Bad Things

by Michael Marshall

  It stopped a few yards past me and the driver’s-side window whirred down to reveal a cheerful-looking man in his fifties.

  “Bob let you down?”

  “Excuse me?”

  The man smiled. “He’s a super Realtor, don’t get me wrong. Sold us our place—we’re up the road a mile? Moved over from Black Ridge a year ago and Bob was great with, you know, the process. But timekeeping really isn’t his core field of excellence.”

  “No big deal,” I said. “I’m only here on a whim.”

  The man nodded as though he understood all about that kind of thing, though he looked like someone who last acted on a whim around five or six years ago, most likely a statistically sound whim concerning moving noncritical cash reserves from one low-risk portfolio to another.

  “Had a look at that property ourselves, in fact,” he said. “Not quite big enough for us, but beautiful. Has direct access to Murdo Pond. But I’m sure Bob told you that already.”

  “It’s been on the market that long?”

  “You don’t know?” he said, sticking his elbow out of the window to settle into what he was about to say. He was wearing a thick black sweater with a roll neck, and looked like he’d never been cold in his life. “Okay, I’m sure Bob would be getting around to telling you, he’s very straightforward, but it’s actually been mainly empty a couple—three years now. There was kind of a thing that happened, apparently, and some new people moved in for a while, didn’t take to it, and they’re still trying to shift the place two years later.” He winked. “So I’m saying Bob’s likely to have a little wriggle room over the price—though you didn’t hear that from me.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “What kind of thing happened? Before the current owners bought the house?”

  “Well,” the guy said. He hesitated, perhaps suspecting he’d said too much and was in danger of compromising his acquaintanceship with Bob-the-Realtor, with whom he doubtless exchanged banter once in a while at the grocery market in Sheffer: but also knowing that he couldn’t back out now without looking rude. “Basically, somebody died. A kid. A young kid.”

  I nodded, not understanding why I’d pushed myself into having this conversation. “Really.”

  “Uh-huh. And, you know, from what I gather . . . nobody’s too clear on what actually happened. I don’t believe anyone in the family got charged with anything, but, well . . . I heard the kid was a strong swimmer but still somehow drowned, you know, with no one else but the parents around, and you’ve got to ask questions in those circumstances, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said tightly. “I guess people do.”

  “But it’s three years ago. And a house is a house and that one’s as close to a solid investment as you’re going to find in this market— they’re not making any more lakes, after all. And it’s not like you’re scared of ghosts, right?”

  “No,” I said, and smiled broadly.

  Something must have been wrong with the way I did it, however, because the guy pulled his arm back inside the car.

  “Little insider information never does any harm,” he said defensively. “But you didn’t—”

  “—hear it from you. Got it.”

  “Okay, well, nice meeting you.”

  “You, too. By the way, one of your taillights is out. You might want to get that fixed.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, with a final, curious look at me, and then his window purred back up.

  I stood and watched as he drove away. When he had gone around the corner and out of sight I walked back to the gate and climbed over it.

  I wondered, as I walked up the driveway, whether I’d ever done this before. You don’t, as a matter of course. You’re driving, naturally, hence the name. And so I hadn’t noticed the way it went steadily uphill during the five minutes it took to walk from the gate. When I turned the final bend, however, the view was abruptly almost too familiar, like a scene from a dream I’d had only the night before.

  Except things were different.

  The grass around the house had grown very long indeed, and the birch trees on the far side seemed to have gotten closer, the alder and dogwood among them thicker. I walked down the slope to the center of the lawn, wet grass swishing against my jeans, and then turned toward the house.

  It looked like it was asleep. All the windows had been boarded over, and had large stickers warning about the alarm system. Assuming the absent owners had, unlike Ted, kept up the payments, I knew that a break in the house’s windows, or disturbance to the contacts of any of the doors, would alert a security company over in Clem Elum. It would be a long way for vandals to come, anyhow. A long way for anyone.

  I stood staring up at the triangular silhouette the house made against the trees and fading sky, and my chest suddenly hitched, and my neck tightened, until the tendons stood out like painful cords.

  I did not really want to go any closer to the house, but nonetheless I walked toward the steps on the far side of the encompassing deck. Having come this way, I did not wish to find myself back in Oregon wishing I had gone a few more yards. It was foolish, especially as we had lived in the house for three months after the event, but as I trudged up the steps I almost believed I could feel the air move past me, as a younger man ran down the steps in the other direction, looking for his boy. It was a breeze, of course, and nothing more.

  I walked slowly back to the other end of the deck, peering at the boarded-over windows and doors as I passed. Someone had done a good job of securing the house, though presumably that made it far harder to sell. The views from inside were one of its key selling points, and not everyone has the imagination for that when they’re standing inside a cathedral-ceilinged coffin. I wondered at the financial reserves of a family who could buy a house like this, move out, and withstand it remaining unsold for a couple of years. Wondered also why they had not remained here. I had loved this house. Every room had something about it—its view, shape, or position in relation to the space where you had just left—that made you content to linger in it.

