Empty Mile (24 page)

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.

CHAPTER 26

I
was buying vegetables in an open-fronted store in Back Town the next day when Gareth accosted me. He’d just turned away from something he’d been watching out on the street and when he saw me he came right over. When he said hello I just stared at him.

Gareth waved away my anger as though I had made a blunder that was too embarrassing to address. “Jesus, Johnny, you’re always focusing on the surface of things.

Lighten up. The other day was just something that had to happen.”

“What you made Marla do was disgusting.”

“Forget that shit. You gotta see what’s happening. You won’t believe it.”

He grabbed my arm and pulled me out onto the sidewalk.

“Look! Look what that fucking bitch is doing.”

A small van was rolling slowly along the street. It had posters taped to its sides and the front of a handheld loudspeaker stuck through the open driver’s window. It looked like something a small-town politician might use for electioneering. And it was being put to a similar use now. The posters displayed several different slogans, but they all boiled down to the same thing—that the proposed road to Tunney Lake should be stopped on environmental grounds. And backing the posters up, the loudspeaker demanded that we save one of our natural beauty spots, that we preserve it from the overexploitation that would certainly come with easier access.

“Look at her. I mean, am I insane? Did the world just take a vote and decide to fuck me in the ass? This is unbelievable.”

I followed his outstretched arm as it tracked the van. In the shadows of the cab, past the bullhorn, I saw the reason for his rage. Vivian was speaking into the microphone and driving one-handed.

“She’s been doing this for three days. And that’s not all. Come here.”

He pulled me along the street to a lamppost. Stapled to the dusty gray wood there was a flier outlining in more detail just what the negative effects of a blacktop road to the lake would be—from the destruction of forest to the death of wildlife to the erosion of the lake’s foreshore.

Gareth tore it from the pole and ripped it to pieces. “She’s putting them everywhere. She’s even stuck them to trees on the Loop. Where’s your car?”

“Around the block. Why?”

“I have something to show you.”

“Not interested.”

Gareth looked at me with dead eyes. “Your chum Jeremy Tripp’s involved.”

And so I found myself back at Tunney Lake, sitting in front of a blank TV in Gareth’s bedroom. Out in some other part of the bungalow I could hear David rolling around in his wheelchair and muttering to himself.

Gareth took a DVD from his nightstand and slid it into a player. “Tripp sent me this in the mail yesterday.”

He hit the remote and the disk started to play. I recognized the setting immediately. Jeremy Tripp’s house—the bedroom where I’d found Vivian wrapped in a towel. She was there again now, only she wasn’t by herself this time.

Jeremy Tripp had her on all fours in front of him on the bed. She was naked and he ploughed into her as though he was working out. On the screen I could see the bed inching across the floor with each of his thrusts. Vivian seemed unaware of the camera but Jeremy Tripp grinned straight at it from time to time and later, as he was finishing, he winked and gave it the finger. After he was done with Vivian they lay on the bed together for a minute or two, then she got up and walked into the bathroom. After she’d gone, Jeremy Tripp rolled off the bed, picked up the camera from wherever it had been resting, and panned it around to a dresser in a corner of the room. On top of this there were several neatly stacked reams of paper. He lifted a sheet from one of them and held it in front of the camera. For a moment the image blurred, then it sharpened again and the screen was filled with a close-up of a flier identical to the one Gareth had ripped from the telegraph pole in Back Town. Then the screen went black as the camera was turned off.

Gareth looked at me with his mouth open and his hands turned up. “What sort of fucking psycho is he? It explains her sudden interest in the road, though.”

“You think he put her up to it?”

“Of course he did. Jesus, Johnny. Vivian’s one of these cunts who live to find excuses to rant at the world. All you have to do is point her and pull the trigger. I used to tell her how much we needed the road when I was going out with her and she moaned about it even then. Now this asshole’s wound her up to the point where she thinks it’s her duty to save the community from it. The fucking eco-liberals on the council are going to eat it up with a spoon.”

“Well, thanks for sharing …” I stood up and started to leave but Gareth stopped me.

“Johnny, wait a minute. Let me ask you something. You hate this guy as well, right? Two plant businesses in one town? He’s gotta be fucking you up. If he wasn’t around,
both
of us would be a whole lot better off. I might even get Vivian back. What would you say to us making him not be around anymore?”

“And how would we do that?”

Gareth held my gaze. “How do you think?”

The idea was appalling, but at the same time I couldn’t help feeling a rush of desire to see Jeremy Tripp dead. When I didn’t say anything Gareth stood up.

