left. On top of this there was the fresh financial wound of the house mortgage. The bank had given us a one- month freeze on the loan, but after that I’d either have to start making payments or show that plans were underway to sell the Empty Mile land. So when Gareth called and offered his standard fifty dollars it seemed stupid to turn the money down.
Around nine p.m. I got into the pickup and headed for Gareth’s place at Tunney Lake. I left Stan watching TV in the living room. He said it would creep him out to go to bed while there was no one else in the house so he was going to stay up till I got home.
At the lake only the office and the last cabin in the row showed any light. As I pulled up, the office door opened and Gareth stepped out onto the porch and stood there waiting while I walked over to him. By the light of the overhead bulb I could see that he was smiling.
“Thanks for helping out again, dude.”
“No problem. End cabin?”
Gareth stayed smiling but he shook his head slowly. “Nope. I have her right here.”
He reached for someone out of sight behind him in the office and pulled. Whoever it was seemed to be resisting him and he had to half turn to exert more strength before he could pull her out through the doorway.
When he did, I felt something run through me that I had not experienced since I’d seen Stan laid out at the edge of the lake twelve years before-a sensation of my insides draining in a rush down through my body and out. For an instant I thought I might not be able to stay standing. Because the girl who now stood beside Gareth was Marla.
“What’s going on?”
“Just what we talked about, dude. Easy money for you, even more easy money for me. Special request from a new customer.”
Gareth let go of Marla’s arm and gave her a small shove. She stepped down off the porch and walked quickly to my truck. She had her eyes on the ground and she didn’t look up as she passed me. I heard her climb inside and close the door.
“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
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
“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
