Empty Mile

CHAPTER 34

We held Stan’s wedding on a weekend so that Gareth would not be at Empty Mile. I had a lot of flowers delivered and Marla and I covered the front of the cabin with them. A celebrant came over from Burton. Marla, Rosie and Millicent all bought matching dresses and Stan and I each rented a tux. On the day we looked like any other wedding party, freshly washed, dressed up, and smiling.

The three women had spent the night at Millicent’s place and as Stan and I waited for them early that morning in front of our cabin he asked me over and over if he looked okay, until finally I put my arms around him and hugged him till he quieted. When I let go he shook his hands in front of his face and grinned at me.

“Boy, Johnny. Boy, oh boy, oh boy. I’m going to burst. You know what I feel like? I feel like when I woke up from drowning. Like everything that happened before is on one side and all the new stuff is just about to start.”

For a moment he stood there, beaming at me, but then he frowned.

“What’s going to happen to me, Johnny? I don’t know how to be married. What if I mess it up? What if I can’t do it?”

“You won’t mess it up.”

The celebrant was standing several yards off to one side, cradling the folder from which he was going to read the service. Stan looked over at him.

“I’m freaking out!”

The man chuckled.

A few minutes later the sun cleared the mountains and Stan’s eyes went round.

“Look, Johnny, there’s sun everywhere. Look!”

It was true. The angle of the light caught the dew that coated the long grass of the meadow and for several minutes the whole field was incandescent. The door to Millicent’s house opened and the three women began a small wedding procession. We watched them come toward us, wading knee deep through a field of light. Stan made small squeaks of delight and shifted his weight from foot to foot.

The ceremony was not long. Stan and Rosie stood together holding hands while the celebrant read some passages Marla and I had picked from a poetry book. Stan kept glancing at Rosie and smiling and though Rosie usually held her head down she raised it for the reading and kept her eyes fixed on him, as though it was only by this connection that she could survive the event.

Though the sun was climbing, the celebrant’s breath steamed and this and the sharp edge to the air made the scene seem festive and somehow entrenched, a ritual that would not only join Stan and Rosie to each other, but also make them part of all those other people across the world who had performed the same rite, who had shared the same hopes for a future together.

After the poetry, though no one there was at all religious, the celebrant read something from the Bible. He finished with the passages that formalized the marriage and Stan and Rosie exchanged rings and kissed each other self-consciously. And then it was over.

Millicent, Marla, and I shared a couple of bottles of champagne with the celebrant and we all watched as Stan turned on some music and danced with Rosie in front of the cabin. And in watching them, the worry I’d had since Stan first told me he wanted to get married, that it could only ever result in some flawed approximation of the real thing, disappeared. Together, dancing, Stan and Rosie removed themselves from comparison with the world at large. They became graceful and self-sufficient, buttressed by each other against the storm of life that raged around them.

In the days that followed Stan used some of his gold money to lease a trailer. We had it placed at a right angle to our cabin and ran electricity in from there. The same firm of contractors who had cleared the ground over the buried river spent a day linking the trailer to the cabin’s plumbing.

In this prefab home Stan and Rosie built around themselves a fragile independence. As withdrawn as Rosie was, she could still drive a car, buy groceries, cook meals, clean house-all the things that Stan either could not do, or could not with any consistency schedule for himself. Being married to her allowed him to participate by proxy and the disillusionment he’d suffered when he realized how money alone had failed him was replaced now by a new sense of his ability to contribute. He might not have been able to perform all the tasks daily life demanded, but he could certainly fund them, and he was happier in the weeks after his marriage than he had been since the early days of Plantasaurus. He and Rosie danced each day in front of their trailer and, most heartening of all, the pouch of moths disappeared from around his neck.

It was a joy for me to see him like this. It did not expunge the guilt I felt about his drowning. It did not make up for the damage his brain had suffered or the wound I had torn in his emotions by leaving Oakridge, but it was as close as I was going to get to fixing that part of my past. He was happy. He had a wife and his own place to live. These were things I had not dreamed possible when I rolled back into Oakridge six months earlier.