“You owe me, Johnny. You’d be a dead man now if I hadn’t stopped those jocks from cutting you open.”

“That was ten years ago.”

“You wouldn’t be any less dead if it happened yesterday.”

“I don’t owe you that much.”

For a moment Gareth looked closely at me, then, as though he had lost interest in the subject, he lifted his hands and smiled. “Hey, just thought I’d say it, you know? I thought maybe you were thinking along the same lines. Forget about it. I tell you one thing that puzzles me, though. Vivian’s Vivian and that’s bad enough, but why the fuck should Tripp care if the road gets built or not?”

I shrugged and didn’t answer. But of course I knew. Jeremy Tripp had begun to move against Gareth, the same way he’d moved against me and Marla, attacking from a distance through something each of us held dear.

As far as I was concerned Gareth deserved everything he got. But it was still strangely frightening to know that I had begun something which might well destroy the only hope he had for the future.

CHAPTER 27

J
eremy Tripp called first thing next morning and spoke without preamble.

“Bill Prentice has confirmed what you said about Gareth Rogers, that he believes he was swindled over the proposed road to the lake.”

“Does that mean you’ll leave us alone now?”

“It means more than that. This shift of focus has made Plantagion redundant. As a gesture of recompense I’d like to hand over our customers to you. And our stock of plants. Gratis, of course.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This was an offer that would save Plantasaurus, that would raise it from certain failure and catapult it into the ranks of stable and sustainable businesses.

“Well, of course, we’d be happy—”

“Good. I’ll have the plants delivered to your warehouse tomorrow. And I’ll call you in a day or so about the customer agreements. How is your brother, by the way?”

“He’s good.”

“His girlfriend cleans my house, I think. Rosie. It must be profoundly affecting for someone in his condition to have a relationship.”

“It’s very important to him, yes.”

There was a brief silence on the line while Jeremy Tripp digested this. Then he hung up.

It seemed that in the space of five minutes Plantasaurus had gone from certain ruin to potentially being more successful than we could have dreamed. That was, of course, if Jeremy Tripp was genuine. But looking at it logically I saw no reason for him not to be. He’d attacked us because he believed we’d made the video that drove his sister to suicide. Now that he knew someone else had made it he had no reason to continue persecuting us.

I went outside. Stan was dancing with Rosie on a flat patch of ground in front of the cabin. He had a radio balanced on the porch railing. It was tuned to a station that played jazz and swing.

Despite the illusion their dancing created, that Stan was happy and without care, I knew there was another, much larger part of him that was troubled and frightened—the moths and his increasing reliance on Rosie’s company were clear evidence of that. So it was good to be able to tell him that Jeremy Tripp and Plantagion were no longer a threat to us, that the success of Plantasaurus was virtually guaranteed.

Stan hugged Rosie and let out a whoop.

“I told you, Johnny! I told you! I knew power was going to come across.”

He lifted his moth pouch from the throat of his shirt, opened it, and held it to his nose. He inhaled deeply and his eyelids fluttered.

“I can feel it coming into me. I’m breathing it in, Johnny. Wow, what a great day!”

It was in the spirit of this newfound optimism that I decided to see if I could make the day even better. It had been two days since Stan and I had climbed to the top of the spur, two days since I’d discovered what I thought was the secret of Empty Mile, and the need to know if I was right had now reached a point where I could no longer put off doing something about it. So, around midday, after we’d finished what little Plantasaurus work we had, I used my phone and made an appointment and took Stan on a drive.

The Bureau of Land Management office in Burton was a storefront conversion that ran back through the ground floor of a ’50s building made from shiny, burnt-purple bricks. There were two women behind computers in the room that opened off the street and one of them pointed us down a short corridor when I asked to see Howard Webb, the man whose name was on the business card Rolf Kortekas had given me. We passed a couple of doors as we made our way to the rear of the building. They had frosted glass panels in their upper halves and the light that came through them made me think there was no one in the rooms behind them.

The door at the end of the corridor was the same as the others except that the blurred nimbus of an electric light showed through the frosting. We knocked and went in.

Howard Webb was a small man with dark hair. He sat behind a wooden desk that looked like it had been thrown away by the local school years ago. There were windows behind him and it was bright in the room, but still he had a lamp burning on his desk. It was angled over a spread of black-and-white photographs. At his direction Stan and I dragged two hard chairs away from a wall and as we set them in front of his desk I saw that the photographs he was looking at had been taken from a plane. We made our introductions and he reached over the desk and shook our hands. Stan coughed nervously when it was his turn. Howard Webb leaned back in his chair.

