Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  Around ten o’clock Millicent and Rosie went home. It wasn’t unusual for Stan to spend the night at Rosie’s, but now that marriage was certain he took himself off to his own bed full of high-minded notions of chivalry.

  Marla and I sat near the fire and watched it burn down to a bed of coals. Though she had engaged in the evening I knew it had been a struggle for her and now, with everyone gone, a bleak unhappiness claimed her again and she felt dull and lethargic in my arms. I told her about my confrontation with Gareth earlier that day, about how he’d admitted that Pat’s suicide was an attempt to stop my father acquiring the Empty Mile land.

  “But he wouldn’t admit to killing him.”

  “Did you expect him to?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Did he say anything about it at all?”

  “No. What do you mean? What would he say?”

  Marla shook her head and didn’t answer. After a moment she stood up and pulled me into our bedroom. She opened a drawer in her dresser, pushed aside a pile of her underwear, and took out something wrapped in a cloth. She laid the bundle on the bed and opened it carefully.

  The gun was an ugly black thing. It lay against its cloth like some deadly reptile, a dangerous presence that drew too much of the room’s light to itself.

  Marla waited for my reaction, looking eager and frightened at the same time.

  “I got it today.”

  “A gun? Jesus, Marla, what were you thinking?”

  The tense energy of a second before drained from her and she was suddenly overcome with despair. “I can’t stand it anymore, Johnny. Gareth being here every day, in our world, coming into our fucking house for Christ’s sake. Looking at me all the time… I can’t live with it. I can’t!”

  She cast her eyes about the room as though searching for help, then picked up the gun and held it out to me with both hands.

  “We can use this, Johnny. For Ray. For ourselves. He deserves it.”

  “Marla, come on! What do you think we are? We’re not fucking killers.”

  “Isn’t that just what we are? Jeremy Tripp didn’t pass away in his sleep. You did it. And I know about it. Pretty hard not to call that murder.”

  “Walking up to someone and shooting them is a bit different.”

  “How?”

  “Fuck, Marla, this is insane. I can’t believe we’re even talking about it.”

  “Johnny, he has to go.”

  “So we shoot him and spend the rest of our lives in jail. Great plan.”

  “You got away with Jeremy Tripp.”

  “Jesus Christ, stop it!”

  From the open doorway behind us there was a shuffling of slippered feet and then Stan’s drowsy voice.

  “Why are you guys yelling? Oh-”

  I turned to see him standing there, transfixed, staring at the gun Marla was now holding loosely in front of her.

  “Wow, you got a gun! Can I see?”

  Marla turned quickly and thrust the gun back into her underwear drawer. Stan’s eyes tracked the weapon as it moved.

  I took him by the arm and steered him out of the room, back along the short corridor to his own bedroom. He’d used his Superman costume as pajamas and the cape was twisted over his shoulder and hung down across the top of his belly.

  “How come you got a gun, Johnny?”

  “Marla thought we should have one, living all the way out here. She made a mistake.”

  “Tomorrow, can I shoot it?”

  “No one’s going to be using that gun, Stan. Just forget you saw it.”

  “But it would be so awesome. We could pretend we were cops. We could shoot cans and stuff.”

  “I’m not joking, Stan. Forget about it.”

  Stan groaned and trundled into his room. I shut the door behind him and went back to Marla. She had undressed and was lying beneath the covers of the bed.

  “I meant it when I said he has to go, Johnny.”

  “I figured that from the gun.”

  Marla threw her arm across her face. “I can’t stand it…”

  She moaned the phrase to herself several times, then stopped abruptly, flung off the covers, and reached under the bed for her cane. She held it out to me. When I didn’t move she shook it violently.

  “Do it.”

  “Marla, I-”

  “Do it! Do it, Johnny!”

  “Marla, why do you feel so bad? I don’t understand-” But Marla wasn’t in the mood to help me understand anything that night and screamed at me from the bed, “Just fucking do it!”