On the downside, a few days after Stan’s wedding, Marla’s desperation reached a point where she could no longer cope at work and she quit her job at the town hall. The job had previously been of such importance to her that I was surprised at her decision, but I took it as a measure of her unhappiness that she would give up something which until now she’d been willing to prostitute herself to keep.

Through all this time the gold mining continued, and every minute Gareth was at Empty Mile I was conscious that I was in the presence of my father’s killer. We spoke only when our work demanded it, and at the end of each day I left the river with Stan before Gareth was quite ready so that we would not have to walk back across the meadow together.

It was bad enough being near him, but what galled me more was that I knew I was too weak and too scared to do anything about it. Despite Marla’s urging, and the eye-for-an-eye appropriateness of it, I knew I didn’t have it in me to pull out a gun and murder him. The best I could do was make barbed references to my father’s death, to wonder aloud as we worked on the river exactly how he had died. Gareth ignored me for a while. Eventually, though, I did it one too many times.

Gareth was loading dirt into the sluice at the time. When I spoke, he stopped working and stood glaring at me, clenching his fists so hard his arms shook. Stan was sitting close to us on the riverbank, resting, but he stood when he saw what was happening.

I was glad to see Gareth so angry, but the pleasure didn’t last long. Because Gareth killed it by beginning the process which would eventually destroy my brother.

“You’re an ungrateful prick, Johnny. I wanted to be your friend. I saved your life when those assholes were going to cut you, I saved your whole fucking world when Jeremy Tripp wanted to tear it down. I could have said no when you wanted help with him. I could have made you give me all of this land. What did I ask for? A third. And now I have to suffer this? Even though I fucking told you I didn’t do anything to Ray I have to put up with, ‘Oh, I wonder how he died,’ ‘Gee, I wish we knew where the body was.’ Get it through your head, whatever happened to Ray, it wasn’t me.”

This seemed to me such an obvious lie that I spoke without thinking. “You tried to stop him getting this land. I’m supposed to believe you just gave up after your video didn’t work? Bullshit. You killed him.”

Stan screamed and my stomach turned cold as I realized what I’d done.

“What? Johnny! What!” He grabbed his head with both hands and turned it rapidly from side to side. “My brain’s going to burst!”

I tried to calm him, but he was too far gone to respond. He stopped shaking his head and started to paw the ground with one of his feet like a bull getting ready to charge. His fists were balled and spit flew across his lips.

“You’re a bad man, Gareth. You fucking shit bastard!” Stan raised both fists above his head.

Gareth lifted his shovel and held its blade out in front of him. “Careful there, Einstein-”

Stan shrieked: “Don’t call me Einstein! I’m going to smash you!”

“No you’re not, Einstein, you’re going to stand there and calm down. I told your brother and I’m telling you, I didn’t kill your father. But there’s a killer here all right.”

Gareth looked at me and his eyes glittered and I felt the world fall away from me. I knew what was coming. I took a step forward but Gareth pointed the shovel at me and shook his head.

“You can’t win this one, Johnboy.”

Stan shouted at him, “I hate you!”

“Stanley, you remember Jeremy Tripp? You remember how you burned his warehouse down?”

Stan was thrown by this sudden change of subject and shamefaced puzzlement replaced his anger. “Yes…?”

I tried to stop Gareth, to talk over him and drown him out, to beg him not to do this. But he just waited until I stopped, then carried on.

“Why do you think you never got in trouble for that?”

Stan looked uncertainly at me and I felt my heart breaking. I knew that nothing could ever be saved after this.

“Because I didn’t mean to do it. Then he had a car crash and died.”

Gareth nodded. “Yes, he did have a crash, didn’t he? But you know what? It didn’t kill him. He still died, though, because Johnny was waiting where he had the crash and when he saw he was alive, Johnny got a big hunk of metal pipe and smashed his head in with it.”

