Bad Things (12 page)

whether it had gone with my wife or if we’d left it with the house for

the new owners. The latter, I thought. Either way, it was gone.

I looked for a moment into the woods, remembering how on

that afternoon I’d noticed the paths were getting a little unkempt.

They were completely overgrown now, ferns covering the ground.

About sixty yards from the house was the scant remains of a sturdy

old cabin, a remnant from pioneering days. I realized that if left long

enough the big house behind me might disappear even faster than the

cabin was doing, and the thought depressed me.

I went back down the steps and walked down the slope toward the

fi nal place I knew I should visit. The remaining light was refl ecting

off the lake at the bottom, turning it into a strip of blue-white glare.

I kept my pace even as I walked out onto the jetty and until I reached

the end, and then I stopped. Down here not much had changed. The

lake stretched out ahead, the right fork of its L-shape disappearing

out of sight at the end. Ours was the only house with direct access to

this section. On all other sides trees came right down to the shore,

and the shallows were dotted with fallen leaves, sodden scraps of

brown and dark green and gold.

As I stood there, I realized that, of all places in the world, this

would be the one where I would most expect to lose control. It was,

after all, the very last place where my son had spoken, and breathed,

and been alive. But it did not happen here, either. I felt wretched, but

my eyes stayed dry.

72 Michael Marshall

I can only ever think about that afternoon in the third person. I do

not think “I” did this, or felt that, and despite the distance I’ve tried

to put between it and me, my recollection is locked in the present

tense. From the moment at which I emerge onto the deck, it’s as if

it’s happening again now. Perhaps this is nothing more than another

defense mechanism, a way of making it feel like a fantasy, continually

fresh-minted in my head, rather than an event with a genuine place

in history.

But it has such a place. There was an afternoon, three years ago,

when my son died in front of my eyes, when I’d dived into the water

and then stood exactly where I was now, holding something in my

arms for which I had made a sandwich four hours before: when I

stood knowing that the person for whom I’d slapped cold cuts and

cheese between bread, and then sliced the result into the preferred

triangular form, had gone away and was no longer there; and that the

wet, heavy thing that remained was nothing but a lie.

What is the difference between those two states? Nobody has

a clue. The local doctors and the coroner certainly didn’t. All they

could tell me was that Scott had been dead before he hit the water,

and they had no idea how or why.

I’m sorry, Mr. Henderson. But he just died
.

This difference is why our species makes sacrifi ces, performs

rituals, repeats forms of words to ourselves in the dark watches of

the night. Gods are merely foils in this process, an audience for the

supplications of metaphor in the face of the intractable monolith of

reality. We need
someone
to listen to these prayers, because without

a listener, they cannot come true, and therefore there must be gods,

and they
must
be kind, else they would never grant our wishes—in

which case why would we pray to them in the fi rst place? It is a circu-

lar argument, like all neuroses, a hard shell around emptiness.

If gods exist then they are deaf or indifferent. They commit their

acts, and then move on.

B A D T H I N G S 73

I knew it was time for me to get onto the next thing, whatever that

was. Finding something to eat back in Black Ridge, most likely, then a

quiet evening in a no-frills motel room before fl ying back to Portland

and fi nding a ride to Marion Beach. Good friend though he had been,

I knew I wasn’t in the mood for Bill Raines’s offer of a night’s drink-

ing and talking up old times, for any number of reasons.

As I turned back from Murdo Pond, however, something made

me pause. A wind had picked up, and the leaves on the trees around

the house were moving against one another with a sound like the pa-

pery breaths of someone not entirely well. The water in the lake was

lapping against the jetty supports, like a tongue being moved around

inside a dry mouth. The combination of the two sounds was discon-

certing, and for a moment the air didn’t feel as cold as it should, but

then felt very cold indeed. It struck me that no one in the world knew

where I was, and though that thought has sometimes been a source of

comfort, right then it was not. Though I had owned this jetty, those

woods, that house, it did not in that instant feel like a place where I

should be.

A stronger wind suddenly came down out of the mountains to

the west—presumably the source of the cold blast I had just felt—

provoking a long, creaking noise to come out of the woods. A tree

that was dry and not long for this world, presumably, bending for

the second-to-last time. Still I did not start walking. I found I did

not want to go back toward the house or the trees. My feet felt unse-

cured, too, as if something more than the water’s gentle movements

was moving the jetty’s supports. Gradually this increased in intensity,

until it was like a vibration buzzing against one leg, as if. . .

“You moron,” I said, out loud. I stuffed my hand in my jeans

pocket. The vibration was just my phone.

I stuck it to my ear. “Who is this?”

It was Ellen Robertson.

C H A P T E R 1 1

I got to the Mountain View a little after eight o’clock. It was the

only place in Black Ridge I could bring to mind, and I wanted to

sound at least slightly in charge of the situation. I did not suggest

my motel because you do not do that with women you do not know.

She agreed and did not ask where the bar was. She said she’d be

there sometime between eight-thirty and ten, but couldn’t be more

precise and would not be able to stay for long.

I walked back along the jetty, up the lawn, and climbed back

over the gate. The house did not look like anything other than an

empty dwelling, but I did not walk any slower than necessary.

I did hesitate for a moment at the top of the rise, however, turned

and said good-bye, before I walked off down the drive. It did not

feel as if I had done anything of consequence.

