Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  “Is this a joke?”

  “It’s business.”

  “You expect me to take Marla so some guy can fuck her?”

  “What’s the problem? It isn’t the first time she’s done it.”

  “What?”

  Gareth looked suddenly aghast. He did a good job of it, but I knew he was putting it on.

  “Oh, don’t tell me you don’t know! Please tell me you know.”

  “What?”

  “That she hooks. I mean not all the time, man. But sometimes. Just now and then. I thought you two would have gone through all of that.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m not taking Marla anywhere.”

  Gareth looked somber. “Well, I’m sorry, Johnny, but you have to.”

  “I’ll take one of your other girls.”

  “I wish I could, but this guy asked for her specifically. He doesn’t want anyone else.”

  “What do you mean, asked for her specifically? If he’s a new customer how would he even know about her?”

  “Beats me, but he does, ’cause he asked for her by name.”

  “You’re fucking insane.”

  “Johnny, listen. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do. I need the money to keep this place going. I start not giving people what they want and pretty soon they’re going to stop calling me.”

  “So fucking what?”

  Gareth didn’t say anything else, he just stood there with his hands on his hips and no expression on his face. I stood there too. I had no intention of moving until he gave in. But then I heard Marla’s voice behind me, calling sadly from the open window of the truck.

  “Johnny.”

  I didn’t turn and she called again.

  “Johnny.”

  I looked over my shoulder then and she beckoned me with a small despairing movement of her hand.

  “Get in. Please.”

  For a moment I hesitated, caught up in my anger, wanting to force Gareth to back down. But then it dawned on me that the simplest solution was to get in the pickup and just drive her home. So I told Gareth to get fucked, climbed into the truck, and drove down the hellish trail to the Oakridge Loop. I didn’t speak on the way down, in the dark it took all my concentration to negotiate the broken surface of the trail, but when we hit the blacktop I pulled the pickup over.

  “What the fuck is this all about?”

  “Keep driving, Johnny, please.”

  “No, I want you to tell me what’s going on.”

  “Start the truck and I’ll explain.”

  I pulled out onto the road again and after a minute or two Marla began to speak.

  “A couple of years ago, maybe a bit more, I was in a bad way. The kind of bad way where the world around you seems smashed to pieces and you feel smashed right along with it. I didn’t have anything left to care about anymore. I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have you, I hadn’t paid rent in months, and one day I got the final notice on the house. The night I decided to do it, it felt like everything left of me worth saving or protecting was so close to dying it didn’t matter what I did. So I got in my car and drove over to Burton and I stood on a street corner where there were some other girls doing the same thing and… and I did it.”

  She took a cigarette from a pack in her purse. Her hands shook as she lit it. She blew smoke at the floor and kept her head bent and didn’t look at me.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  I looked out at the black road, at the wash of white light from my headlights, and wondered if there was anything I could say. I couldn’t make it not have happened, the same as I couldn’t not feel my anger. In the end I just shook my head.

  Marla sighed, she sounded like a child that had cried itself out. “I hated it. I did it for a year and I hated every second of it. Then finally I woke up and thought what the fuck am I doing? I was going to stop, I really was, but then Gareth found out.”

  “So you went to work for him instead. For what, old times sake?”

  “Don’t be a bastard. I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Oh yeah, how’s that?”

  “I got arrested. And by some hideous coincidence Gareth was in Burton at the time. He saw me on the street and when I got into some guy’s car and we parked in an alley he followed to watch. And while he was watching a patrol car came along and I got busted. He didn’t use it at first. I guess when it happened I didn’t have enough to lose to make me a blackmail target. But then I got my job and he realized he could make me do whatever he wanted. All it would take was one phone call from him and they’d fire me, they’d have to-you can’t have a hooker working for the town council.”

  “You let him pimp you just so you could keep your job?”

  “It’s too important to me. That job makes me feel like a normal person, like all the people who have proper houses and families and husbands. Without it all I’ll ever be is a waitress and an ex-hooker.”

  Marla put her cigarette out in the ashtray.

  “I don’t suppose it helps, but it wasn’t like it was a full-time thing. He’d make me do it once every couple of months. It was more about control than money.”

  “I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone.”

  “I told you the first day you came around I wasn’t the same person you left behind.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were that different.”

  “How could I? All I’d dreamed of for eight years was that you’d come back to me. I wasn’t going to risk losing that. You know, Johnny, everybody gets ruined by the past one way or another. You aren’t the only one.”

  “Well, you’re not doing it tonight.”

  “I am.”

  “What are you talking about? I’ll see Gareth tomorrow and tell him to fuck off.”

  “No, you won’t. If I don’t do it he’ll call the council, and I am not losing my job. I had it before you came back and I’m not giving it up just because you suddenly felt the need to come home and try and fix your past.” She put her hand on my arm and her voice softened. “I’m not even there when it happens.”

  “Don’t give me that shit. There aren’t too many other places you can be when you’re flat on your back with some guy on top of you.”