“No!”

“Yeah, he did. Maybe one day I’ll show you the pipe. It has blood all over it.”

Stan moaned and started crying. “Johnny…”

He reached out for me like a small child and I held him and he cried against me. And though nothing more needed to be said, Gareth said it anyway.

“And you know why he had to do that? He had to do that to stop Jeremy Tripp telling the police you burned his warehouse down.”

Stan lifted his head, blinking through his tears like a man trying to see through smoke, his face twisted by the horror that had this moment taken root in his soul.

“What? What, Johnny? Because of me? You had to do it because of me?”

His large body sagged against me and I stumbled and caught him under the arms and lowered him so that he lay on the ground.

Gareth threw down his shovel then and left the river. As he passed me he said quietly, “Why the fuck couldn’t you leave things alone?”

After he’d gone the only sound in the world was that of Stan sobbing. He shook against the ground and curled into himself as though some dreadful physical pain clawed at his guts. I lay beside him and tried to hold him still, tried to quiet him with words that sounded meaningless even to myself. But it didn’t work and Stan cried on and on until eventually exhaustion claimed him and it seemed that I felt his body cool and stiffen against me.

A long time after that, with nothing left inside either of us, Stan and I sat at the edge of the river and watched blankly as the water passed by, and I did what I could to sew up the terrible hole in my brother.

“Listen, Stan. Listen to me. What I did to Jeremy Tripp had to be done. He was an evil man. That doesn’t make it right but it means it’s not such a bad thing. And it didn’t have anything to do with you.”

“But if I hadn’t lit the fire, everything would still be all right.”

“No, it wouldn’t. He was never going to stop attacking us. Sooner or later I would have to have done it. You lighting the fire doesn’t mean anything.”

“But you feel bad about everything, Johnny. Even small things. And I made you kill someone. That’s the biggest thing that could ever happen to anyone.”

“Stan, honestly, I don’t even think about it.”

He didn’t believe me, of course. He sat with his shoulders slumped so that his belly ballooned below his ribs and his misery was so great it almost seemed like he might sink into the riverbank beneath its weight. He was silent for several moments and then, without turning his head to look at me, asked what I’d meant when I’d accused Gareth of killing our father.

I told him everything I’d found out, everything I suspected. He listened without interrupting and when I’d finished he didn’t speak again that day.

I walked him back up the meadow to his trailer. He moved like his limbs were frozen. He seemed to see nothing around him and several times he stumbled against a rock or a twist of grass. Rosie took him from me when I opened their door. She led him into the trailer’s dim interior and when the door closed behind them I stood staring at it for several minutes. Then I went into my cabin and sat at the table in the kitchen with Marla and told her about the latest horror I had visited on someone I loved.

Gareth had the good sense not to turn up at Empty Mile for a week. I spent the time sitting on the stoop staring at the meadow or walking the few yards to Stan’s trailer to check on him. At these times I would find him either staring blankly at some children’s show on his TV or half asleep in bed. If I tried to rouse him he would look sleepily at me and ask if I was all right before turning over and closing his eyes again. I began to think that I would have to get him psychiatric help. How I could do this, though, without the whole Jeremy Tripp issue coming to light, I had no idea. I was in a state of despair. I knew how badly Stan must feel. Anyone would bow under the weight of knowing they were responsible for driving a loved one to kill another human being. But Stan, who had so little experience with these dreadful adult emotions, who had so little ability to intellectualize justifications for action, would be crushed.

That he was in pain was terrible enough, but it was made infinitely worse for me by knowing that if I had not provoked Gareth, if I had not lost my head, Stan would still be basking in the honeymoon glow of his marriage. But I had lost my head, and in so doing I had infected Stan with my own personal disease. I had passed on to him the dreadful contagion of guilt.

When Gareth returned to Empty Mile, early one morning, he didn’t bang on the door and push his way in for breakfast as he had done in the past, but yelled from outside that he was going to start sluicing again and headed off across the meadow without waiting for an answer.

