Bad Things (16 page)

she the same, or none she wanted to share. Conversing with people

you used to love is very draining on your sense of reality. The gulf

between now and then is too deep and bizarre to ignore, and there’s

little more strange than someone who used to be the opposite of a

stranger. Nonetheless I dialed Carol’s cell phone number, rehears-

ing the breezy tone I’d use to invite myself around for coffee.

“Hey, it’s me,” I said, when she picked up. It didn’t sound the

way it had in my head.

There was a pause, and so I added, “John.”

“Oh, hi,” she said, with bland warmth, as if it had been her,

102 Michael Marshall

rather than Ellen, to whom I’d pretended to be a bookstore manager

announcing the arrival of a not-much-anticipated volume. It was pre-

cisely this tone of voice, and its payload of considered maturity, that

prevented me from dialing her number more often.

“Hi to you, too. So, how are things?”

She was fi ne. Tyler was evidently fi ne, too. Carol’s brother was not

quite fi ne, however, having slipped on a wet supermarket fl oor and

hurt his ankle. The play-by-play on Greg’s vacillation over whether

to sue the market soon ballooned to occupy more airtime than had

been dedicated to my ex-wife and remaining child. I took the phone

outside and smoked a cigarette while I withstood it. Is there anything

in the world more dull than the lives of the relatives of an ex-partner?

It’s like being proudly shown a factory-condition Betamax VCR and

expected to admire the detailing.

“The thing is,” I said, when the topic eventually ran out of steam,

“I’m in the area. I wondered whether—”

“You’re
here
?”

“Yes. Well, not in Renton. I’m in Black Ridge.”

There was a pause. “What are you doing there?”

“It’s been a while. I wanted to see the house.”

“You went to the
house
?”

“Yes. There’s no one living there at the moment.”

“But why did you go there?”

“Because it was time.” I was feeling defensive by now, also an-

noyed, and my voice had become clipped. “I’m going back south later.

But given that I
am
here, I thought I’d come over and see you.”

“I’m on my way to work.”

“Okay, so this afternoon. I can fl y out of Sea-Tac and—”

“This afternoon’s not good, either.”

“Carol, I have a right to see my son.”

“Oh, really? After three years?”

“After three, ten, or
twenty
years. What’s the problem? Is there

something you’re not telling me?”

B A D T H I N G S 103

“We’re divorced, John. I don’t have to tell you anything. I don’t

have to see you and I don’t want to. Just go back to Oregon. And stay

there.”

For a moment I didn’t know what to say, and then I did. “Fuck

you, Carol.”

I don’t think she was even on the line anymore.

I stood, my hand squeezing the phone so hard it hurt, for several

minutes after she’d cut the connection. Discourse between the mar-

ried doesn’t always bear scrutiny in matters of reason or politeness.

Even less so that of the no-longer-married—who will casually say

things that would lead to a knife fi ght in any other situation. This had

never been the case between Carol and me, however. I tried to work

out if it would bother me if she had a new man in her life, and couldn’t

decide. At some level, maybe, but I’m a big boy and could have taken

the information. She should have known that.

I called her back, but there was no reply. There didn’t seem any

point leaving a message.

I was putting my bag in the back of the car when my phone buzzed.

“You were here,” a woman said.

“Yes,” I said. “And so were you, Ellen. Which wasn’t what Cory

told me, when I asked if I could have a look in your house.”

“But
why were you were here
?”

I was done being talked to this way by women, for one morning

at least. “Because someone left a message on my phone last night,” I

snapped, “after you went nuts and ran off. It was a woman’s voice but

calling from the Robertson house. It said that I shouldn’t trust you.

Because you lie.”

There was silence. I’d already put this down to her realizing she’d

been caught out, before I realized I could hear the sound of quiet,

weary crying. “Ellen,” I said. “I’m going home now.”

I heard nothing but more of the same sound. I looked at my watch.

104 Michael Marshall

Coming up on eleven. It was already going to be touch and go to make

it back for the evening shift, but I don’t think it was that which changed

my mind. I believe two conversations melded in my head—the debacle

with Carol, and the present one—and I felt I had to do something

about at least one of them. A woman’s anger or distress is different

from a man’s. There is something more critical about it, as if it relates

to an underlying condition of the natural world. Depending on the

kind of male you are, you will either feel compelled to resolve the situ-

ation, or become excited (in a corner of your soul you don’t want to

know how to fi nd) at the idea of making it interestingly worse.

“Come meet me,” I said. “Let’s talk. Doesn’t have to be in Black

Ridge. I’ve got a car and a map.”

There was silence for a moment. “Can I trust you?”

“Yes,” I said.

I put my bag back in the room and stopped by the motel office to tell

them I’d be staying the extra night after all. Marie wasn’t there, but a

young girl with long brown hair was standing behind the desk looking

over a list of chores, as if wondering what language it was written in.

“Hey,” I said.

She looked up, slowly. Blinked at me. She seemed to be about

sixteen, seventeen, and very pretty. From the housecoat she was wear-

ing I guessed she was the maid. She looked like she’d been awake for

about a week. Not partying, just awake.

“Hello?” she said.

I told her what I wanted to do but she just didn’t really seem to

get it. It didn’t appear to be a matter of lack of intelligence so much as

the information just not getting through. In the end I leaned over the

counter, grabbed a piece of paper, and wrote the information there in

big letters. The girl seemed not to take offense. I’m not sure she even

noticed. I said good-bye and she watched me back out of the offi ce

like someone observing clouds passing overhead.