  So I took the cane and raised it up and brought it down across her naked back. Her body clenched. One of her fingernails broke against the fabric of the mattress. Almost immediately a red welt rose on her pale skin. She grunted through clenched teeth. And I raised the cane again.

  Later, next to her in bed as she slept, I knew that she was slipping away from me. If Gareth wasn’t dealt with soon she would be gone, her own survival would demand it. But if I couldn’t kill him there was only one way to save our relationship-leave Empty Mile. We could do it now. I had enough money to travel across the country, to rent a house in the East as Marla had said she wanted, to start looking for work, to rebuild our lives.

  But there was Stan. The trauma of moving again would be more than he could bear, and something he would refuse to do now anyway because of Rosie. And if I could not take him with us then how could I possibly leave?

  In the darkness of the bedroom there seemed to be no solution, and in the end my tired mind gave up and turned instead to something Gareth had told me earlier that day-that my father had demanded he stop pimping Marla so that I would not be hurt on my return to Oakridge.

  It would have better fit the picture I had of my father if this had been nothing more than an excuse, a step in his process of cutting Gareth out of the Empty Mile land. But by that time he already had everything he needed to go it alone. He had enough money from remortgaging our house, he knew about the possibility of gold on the land, and, most importantly, he had exclusive access to Patricia Prentice. Why would he need to manufacture a reason for falling out with Gareth?

  It seemed unavoidable, then, that he had acted simply out of love for me, that he really had just been trying to spare me some pain. It was a startling notion that at the very end of his life he had left me something to balance against all those dark, wanting years when I had been so sure that he did not like me. And this isolated expression of affection was made all the more poignant because it seemed that in trying to help me this way he had, in effect, signed his own death warrant.

  CHAPTER 34

  We held Stan’s wedding on a weekend so that Gareth would not be at Empty Mile. I had a lot of flowers delivered and Marla and I covered the front of the cabin with them. A celebrant came over from Burton. Marla, Rosie and Millicent all bought matching dresses and Stan and I each rented a tux. On the day we looked like any other wedding party, freshly washed, dressed up, and smiling.

  The three women had spent the night at Millicent’s place and as Stan and I waited for them early that morning in front of our cabin he asked me over and over if he looked okay, until finally I put my arms around him and hugged him till he quieted. When I let go he shook his hands in front of his face and grinned at me.

  “Boy, Johnny. Boy, oh boy, oh boy. I’m going to burst. You know what I feel like? I feel like when I woke up from drowning. Like everything that happened before is on one side and all the new stuff is just about to start.”

  For a moment he stood there, beaming at me, but then he frowned.

  “What’s going to happen to me, Johnny? I don’t know how to be married. What if I mess it up? What if I can’t do it?”

  “You won’t mess it up.”

  The celebrant was standing several yards off to one side, cradling the folder from which he was going to read the service. Stan looked over at him.

  “I’m freaking out!”

  The man chuckled.

  A few minutes later
the sun cleared the mountains and Stan’s eyes went round.

  “Look, Johnny, there’s sun everywhere. Look!”

  It was true. The angle of the light caught the dew that coated the long grass of the meadow and for several minutes the whole field was incandescent. The door to Millicent’s house opened and the three women began a small wedding procession. We watched them come toward us, wading knee deep through a field of light. Stan made small squeaks of delight and shifted his weight from foot to foot.

  The ceremony was not long. Stan and Rosie stood together holding hands while the celebrant read some passages Marla and I had picked from a poetry book. Stan kept glancing at Rosie and smiling and though Rosie usually held her head down she raised it for the reading and kept her eyes fixed on him, as though it was only by this connection that she could survive the event.

  Though the sun was climbing, the celebrant’s breath steamed and this and the sharp edge to the air made the scene seem festive and somehow entrenched, a ritual that would not only join Stan and Rosie to each other, but also make them part of all those other people across the world who had performed the same rite, who had shared the same hopes for a future together.

