Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  My father poured another drink and swallowed it. He was very drunk. His words were beginning to slur.

  “What sickens me is that I always had it in the back of my head that if I stayed with her long enough some of her money might rub off on me. And all the time I was thinking about money, she was thinking about killing herself.”

  He slumped forward on the table and put his head in his arms. I waited for several minutes until I thought he must have fallen asleep. I was going to rouse him and try and get him up to bed, but when I shook him he lifted his head and told me to leave him where he was. There wasn’t much else I could do, so I put a glass of water on the table next to him and headed out of the room. As I reached the doorway he called to me.

  “Johnny, that friend you used to have-Gareth.”

  “What about him?”

  “He isn’t the sort of man you want to be mixed up with.”

  He pointed his finger at me. His face was swollen and loose and his eyes were bleary.

  “You hear me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good…”

  He dropped his head into his arms again and his breath came out in a sob.

  The room felt abandoned, as though everywhere outside was empty and gone. The electric clock on the stove ratcheted painfully through the minutes and the light from the ceiling bulb made things dirty around the edges. I felt terribly sad standing there watching my father. It seemed to me, at that moment, that the world was nothing more than a place where lives fell apart.

  CHAPTER 10

  Stan asked me to drive him to work the next day. Bill Prentice was unlikely to be in and he wanted to be there to help out as much as he could. After I’d dropped him off I headed into Back Town to meet Marla. She worked in a modern-looking annex the council had built for its administrative staff a block away from the town hall itself. We went to a café called the Black Cat opposite her building. It was a basic place with plain tables and hard chairs and had been around long before gold town nostalgia became the obligatory decorative motif for eateries in Oakridge.

  At breakfast and lunch the place was busy with workers from neighboring businesses but midmorning it was almost empty and Marla and I had our pick of the tables. We sat at the front of the place by one of the large plate-glass windows. Around us sunlight picked out dust motes in the air and the occasional chink of plates from back in the kitchen seemed somehow to point up the loneliness of this in-between time.

  Marla looked efficient in her office clothes but under her lipstick and eyeliner she was pale and her eyes were tired.

  We talked about Pat dying. When I told her it looked like an overdose of sleeping pills she tensed and began twisting a napkin between her hands.

  “What sort of sleeping pills?”

  “Halcion.”

  “Oh Jesus…” For a moment she closed her eyes. “I gave them to her.”

  “What?”

  “I gave her the pills.”

  “To kill herself?”

  “No! For fucksake, Johnny. She couldn’t sleep, she wanted something. I was going to get her some grass, but when I asked Gareth all he had was pills.”

  “Hang on, why are you asking Gareth anything?”

  “He’s the only guy I know for that kind of thing.”

  “So you’re what, in touch with him on a regular basis?”

  “Jesus Christ! Didn’t you hear what I said? I’m telling you she got the pills off me, and all you’re worried about is if I’m seeing Gareth.”

  “Are you?”

  “Fuck.” Marla let out a breath and worked at not being angry. She reached across the table and took my hand.

  “Why would I be seeing Gareth?”

  She looked at me levelly until I gave in.

  “Okay… Okay, I’m sorry. Were you close… with Pat?”

  “She’d come around sometimes without Ray and we’d talk. I liked her but we weren’t girlfriends or anything.”

  “Why didn’t she get her own pills?”

  “Her doctor wouldn’t give them to her, I don’t know why.”

  “Was she taking antidepressants?”

  “Of course, she’d been on them for years.”

  We finished our coffee and went outside and stood in the sunshine in front of the café while Marla smoked a cigarette.

  “Do you think the thing with my father and Pat would have gone anywhere?”

  Marla shook her head. “She would never have left Bill. He treated her like shit, fucked anything that moved, but she loved him. She had this dream that one day everything was going to come right between them. And Ray always seemed really uncomfortable with the whole affair thing.”

  Marla rubbed the butt of her cigarette against the wall of the café and took a few steps along the sidewalk to a trash can. I watched her until movement a block away on the other side of the road caught my eye.

  Bill Prentice, alone and wearing a dark suit, was running down the short flight of stone steps in front of the town hall toward us. From the expression on his face it looked like he was reprising the anger he’d exhibited toward me in his wife’s bedroom.

  Marla stepped back from the trash can and stood close to me. Bill didn’t slow when he got to the sidewalk on our side and as I opened my mouth to make some sort of greeting he raised his fist and hit me hard enough on the side of the face to knock me down. I struggled to my feet as fast as I could, expecting further blows. But they didn’t come.

  Bill stood before us, quivering, arms straight at his sides and rigid, his head turning in a narrow arc between Marla and me as though he couldn’t decide who to settle on. The tension in him was so great he seemed unable to speak and in those silent moments I saw a dreadful sadness replace his anger and I knew I was looking at a man for whom the world had become incomprehensible.

  When he finally spoke his voice was strangled. “Why did you do it?”

  “We just found her. We didn’t do anything.”

  Bill looked around him as though he didn’t know where he was, then stared hard at me again and screamed, “I don’t understand!”

