Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  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.

  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 the
n 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 st
ood 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

  Jeremy 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.