  After the poetry, though no one there was at all religious, the celebrant read something from the Bible. He finished with the passages that formalized the marriage and Stan and Rosie exchanged rings and kissed each other self-consciously. And then it was over.

  Millicent, Marla, and I shared a couple of bottles of champagne with the celebrant and we all watched as Stan turned on some music and danced with Rosie in front of the cabin. And in watching them, the worry I’d had since Stan first told me he wanted to get married, that it could only ever result in some flawed approximation of the real thing, disappeared. Together, dancing, Stan and Rosie removed themselves from comparison with the world at large. They became graceful and self-sufficient, buttressed by each other against the storm of life that raged around them.

  In the days that followed Stan used some of his gold money to lease a trailer. We had it placed at a right angle to our cabin and ran electricity in from there. The same firm of contractors who had cleared the ground over the buried river spent a day linking the trailer to the cabin’s plumbing.

  In this prefab home Stan and Rosie built around themselves a fragile independence. As withdrawn as Rosie was, she could still drive a car, buy groceries, cook meals, clean house-all the things that Stan either could not do, or could not with any consistency schedule for himself. Being married to her allowed him to participate by proxy and the disillusionment he’d suffered when he realized how money alone had failed him was replaced now by a new sense of his ability to contribute. He might not have been able to perform all the tasks daily life demanded, but he could certainly fund them, and he was happier in the weeks after his marriage than he had been since the early days of Plantasaurus. He and Rosie danced each day in front of their trailer and, most heartening of all, the pouch of moths disappeared from around his neck.

  It was a joy for me to see him like this. It did not expunge the guilt I felt about his drowning. It did not make up for the damage his brain had suffered or the wound I had torn in his emotions by leaving Oakridge, but it was as close as I was going to get to fixing that part of my past. He was happy. He had a wife and his own place to live. These were things I had not dreamed possible when I rolled back into Oakridge six months earlier.

  On the downside, a few days after Stan’s wedding, Marla’s desperation reached a point where she could no longer cope at work and she quit her job at the town hall. The job had previously been of such importance to her that I was surprised at her decision, but I took it as a measure of her unhappiness that she would give up something which until now she’d been willing to prostitute herself to keep.

  Through all this time the gold mining continued, and every minute Gareth was at Empty Mile I was conscious that I was in the presence of my father’s killer. We spoke only when our work demanded it, and at the end of each day I left the river with Stan before Gareth was quite ready so that we would not have to walk back across the meadow together.

  It was bad enough being near him, but what galled me more was that I knew I was too weak and too scared to do anything about it. Despite Marla’s urging, and the eye-for-an-eye appropriateness of it, I knew I didn’t have it in me to pull out a gun and murder him. The best I could do was make barbed references to my father’s death, to wonder aloud as we worked on the river exactly how he had died. Gareth ignored me for a while. Eventually, though, I did it one too many times.

  Gareth was loading dirt into the sluice at the time. When I spoke, he stopped working and stood glaring at me, clenching his fists so hard his arms shook. Stan was sitting close to us on the riverbank, resting, but he stood when he saw what was happening.

  I was glad to see Gareth so angry, but the pleasure didn’t last long. Because Gareth killed it by beginning the process which would eventually destroy my brother.

  “You’re an ungrateful prick, Johnny. I wanted to be your friend. I saved your life when those assholes were going to cut you, I saved your whole fucking world when Jeremy Tripp wanted to tear it down. I could have said no when you wanted help with him. I could have made you give me all of this land. What did I ask for? A third. And now I have to suffer this? Even though I fucking told you I didn’t do anything to Ray I have to put up with, ‘Oh, I wonder how he died,’ ‘Gee, I wish we knew where the body was.’ Get it through your head, whatever happened to Ray, it wasn’t me.”