  Her tone changed abruptly and she pulled away. “You might want to consider that we wouldn’t be having this conversation if you’d shown some fucking spine and hadn’t run away to London. Do you think I would ever have started doing it then? Ever?”

  We’d entered the town by then and the darkness of the forest had been replaced by the orange glow of streetlights. There were people walking around in the warm night and through the windows of restaurants and bars life gently ticked away the minutes and the hours. And suddenly my anger faded and I wanted the dirt of this night to be gone. I wanted to stop the pickup and park and take Marla into a bar and forget everything that had ever happened in her past and in mine and just have a drink and some food and be alive in the present. For once. For one goddamned moment.

  And I wanted Marla not to be right. But I knew what she said about me and what I’d done to her was true. And I knew I didn’t have the right to force her to lose something she held dear. I’d taken too much away from her already.

  So, on the other side of Back Town I didn’t take the road up to my house, but turned instead onto the long dark grade of the forest road that led up to the Slopes.

  “What’s the address?”

  Marla gripped my arm tightly and whispered, “I’m so sorry, Johnny.”

  She passed me a scrap of paper. I recognized the street name, but it wasn’t until I turned into it ten minutes later that it finally dawned on me what our destination was.

  Lights buried in the ground threw columns of gold against the white front of Jeremy Tripp’s house. The plants in the garden and beside the driveway caught the light on the edges of their leaves so that they looked like ornaments placed for effect.

  I should have stayed in the pickup, I should have let Marla c
limb out and go to the house by herself and do what she had to do. I should have waited for her out there on the dark street and tried not to think, or maybe gone driving in some attempt to distract myself until it was time to pick her up again. But I didn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to let go of her. So I walked with her to the front door and stood close as she rang the bell and waited.

  Tripp opened the door holding his longbow. He was wearing knee-length shorts and an NYU T-shirt. When he saw me he looked a little surprised.

  “John. This is a bonus. Doing a little moonlighting? Plants not working out?”

  “I’m the driver.”

  His face changed nastily. “Not tonight, you’re not.” His eyes moved to Marla. They narrowed slightly as though the way she looked meant something to him.

  I turned to her and nodded toward the pickup. “I guess I’ll just wait, then.”

  Marla put her hand on my arm and leaned forward to kiss me quickly on the cheek. For a second her eyes held mine and I felt her hand tighten. I turned to go, but Jeremy Tripp stopped me.

  “Oh, no, John. Now that you’re here you’re coming inside too.”

  Marla started to protest, but Tripp stopped her.

  “Without John here I call your boss and tell him you wouldn’t cooperate. He said all I had to do was pick up the phone if you gave me any trouble. Plus it might be safer. I could quite easily forget myself and become violent. It’s up to you, though.”

  He looked blandly at Marla until she dropped her gaze. I saw her shoulders sag. I saw her press her hands against her thighs to stop them shaking. Then, after a long moment in which no one moved or spoke, she stepped forward and the three of us went into the house.

  Out back the wooden deck was brightly lit by harsh white floodlights that hurt my eyes. The long lawn shimmered in their light. The archery target had several arrows in it and behind it the forest made a smoky backdrop. At one end of the deck the jets of the Jacuzzi churned water and threw a halo of mist into the air.

  Jeremy Tripp walked to the edge of the deck, took an arrow from a quiver, and set it in his bow. He drew the string and held it for several seconds before he loosed it. The arrow hit the target near its center.

  He turned and leaned against the railing and pointed to a bench against the wall of the house. “You sit over there and don’t move until we’re finished.” And then, to Marla, “Take your clothes off.”

  Marla looked uncertainly at me and then at Tripp. “Can’t he wait in the house?”

  “No, he can’t.”

  The bench was fifteen feet from where Marla stood and I saw her sigh and as the air left her she seemed to break, to be no longer something with free will but an object, resigned to whatever battering life had decided to dish out.

  She dropped the purse she was carrying on the wooden planking and pulled the pieces of clothing from her body-her shirt, her sandals, her short skirt and her underwear.

  Jeremy Tripp watched every second of it with an angry intensity. He told Marla to lie on her back, then took off his own clothes and peeled on a condom. He stepped over her and crouched and leaned forward and forced himself into her mouth.

  I started to rise from my chair, desperate to leave, feeling sure that I would soon be physically sick, but Jeremy Tripp heard me move and called across to me: “Stay where you are, John. It’ll be far safer for her.”

  Something moved out on the lawn. Several yards in front of the archery target a large brown rabbit took a few slow hops and then stopped to nibble grass. Jeremy Tripp saw it. He pulled himself out of Marla’s mouth and retrieved his bow. He set an arrow and drew the string back. For a moment he was frozen in the hard light, then the arrow streaked across the lawn and into the rabbit’s stomach, skewering the animal to the ground. It lay on its side with its legs running and blood darkening its fur and screamed like a child burning.

  Jeremy Tripp went back to Marla and climbed on top and started to grind himself into her. Out on the lawn the rabbit kept on screaming and I covered my ears and closed my eyes and tried not to feel the world tearing itself open around me.