Stan had begun to reemerge by this time and would sit in the afternoons outside his trailer, wrapped against the cooling weather, or walk with Rosie through the long grass, talking quietly and holding hands. Neither he nor I had been down to the river since Stan learned about Jeremy Tripp, and there was now such a distance between him and the workings of the world around him that I knew his time digging gold out of the ground was over.

And for my part, there was no way I could ever work alongside Gareth again. We had reached a point where the dreadful partnership could not continue.

Toward the end of the morning I put on a heavy coat and went down to the river. I found Gareth working one of the sluices, his face set and angry.

“Johnny. Glad you could finally get off your ass.”

“I’m not here to work.”

Gareth leaned on his shovel. “What?”

“I want to move on. I don’t care about the gold anymore. I want to sell the land to a mining company. You can have half of what we get for it.”

“No fucking way. We are not selling. Those guys’ll pay us a fraction of what it’s worth, you know that. They’ll see us coming and fuck us in the ass without even thinking about it. No, we’re going to keep on mining just like we’ve been doing. And you’re going to behave yourself, and Marla’s going to come out of the fucking cabin and say hello to me once in a while. In fact, Johnny, while we’re on the subject, there’s a whole lot more Marla could be doing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Given our history, how we all started off together and how we’re all together again-”

“We’re not ‘all together again.’”

“-how we’re all together again, I think we should share Marla. I have a share in the land, dude. I should have a share in the woman.”

“Are you fucking insane?”

“Gosh, I hope you haven’t forgotten that piece of pipe.”

“Gareth, we are not sharing Marla. You’re not getting anywhere near her.”

“Well, you’re angry now, you’re not thinking clearly. But I’m telling you, Johnboy, tomorrow I’m coming a courtin’.” Gareth smirked at me and lifted a shovel of dirt and began sifting it into the sluice.

On my way back to the cabin I collected Stan and Rosie from their trailer. If it had been anything else I would have tried to keep Stan out of it. There was no need, after all, to load him with worries that he could do nothing about. But I knew we could not give in to Gareth and opposing him would have serious consequences for all of us. It seemed only fair, then, that Stan should be included if his future was at stake as well.

Marla, Stan, and Rosie sat across from me in the living room. Marla and Stan looked worried. Rosie stared at her lap.

I told them what Gareth wanted and explained that his leverage to make it happen was the threat of having me arrested for the death of Jeremy Tripp. Stan looked ashen and began squeezing his knees with his hands, trying not to cry. It occurred to me then, too late of course, that he would now feel not only responsible for making me kill Jeremy Tripp, but also for the fact that Gareth might send me to jail for it.

“Don’t worry, Stan, we’re not giving in this time. We have to stand up to him or this will go on forever.”

Stan spoke in a kind of croaking whisper: “But Johnny, I don’t want you to go to jail.”

“I’m not going to jail. I don’t think Gareth will really tell the police.”

Marla snorted incredulously. “What makes you think that?”

“He’ll have to explain how he got the pipe and that’ll make him almost as guilty as me.”

“He’ll send it in anonymously, you idiot.”

“Then I’ll tell the police about him, same thing. And anyway, I think there’s more to it. I think in a weird way he doesn’t want to be without me, without you. He needs his toys to play with.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“I don’t know, but we have to at least try to get out from under him. If we don’t, this kind of shit is going to keep on happening.”

Marla made a gun with her thumb and forefinger and fired it at the side of her head. “My way would be better, Johnny.”

Even though, if my planned opposition to Gareth failed and we were forced to capitulate, Marla would be the one suffering most at his hands, I was more worried right then about Stan. I felt powerless to do anything for him, to get past his unhappiness and help him in some way. Out of desperation, I asked him to camp out with me that night. We had often gone camping as kids and I was hoping that memories of those times and the closeness of just the two of us together outdoors would help him shed a little of his guilt.