  Marla moved forward a little. There was a tremor in her voice when she spoke. “Bill, you’ve had a terrible shock. You should be at home. Do you want me to take you?”

  “You bitch! You fucking evil bitch! Do you know what you’ve done to me? What did I do to you? What did I do? I paid you. I didn’t touch you, I just watched. What did I do wrong?”

  Marla looked uncertainly at me. I felt out of my depth. I didn’t understand his anger and I didn’t know how to help him.

  “Bill, come on, man-”

  “Fuck you! Fuck you!”

  He broke down then, sobbing, clenching his fists in front of his chest. A couple of people on the sidewalk stopped to watch and one of the security guys from the town hall came over. He recognized Bill and stepped between us.

  I felt Marla pulling me, dragging me away. It didn’t feel right to leave him like this, crying and so obviously broken, but she pulled harder and we walked away and left him there collapsed in the arms of the guard.

  We went back to where I’d parked the pickup. We were both shaken and we locked the doors after we got in. Marla shuddered.

  “He was talking about what we did at the lake.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she groaned. I put my hand on her arm but she jerked away angrily.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  “He’s just feeling guilty. It’s not our fault if he feels bad about it now. We’re just someone he can take it out on.”

  But Marla wasn’t listening. Without warning she twisted in her seat and slapped me across the face. The blow wasn’t hard but it caught me on the same side of the face as Bill’s punch and it stung.

  “What the fuck!”

  “Why did you have to leave me? Why the fuck couldn’t you have stayed? Look what you turned me into! Someone who can fuck in front of another man. I’m disgusting. We could have bought a house and had a ki
d. We would have been normal and clean. We would have been fucking happy.”

  She put her face in her hands and fell against me and sobbed.

  “Jesus, Johnny, Jesus…”

  I held her and let her cry and stared blankly through the windshield. The town bustled about its business, people walked along the sidewalk, cars drove down the street, but I saw nothing through the glass except the cold shine of my own guilt. Later, when Marla had quieted, she went back to work and I drove fast along country roads for a long time with all the windows open and the air rushing in.

  CHAPTER 11

  The day they buried Patricia Prentice my father was almost killed. And because I’d accepted his offer to drive into town with him and have breakfast before he started work, I was almost killed too.

  Earlier, I’d tried to talk to him about Patricia Prentice but when I raised the subject his conversation became monosyllabic and guarded and he avoided saying anything except that he was okay and I shouldn’t worry about him. I didn’t press the point, I knew from experience that any coming to terms he had to do he’d do deep down inside, in that hidden part of himself where his emotions were sealed.

  The end of our street joined a long road that ran downhill. As my father turned the car into it I saw him frown a little.

  “Brakes are a bit soft.”

  He shrugged and wound down his window. We gathered speed and he took an exaggerated breath of the air coming in.

  “I like this time of morning. Before everything starts.”

  He frowned again.

  “These brakes really don’t feel right.”

  There was very little traffic about at this time and going downhill we’d reached a speed of about fifty miles an hour. A hundred yards ahead of us the road curved sharply to the left where it crossed a culvert before flattening out against the floor of the basin. We needed to slow quickly to make the turn but the car continued to pick up speed. I looked across at my father. He was staring through the windshield, gripping the wheel so hard his knuckles showed white beneath the tan of his hands. His right foot pumped rapidly on the brake pedal. He shouted, “The brakes have gone. Hold on!”

  He yanked the emergency brake and the scream of the locking rear tires added to the cacophony of sound that had suddenly engulfed us-the engine of the car, the rush of our passage through air and over tarmac, the thudding of our hearts and the roar of our blood, our shouts in the last sickening second as we entered the turn, my father wrenching the wheel around, fighting the weight of the car.

  “Cover your face, John!”

  And then the howl of the wheels losing their grip and the sideways drift of the car, beyond any hope of control now, out across the angle of the curve as though it floated on oil, the white beams of the guardrail across the edge of the culvert suddenly at my window. And then our impact, a single explosive bang and a hail of shattered glass, the final slewing through a quarter turn, the lurching drop as the back of the car went through the guardrail and over the concrete edge of the culvert, the shriek of metal being scraped from the bottom of the car. And then silence.

  For a moment, after it all stopped, neither of us moved or spoke, sure that we must be hideously injured and that movement of any kind would reveal to us the terrible nature of our wounds. But the seconds passed and we did not find ourselves dying or drenched with blood and we peeled ourselves away from the positions into which we’d been thrown.

  “Are you all right, John? Are you hurt?”

  I flexed my legs and arms. I’d hit the side of my head on the doorframe and I had small cuts on the backs of my hands, but I was uninjured.

  “No, I’m okay. I’m not hurt. Are you?”

  My father moved a little in his seat and then smiled like he didn’t believe it. “You know, I think I’m all right.”

  “You’re bleeding a little.”

  He had a small cut on his cheekbone and a drop of blood had run halfway down the side of his face. I pointed to it and he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed it away. He held the handkerchief in front of him and looked at the small red mark his blood had made. He turned it so I could see it. And we both began to laugh at the insanity of surviving such violence and noise and danger with nothing more than a few drops of blood to show for it. For a long time we couldn’t stop, but eventually the tension left us and we climbed out of the car.