The bar was largely empty when I arrived. Lone drinkers held each

corner of the room, like tent pegs. There was no one at the counter,

generally the fi rst roosting place of the professional drinker—for

ease of access to further alcohol, and the faux conviviality of shoot-

ing it back and forth with the barman. I guessed I was between

B A D T H I N G S 75

shifts, that the place never did that much hard-core business, or that

Black Ridge was slowly sinking into the swamp and the drinkers had

worked it out fi rst. The Marilyn Manson playing on the jukebox

probably wasn’t helping, either. Not everyone enjoys the company of

music that sounds like it means them harm.

I stood waiting for a couple of minutes before I heard someone

coming out of the rear area. When I turned I was surprised to see

the woman I’d spotted while sitting on the bench opposite, earlier in

the afternoon.

She looked at me a moment, raised an eyebrow. “Am I in trouble?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “I just want a beer.”

The eyebrow went back down and she slapped each of the pumps

in turn and told me what was in them.

“What’s popular?” I asked.

“Money and happiness,” she said, quick as a fl ash. “We don’t have

either on draft.”

I nodded at the one in the middle. “Can I smoke in here?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “We are not afraid.”

I watched her as she leaned over to the other side to get me an ash-

tray. I guessed she was probably in her late twenties. Tall and skinny,

with a high forehead and strong features, hair that had been dyed jet

black and cut in an artfully scruffy bob. Her skin was pale, her move-

ments quick and assured.

“You want to pay, or run it?” she said.

“For a while,” I said. “I’m meeting someone.”

“Oh yeah—who?”

I hesitated, and she winked. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen a woman

wink before.

“Okay,” she said. “I get it.”

“You don’t,” I said. “It’s just an old friend.”

“Whatever you say.”

One of the tent pegs came up to buy another beer, and I took the

opportunity to walk away. I climbed on a stool at the counter which

76 Michael Marshall

ran along the bar’s street window, got out my cigarettes. It was a long

time since I’d smoked or even taken a drink inside, and my associa-

tions with the practice were not good. Have you ever set fi re to the

hair hanging lankly over your face, when very drunk and trying to

light yet another cigarette—despite the fact you’ve already got one

burning in the overfl owing ashtray? It’s not a good look. Nobody’s

impressed.

But that was then.

The drunk period lasted about a year. It began in the way one chooses,

without being aware of a conscious decision, to take one route around

the supermarket rather than another. The fi rst time, it’s happen-

stance; the second, it’s the way you did it before; and then it’s just

what you do.

I had been someone who didn’t drink at home, or alone, or to

frequent excess. And then I was. Small differences. Big difference.

Just because.

The advantage of being drunk is not that it helps you forget, though

it will keep reality at arm’s length. Mainly it conveys a rowdy vainglo-

riousness to the things you
do
think about, which may seem preferable to their being blunt, hard facts. It wasn’t the drinking that was the problem—it didn’t make me aggressive or abusive (merely drunk, and

maudlin)—as much as the hangovers. I never got to the point of turn-

ing pro, where you plane out of the morning after by starting again

bright and early, and so I found myself mired four or fi ve times a week

in dehydrated despair, consumed with self-loathing, all too aware I

was letting down Scott’s memory by failing to be the straight-backed

and self-reliant adult I’d hoped he would grow up to be.

When I’m hungover I can only get by if I retreat inside, which

basically means I can’t listen to other people. Carol needed me to

listen. Her way of dealing with the thing we couldn’t talk about—it

was not subject to interpretation, once we’d established the medical

B A D T H I N G S 77

profession didn’t have a clue as to what might have caused Scott’s brain to blow a fuse, and hours on the Internet had produced no further clues—was to talk about everything else. As if she felt that by

containing life’s trivial chaos in words, in obsessive detail, it would

become contained, made incapable of doing us further harm. Not

only did I disbelieve this, I found it hard to withstand hours of mean-

ingless utterance from someone who had once been so concise and

sparing of observation.

As a result I drank even more, to get through the listening peri-

ods, and the hangovers got worse and more frequent, and my will-

ingness to listen decreased yet further. It came to the point where

she would be talking all the time we were together, knowing I wasn’t

listening but unwilling to stop, unable to understand that I was com-

ing to hate her for fi lling the world with noise that made it impossible

for me to start healing in silence. Consequently we began to spend

less and less time together, and I started missing more and more of

her narrative—until I realized I had lost track of whatever story she

was trying to tell: and then fi nally came to understand that I was no

longer even a part of it.

I got this, in the end, when she left. Of all the things she tried

to say, that was the one that got through. It was four months after

Scott had died. I woke one weekend morning, late, in a house that

felt empty and too quiet. I lurched around in my robe until it became

clear that signifi cant things were missing: principally, my wife and

remaining child. Eventually I found a letter propped up on the desk

in my study. It boiled down to:
The world is broken, you’re fucked up, and
I’m out of here.

In the next six weeks I did what we should have done long be-

fore—something Carol had tried to make me do many times. I sold

the house. I sent her three-quarters of the proceeds, once the loan

and other expenses had been paid. Half for her, a quarter for Tyler.

An odd name for a child, I’d always felt, but it was not my choice. He

had been a while in arriving, and was Carol’s son from before birth,

78 Michael Marshall

somehow announcing this to us from the womb. I would have loved

him nonetheless, but it was Scott who had been
my
son. I did not feel like a father anymore, and had failed at pretending otherwise.