B A D T H I N G S 105

Outside I called my third woman of the morning. I was so focused

on making sure Becki was okay with covering for an extra night that

it wasn’t until that was done that I noticed she was sounding dis-

tracted.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” she said. “Well, sort of.”

“Don’t tell me Kyle’s done something dumb again.”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, after a beat. “But he’s acting weird,

and kinda shouty, and . . . shit, this really isn’t your problem, Walking

Dude. You okay up there? Where the hell are you at anyway?”

“Washington. A place called Black Ridge.”

“And it’s going okay, this family thing?”

“Fine,” I said. “Look, I’ll be back tomorrow night, okay?”

“Be good if you were,” she said, and was gone.

I walked to the car, refl ecting that—for a man who’d spent every

night of the last three years alone—I suddenly had a whole lot of

women in my life.

I had an hour and a half to kill before meeting Ellen, and I used the

time to grab something to eat in the Write Sisters. Once you ignored

the fact the food was good for you, it didn’t taste too bad. Afterward

I decided to order coffee, experiencing some diffi culty in attracting

the blue-haired server’s attention. In the end I had to stand up and

go over to the counter, and she operated the coffee machine as if for

the fi rst time.

“Are you okay?” I asked eventually.

She shrugged. “Bit of tummy pain, that’s all.”

“Seen a doctor?”

“They’ll just tell me to take a pill.”

“It’s how they roll,” I said, and got a very small smile.

As I drank the eventual result of her labors I leafed through a lo-

cal chapbook on the town. It had been produced a decade back, and

106 Michael Marshall

the only business I recognized was Marie’s Resort. The others had

evidently all closed down.

Black Ridge had a background common to many settlements in

the area, and it didn’t take long to absorb. Originally a site of inter-

mittent use to a variety of Salish-speaking local peoples, it was lost

to the white man after a tribal member with no authority was talked

into putting his mark on a treaty document. After that, any Indian

found on land to which a white person held title was deemed to be

squatting, and could legally be moved on.

And so they were. Settlement came in fi ts and starts, until in 1872

one Henry Robertson subdivided his homestead into lots, laid out the

streets, and registered the town, together with John Evans, Nikolas

Golson, Joshua Kelly, and Daniel Hayes, a dairy farmer—the fami-

lies having arrived from Massachusetts either together, or more or

less at the same time. The Kelly family disappeared back east again

within months, and Golson was run out of town a year later for petty

theft, but the rest of the settlers prospered. Timber gradually became

the main focus of business and the place was prosperous and confi -

dent enough to be incorporated in 1903, at which point the couple of

blocks where I was sitting constituted the center of town, a collection

of short, angled streets that looked like they had been drawn in the

sand with a stick.

I glanced through the window when I reached that point in the

narrative, and found it hard to imagine the eleven saloons that had

plied noisy and sometimes dangerous business along either side of

those muddy tracks, or the mustachioed men and boot-faced women

who had frequented them. Either that vitality had seeped into the

ground like spilled blood or their spirits had blown away into the for-

est long ago.

For a time men and women from local tribes had played a part in

the town’s history, predominantly helpful, occasionally losing it and

whacking some especially annoying white boy, but eventually they

faded from the story along with, frankly, pretty much everything else

B A D T H I N G S 107

of interest. Black Ridge now felt tired, starved of power and direction,

as if its batteries were giving out. The only thing that struck me was

why Henry Robertson had chosen to build his house a substantial

walk away from the fl edgling town, in what remained forest to this

day, rather than slap in the middle, as founding fathers (like Henry

Yesler, over in Seattle) were prone to do. The Evans house still stood,

having been turned into the town’s library during the 1970s. The site

of the original Hayes property was also nearby, now under the bank

in whose parking lot I’d acquired a coffee from early that morning.

The Kelly family, despite apparently not even lasting six months in

the area, got the main street named after them. So why had Henry

Robertson chosen to build four miles away? It didn’t seem likely that

I’d ever know, or that it could matter much.

I added a copy of the book to my tab, paid, and left. The waitress

was looking more off-color, if anything, and I hoped she hadn’t taken

her lunch at work, and if so, that I hadn’t eaten what she had.

The place Ellen specified was a picnic spot between Cle Elum and

Sheffer. Eight tables spread among the trees, with a graveled lot in

which one vehicle was already parked. A red sports car. I hoped it was

Ellen’s, or—given her nervousness about being observed—it seemed

unlikely she’d stay when she arrived. When I got out I saw a fi gure

standing at the edge of the trees, a few yards past the farthest table.

I realized Ellen wouldn’t know what car I drove, or be able to see me

clearly, and so I walked into the area slowly.

“Ellen?”

There was no response.

I took a few more steps and realized she must have been deeper

into the trees than I’d at fi rst thought, or had then moved, as what I

had assumed was her turned out to be just another tree.

“Ellen—it’s John Henderson.”

She must be able to see me, wherever she was standing, and so I

108 Michael Marshall

stopped moving and waited. After about a minute she came walking

out of the woods, from more or less where I’d expected. She looked

tired and pale.

“Are you alone?”

“Yes,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Sometimes people aren’t.”

“Well, I am,” I said, holding out my arms and turning slowly to

encompass the world in general. “Even the little voices have stopped

talking to me.”

She bit her lip, and fi nally smiled.

C H A P T E R 1 6

We sat on opposite sides of a table. She was wearing jeans and a

thick maroon sweater, her hair and makeup looked less polished,

and I revised her age down a couple of years as a result.

“So where are you really from?” I asked.

“I told you already.”

“You’re not from Boston,” I said. “So let’s use the next two