Empty Mile (23 page)

“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.

CHAPTER 25

J
eremy 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.