“You’re lucky to catch me. This office is mainly an administrative station—permits for land use, that sort of thing. I’m only really here when there’s a survey in the area. You said on the phone that you have a picture you want me to look at?”

I handed him my father’s aerial photograph. “I was wondering what you could tell us about it.”

He looked at the picture for a moment, then set it down and typed the serial number in its bottom right-hand corner into a laptop that stood on a small table beside the desk. He read the screen for a moment then turned back to us.

“It’s a place outside Oakridge. We did an aerial survey of the area a year ago. How’d you come across it?”

Stan shifted in his seat. “Uh-oh, Johnny.”

Howard Webb glanced at him uncertainly. “There’s nothing wrong with you having it. I just meant that they don’t really find their way out into the world with any sort of prevalence …” His voice tailed off on the last word, as though he was uncertain Stan would understand its meaning.

Stan looked embarrassed and said quietly, “My dad had it.”

“Oh. Was he developing land in the area?”

“He was a real estate agent.”

Howard Webb frowned and looked at the photo again. Then he turned it over and read out what was written there. “
The trees are different …”
He repeated it to himself and smiled. “I remember this picture. Your father sold real estate in Oakridge. Yes, I remember him. We met at his office back in the middle of April when I was researching the area. He asked me if I had any photos he could have for his office. And I remember particularly because, a few days after I’d given him some, he asked me exactly that—why the trees were different.” Howard Webb looked at me and squinted. “How is he?”

“Well, we’re not really sure right now. He may be off on a midlife crisis.”

The surveyor was momentarily confused, but evidently decided it would be indelicate to probe further. “Oh, well, he seemed like a nice man. Do you know what he meant, about the trees?”

“I can see something in the photo, but I’m not sure what it is.”

“Okay, look here.”

Stan and I stood up and leaned over the desk as Webb pointed at the photo with the tip of a pencil.

“So, most of what you can see is typical topography for the area—forest, river, a collapsed spur. But there’s something else a little more interesting here too. The trees we’re talking about are here.”

Webb traced the faintly differentiated channel of trees on the picture with his pencil.

“You can see how this area of forest appears very slightly lighter on the photograph. That’s because the vegetation here—the trees—is less dense and of lesser stature than the forest on either side of it. And it’s like that because it’s growing in ground that is poorer in nutrients. You see the course of the river? How it curves around this spur? That’s not its original course. I think what we’re looking at here is the result of a landslip. At some point the face of the spur fell away into the path of the river and forced it into this curve, here. The line of sparser vegetation on the other side of the bluff follows the original path of the river. The trees are, in effect, growing on top of the original riverbed. In some cases a riverbed will be sediment rich and we would see the opposite effect on vegetation—that it would grow more strongly—but in others the riverbed is composed of gravel and sand and plants have a harder time because they only have a shallow layer of topsoil from which to source nutrients. That’s probably the case here.”

“But we own that land and where those trees are doesn’t look like a riverbed. I mean, it doesn’t dip down or anything.”

“The Swallow River is very shallow in that part of the country even now. There’s no reason to suppose it was any deeper along this old, original stretch. The slip might have happened several hundred years ago. Over that time whatever depression there was could easily have been filled with windborne debris, matter washed in by rain, accumulated dead vegetation …”

Stan made two quick popping noises with his lips. “Yikes, Johnny, a secret river and we didn’t even know it was there!”

Howard Webb looked slightly nonplussed, but recovered quickly and smiled at Stan. “A lot of these things are only visible from the air.”

I had what I needed. Stan and I thanked Howard Webb for his time and headed out of the office. At the door, though, something occurred to me and I turned back to him.

“When my father was here asking about the picture, was there anyone else with him?”

“Yes, a kind of redheaded guy, about your age.”

On the way home Stan was agog with the idea of a hidden river.

“I bet we’re the only people in the whole world who know about it, Johnny. It’s right there, in the trees, and anyone else would just walk over it, but we know. I told you it was weird how the trees were like that. And I was right.”

“That you were, dude.”

“I wonder what it would look like if we dug it up.” For a moment he was silent, then he startled me with a sharp intake of breath. “Johnny! That must be why Dad dug those holes there. Where he got that sample from. The hidden river must be full of gold!”

“Calm down, dude.”

“But why would he dig samples if he didn’t think it was? Hey, you know what? We should go exploring there.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll be exploring it all right.”