  The impact with the guardrail had buckled the panels along the entire right-hand side of the car. Although the back wheels had gone over the edge the car was stable on its belly and didn’t shift as we both got out through the driver’s door. Six feet below us a small creek entered the mouth of a tunnel which allowed it to pass beneath the road. On either side of the culvert there was a margin of woodland and then houses. In the garden of one of these a middle-aged couple stood watching us anxiously. They were holding hands and they waved at us.

  The police turned up ten minutes later and my father answered questions for their report. They figured the only thing that had saved us was hitting the guardrail side-on. If we’d ploughed straight through it, they said, we would have gone nose-first into the culvert and the impact would have killed us for sure. A couple of people who’d come out to look at the damage nodded and made agreeing noises and said how amazing it was we weren’t dead. The police radioed a garage to come out and tow the car, then they gave us a lift into town.

  By the time we got there it was late in the morning and my father couldn’t do breakfast anymore. I arranged to come in and pick him up after work, then I wandered around town by myself for half an hour and bought an espresso. I was about to get a cab from the small taxi stand in Old Town when two dark vehicles caught my attention. A hearse and a town car, both bearing the name of a funeral home in gold lettering on their sides. The hearse carried a pale brown coffin and the town car had only one passenger, a man in a dark suit with a rosebud pinned to his lapel. He sat in the back of the car looking straight ahead. I had not expected that Bill Prentice would be solitary for this occasion. He was well known and gregarious and he’d been that way for a long time. When I thought of the kind of funeral procession that might attend his wife I thought of a long train of cars, elaborate wreaths, parties of people for whom he had done favors or been in business with. I thought of an event.

  But there was nothing of this about the two lonely cars that passed me. They seemed closed and inward-facing, as though the thing they carried was not to be shared and they wished to pass from view as quickly as possible. I watched them as they moved along the road, their brake lights occasionally flicking red as they slowed for traffic or waited at signals. And then they turned a corner and were gone.

  I hadn’t been at home long when Rachel, the manager of the garden center, dropped Stan off in front of the house. He came down the hall and into the kitchen all breathless and full of news.

  “Bill closed the garden center.”

  “Yeah, I think it was Pat’s funeral today.”

  “No, I mean forever. When I got in Rachel was giving everyone their last paychecks and telling us not to come back. Bill’s so sad he’s not going to open it again. He’s not even going to live at his house anymore. He’s gone up to his cabin in the mountains. Rachel said he sold all his furniture.”

  “Ah, man, your job…”

  “No, Johnny, it’s good. Now we can go full power on Plantasaurus. And guess what? Rachel told me that Bill said I could take all the big plants to help me start, and all the sacks of potting mix too. It’s a reward for the bear.”

  Stan went to the refrigerator and got a can of Coke.

  “You should cut down on that stuff. It isn’t good for you.”

  “What are you talking about, Johnny? It powers you up.”

  “It’s full of sugar.”

  “Of course it is.” He took a big swallow of the drink and made a growling noise. “Powerin’ up for Plantasaurus!”

  Drinking so fast made his eyes water. He blinked rapidly and burped.

  I to
ld him about the crash that morning. He went wide-eyed at the story of our narrow escape and then seemed to withdraw into himself. Later, he went upstairs to his room and put on his Batman costume and sat down at his desk with his comic books and his drawing things.

  Stan and I met my father at the garage in town. Oakridge had three of these places but, by chance, the Ford had been taken to the one that used to belong to Gareth’s father. The place had been bought and expanded by a nationwide chain and was now run as a franchise by staff who all wore matching uniforms. A short, fat mechanic carrying a clipboard joined us in the workshop. He moved slowly, as though the weight of the fat dragging at his body exhausted him.

  “She’s up there.”

  He jerked his head at a hydraulic hoist, then took a flashlight out of his pocket and shone it on the underside of my father’s car. The damage was extensive. The exhaust system had been torn away and the drive shaft was no longer connected to the differential. The base of the car itself was scraped and gouged and marked in places with powdered concrete.

  “Brake failure.”

  Using the flashlight beam he traced a thin metal pipe that came out from somewhere in the engine and ran along its base before splitting out to feed the brakes on each side of the car. Where the pipe bent to curve around the engine it looked discolored and corroded.

  “Someone hold the flashlight.”

  I took it from him and held it trained on the spot while he went to work with a pair of wire cutters. When he was done he stepped out from under the car and held his hand out to us. A six-inch section of the pipe rested on his palm. The metal on one side of it had rotted away leaving a hole in the pipe wall about two inches long. My father took it and examined it closely. His face was tight with anger and he shook his head slowly.

  “Unbelievable.”

  The mechanic snorted derisively. “Yeah, it’s pretty poor. Looks like some sort of metal fatigue.”

  “But these things aren’t supposed to corrode.”

  “What can I say? You got a defective part. This is a reasonably old car.”

  “It’s only a ’93.”