  Perhaps the owners’ problem had not been with the place itself, but with the locals, who had evidently started to retrofit a juicy little scandal over what had taken place, with Scott as their own JonBenét Ramsey and Carol and me as the unconvicted perpetrators of negligence, if not something far worse. Why they would wish to do that I had no idea, but it had been as well that the SUV driver had moved on when he did. A good idea, too, that I not make a nostalgic diversion to Roslyn or Sheffer on the way back, in case I was recognized and someone said something they might regret.

  I walked all the way around the house and found only one window, on the far side and at the back, where it looked like someone might have tried to break in. They’d got as far as levering one corner away and then given up. On the other side was a small storeroom at the end of the utility area, and for a moment I remembered it as it had been. Shelves, lined with produce bought from local markets. Backup supplies of batteries and bottled water—Carol had always seemed quietly convinced that the collapse of civilization was only a matter of time, and that it was best to be prepared. The smell of sheets, drying.

  When I got back around to the front I paused for a moment at the spot halfway along the deck where I had been accustomed to stand at the end of a day’s work, or with my first coffee of the day. The very position, in fact, where I had asked Carol where Scott had gotten to.

  Being there should have felt momentous, or unusually horrible, but it did not. Just sad. The lawn below was overgrown and forlorn. The artisan yard furniture was absent, and I couldn’t remember whether it had gone with my wife or if we’d left it with the house for the new owners. The latter, I thought. Either way, it was gone.

  I looked for a moment into the woods, remembering how on that afternoon I’d noticed the paths were getting a little unkempt. They were completely overgrown now, ferns covering the ground. About sixty yards from the house was the scant remains of a sturd
y old cabin, a remnant from pioneering days. I realized that if left long enough the big house behind me might disappear even faster than the cabin was doing, and the thought depressed me.

  I went back down the steps and walked down the slope toward the final place I knew I should visit. The remaining light was reflecting off the lake at the bottom, turning it into a strip of blue-white glare. I kept my pace even as I walked out onto the jetty and until I reached the end, and then I stopped. Down here not much had changed. The lake stretched out ahead, the right fork of its L-shape disappearing out of sight at the end. Ours was the only house with direct access to this section. On all other sides trees came right down to the shore, and the shallows were dotted with fallen leaves, sodden scraps of brown and dark green and gold.

  As I stood there, I realized that, of all places in the world, this would be the one where I would most expect to lose control. It was, after all, the very last place where my son had spoken, and breathed, and been alive. But it did not happen here, either. I felt wretched, but my eyes stayed dry.

  I can only ever think about that afternoon in the third person. I do not think “I” did this, or felt that, and despite the distance I’ve tried to put between it and me, my recollection is locked in the present tense. From the moment at which I emerge onto the deck, it’s as if it’s happening again now. Perhaps this is nothing more than another defense mechanism, a way of making it feel like a fantasy, continually fresh-minted in my head, rather than an event with a genuine place in history.

  But it has such a place. There was an afternoon, three years ago, when my son died in front of my eyes, when I’d dived into the water and then stood exactly where I was now, holding something in my arms for which I had made a sandwich four hours before: when I stood knowing that the person for whom I’d slapped cold cuts and cheese between bread, and then sliced the result into the preferred triangular form, had gone away and was no longer there; and that the wet, heavy thing that remained was nothing but a lie.

  What is the difference between those two states? Nobody has a clue. The local doctors and the coroner certainly didn’t. All they could tell me was that Scott had been dead before he hit the water, and they had no idea how or why.

  I'm sorry, Mr. Henderson. But he just died.

  This difference is why our species makes sacrifices, performs rituals, repeats forms of words to ourselves in the dark watches of the night. Gods are merely foils in this process, an audience for the supplications of metaphor in the face of the intractable monolith of reality. We need someone to listen to these prayers, because without a listener, they cannot come true, and therefore there must be gods, and they must be kind, else they would never grant our wishes—in which case why would we pray to them in the first place? It is a circular argument, like all neuroses, a hard shell around emptiness.

  If gods exist then they are deaf or indifferent. They commit their acts, and then move on.

  I knew it was time for me to get onto the next thing, whatever that was. Finding something to eat back in Black Ridge, most likely, then a quiet evening in a no-frills motel room before flying back to Portland and finding a ride to Marion Beach. Good friend though he had been, I knew I wasn’t in the mood for Bill Raines’s offer of a night’s drinking and talking up old times, for any number of reasons.

  As I turned back from Murdo Pond, however, something made me pause. A wind had picked up, and the leaves on the trees around the house were moving against one another with a sound like the papery breaths of someone not entirely well. The water in the lake was lapping against the jetty supports, like a tongue being moved around inside a dry mouth. The combination of the two sounds was disconcerting, and for a moment the air didn’t feel as cold as it should, but then felt very cold indeed. It struck me that no one in the world knew where I was, and though that thought has sometimes been a source of comfort, right then it was not. Though I had owned this jetty, those woods, that house, it did not in that instant feel like a place where I should be.