  In the truck on the way down from the Slopes afterwards Marla smoked one cigarette after another. We didn’t speak. What could we say to each other? By that point recriminations were as pointless as apologies.

  I drove to my place. Stan was asleep on the couch in the living room. The TV was still on, tuned to Nickelodeon. There was a Coke can and an empty packet of potato chips on the floor. I woke him and walked him up the stairs to his bedroom. While I was getting him settled Marla showered, then she and I sat in the kitchen and drank bourbon until the alcohol blurred the images of the night enough for us to risk the darkness of the bedroom.

  As Marla undressed she said, “You know Gareth hates both of us, don’t you?”

  “Well, he must hate you, that’s for sure.”

  “And you. He loved it that he could involve you. You could have picked me up from my place. Instead he drove me up to the lake and made you come out there. Why? Because he wanted to be there when you found out. He wanted to see how much it hurt you.”

  Later, as we lingered at the edge of an alcohol-hazed sleep, she pressed her face against the base of my neck and whispered for me to tell her that nothing had changed between us. And I did, because although the horror of that night had been almost insupportable I knew that being without her, being unable to somehow make up for abandoning her, would be something I was far less able to bear.

  CHAPTER 16

  The next morning, after Marla had gone to work, I went outside and sat in the back garden and forced myself not to replay images of her lying underneath Jeremy Tripp. I spent a long time doing this before I turned to one of my other problems-how the hell I was going to hold on to the house.

  Leaving would traumatize Stan and if there was any way to spare him the loss of his home I had to try and find it. The only solution I could see right then, and the one the bank seemed to favor, was to sell the Empty Mile land. But my father had made me promise not to do that under any circumstances. Why? What could be so important about a piece of land that he had plunged himself into debt again at the age of fifty-seven to buy it?

  Stan and I had to meet a prospective customer at the warehouse that afternoon but everything else we had scheduled work-wise could be put off to another day. When I told Stan we were taking some time off he was dubious at first, but he came around pretty quickly when he realized it would involve seeing Rosie.

  At Empty Mile the meadow had trapped the sun and crickets were singing in the long grass. On the porch of Millicent Jeffries’s house the smell of warm wood and dust was sweetened by a sprig of jasmine that stood in a jar of water on a sill outside an open window. The screen door was closed and on the other side of it the old woman stood peering at us through the mesh.

  “I wondered who it was.”

  “Stan and I thought we’d say hello.”

  “I figured we’d see you at some point. Rosie wanted to visit after we read about your father but I told her to let you be for a while. Come inside.”

  The front door opened directly onto a sitting room that occupied much of the front of the house. It was clean and smelled somehow as though everything in it had just been swept. The walls and the furnishings were pale and because the room was not large its surfaces were cluttered with the vases and knickknacks they held. But it was a pleasant place to be-the porch roof shielded its walls from the sun and there was a cooling movement to the air as it came in through the open windows.

  Millicent sat in a chair with a creaking mechanism beneath its upholstery that allowed it to rock. She had been in the middle of some needlework and she picked up the hoop again and laid it on her lap and the dry ends of her fingers moved absently across a half-completed stitching of flowers. I sat on a couch but Stan stayed standing.

  “Is Rosie here, Mrs. Jeffries?”

  “She’s in her room.”

  Stan looked uncertain.

  “Go on, you can g
o through.”

  Stan walked through a square arch in the back wall and a moment later I heard him tapping on a door. Millicent smiled gently at me.

  “We were both sorry to hear about your father. What a mystery. He seemed like a decent man.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “The police don’t expect to find him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Millicent nodded to herself. “Will you sell the land?”

  “My father wanted me to keep it.”

  “Well, it’s a pretty enough spot.”

  “It is, but I’m kind of puzzled about what he was planning to do with it.”

  Millicent shrugged. “First time I met him he was trying to get me to put my house on the market. Maybe when he saw the land he just fell in love with it. Maybe he didn’t have any plans.”

  “When was that?”

  “February. I remember because it seemed a silly time to be selling a house, but he said there were a lot of buyers in the market for vacation homes and he wanted to get it listed for spring when people started to buy. He said he could get me a good price. I told him to take a look and tell me where I could go on the kind of money I’d get for this place. Our water’s that rain tank out there, toilet’s another tank buried in the ground. He kept trying, of course, I suppose they have to, but he gave up when he saw I wasn’t going to change my mind. We ended up talking about gold, of all things.”

  “Gold?”

  “Yes, he and the young man he had with him were both amateur prospectors and it happens that one of my ancestors, an Englishman like your father, came to California in the Gold Rush and kept something of a journal about it. Your father asked to see it. He seemed very interested in the history of the area.”

  “Who was the guy with him?”

  “I don’t know, a friend, perhaps. He didn’t appear to be involved in your father’s business.”

  “Does the journal say anything about this land here?”

  “A little, I think. It’s been a long time since I even looked at it. It never interested me all that much.”