It was no great expedition, just a tent and some food and a hike in the afternoon, up to the top of the spur that bordered the meadow-the same hike we’d made when I’d checked my father’s aerial photograph against the landscape.

We pitched our tent twenty yards back from the collapsed end of the spur. There was still an hour of daylight left when we were done and we prepared a fire for later then sat wearing sweaters and coats, gazing at the view. The hills ran off to the distance in broken ranks, their upper slopes copper-gold in the lowering sun, the valleys between them in shadow, filling with mist as the air cooled.

It got cold enough for us to start our fire pretty soon, and while there was a little light left in the air we made a dinner of sausages, beans, and bread rolls. Stan became quiet as evening fell and when we were finished eating we sat close to the fire and there were long periods of silence between us. I was hoping he would open up, that the hard shell of his depression might crack a little. But between our sparse bursts of small talk he stared into the fire and said nothing.

We had a gas light set a couple of yards out from the fire and moths were battering themselves against its bright frosted glass. I went over and caught a few and gave them to him in the plastic bag our bread rolls had come in.

“If you don’t have any moths, how are you going to bring the power across?”

Stan took the bag from me and held it up to the fire. For a moment he watched the moths crawl around, then he handed the bag back to me.

“I don’t want them. I don’t want to bring any more power across.”

“Why not?”

“Everything’s too wrong.”

“Won’t the power fix it?”

Stan breathed in and out and shook his head.

“Look, Stan, you lit a fire when you were angry. And you did it because Jeremy Tripp did something bad to Rosie. That’s all. Everything else has nothing to do with you.”

“You’re going to go to jail.”

“I’m not going to jail, I told you. Nothing bad is going to happen.”

Stan turned away from me and stared into the fire. “It is, Johnny.”

“Stan-”

“It is.”

We were cold that night in the tent. We lay in our sleeping bags fully clothed and breathed steam against the close nylon walls and I told Stan all the stories I remembered from our childhood, all the tiny, normal events we had shared as brothers growing up in the same family. I wanted him to laugh, I wanted to bring back to him the memory of how it felt to be carefree. But rather than remind him of the good things in his past my stories seemed only to make him more aware of what he no longer had.

In the morning there was frost on the ground and Stan and I stood beside the remains of our fire as the sun picked out the land around us in clear yellows and blues. For a short time, after the interruption of sleep, Stan was able to watch the scene about him without reference to the sadnesses which were currently undoing his world. He stood and looked and breathed and he was still and I saw the soft bravery which I so much associated with him return to his eyes.

“Johnny, don’t you think it would be better if you could just live like this? If all you had to do was cook your dinner and sleep and be in the forest and you didn’t have to do anything with other people?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Stan nodded. “Yeah…”

He walked off to the end of the spur and sat there, knees hunched up to his chin, staring out at the landscape. I relit the fire and made coffee and cooked pancakes. I expected Stan to come when he smelled the food but he didn’t move and when I called to him he turned his head and smiled and called back, “I’m just going to sit here, okay?”

He sat for a long time. So long that I had to busy myself packing up the tent and the rest of our things. I knew this time was good for him and I left him alone with himself as long as I could, but we had no more food with us and I was getting anxious about being away from Marla, so eventually, around midday, I had to tell him it was time to go.

He came back from the edge of the spur and looked at the packed-up camping gear.

“We should run away, Johnny. Get Marla and Rosie and another tent and just disappear in the forest where Gareth can’t find us.”

For a moment he stood looking about him, then he sighed and reached down and started picking up pieces of our gear.

When we got home Rosie was sitting in front of the trailer, listening to the soft music they liked to dance to. She had been waiting for Stan’s return and stood when she saw him, her head down as always but her hand out for his. Stan took it and kissed her and led her into the trailer. As he passed the portable stereo he turned the music off.

After they had gone I stood looking at my cabin, at the space in front of it, at my pickup and Marla’s car, at the track that led up to the road… and I couldn’t help the uneasy feeling that Stan’s desire to run away from it all made an awful lot of sense.