“We should make an equipment list. Like a flashlight and an axe. And some rope.”

“What are you going to use rope for?”

“You coil it up and put it over your shoulder. So it goes across your chest.”

“And you look totally cool.”

“Yeah. We gotta do it when Rosie’s around so she can see.” After that he gazed out the window for a couple of minutes, then he turned back to me and said quietly, “You think we should get married, Johnny?”

“Can’t, we’re brothers.”

“Me and Rosie, stupid.”

That Stan and Rosie might get married was an idea so bizarre I’d never contemplated it and caught unawares as I was now I couldn’t help but react negatively.

“I don’t know, Stan, Marla and I aren’t married.”

“Yeah, but Johnny,” Stan looked uncomfortable, “you’re you.”

“Okay, even so, do you think it’s a good idea? I mean, Rosie’s a lovely girl but I think she had a pretty rough life in the past. Being married is kind of different than just going out, you have to deal with more of each other’s problems.”

“But Rosie and I don’t have problems. We’re happy.”

“Yeah, but what I’m saying is you might have problems if you got married.”

“That doesn’t make sense, Johnny.”

“Look, Stan, I know you love her, but you live right next door, you see her whenever you want. What’s the difference?”

Stan was silent for a mile or so and I knew I’d made him unhappy.

“But if we did get married you wouldn’t be angry, would you, Johnny?”

“No, I wouldn’t be angry.”

Stan smiled to himself and wriggled comfortably deeper into his seat. And I drove on, wondering just how complicated life could get.

Marla was later than usual and it was dark when she got home from work. She dropped her things over the back of a chair and collapsed on the couch. Her cheeks were flushed from the cool air outside but under the color she looked the same sort of tired she always did nowadays. Stan was in his room watching TV and came out when he heard her arrive. He was bursting to tell her about our buried river but before he could start Marla sighed and launched into an explanation of why she was late.

“They called an unscheduled meeting at the town hall about the road to Tunney Lake. I had to go up and take minutes.” She smiled grimly. “Things don’t look good for Gareth. They took an informal vote; there wasn’t enough of a majority to veto the project, but it could easily end up that way given time. You won’t believe who was there—Jeremy Tripp. He was with that woman who’s been campaigning around town.”

“Vivian Gelhardt.”

“You know her?”

“Gareth used to go out with her. He introduced us awhile ago, before she left him for Tripp.”

“What a shame. Well, they’ve got this petition with a ton of signatures. Tripp said he was going to keep collecting them until he had enough to force the council to abandon the road.”

“Could they really do that?”

“They see that van around town and enough people sign a piece of paper, they can’t just ignore it. Plus a couple of the councilors don’t want to spend the money anyhow.”

Stan, who had been jigging from foot to foot while she spoke, couldn’t contain himself any longer and blurted, “We’ve got a hidden river and it’s full of gold!”

Marla looked confused and I could tell she was trying to figure out if his comment was another behavioral anomaly like his moths. I held my hand up to stop him saying any more and he sat down on a chair facing the couch, grinning at me, waiting for me to explain our discovery to Marla.

“Stan and I found out something today that makes me pretty sure I know why my father bought this land.”

Stan leaned forward excitedly and said, “Because there’s a river full of gold!”

Marla rolled her eyes. “Oh God, Johnny, he was always digging around in one place or another. He never found anything worth more than a couple hundred dollars, you know that.”

“Well, listen to this—Millicent told me he was out here in February trying to get her to put her house on the market. While he was there she showed him a journal her great-great-grandfather or someone had written early in the Gold Rush. I’ve read it too, and this guy came up the Swallow and panned the whole length of Empty Mile. Didn’t find a thing, got pissed off, and moved on up the river. Okay, no big deal. Empty Mile’s called Empty Mile because no one found gold here. Everyone’s always assumed it was because some early party of miners got to the bend before the Rush really got going and mined it clean. Thing is, Millicent’s great-great-grandfather said in his journal that the bend had
never
been mined before he got to it. There were no piles of dirt, the riverbed wasn’t disturbed, etcetera, etcetera. So the reason there was no gold at Empty Mile couldn’t have been because it was mined out. Now, my father, being interested in gold forever, would have found this an interesting fact, and he would have remembered it, particularly because the rest of the Swallow River was so rich. Then, Chris Reynolds told us, he attended a lecture in March at the Elephant Society—the same subject you and I sat through—about how changes in the landscape, things like landslides and so on, can change the course of a river. I think it was at that point he started speculating about Empty Mile. But the breakthrough came with this.”