, the lecture Chris Reynolds had said my father and Gareth had been so interested in. And I wondered if what I was thinking could possibly be true.

Stan and I left the spur and tramped our way back down to the meadow and our cabin. I didn’t say anything to him about the photo or the river or the trees. I didn’t say anything to Marla about them either when she came home that evening. Because although I would have liked nothing better than to give them something to hope for, I did not want to be responsible for snatching it back again if it turned out that I was wrong.

But while I avoided that particular pitfall, while I did not set them up for disappointment, that night, as so many days and nights during that time seemed to, brought its own unique portion of unhappiness nevertheless.

It is a strange thing to cause physical pain to someone you love, to watch as your arm sweeps down and welts appear on the body before you, to see the muscles clench and the spine twist as the reflex to escape is bitten down on by some greater imperative, some dark need for atonement that will not be ignored. But that was what Marla made me do to her for the first time that night.

She had found a slim bamboo rod somewhere in town and hidden it behind the dresser. When we went to bed she took it out and begged me to use it on her. I refused, of course, but she walked out to the kitchen and came back with a knife and said she’d start cutting her arms if I didn’t do it.

How had such emotional horror come to be part of my life? How was it that a woman could feel so bad about herself? I’d known since my return to Oakridge that she was a long way from happy. I had stolen eight years from her, she felt terribly responsible for the death of Patricia Prentice, and she lived in daily fear of Gareth’s pimping. But needing to be caned? None of it seemed a basis for such an extravagant act of penance.

Yet I did what she wanted. She was so insistent, so crazy with need, so determined to self-harm if I did not play this role that it seemed a safer option than leaving her to punish herself.

It wasn’t until it was over and we were in bed together that I hit upon a possible motivation for her behavior.

The roller coaster photo.

My father and Marla together in San Diego.

Had there indeed been something between them? Was it this that drove her to fits of depression so black that her only escape was the distraction of physical pain?

It sounded like something from a daytime soap opera. But it was possible. My father was a handsome man. He was in his mid-fifties in the photo, not too old for a fling with a girl at the end of her twenties. And Marla? Could she have done something like that? I figured if she could be a hooker she could probably do pretty much anything.

I turned on the light and lifted my wallet from the nightstand. I took out the photograph of Marla and dropped it on the covers in front of her.

“Maybe it’s time to stop feeling guilty.”

She pushed herself up from her pillow, wincing as her back pressed against the wall, and picked up the photo with an expression of puzzled query on her face. Her eyes, though, I saw, carried a sheen of fear.

“It fell out of one of the trash bags when we were cleaning out your place.”

“Oh. Yeah, I went to San Diego once. I didn’t tell you, did I?”

“No.”

I took the second photo from my wallet, the one of my father, and showed it to her.

“My father had one too, in his things. Just like yours.”

Marla put a brittle smile on her face. “Well, yeah. It was kind of a coincidence. It was… It was…” She stopped and swallowed and tried again. “It was…” Her face crumpled and she began to cry, huge wracking sobs that tore through her chest as though they carried small pieces of her soul with them. For a long time she could do nothing else and I held her and felt her body shaking. Eventually, though, there was nothing left in her and she was able to force words into her broken voice.

“Three years ago we had an affair. It lasted six months. Sometime in the middle of it we went away for a few days, not even a week. Ray paid someone to take care of Stan.”

Marla wiped her eyes with the palms of her hands. She didn’t look at me.

“I thought you were never coming back. I’d waited so long. I’d waited for years. And then I just gave up and it seemed like it didn’t matter what I did anymore. There wasn’t any right or any wrong, there was just… nothing. I didn’t have anything left to lose. But even then I knew it would turn to shit. You can’t do something like that and get away with it. It doesn’t change anything, I know, but we both felt terribly guilty about it. In the end the guilt was all Ray talked about. And I knew you’d find out. I didn’t know how, but I knew you would. The only good thing was that no one else ever did, we were very careful. Stan never knew.”

“How did it end?”

“Ray. But I was glad he ended it. There was never any love there. We were just company for each other. You must be disgusted.”

“I’m not disgusted.”

“I’m such a pig. It was an insane thing to do.”

Marla cast her eyes wildly about the bedroom. They came to rest on a small pair of nail scissors on her nightstand. I knew what was going through her mind.

“Don’t you fucking dare.” I reached past her and threw the scissors across the room.

Marla folded her arms over her chest. “When it was over I felt so sick with myself. That’s when I started hooking. I figured if I was such a pig I might as well act like one.” She shook her head and laughed sadly. “All I wanted was to live in Oakridge and be quiet and to just get by. If you can do that anywhere it should be here. But you can’t, you can’t do it anywhere, not if you’re the wrong sort of person. Are you going to leave me now?”

“Leave you? It was three years ago. I wasn’t even here, I hadn’t been for five years before that.”

“It doesn’t matter to you?”

“Of course it matters. I particularly don’t want to visualize the bedroom scenes. But I’m not going to leave you over it.”

I thought I would see some kind of relief in her face. Some great weight rising from her, freeing her of at least some of the hell she lived under, but it didn’t happen. She closed her eyes and hung her head, slowly turning it from side to side like a blind woman listening to something in the distance. It was disturbing to watch, but not as disturbing as when, a moment later, she threw back her head and opened her mouth, tears streaming from the corners of her eyes, and laughed at the ceiling-long, mad peals of noise as though she had just been told something so crushing that the only possible response was an insane, deformed humor.

I let it go on for as long as I could bear. She’d been caned, she’d been forced to confess to an affair with my father, some purging of emotion was understandable. But it was too raw and I became frightened that she was heading toward some sort of fit, so I held her and kissed her hair and at my touch she stopped her howling and buried her head in the hollow of my shoulder and sobbed quietly as I rocked her and made quiet noises to her until she fell asleep.