  This seemed to me such an obvious lie that I spoke without thinking. “You tried to stop him getting this land. I’m supposed to believe you just gave up after your video didn’t work? Bullshit. You killed him.”

  Stan screamed and my stomach turned cold as I realized what I’d done.

  “What? Johnny! What!” He grabbed his head with both hands and turned it rapidly from side to side. “My brain’s going to burst!”

  I tried to calm him, but he was too far gone to respond. He stopped shaking his head and started to paw the ground with one of his feet like a bull getting ready to charge. His fists were balled and spit flew across his lips.

  “You’re a bad man, Gareth. You fucking shit bastard!” Stan raised both fists above his head.

  Gareth lifted his shovel and held its blade out in front of him. “Careful there, Einstein-”

  Stan shrieked: “Don’t call me Einstein! I’m going to smash you!”

  “No you’re not, Einstein, you’re going to stand there and calm down. I told your brother and I’m telling you, I didn’t kill your father. But there’s a killer here all right.”

  Gareth looked at me and his eyes glittered and I felt the world fall away from me. I knew what was coming. I took a step forward but Gareth pointed the shovel at me and shook his head.

  “You can’t win this one, Johnboy.”

  Stan shouted at him, “I hate you!”

  “Stanley, you remember Jeremy Tripp? You remember how you burned his warehouse down?”

  Stan was thrown by this sudden change of subject and shamefaced puzzlement replaced his anger. “Yes…?”

  I tried to stop Gareth, to talk over him and drown him out, to beg him not to do this. But he just waited until I stopped, then carried on.

  “Why do you think you never got in trouble for that?”

  Stan looked uncertainly at me and I felt my heart breaking. I knew that nothing could ever be saved after this.

  “Because I didn’t mean to do it. Then he had a car crash and died.”

  Gareth nodded. “Yes, he did have a crash, didn’t he? But you know what? It didn’t kill him. He still died, though, because Johnny was waiting where he had the crash and when he saw he was alive, Johnny got a big hunk of metal pipe and smashed his head in with it.”

  “No!”

  “Yeah, he did. Maybe one day I’ll show you the pipe. It has blood all over it.”

  Stan moaned and started crying. “Johnny…”

&nbs
p; He reached out for me like a small child and I held him and he cried against me. And though nothing more needed to be said, Gareth said it anyway.

  “And you know why he had to do that? He had to do that to stop Jeremy Tripp telling the police you burned his warehouse down.”

  Stan lifted his head, blinking through his tears like a man trying to see through smoke, his face twisted by the horror that had this moment taken root in his soul.

  “What? What, Johnny? Because of me? You had to do it because of me?”

  His large body sagged against me and I stumbled and caught him under the arms and lowered him so that he lay on the ground.

  Gareth threw down his shovel then and left the river. As he passed me he said quietly, “Why the fuck couldn’t you leave things alone?”

  After he’d gone the only sound in the world was that of Stan sobbing. He shook against the ground and curled into himself as though some dreadful physical pain clawed at his guts. I lay beside him and tried to hold him still, tried to quiet him with words that sounded meaningless even to myself. But it didn’t work and Stan cried on and on until eventually exhaustion claimed him and it seemed that I felt his body cool and stiffen against me.

  A long time after that, with nothing left inside either of us, Stan and I sat at the edge of the river and watched blankly as the water passed by, and I did what I could to sew up the terrible hole in my brother.

  “Listen, Stan. Listen to me. What I did to Jeremy Tripp had to be done. He was an evil man. That doesn’t make it right but it means it’s not such a bad thing. And it didn’t have anything to do with you.”

  “But if I hadn’t lit the fire, everything would still be all right.”

  “No, it wouldn’t. He was never going to stop attacking us. Sooner or later I would have to have done it. You lighting the fire doesn’t mean anything.”

  “But you feel bad about everything, Johnny. Even small things. And I made you kill someone. That’s the biggest thing that could ever happen to anyone.”