  A stronger wind suddenly came down out of the mountains to the west—presumably the source of the cold blast I had just felt— provoking a long, creaking noise to come out of the woods. A tree that was dry and not long for this world, presumably, bending for the second-to-last time. Still I did not start walking. I found I did not want to go back toward the house or the trees. My feet felt unsecured, too, as if something more than the water’s gentle movements was moving the jetty’s supports. Gradually this increased in intensity, until it was like a vibration buzzing against one leg, as if. . .

  “You moron,” I said, out loud. I stuffed my hand in my jeans pocket. The vibration was just my phone.

  I stuck it to my ear. “Who is this?”

  It was Ellen Robertson.

  CHAPTER 11

  I got to the Mountain View a little after eight o’clock. It was the only place in Black Ridge I could bring to mind, and I wanted to sound at least slightly in charge of the situation. I did not suggest my motel because you do not do that with women you do not know. She agreed and did not ask where the bar was. She said she’d be there sometime between eight-thirty and ten, but couldn’t be more precise and would not be able to stay for long.

  I walked back along the jetty, up the lawn, and climbed back over the gate. The house did not look like anything other than an empty dwelling, but I did not walk any slower than necessary.

  I did hesitate for a moment at the top of the rise, however, turned and said good-bye, before I walked off down the drive. It did not feel as if I had done anything of consequence.

  The bar was largely empty when I arrived. Lone drinkers held each corner of the room, like tent pegs. There was no one at the counter, generally the first roosting place of the professional drinker—for ease of access to further alcohol, and the faux conviviality of shooting it back and forth with the barman. I guessed I was between shifts, that the place never did that much hard-core business, or that Black Ridge was slowly sinking into the swamp and the drinkers had worked it out first. The Marilyn Manson playing on the jukebox probably wasn’t helping, either. Not everyone enjoys the company of music that sounds like it means them harm.

  I stood waiting for a couple of minutes before I heard someone coming out of the rear area. When I turned I was surprised to see the woman I’d spotted while sitting on the bench opposite, earlier in the afternoon.

  She looked at me a moment, raised an eyebrow. “Am I in trouble?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I just want a beer.”

  The eyebrow went back down and she slapped each of the pumps in turn and told me what was in them.

  “What’s popular?” I asked.

  “Money and happiness,” she said, quick as a flash. “We don’t have either on draft.”

  I nodded at the one in the middle. “Can I smoke in here?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “We are not afraid.”

  I watched her as she leaned over to the other side to get me an ashtray. I guessed she was probably in her late twenties. Tall and skinny, with a high forehead and strong features, hair that had been dyed jet black and cut in an artfully scruffy bob. Her skin was pale, her movements quick and assured.

  “You want to pay, or run it?” she said.

  “For a while,” I said. “I’m meeting someone.”

  “Oh yeah—who?”

  I hesitated, and she winked. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen a woman wink before.

  “Okay,” she said. “I get it.”

  “You don’t,” I said. “It’s just an old friend.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  One of the tent pegs came up to buy another beer, and I took the opportunity to walk away. I climbed on a stool at the counter which ran along the bar’s street window, got out my cigarettes. It was a long time since I’d smoked or even taken a drink inside, and my associations with the practice were not good. Have you ever set fire to the hair hanging lankly over your face, when very drunk and trying to light yet another cigarette—d
espite the fact you’ve already got one burning in the overflowing ashtray? It’s not a good look. Nobody’s impressed.

  But that was then.

  The drunk period lasted about a year. It began in the way one chooses, without being aware of a conscious decision, to take one route around the supermarket rather than another. The first time, it’s happenstance; the second, it’s the way you did it before; and then it’s just what you do.

  I had been someone who didn’t drink at home, or alone, or to frequent excess. And then I was. Small differences. Big difference. Just because.

  The advantage of being drunk is not that it helps you forget, though it will keep reality at arm’s length. Mainly it conveys a rowdy vaingloriousness to the things you do think about, which may seem preferable to their being blunt, hard facts. It wasn’t the drinking that was the problem—it didn’t make me aggressive or abusive (merely drunk, and maudlin)—as much as the hangovers. I never got to the point of turning pro, where you plane out of the morning after by starting again bright and early, and so I found myself mired four or five times a week in dehydrated despair, consumed with self-loathing, all too aware I was letting down Scott’s memory by failing to be the straight-backed and self-reliant adult I’d hoped he would grow up to be.

  When I’m hungover I can only get by if I retreat inside, which basically means I can’t listen to other people. Carol needed me to listen. Her way of dealing with the thing we couldn’t talk about—it was not subject to interpretation, once we’d established the medical profession didn’t have a clue as to what might have caused Scott’s brain to blow a fuse, and hours on the Internet had produced no further clues—was to talk about everything else. As if she felt that by containing life’s trivial chaos in words, in obsessive detail, it would become contained, made incapable of doing us further harm. Not only did I disbelieve this, I found it hard to withstand hours of meaningless utterance from someone who had once been so concise and sparing of observation.